Found this today, and I have to say it looks awesome! I’m going to be signing up for a course in the very near future, I’ll let you know how it goes. People sharing what they know instead of hoarding information for Job Security (you know who you are), nice!
Skillshare is a community marketplace to learn anything from anyone. We believe that everyone has valuable skills and knowledge to teach and the curiosity to keep learning new things. This means our neighborhoods, communities, and cities are really the world’s greatest universities. Our platform helps make the exchange of knowledge easy, enriching, and fun.
All of the classes happen in the real world. That means offline despite what we nerds may consider to be “real.” We believe that learning should happen in groups around shared interests and passions. When you bring together a variety of voices and hands-on instruction, truly spectacular things happen. This magic just can’t be replicated over a webcam and chatroom. We’re here to spread this magic and increase the gross happiness index around the world.
Researchers from from the Grenoble Informatics Lab in France are using the camera to track your eye gaze and change the image displayed on the tablet based on your perspective.
If anyone has read Daemon and FreedomTM by Daniel Suarez you’re now thinking of a new world order where the constant real-time voting, interactions, and contributions into a virtual social network govern the way a real life society functions. A new world where power is truly in the hands of the people and not the “ambiguous few”. If you haven’t read these books and enjoy true sci-fi that imparts your sense of philosophy, ethics, and society, I highly recommend it.
In this adaptation of the near future, people have a “social score” based on their trade, the level they have achieved in their trade, and rating by others. For example, in this world I’d be: a level 22 information architect with a 4 out of 5 rating from a base of 143 (totally made up example). It’s my social circle itself that gives me raises and praises.
Your probably reading this thinking of all the lawsuits and litigations that might ensue from the principles of defaming. You might get uneasy thinking that anyone can anonymously give you a rating that anyone (including your mother) can see. You could think of those who would game the system by cheating to give themselves an advantage and their competitors disadvantage.
I for one, am intrigued. First, I’ve always been fascinated by what people think of my actions. Am I really the good guy that I think I am? I might be surprised.
Secondly, we all grow and adapt from feedback from our surroundings. If I did something that might have hurt someone else, I’d like to know so that I could try not to do the same in the future. It doesn’t help me if no one tells me how I just made them feel uncomfortable. Similar systems are already in place in company’s HR departments with 360 feedbacks and performance evaluations.
Finally, if I am doing something questionable and know that anyone can make public, I might be quicker to give apologies and also be more aware of my actions overall. There are a few people I can think of who should be more aware of their actions.
Where it stands today. I believe society has to be weened into this way of thinking. In fact we are being weened into it. There are a few sites that are introducing the concept (maybe you’ve heard of them):
On LinkedIn you can give “recommendations” to others. This is like a letter of reference. Useful and powerful, but ultimately you can only say good things. You can also “like” people’s comments and follow people and you can “pass” or degrade the comment.
On Facebook you can “like” artifacts that people post such as photos, comments, or objects that exist.
Twitter is a social rating system whereas the more people who follow you the more useful your twits are perceived to be.
eBay sellers have a rating system that increases or decreases their trust from buyers. This way you won’t pay someone who has been rated poorly in the past.
Ratemyprofessor.com does just that. Students can give college and university professors a review. This can potentially help students pick and choose classes. I wonder if administrative staff put any weight to this “user feedback”.
Unvarnished is in public beta and is seemingly the closest thing so far to the world Daniel Suarez created. It uses Facebook connect to rate people over a variety of categories. There’s been many controversy over this one: MSNBC, SMSEO, LATimes. The funny thing is all these sites are criticizing a rating site by giving it a poor rating.
It seems that the world is not be ready for something like this at the moment. I’d like to believe it’s a tool that would slowly help us create a better society. It will cause more contention in the beginning just as most new ideas do. I am curious to see the implications and hear the thoughts of people as me move forward into this area. Especially since we are all rating each other in more ambiguous ways.
James Chudley of Smashing Magazine posted a great article on How to Use Photos to Sell More Online. Its a lengthy article with great photo examples. The article was written for products, but I believe these can be put to use no matter what you are doing online. Most importantly, we don’t want to put up a photo just to put up a photo… make it do something for you like:
Show off product benefits
Don’t give reasons not to buy
Create an immersive experience
Make ‘em laugh
Educate and inform
Tell a story
Highlight your innovation
Show people doing something
Don’t mislead users
Evoke an emotional response
Plug accessories
Show features and versatility
Understand needs
Match imagery to the brand
Sell a lifestyle
Demonstrate exciting features
Make it beautiful
Avoid cliche stock shots
Create desire
Be stylistically consistent
Convey the itangibles
Show some personality
Be subtle sometimes
Look professional
Be consistent
Use unusual vantage points
Shoot from the best angles
Show objects in their natural evironment
Convey a sense of scale
Image size is important
Show the product in use
Shoe how it works
Make choosing easy
Enhance the experience
Show details
Show me what it looks like
Encourage interaction
Show me I’m in the right place
We curate quite a few websites where we manage the use of photography. We work hard not to “slap on a photo”, but make it have some meaning and usefulness in the grand scheme of the website. Read the full article.
I’m a little late in seeing the new and official iphone 4 videos. I must say, it looks absolutely amazing. Its a technological, engineering, and manufacturing marvel that its rocketing us into the future that we’ve only been seeing in sci-fi movies.
Facetime is the new video conferencing. It seems that both callers will need to be on a wifi network to use this feature. You can switch between front and back cameras at any time so that your caller will be able to see you or whats in front of you.
Retina display is the the new 960 x 640 display, the highest resolution screen in a smart phones to date. 326 pixels per inch which is 4 times the current iphone. Apple engineers have made the pixel even smaller so that the human eye won’t notice pixelation. Optical lamination is the process that eliminates light refraction to optimize the visual clarity.
Multitasking is now available. You can double click the home button and the interface slides up to show the apps that you are currently running.
Folders is fresh. Not a new concept, but the interaction is quite amazing. You hold down an app on the home screen and drag it on top of another app to group them in a folder. That’s like 3 steps less than any OS we’re used to. The folder is automatically named based on the apps that you’ve grouped together.
The mail app has been rearranged a bit to have all your inboxes together. No need to jump back 2 times and then forward 2 times to view another inbox. Messages are also organized by thread and so you’ll be able to track by topic.
The camera is now 5 megapixels (Rjay will love it for our homepage) and it comes with a led flash so low light shots will be way better, hopefully. The video camera captures video in 720p high definition at 30 frames per second (not sure how many frames per second are on the 3Gs). iMovie is coming to the iPhone allowing you to edit and stitch videos together while your on the move.
The A4 chip adds more power. This gets into the engineering marvel that I wrote about earlier. It will make the iPhone faster and more powerful, but the chip itself is smaller than the current phone which allows for a bigger battery.
Bigger battery means more life. We have up to 40% more talk time.
The new frame is a new stainless steel alloy that Apple has created?!?! WTF? Its supposed to be 5 times stronger than standard steel. This band also acts as the antenna for the phone boosting the range. This frame also makes the iPhone 4 actually smaller than its predecessors.
As we talk about engineering feats, the front and back of the phone is made with a newly engineered glass which is comparable to sapphire crystal and is 20 times stiffer and 30 times harder than plastic. This makes it more scratch resistant and durable.
The accelerometer has been coupled with a three-axis gyroscope. This makes motion sensing even better allowing the phone to know more about whats happening to it in its spatial environment.
A secondary mic has been added to the top of the iPhone. This is used for suppressing external sounds like other conversations and music. This should help you sound better when talking in a noisy place.
All this makes an app developer’s imagination soar. I can’t wait to see what things will come out of the phone as far as apps.
So you can pre-order the phone starting June 15th and actually get your hands on it by June 24th. There will be two models of the phone 12GB and 32GB and will cost $199 and $299 respectively.
Clark Kokich, CEO of Razorfish, one of the largest digital marketing and technology firms in the world just put up a blog post entitled Simple Math.
He talks about how digital agency fees are growing higher than the digital media spend. As some customers see this trend as “wrong”. Kokich goes on to say that it’s perfectly fine and going back would be bad.
The world of digital marketing is changing. Its moving away from buying media on the traditional outlets and moving into owning media on your own outlet or earning media on online social outlets.
If a $500k social influence marketing program (all agency fees) performs as well as a $10-million paid media program (10% agency fees), who really is being penalized? Answer: the media, not the client. Instead of being challenged, agencies should be applauded for building and managing owned media that delivers results at a fraction of the cost of paid media. – Clark Kokich
Was doing some research today on an IPad case as I still don’t have one. The guys at the office got the Apple one, but I don’t really like it as it’s very cheap feeling, but I do love that it converts into the stand for the IPad. So I looked at hard/soft cases, soft sleeves, folio, folio/book-stand cases and I’m leaning towards getting protection and the book-stand functionality with a few choices I’ll show here:
1. Incase convertible book jacket – protects the IPad all the time and gives 3 viewing angles when you’re at a table. It’s close to what Apple released, but from what I’m seeing in the reviews, it’s of much better quality and people like it.
2. Macally Bookstand – Very similar to Apple case, but I like the color more and it fully exposes the edges of the ipad. No reviews to speak of, so I’m hesitate to take on for the team and buy it. The note that the IPad isn’t included is from the legal department
3. Marware Eco-Vue - This one is the most interesting of the 3 as it’s very slick looking, gives you the 2 bookstand options, but also throws in a hand-sleeve where you can hold the IPad like it’s a glove, check it out below:
I think the glove sleeve sells me on the Marware one, but I’m going to sleep on this on. So these are the one’s I’m thinking about, let me know what you’ve found or what you’re using for the IPad protection dilemma. I also found this article at PC World that discuss a bunch of companies that are creating cases/sleeve/ bookstands for the IPad, most of which I’ve never heard of. The custom ones are pretty cool, and there’s one in there that does decals
Found this while posting the last post, 9 Technologies to help bring down the costs of our healthcare systems. I’ve put a couple the ones I thought were amazing below, but you can read the whole article here. Some are simple changes to current tech and some are complete revamps, but awesome all around. Funny thing, I bet you no one will complain that we’re putting a bunch of lab workers or doctors out of jobs with this tech. But when we try to implement technologies to make local and federal government more efficient and need less workers, everyone goes crazy about job security.
Didn’t mean to go off topic, by NJ is bankrupt but everytime they try to cut people out to save money, it turns into a huge protest and I’m tired to paying some of the highest property taxes in the nation….
Medical Acoustics Lung Flute
“People with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease might be able to scale back on their meds by instead using this $40 reusable instrument (also a PopSci Best of What’s New award winner) that sends vibrations into the lungs to break up mucus. Make sure to check out the video of the Lung Flute in action, starring Senior Associate Editor Bjorn Carey and His Mucus.”
Insulin Made From Flowers
“Americans with diabetes shell out some $132 billion a year for insulin, which usually comes from genetically engineered yeast or bacteria. But Canadian scientists can make it cheaper. They inserted the human insulin gene into the common safflower plant, which churns out the drug for a fraction of the cost. Just 25 square miles of the crop could make insulin for the entire world.”
