A Tool with a Game September 12, 2007
Posted by Brian in announcements, ideas, interactivity, mashups, software.add a comment
In case anyone didn’t know, the latest version of Google Earth comes with an easter egg: a flight simulator.
This is, of course, way above our abilities to integrate a “game” within a wonderful tool, but it’s just something to look at.
Maybe we could get some cues from… August 22, 2007
Posted by Jeff in data display, software, tools.add a comment
* the GUI (graphical user interface) for the OLPC (one laptop per child) seems to be very promising in the “community” aspect. It is introducing what could be deemed a “new paradigm” in personal computing – switching from the window-based interface to something completely different. Their demo shows what it is like.
* Microsoft is introducing a competitor to Flash called Silverlight. As a demonstration of this product, they have made a new search website called tafiti. Looks promising, but their search still sucks.
Scene Completion Spin-off August 21, 2007
Posted by Brian in software.add a comment
Algorithmic! Newly developed software from two Carnegie Mellon computer scientists takes a photo that has missing parts and fills it in based on data from millions of other photos gathered from the Web!
Simply makes me think of, say, a site which would provide “filled-in” stories based on other pieces of the same story across the Web. Is this story missing a side (which would, ostensibly, make it more objective)? Is it just missing data? I hate reading a story about verified existence of neutrinos from the sun in one story to only find it elsewhere, but with many repeated parts and only a few paragraphs of new information.
Any viability here?
Google Going for the Gooold August 21, 2007
Posted by Brian in data display, mashups, software, statistics, tools.add a comment
People want to know how they’re connected. But we don’t have a clear-cut means of doing so yet.
Google is developing a social network aggregator. (This, of course, means that social sites existing as walled-gardens would be out of the loop. I wonder how many will open up after this?) Google wants to be the main provider of a social graph (a big visualization of how everyone is connected). Google also realizes that “[p]eople are getting sick of registering and re-declaring their friends on every site, but also: Developing ‘Social Applications’ is too much work.”
The man who founded LiveJournal left for Google, and he has some ideas for the social graph himself:
- Open-source software for such graphing
- Decentralization of information for such graphing
- Right-after-sign-up addition of “old information” to new network
- Syncing multiple sites for a user
- Not to replace _____
And has anyone heard of FOAF, the Friend of a Friend Project? It’s going to try to show how you’re related to everyone else, which sounds like XFN, the XML Friends Network, which links people by metadata.
Universe August 21, 2007
Posted by jonathan686 in data display, software, tools.2 comments
I’m not sure if this inspires or intimidates me, but this TED talks video of Jonathan Harris includes a few awesome data display interfaces. In particular, Universe, which he discusses at the end, displays and connects news stories from around the world.
Mogulus: We Thought of You August 15, 2007
Posted by Brian in competition, software.add a comment
This is just ridiculous. First we heard that CNN was coming out with NewsReel, and now Mogulus LLC in NYC came out with something dern-near similar … Mogulus.
From the about page:
We’re giving Mogulus users the power to create live, original television programming, all done on their own global broadcasting channel.
The Mogulus studio transforms all of this expensive 20th century hardware into one simple, easy to use application. We’re making the beauty, passion and creativity involved in television production accessible to everyone. Million dollar equipment setups and “brick and mortar” studios are a thing of the past.
To make money, they insert an add every 8-10 minutes. It has a good-looking online editing bay, and you can embed it in your own site.
(Watch the video on the front page. [This site could be big.].)
trendalyzer August 12, 2007
Posted by jonathan686 in software, statistics.1 comment so far
From the always excellent Ted Talks: Hans Rosling’s latest presentation of his trendalyzer software.
