Posts by Category: hmm..interesting

Mmm…wonder if it works?

hmm..interesting April 21, 2008 posted by

The world’s first hand controlled web site interface – wave goodbye to your visitors, dude

The new Publicis ad agency website has launched with a jolly klever new navigation interface which uses your hands and a webcam. Click on the webcam control button and you can wave your hands to move through the site. As with all these ‘creative’ Flash interfaces, accessing the site content is as slow as frozen mud, but what the heck, it’s good for some PR points eh? Even the mouse version of the site is dire, so you can imagine how…


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hmm..interesting April 21, 2008 posted by

Nokia 500 GPS viral video gets the big star treatment – advertising gets adventurous

Mmm…I often get asked during my consultancy gigs what it takes to do successful online viral advertising campaigns and of course the answer is, who knows? It’s certainly not just money, although that clearly helps, nor is it just clever thoughts, because the best ideas can languish unloved. So my usual answer is either 1)give real value or 2)be so outrageously different (a la Subservient Chicken) that you grab traction by the scruff of the neck. Interesting to see, therefore, the…


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Bookmark This! April 17, 2008 posted by

SearchMe – new visual search engine does browse nicely

SearchMe is still in private beta but I took a quick look at it the other day and came away kind of impressed. Regular readers will know – ad nauseum – about my reservations on this type of tool, simply because visual search engines seldom add any real value to the search process, especially if you’re a power user researcher.   SearchMe offers a nice little variation on the theme, with a scrolling window of search result thumbnails, but it still…


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Awesome April 16, 2008 posted by

B Corporation – the new corporate ‘do no evil’ standard

B Corporation. It’s clear that as long as companies have the maximisation of profits for shareholder benefit as the cornerstone of their existence, we will continue to experience greed, corruption and Enron type corporate ‘dislocation’. And this current fake ‘social responsibility’ hype needs to be trashed too, and quickly. So it’s extremely interesting to see the launch of this new alternative standard for incorporation which puts social and environmental responsibility at the heart of the corporate charter. This shift from shareholder…


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Gadgets April 11, 2008 posted by

Is our love affair with the iPod over? – Sony beats out Apple in massive customer survey

According to a new survey by the UK’s biggest user review site, Reevoo, the Apple iPod is barely clinging to a place in the top 5 rated music players on the market. Surprising news indeed, especially when you see that the top product is Sony’s elderly NWE016 music player, which even beat Apple to the top spot in terms of design – 10/10 vs 9.2/10 for the iPod. Another Sony comes next, followed by Hitachi, and as we speak the Samsung Yepp and new…


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Bookmark This! April 10, 2008 posted by

Twiddla – free no registration online meeting playground

Twiddla. A free online collaboration tool which has a number of very nice features. One it’s free. Did we mention that? Two, it’s got a no-brainer interface which makes it really easy to set up and run a group collaboration. You can set meetings up as private or public, and there are a bunch of useful tools available, including annotation icons and shapes. Basically it’s a great product for whiteboarding or testing out website designs with teams of remote people,…


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hmm..interesting April 9, 2008 posted by

Online spat hits out at Zap Electric Cars – EV market to link arms and protest?

Wired started it, Metafilter broadcast it and numerous sites are talking about a new downer review of the Zap company and its range of electric cars. Or rather the lack of a range. It’s all a bit sad really, since all we’re waiting for is a half decent electric vehicle which makes commercial, consumer and technical sense. Funnily enough, in amongst all the furore I stumbled across an electric car maker which looks like it’s actually getting somewhere (i.e. they’ve…


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Bookmark This! April 9, 2008 posted by

Gramlee – real live writers to edit and correct your sub-standard prose

Gramlee is a new online text editing service that uses real live writers to correct and polish your text. Just upload your words in any state you like, cough up the fee (starting at around $4.95 for 250 words) and their ‘team of professional writers’ will tweak, edit and correct your prose to make it sing with the joy of a soaring skylark. Or something. I’m thinking that this is a service that a good many PR and company executives could…


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hmm..interesting April 9, 2008 posted by

Hmm…Gmail troubles explained…perhaps

Hmm…Ars Technica is reporting on a possible explanation for all the problems with Gmail messages going missing etc. Apparently an earlier hack which broke the company’s captcha system seems to have created a flood of spam originating from Gmail mail servers. The result is several ISPs are now blocking Gmail addresses, so the message goes AWOL. Great, eh? We’ll keep tabs on the situation, and hopefully someone inside Google will fix the thing sooner rather than later. Sheesh!  Have you…


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Bookmark This! April 3, 2008 posted by

iComment – turn the whole internet into one big comment forum

iComment is an interesting new freeware browser plugin which turns the whole web into a comment forum. Once installed you get the chance to comment on every web site you visit, just by clicking on the iComment icon in your browser bar. There have been other attempts to do this kind of thing (e.g. Commentist, JumpKnowledge and Zspeech) but this version seems to have taken the idea a step further in terms of ease of use and accessibility. The install is a…


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Bookmark This! April 2, 2008 posted by

Glogster – create your own instant online poster

Glogster. An interesting variation on the personal home page concept, this new service uses lots of Web 2.0 lipstick and gloss to help you create your own online artistic statement. You can upload audio, video, images, add text, just about anything you want, and at the end of it you’ll get a page full of you and nothing but the you.   It’s a laudable idea, but if Geocities taught us anything, it’s that most people’s idea of art –…


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Bookmark This! March 28, 2008 posted by

Buddyfetch – the search engine for friends

Buddyfetch. Interesting new search engine which trawls social networking, IM and community sites to locate people who share the same tastes as you do. The idea is you can find friends from amongst the zillions of community users by entering your favourite hobbies and suchlike and the system will match you up instantly. The site covers just about every community out there, from the obvious ones like Facebook and Bebo to more obscure offerings such as Blurty and Vox. It even covers Skype, Youtube and Stumbleupon, which is what I call…


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hmm..interesting March 15, 2008 posted by

The Portobello Estate – is this the $75 million home of your dreams?

The Portobello Estate. Yep, this $75 million splash of prime ocean front real estate is still available for your enjoyment and mirth, although we can’t help feeling the owner might take an offer right now. We’re not sure if you’re in the market for something quite so modest, but if you are, then rest assured that nothing has been overlooked in the quest for ultimate affluenzic luxury. 30,000 sq ft 3 level central grotto with 3 pools, tunnel slide and ‘splashing waterfalls’…


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Bookmark This! March 12, 2008 posted by

Veropedia – Wikipedia gets cleaned up

Veropedia is a new service which has been set up to collate, clean up and stabilize Wikipedia content. The idea is for their team of ‘experts’ to grab hold of the volatile material on Wikipedia and add some control, so it can be made more stable and reliable. In effect this is an attempt to apply old style editorship rules onto the new style Wikipedia model. It seems to be a worthy cause, even though critics will probably accuse the Veropedia founders of of piggy-backing off the world’s largest…


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hmm..interesting March 10, 2008 posted by

Social Networking is just CB Radio?

Cringley reckons that social networks are just a new version of the CB Radio fad. Destined to crash and burn as he puts it. And to be honest, I have to agree with his central premise, which is that they don’t supply *enough* real value, long term, to survive, in the same way that Geocities faded away because of user apathy. The only thing I would say is that the vertical networks like LinkedIn do offer value for job and…


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