Spleak. Not sure about this. In general I find very little to recommend ‘virtual buddies’, but maybe this MSN Messenger version is useful to some people. Here’s more on Spleak from developers IMT Labs. Hmm…one slight problem, it won’t download properly from Firefox, needs IE. Tsk sloppy! Anyway on playing around, it looks quite interesting, in a ‘probably remember to use it for 5 mins then forget’ kind of way. And shame it’s MSN Messenger bound.  They call me an Instant…

Deep in the impenetrable bowels of a website so obscure it makes James Joyce look like Noddy, lies DigiPie. An idea which may or may not have merit. Apparently it’s about consumers grabbing an equity share in artists. Consumer downloads song/media, earns points, which are then redeemed for an x% share of the artist’s total earnings over a period. Confused? You may well be. Guys, you need to make the concept clearer to us muppets out here!  With DigiPie a user can locate,…

Yotels. Japanese micro hotels re-jigged and brought to London. Bedtastic!  However, the truly revolutionary element of YOTEL is its windows, which are internal rather than external – they look into the corridors, which are in turn naturally lit through reflective mechanisms and channelling of light. This allows YOTEL to boldly go where other hotels simply can’t – tricky central city locations, airports, even underground. The reduced land costs and savings can then be passed on to customers to offer a first…

Excellent SFGate.com piece on the death of American music radio.  Corporate radio sucketh, whole and large and true. We know this. Everyone knows this. There is not a single person out there right now who is listening to any of the one zillion lifeless Clear Channel or Infinity-owned rock stations anywhere in the nation who is saying to themselves, gosh this KLOG station is just exceptionally good and clever and smart and plays amazingly fresh music and makes me want…

Apparently Google has a golden triangle. That’s an area on the results page which gets the most eyeball views. Interesting but not really rocket science, although fascinating to learn that only 20% of people looked at the results right at the bottom of the page. Of course this also means that screen display resolution could be a major factor in ‘above and below’ the fold visibility/effectiveness.  What it doesn’t explain, however, is whether the triangle exists at the top of every page of results, in which case it could…

Snatchit. Bizarrely designed reverse auction site which counts down time and bids until the last product is sold at the lowest price. £100 million in turnover and they call it a game? Yowsers!   On clicking the Buy Now button you will proceed to a screen which will prompt you to “CLICK HERE TO CONFIRM PURCHASE QUICKLY” Here, speed is of the essence – remember, the clock is ticking, If the time runs out, you’ve lost the game and you’ve missed the product…

Radio.Blog. Now with Podcasting.  Radio.blog is the first stand-alone player to let you stream sound on your website.

Fascinating piece on the fightback by the arcade games business, after years of slow decline caused by the popularity of home gaming consoles like Xbox and Playstation. [Thanks Kevin]  The hope is that new technology will once again push arcade games beyond what players can experience at home. Justin Burke, special projects manager at Sega Amusements Europe, thinks that this should be an easy task. “The next generation of graphics from Sega’s secret new hardware will out-perform the current excellent graphics found…

Hmm…the Sky Plus satellite service – the hard disk PVR system – appears to be having a lot of problems with broken encoding on the top three standard movie channels (not Box Office!). The symptoms include intermittent and very annoying stuttering audio on playback of recorded movies, which can be ‘cured’ by rewinding for a second then continuing play. I’ve talked to the support dept twice and each time been told that they’re ‘working on it’. It’s a pretty serious issue since Sky Movies…

According to this Telegraph article UK boffins are finally going to start research into the issue of ‘electricity sickness’. Basically where people complain of ultra sensitivity to EMF (electro-magnetic field) radiation, as emitted by just about everything that is powered. Mmm…  Scientists and health advisers are taking the claims of people who say electricity makes them ill seriously for the first time. The National Radiological Protection Board (NRPB) is carrying out a review of existing scientific studies into “electromagnetic hypersensitivity”…

How to detect lies.   The following techniques to telling if someone is lying are often used by police, and security experts. This knowledge is also useful for managers, employers, and for anyone to use in everyday situations where telling the truth from a lie can help prevent you from being a victim of fraud/scams and other deceptions.