everwas

a blog by Ian Kennedy

Tag: web & tech

  • Microsoft Surface, Minority Report realized

    I saw and blogged about an early prototype of this device back when I saw it demoed at eTech last year. It blew people away back then and is even more impressive today. The video below shows some new enhancements such as the ability to drag photos from a digital camera to the table for preview and then again to your Windows Mobile device.

    Combine this UI with Sony’s recently announced flexible OLED displays and one can only imagine the possibilities – a multi-touch jacket which animates itself based on RFID and Bluetooth signals around it, call it a high tech chameleon.

    Very, very cool.


  • FlipFrames launches


    Congratulations Dave, Aaron, and Josh!

  • Blades of Glory Japan Style – A Robot that Skates!

    f_robot_plen.jpg

    Fresh out of the labs in Osaka, a robot that can skate! Check out the Akazawa Plen website gallery page for videos of Desktop Hobby Robot Plen on a skateboard as well. Bluetooth-enabled and on sale now for $2,400.

    Thanks to AI & Robotics blog for the pointer.

  • reinvigorate.net – shiny new stats app reborn

    login.png

    I’m a bit of a stats nerd so I was quite pleased to see that a longtime favorite hosted stats package came back to life after going dark over a year ago. Reinvigorate.net has been reborn from the ashes and is now hosted by the fine folks over at mediatemple which should be able to handle any traffic people throw at it.

    One of the unique aspects of the early version of reinvigorate that I’m happy to see is still part of the service is the tracking of visitors in real-time.

    reinvigorate-summary.png

    Click on the image above for a larger view. You can see that reinvigorate has two large boxes that keep track of Active Visitors & Active Pages. There’s also a clean and simple dashboard telling you how many users you’ve had so far today (you can set your site’s timezone in the preferences), the average number of pages viewed on your site as well as information about referrals. I like this approach because it’s very easy to take in the health of your readership at a glance.

    (more…)

  • Sure the iPhone looked cool but at least you could touch this interface

    We all gawked at the hermetically sealed display of the iPhone at the recent MacWorld show but the Smart Board was one of the cooler things I saw. Basically it was like a huge touchscreen display that your could write on with digital ink.

    I’ve seen these used on CNN and ESPN but this was the first time I could play with one. It was totally cool to drag your hand across a map to scroll around and drag a corner of a box with your finger to make it bigger.

    Smart Board by Smart Technologies

  • Is your website tasty?

    353310992_3ee640e005.jpg
    The Yahoo Publisher Network blog has an excellent graphic which describes how a crawler might look at a webpage if it was a voracious carnivore. This is Part II of a series that my colleagues Cody and Amit are doing on optimizing your site for advertising.

  • A Lazy Man’s Hack

    Back in September I wrote about a quick and dirty hack which showed how you could use a service called favoritethingz.com to build a badge which would show a visual representation of your blogroll.

    I never got around to finishing up the rest of the story. Basically, the 20-minute hack post made the front page of Digg and covered by Lifehacker so the downstream links & signups to favoritethingz blipped and they got in touch with me. Better than that, they basically took a look at my post and automated the whole thing so now when you go to their Blogz Badge page all you need to do is paste in a URL and they’ll do the rest.

    Feeling real lazy? Head over to their del.icio.us badge page and give them your del.icio.us ID and they’ll create an image blogroll from your bookmarked pages. Small feature request on this one though – you should be able to feed it a del.ico.us tag so it limits itself to slurping down just a subset of your saved pages. I have hundreds (and I know people that have thousands) of saved links and a slideshow of all in thumbnail view is not that useful. On the contrary, a slideshow of my excellenceinadvertising tags would be useful.

    Ah well, roll another snowball and let’s see what happens. 

  • Polaroid-o-nizer – creating an online version of a classic offline medium

    All sorts of fun this week with image manipulation. The Image-Rich Blogroll got a fair bit of play but there was some grumbling on that it was too manual. Yes, it would be good to automate this stuff I dream up – that’s a project for a rainy day.

    Next on the agenda of cool web services that could be used in interesting ways is B3ta’s Polaroid-o-nizer service. Point it to any image file URL, type in some text and then hit the “Onize” button and they’ll generate a realistic looking Polaroid of the image.

    There’s even a check box if you want to upload the image to Imageshack to have them host your image for you.

    So if earlier this week the project was a graphical representation of your blogroll, how about using Polaroid-o-nizer to become your annotated feed of images you come across on the web?

    – found while reading Pacific IT

  • Map Directions on your iPod

    iway_img.jpg
    iPod Directions is a cool little app that takes your Yahoo Maps (remember, we support multipoint and right-click location) driving directions and puts them in your video or nano iPod.

    Note: I haven’t been able to get this to work with the Yahoo Maps Beta (I contacted the company several days ago but never heard back) but it works just fine on basic Yahoo Maps.