17.07.2009 by Zoltan

Future Routers

Future Routers is a great little colab design project between Goldsmiths and Talk Talk (appalling customer service, even if they have interesting corporate comms projects) that re-imagines the humble broadband router into something nicer/smarter – essentially designed around people rather than technology.

My favourite is the snappily titled ‘Energy Saver’ above, which has 4 hooks for house keys. When the last person to leave home takes their keys, it switches itself off. Presumably it switches on again when the keys are deposited back, but it doesn’t actually state that anywhere :(

via CR Blog

16.06.2009 by Zoltan

facebook.com/yourname

If you haven’t already heard, Facebook has just released vanity URLs. They’re up for grabs now. Hit me up here facebook.com/zoltan.csaki, and make sure you grab yours before someone else does…

11.06.2009 by Zoltan

How deep does the rabbit hole go?

RabbitHoles 3D is some pretty cool tech, but waaaay under-utilised IMHO.

“The pieces are printed in the amazing form of RabbitHoles state-of-the-art digital motion holograms, which display 1280 frames of full-color, 3D imagery with up to ten seconds of fluid and seamless animation on a completely flat surface.”

Why is it that tech-leading artists have such a horrible aesthetic? The only artist that actually thought about the medium and what makes it interesting is Nape of the Neck by Jeremy Engleman (around 05:28).

Anyway it will be interesting to see if and how it gets picked up moving forward.

11.05.2009 by Zoltan

The true value of twitter

Super interesting article over on Contagious that the true value of twitter is actually as an immediacy search engine? Think google in real-time. Yep, the penny drops and you realise why they turned down half a bazillion.

“$500m seems like small fry when you may have accidentally stumbled on the latest evolution of a cash cow as gigantic as search marketing.”

Anyway some clever lad has created a firefox plugin that puts Twitter results directly into the google results page. Its the dog’s bollocks, trust me. It fundamentally changed search for me. Go on, give it a whirl

via contagious

07.09.2008 by Zoltan

Out intellectual-ise your mates with bkkeeper

I’m not really a big twitterer yet (but I think my new iPhone will change that), but I just came across this ingenious bolt-on idea called bkkeeper, which turns your twitter into a broadcast of your book reading habits.

But apart from sharing the titles you’re currently reading, they’ve also built a system which allows you to digitally dog-ear / bookmark pages. Its a great way of sharing with people in real-time what was previously only a solo experience.

Apart from the fact that I haven’t figured out how to get an account there yet (am I just completely stupid/blind?), the only thing that could improve this would be some webcam integration to read the ISBN number for you – you know, like Delicious Library.

07.09.2008 by Zoltan

The One

Watch this through and you’ll think the Wachowski’s were perhaps more than just a little prescient. Kevin Kelly from Wired looks at the fact that the current web is only 5000 days old, and posits what the coming 5000 days will bring.

If you don’t have the time, then it pretty much goes like this -

“There is only One machine.
The web is its OS.
All screens look into the One.
No bits will live outside the web.
To share is to gain.
Let the One read it.
The One is us.”

Word.

via in my atmosphere

07.09.2008 by Zoltan

Lateral thinking

In Australia, Stella Artois is the king of premium beers. But like any brand, they wanted to sell more (of course). They needed to up their game, and created a new sales team to focus on it. And of course, they needed some marketing materials to help them do the selling. So far, so traditional.

But the sales team didn’t really know about the legacy of the brand and the long association with film, especially in the UK. Instead of a series of sleep-worthy PowerPoints, they were each given a customised PSP loaded with film content. Not only could they educate themselves, but they could educate the bar owners as well. And importantly, have some fun doing it.

And it worked (from after the jump) – “analysis has shown that every sales representative who was given a PSP met all their sales targets for the relevant quarter. Anecdotal feedback also confirmed that without exception, the PSP was regarded as the best sales presenter ever received. As a result, Foster’s is now reviewing further rollout of the tool.”

This is a great example of an agency, in this case Lowe Rivet, stepping back from the brief and thinking about what needs to be achieved and by whom. Again, in digital we’re often too proud to offer clients ready-made solutions. But custom is not always king. Often – and increasingly more so as every single facet of digital possibility has a web 2.0 offering – it just makes sense to take something pre-engineered, and tweak it as required.

via i believe in advertising

12.07.2008 by Zoltan

The future of DJing?

Seeing this makes me think of how my mother used to think spinning vinyl was ‘just not how you make music’. Nostalgia for real wax aside, it seems to me that this is a bit too clinical and (potentially) takes a lot of the skill out of DJing. Almost like being able to see the waveform is cheating, as you no longer need to ‘feel’ the music.

But in time i’m sure kids will grow up knowing that they can touch any screen, and expect it to react. Then this will be OK, and we will most certainly be in the future. Or maybe that will be when someone ports this software to the iPhone and tells Andrew Andrew (of the legendary NYC iPod parties) about it?

12.07.2008 by Zoltan

Stop spam, read books

Everyone hates proving that they’re human. Captcha’s are those annoying sequences of letters, deformed beyond OCR, in every online form where you have to prove you’re smarter than the computer. But rather than use randomly generated sequences, some clever bod decided it could be put to better use by helping to digitise the world’s library, via a project called ReCAPTCHA

According to the site, “About 60 million CAPTCHAs are solved by humans around the world every day. In each case, roughly ten seconds of human time are being spent… more than 150,000 hours of work each day.” Put it all together and you get an endless distributed workflow, making good on their promise of “Digitizing Books One Word at a Time”.

A noble cause no doubt and a very simple and powerful idea. Honestly though, if these little puzzles are all that separate us from the machines, we’re fucked anyway, digitised world library or not.

10.07.2008 by Zoltan

What was I thinking?

I love the simplicity of this graphic, which neatly sums up my waning love for virtual friends. Although I still have my profile, I use Facebook now almost exclusively as an advertiser. And for this its absolutely awesome (though expensive at times). Anyway I just had to get it out there – I’m not in love with Facebook anymore. Phew. I feel better already…

17.06.2008 by Zoltan

Interactive YouTube

Something big is happening on YouTube. Something which is fundamentally going to change the way you and I use it. They may not look like much, but the newly added annotations allow you to embellish videos and even make them interactive.

Imagine the possibilities. Truly interactive narratives. User-defined endings. And even games (the example after the jump). Unfortunately the embed function doesn’t work, so you’ll have to jump over to check it out.

via Digital Examples

25.02.2008 by Zoltan

PicLens

PicLens is something very very special. Quite simply its a better way to search for images. A browser add-on, it uses the metaphor of a never-ending wall to display image results from google (or flickr) in a more natural way than simply by ‘page’. The infinite non-space of PicLens makes the act of searching for images a joy.

I think their brief must’ve been to re-create the experience of lightbox – where there is nothing apart from the image to distract your attention – and mash it up with everything that’s beautiful about digital.

And its surprisingly FAST! Actually its faster than normal because of the way it constantly grabs the forthcoming images. So by the time you want to see more, they’re already loaded. Brilliant! FYI its heaps better in Firefox.

31.01.2008 by Zoltan

Flash on the iPhone / iPod Touch

Apple fanboys pony up, cause my brand the-affair is officially the very first t-shirt brand with a mobile store, accessible through everyone’s favourite gadget. That’s right, our awesome Flash website is now available on the i’m-so-very-very-cool-but-still-can’t-play-Flash, iPhone. That’s right fanboys, you heard right – FLASH ON THE IPHONE!

So how did we achieve this little bit of tech-magic I hear you ask? Well, actually we did very little… All you’re going to need is the VNSea client released recently, and obviously a VNSea server running on some other broadband computer that you can then control. Its a tad on the slow side too, but hey, that’s the price for the bleeding edge.

Thanks to Kamil, our resident Flash guru :)

28.01.2008 by Zoltan

World Trends 2008

I never really understood the link between tube map and trends (apart from an easy way to lay out various loosely linked pieces of information), but anyway here is the 2008 version.

Nothing too-crazy / unexpected here. But it is interesting to note the rise of “Karma capitalism”, which only caught my eye because I received an xmas gift in the form of a KarmaCurrency voucher (which I am yet to spend). This in itself is not very interesting. The fact that I got it from my technologically illiterate mother certainly is…

via ad lab

22.01.2008 by Zoltan

PV3D 2.0 Alpha

You may not like magenta quite as much as Mr Doob (or even T-Mobile’s legal department for that matter), but you should definitely check out his experiments with the new-ish PV3D 2.0 alpha which supports run time lighting effects / shading.

Because if you remember anything about motion graphics circa 2001, your interweb is about to be infested. Don’t say I didn’t warn you. Let’s just hope that the de rigeur feedback-infused soundtrack doesn’t come bundled with the effect this time around ;)