Ideo’s 3d immersion technology

Amazing 3D immersion technology from IDEO Labs on Vimeo.

This is really awesome, I have always been impressed by Tom Kelley led Ideo for all the cool products they design which win product design contests every year. Check out this video about a 3d immersion technology which they are have prototyped in their labs. Looking at this I feel the virtual world is one step closer to the real world. Tom Kelley has always been my inspiration, Kudos Ideo! keep up the best work. if you guys want to dig in more data, check it here in their Ideo labs.

50 great photographers

I came across this interesting article on the Hongkiat, a website for tech users, designers and bloggers. This is a list of the best photographers around the globe with their awesome portfolios. My personal favorite was Simon Hoegsberg, I especially liked his creative photo shot which is called the 100 meters of existence, the photo is actually 100mx78m long. The photo depicts candid shots of people from different walks of life. Your opinion may differ here but I liked his creativity with the canvas.

Skype Iphone App launched

Great news for Skype lovers like me, the company recently launched their iphone application on the Apple store. You can download it from here. This would let you make Skype-to-Skype calls from Wi-Fi zone. But you won’t be able to connect through 3G or Edge calls (obviously for legal reasons, if they allow that AT&T and other carriers would loose a lot of revenue since all would call their friends and family through this protocol and they would not use the mobile voice network) So don’t expect this to work anytime in the future. The interface design is well done and is more OS X UI. I checked the audio quality from my home wi-fi network and the quality was awesome. The application can integrate with your address book and can connect to your skype friends. Good application, worth downloading and installing on your iphone. Go get it!

My best friends blog goes online : UXSuccess

One of my past colleague and my very best friend Julie Booth has recently launched her own blog on user experience, UXSuccess. On this blog she will  talk about User Experience in product and service development areas. I recommend this blog to all the people out there who are constantly looking out to read and learn more about User experience in detail, this is the best space to keep you updated. I am very much confident that Julie would provide an interesting and informative read to all her readers given her vast experience in this field. I wish Julie all my best compliments for taking this blog to the next level and making it a good resource for people from UX discipline. Best of Luck JB!

Great resources for Music Album Art

Frankly, I don’t like Itunes or Media player messing with my system in the background for automatically displaying the album art. I don’t know if my music data is shared with any music labels or music selling sites by caching them in the background. So for all the people who belong to my category can download Album Art manually from the net. This applies both for Ipods and Iphone. Its pretty simple really, here is what I do. Straight away search for album names on  images.google.com or check it on Slothradio.  Both of these resources would grab a lot of images with various image dimensions.  I always prefer to save the images with 300 x 300 (width x height) which actually saves file size as well look pretty decent on ipod or iphone coverflow. Right click on the image and save it in a folder dedicated for album art.

Now about attaching the album image to a album in itunes, open Itunes >  Select the album > select all the song files by Shift + left mouse click > right click on these selected files > a menu would be displayed > select Get Info > Multiple Item Information window opens up > You canedit changes from Artist, Album artist, Album, Grouping, Composer, Genre etc. on the right side there would be a Artwork white box > Double click on this white box > browse album image path location to the folder which has downloaded album images > Select the image and click Open button > bingo ! itunes will add the album image to all the songs in that album. 

Most of you out there would have experienced another issue with itunes, sometimes when you apply a album image to a music album or edit changes regarding the album information these changes are not applied to this album. I actually had faced this problem so as everyone else I googled to read any remedy available, went from forum to forum tried out what people stated but all was in vain. So after my own research, I was able to find a solution for this problem. Here is what you can do, just before adding music files to Itunes check the folder properties on your CD or local folder if they have Read-only access rights. Because if they do and you add song files with read-only rights, these song files would also inherit the read-only properites in Itunes library and then their album properites won’t be editable which means if you want to add a album image or edit album/song information, first the information would be not editable as well as changes won’t reflect on the song information even if you are able to edit.  So the golden rule is check your folder rights before adding the music folder to your devices.

Nokia asks Users to sketch their Nokia dream phone

This is getting interesting, today morning I read on Gizmodo that Nokia is pulling outtheir newly launched 5800 Xpress Music mobile phone from all stores in the US. And then I read this story about Nokia going to cities like Mumbai, Rio de Janeiro, and Accra as well as from other mega cities. They asked local community users to sketch a graffiti of what they dreamt about the next Nokia phone. They were free to sketch features that they would like-to-have in their dream nokia phones. Now this is really cool to hear that Nokia is displaying their openess for new innovation in their phones.  I appreciate their initiative just the way google says “Focus on the user and all else will follow”. You can check all these users design here on Businessweek

Blackberry shoots Apple!!

The gadget ad-wars are live n’ kickin butts, even during the worst recession in the history of world, Blackberry’s new ad displays a real blackberry piercing through the apple and at the end claiming “The worlds first touch-screen blackberry … Nothing can touch it” teaser. Since, I am a loyal Apple fan, I can just imagine how much BB hates apple. But I can just say the apple was first fruit on earth, apple also is the first mobile phone to have the first multi-touch screen. Hey, Blackberry you may be the last one to enter the touch-screen race but the race is already won by none other than Apple.  A apple a day keeps the blackberry away!!

Facebooking gets mob-flashing in Liverpool station

I would call this the power of  expression which was actually triggered by a group of Facebook members.  On February 06 ‘ 09 , around 15,000 people descended on the train station just after the evening rush hour. The idea of this group was to hold a silent disco reminiscent to the T-Mobile ad which was aired recently. The end result was an hour and half delay at the station which was a full chaos. Now this is what I call Mass-Public-Endorsement of T-mobile.

Greener Gadgets 2009

The second Annual Greener Gadgets 2009 conference will be held on February 27th 2009. There is an interesting Design competition been conducted. Planet Green and Tree hugger are the sponsor for this event. Expect some greener gadgets on display with lot of ‘Green’ talks during the conference. If anybody wants to attend this conference, here is a link on Linkedin and Facebook

There would be some engaging discussion on :

• This year’s conference will feature engaging discussion on:
• Emerging energy technology
• Real solutions for e-waste recycling
• New inventions in energy generation and efficiency
• Future forward recyclable gadgetry
• The business case for going green

Here are some quick details for reaching this conference:

Conference date : February 27, 2009
Time : 9 a.m. – 6 p.m.
Venue : McGraw-Hill Conference Center
1221 Avenue of the Americas
New York, NY

History of Internet in PICOL icons

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This was an interesting discovery for me today morning, when I was browsing for some icons. History of internet is an animated documentary of various inventions illustrating events right from the start of ARPNET to Internet. This is written and directed by Melih Bilgil for his Diploma project. The director of this clips has used very simple and innovative way to tell the story by using PICOL icons. These icons are sharp, simple and in black color. They can be downloaded here. I think its a creative way to tell a technology era story.
Kudos to Melih Bilgil for giving us an opportunity to trace back the history of Internet.