Category: Miscellaneous

Dharmesh Shah of OnStartUps.com has some interesting thoughts on Web 2.0 start-up stumbles and fumbles, on the news that Kiko is on the blocks, on eBay (bidding starts at $49K. No takers yet). He writes:

“For those that don’t know who/what Kiko was, it was one of the prototypical Web 2.0 companies (a free online calendar with AJAX, written in Ruby On Rails and funded by Y Combinator). It doesn’t get much more Web 2.0 than that.”

Read his five reflections on where Kiko may have gone wrong. (Some interesting forum discussion follows.)

This pic may look like the set of Tron or Logan’s Run, or some futuristic mall, but it’s actually a close-up of the giant machinery inside Japan’s High Energy Accelerator Research Organization. It’s just one of the amazing images in a piece on PingMag called “Joe Nishizawa: Japan’s Underground Photography.” All the images are from a book of Nishizawa’s photographs, called Deep Inside, which explores the inner (and under) workings of Japan through photos and deep captions. Think of it as UNDER street tech.

Thanks, Jay!

Update: (via Boing Boing):
Matthew says: “The photo in this item is from KEK (“Japan’s High Energy Accelerator Research Organization”, as you say), which is not in Tokyo. It’s it Tskuba, about 40 miles north east of Tokyo, more or less the middle of nowhere. I spent a week there in college, installing code for controlling high voltage power supplies for the Belle detector project.”

The good folks over at Treehugger have teamed up with I.D. magazine to create an innovative two-fold design competition called Umbrella Inside Out, subtitled: An Umbrella with a Future (that’d be competition no. 1) and Design with a Past (you guessed it: no. 2).

As you may have noticed, umbrellas don’t tend to last very long. Millions of them end up in landfills (some 33 million are sold every year). The first competition is for an umbrella design that meets the new standards of a “cradle to cradle” (C2C) product lifecycle, which basically means something that can naturally decompose, or something that can be “upcycled” into something else useful (you can read more about C2C here). The second contest is to find creative uses for the umbrella trash we’re already stuck with. Personally, I vote for more of these mini-skirts made out of umbrella vinyl. That seems like a perfectly fine and noble way of breathing new life into dead Totes.

If you happened to read the piece “Wikipedia 3.0: The End of Google?” on Evolving Trends, which got Dugg to death, Nick Douglas, of Valleywag, returns serve on this little round of brain tennis with: Five reasons no one will replace Google. He offers five, count ’em, six reasons why nobody’s killing Google by a thousand volunteer cuts anytime soon.

The EFF has put together an awesome little animated vid to demonstrate the perils to consumers of overly restrictive copyright laws. Take THAT Captain Copyright!

The only thing that would make this better is if Mark Frauenfelder had done it. It’s great that Mark has been given the opportunity to show his stuff as a writer/editor via Make, but it’s a shame we don’t get to see more of his wonderful art (of which the style of this EFF vid is vaguely reminiscent).

Street Tech pals Core77 are celebrating their 11th birthday (gee, I can remember when they were still breast feeding). To celebrate, they teamed up with Fila and designed some awesome sneaks. At first glance, they might not look that unique, but designers, architectual model builders, and even makers of wargame terrain will recognize the “blue foam” material the shoes are made to look like they were carved out of. They even replicate the all-too-familiar black diamond logo. (Coinicidentally, as I write this, I have a pile of the stuff a few feet away from me.) I still covet my Core77 T-shirt. I wonder if they have any free sneakers to give away to former judges of their design competitions who traveled all the way to NYC for zippo compensation (save aforementioned groovy Tee).

And whether he was aware of it or not, he made his admission on “Satan’s Birthday” (as Letterman called it): 06/06/06:

“Google Inc. co-founder Sergey Brin acknowledged the dominant internet company has compromised its principles by accommodating Chinese censorship demands. He said Google is wrestling to make the deal work before deciding whether to reverse course…

“‘We felt that perhaps we could compromise our principles but provide ultimately more information for the Chinese and be a more effective service and perhaps make more of a difference,’ Brin said.”

From the Sydney Morning Herald.

[Lawrence Lessig Does A Virtual
Book Tour in Second Life]

Regina at we-make-money-not-art does a nice condensation of an article that recently appeared in Harvard Business Review on Marketing to Avatars. She quotes:

“The strong involvement of Second Life (and other virtual worlds)’s residents with their virtual environment (from personalized avatars to virtual businesses, scheduled celebrity book signings, etc.) constitutes a dream marketing venue. Commerce is already an integral part of the game. Residents spend—in Linden dollars—the equivalent of $5 million a month on transactions for in-world products and services. Introducing real-world brands is just a logical step.

“Whom do marketing efforts target? The members who gave their credit card numbers to register for the game—or their avatars? If the real-world human controls the real-world wallet, the avatar represents a different “shadow” consumer, one able to influence its creator’s purchase of real-world products and conceivably make its own real-world purchases in the virtual world.”

Read her condensed version.

Read the full HBR piece.

TechEBlog has a list of the Top Ten Strangest Office Gadgets. Some of them you’ll likely recognize, such as the USB Aroma Therapy bot that we blogged here, and the USB powered air dart launcher, which was blogged everywhere else. But how about “Programmable Soda,” with different flavor capsules along the bottle that you press to release the flavors you want into the drink? Or the Wearable Sleeping Bag that has arms and legs? Or the EEG-driven Mental Typewriter? And then, there’s our favorite, the one that makes us certain there is a God (and she has a wicked sense of humor): The AOL CD Thrower. Okay, it throws ANY CD, but we like the idea of it exclusively destroying the giant pile of this vile little platters we still have on top of our filing cabinet.

BTW: Here’s a direct link to the Web page for the LEGO CD Thrower.

Thanks, Mr. Townsend!

The amazing and wonderful Regine Debatty (of we make money not art) has an interview with Blendid, a fascinating group of Dutch interface designers/new media artists. From her introduction:

Among the works of the Amsterdam-based studio is Demor, an immersive outdoor game experience for visually impaired children; Robotract, an augmented reality game; TouchMe, an interactive installation that allows the public to leave a personal imprint in the public space. Experimenting with the whole body of a dancer as an input device they also created the Mocap Performance

Read the entire review.