The app I really liked is called VanPark 2010, and overlays metered parking rates on top of a map of downtown Vancouver.
Lots of geeks abstractly advocate the power of open source and open data, but this seems to be a great example of how opening up data can help the average citizen. I requested a feature where the user enters an address, and the app highlights the cheapest parking within, say, 500 meters.
And can we take a moment to recognize the awesomeness of Bing Maps’ Birds eye view functionality. It truly is the eye of God.
Somebody sent me a link to this foldable electric bicycle designed, I gather, for urban commuting. This ad is ill-advised in a number of ways (is the more egregious crime the green wave of faux-exhaust or the attempt to make ‘yike’ a verb?), but you get the general idea:
There’s a longer Discovery Channel piece on the site that explores the design and features of the bike a bit more. I like that it breaks the ‘lean forward over the bars’ paradigm of biking.
The key question, though, is this: is it less nerdy than a Segway?
It’s taken, what, about 25 years of the personal computer to finally break out of the screen + keyboard + mouse paradigm. There have been plenty of small wins and big failures along the way, but lately it feels like we’re on to something. Maybe just as the last decade saw laptops and netbooks overtake desktop computers, the next decade will see assorted other devices replace the laptop.
The latest candidate is the Microsoft Courier, a tablet computer with a bookish form factor. Here’s some video from Engadget:
I really like the way that demo video plays. The narrator is very natural, and I like that it’s focused on a case study as opposed to the “rejoice, for this thing is awesome” tone so common to Apple’s videos.
I’m not sure I want one, but I’m excited by these mainstream players like Apple and Microsoft thinking creatively about interface design and how we should interact with computers.
Chatroulette is a kind of serendipity engine for discovering strangers with whom to video chat. It’s also one of the first web memes that made me think, “I am way too old for this.” Here’s a great six-minute movie describing what Chatroulette is:
Everybody’s talking about Chatroulette at the moment. There’s a good piece from New York magazine–I like their description of what you might find when you join the site:
A guy from Sweden was reportedly speed-drawing strangers’ portraits. Someone with a guitar was improvising songs for anyone who’d give him a topic. One man popped up on people’s screens in the act of fornicating with a head of lettuce. Others dressed like ninjas, tried to persuade women to expose themselves, and played spontaneous transcontinental games of Connect Four. Occasionally, people even made nonvirtual connections: One punk-music blogger met a group of people from Michigan who ended up driving eleven hours to crash at his house for a concert in New York…I sing the body electronic.
I don’t have a lot to say about Chatroulette at the moment, beyond these three thoughts:
Once again, we have the pornography industry to thank for foreshadowing a mainstream phenomenon.
It’s simultaneously voyeuristic and exhibitionist. You’re the watched and the watcher. That, to me, is its secret sauce.
In terms of lonely cries into the ether, Chatroulette puts blogs to shame. We just keep inventing better metaphors for the disconnected existential existence that is modern life.
I find nothing about Chatroulette appealing. I’m obvious not opposed to superficial wastes of time, but the process just seems kind of joyless to me. Am I wrong?
The trouser-rubbing hordes of Macolytes are all in a lather about Apple’s newest device: the oddly-named iPad (insert menstrual humour here). If you haven’t seen it yet, watch the introductory video. It features the usual legion of starry-eyed, breathless Apple senior staff speaking reverently about their newest saint.
It’s a big, thin iPod. And it’s dead sexy. And surprisingly cheap, with prices starting at US $499.
It looks like a cool toy, but which of my computing, communications or entertainment problems does this device actually solve? It’s a sexier Kindle (with, no doubt, the same level of vendor lock-in)–a cool-looking reading device, for newspapers, books and the Web. I’ve been pretty ambivalent about the Kindle and other ebook readers up to now. I’ll probably buy one eventually, but I find I have an affection for the analog reading experience of dead tree books and New Yorker magazines.
And I don’t sit down to ‘read the Internet’. My ‘web surfing’ experience, if you will, is this mix of reading, blogging, tweeting, sending emails and chatting online, and all of that is usually intermingled with my doing actual work. The iPad looks to be great for reading the web, but worse than a laptop for each of these other functions.
I do watch TV and, rarely, feature-length movies on my laptop. I’m usually either on a plane or in bed. In either case, I appreciate the fact that my laptop can sit all on its own, without me holding it up. I know there will be docks and sundry other, uh, mounts for the iPad, but I’m not sure how else it would be superior to my MacBook Air.
In short, it’s a great-looking device, but I’m not sure it’s right for me. What are your initial impressions?
The 2010 International Consumer Electronics show ended a couple of days ago. I didn’t pay much attention to all the coverage that CES received, but I did see one technology demo that was pretty cool.
Samsung has developed a 40% transparent OLED screen, not dissimilar to those touch screens Tom Cruise fondled in Minority Report:
Not a game-changer, but that’s still some pretty cool tech. I liked the suggestion that office cubicle walls could be made of these screens. They could permit more light into the cubicle, but you could simultaneously display data or documents on them.
A couple of months back, I wrote aboutFoursquare. It is, as far as I can tell, the location-based social network with the most legs. It enables you to share your physical location, in real time, with a network of friends you select.
I’m not sure why, but I’ve been diligently ‘checking in’ a couple of times a day. As an aside, besides generating a database of where I spend my time, I’ve realized zero value from Foursquare. That doesn’t mean I won’t see future value–I just haven’t experienced any yet.
When I check in, I declare my location to 77 Foursquare friends (looking at their avatars, that’s a big grid of geeky dudes). Just like Facebook or another social network, you can invite other users to become your friends so that you can share location data.
Here’s the thing. I recently checked my list of pending friend requests. I’d been ignoring it for a while, so the requests had added up. When I went through the list, there were over 60 strangers who wanted to share their location and receive notifications about mine on an ongoing basis.
I may have met a few of these people once before at an event–I have a horrible memory for names. Regardless, theirs are not names I immediately recognize.
If I was on some online-only network, I might have no qualms about ‘friending’ near or total strangers. But when we’re talking about meatspace, that crosses a particular line for me. I don’t actively worry about anybody doing something injurious to me, but I want to know who knows where I am.
This leads me to a question: why are strangers friending other strangers? Do they assume, unlike me, that the stakes are the same on Foursquare as they are, say, on Twitter? What do you think?
My background in technical writing has apparently made mehighly sensitive to how devices and control mechanisms are labeled. I always get a little perturbed when technology doesn’t make sense. Here’s the latest example:
What happened to the ‘Large’ setting? Did the user interface designer go to the Starbucks school of sizing? Hmm…I suppose if they had, the sizes would just be Medium, Large and Extra Large.
This is a classic ‘level of abstraction’ problem. I assume that the washer uses this setting to determine the water level in the tank. Why not just show the water levels and trust humans to correlate their pile of laundry to the level of water in the tank?
The other day I was scheduling a meeting at the sushi restaurant on Granville Street that’s really near Cherry Bomb and Fluevog. I couldn’t remember the name–maybe I never knew it–so I brought up Google Street View to have a look.
When I went to drag the little Street View orange man over Granville Street, it didn’t turn blue like the rest of the map:
That’s because, earlier this year, when the Google Street View car drove by, Granville Street was under construction or otherwise restricted to pedestrian traffic.
This isn’t that big a deal here, but what about the great pedestrianized streets of Europe and Asia? I’m thinking here of Dublin’s Grafton and Henry Streets, which are long and restricted to walkers and cyclists.
Maybe Google needs to expand into other vehicles. A Google Street View tricycle, perhaps? Or maybe something mounted on a human, like a four-way SteadiCam?
Thanks to an invitation from Chris Breikss, I submitted a photo to a Flickr contest being run by imagine1day, a non-profit focused on child education in Ethiopia.
The contest asks participants to “submit a photo and 50 words or less that represent greatness for your chance to win”. Here’s the photo I offered:
The photo is totally banal, but I love the story. Here are my 49 words:
This is Robben Island, a prison in South Africa. Nelson Mandela was imprisoned here for 18 years, and he worked in this lime quarry. During breaks, Mandela and fellow political prisoners sat in a cave, debating politics. Together, they created the soul of an Apartheid-free South Africa.
The prize is two tickets to the premiere of “Facing Ali”, a boxing documentary I wrote about earlier in the summer. It’d be neat to go, as I’m friends with the director Pete McCormack and his partner. If you want to help me out and have a Flickr account, drop by the photo and leave a comment. That’s the criteria for winning the contest.
It’s probably the first time I was ever published, and it’s a sad little essay about being an environmental defeatist. Click to brobdingnangate (an awesome term I stole from Phil):
We talked a lot about TckTckTck, activism and social change in the five days I recently spent on the far side of Cortes Island, at the Web of Change conference. It’s the second time I’ve been.
The first time I went was back in 2006, and I found the conference a bit vexing. As with this year, the people were awesome–smart, dedicated and incredibly welcoming. However, I felt pretty intimidated by the high woo woo factor and Hollyhock’s particular philosophical–one might say downright religious–bent.
I tried to go back this year with a more open mind and a higher tolerance for the woo woo. I once again found my fellow attendees–there were only 90, so I met nearly everyone–friendly, super-smart and all seemingly world-changers. The sessions were mostly good. Zak Exley’s talk entitled “Revolution in Jesusland” stands out as particularly excellent. He’s a labour-organizing progressive who moved to Kansas and ‘infiltrated’ the Christian Right because he married an evangelical Christian. He’s been blogging about the experience, and about a remarkable thing that he sees happening in Middle America:
There is an incredibly large and beautiful social movement exploding among evangelicals right now that stands for nearly all of the same causes and goals that secular progressives do. Those goals include: eliminating poverty, saving the environment, promoting justice and equality along racial, gender and class lines and for immigrants—and even separation of church and state.
In terms of our work, I was kind of an outsider compared to many other attendees. They’re advocates, campaigners and change-makers for organizations like the David Suzuki Foundation or BC Health Coalition or Knowledge as Power. Me, I run a marketing company. They know a ton about advocacy, online and off. I have never actually made a protest sign.
Still, I learned a ton and will hopefully be back next year. As with my occasional work in the arts, I’ve always found it stimulating to step a little outside of my daily focus to gain insights and meet new people. I often find that, down the road, I draw fruitful connections across these domains which I would have never otherwise seen.
Now, if I can only convince Hollyhock to serve the occasional piece of chicken.
