This week I read some interesting, some bizarre, some funny but mostly mind stimulating articles. Here is a short selection that includes a must read post about the rise of narrative in social networks and a fascinating presentation by graphic designer Nicholas Felton.
Lastly, watch this video of graphic designer Nicholas Felton, the creator of The Feltron Annual Report. At PopTech 2009, he showed snapshot of The New York Times‘ front pages and what it means about America. Worthy of your time. And if you are interested in collecting personal data, check out Felton’s Daytum, a tool.
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I was thrilled to hear that current apps will be compatible with the iPad, but I’m more excited for apps that haven’t been written yet. Apps for the iPhone and iPod touch are designed for use while being held. There’s an exciting new use case that comes with the iPad — when it’s sitting in the dock. Owners not only have a new device to read news while on the couch, but they also have the perfect peripheral display.
What’s a peripheral display? Something that provides basic information without distracting you from your primary task. It runs silently in the background and it’s there when you need to retrieve some glanceable information. You already use plenty of them every day: clocks, stock tickers, weather icons, unread email icons, etc. I currently use one app on my iPhone as a peripheral display: Flip Clock. I think we are soon going to see a lot more apps like this.
My perfect peripheral display app would come with a few basic widgets like a clock, calendar, stocks, weather, and access to photos on the iPad. The app could then offer upgrades (perhaps $2.99 each) for access to services like Flickr, Picasa, Twitter, Facebook, CNN (and other news sites), etc. The app could be free with the requirement that one of the widgets shows advertisements. A quick paid upgrade (perhaps $9.99) would remove the ads and offer a spot for another widget.
I’ve taken the liberty of mocking up in Photoshop what this app may look like using the iPad GUI. Below you can see a few basic widgets, a tweet that changes every few minutes, and a photo slideshow powered by Flickr. The tweet includes a link which when tapped should close this app and launch Safari. This applies to the other widgets too; tapping them should launch their corresponding apps. Interactivity makes this app better than any digital picture frame available.
There are tons of apps that provide basic information, but now they can be combined to take advantage of the larger screen.
Now that I’ve filled your head with ideas, go build it! Just think of me when you publish the app to the store. Also, let me know if you think this is a good idea.
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At the launch event of fuel cell company Bloom Energy last week General Colin Powell, who is on the board of directors for Bloom Energy and a limited partner for venture firm Kleiner Perkins, talked about his experiences of working with Bloom and his vision for Bloom’s server for the developing world. Powell called the Bloom server “a breakthrough product,” and said that 5 years ago he met with Bloom’s founder KR Sridhar in his garage and joked that nowadays he still gives Sridhar the occasional lecture — I still act like a General, Powell quipped.
To see the complete video of Powell’s speech watch this clip from The Auto Channel and move ahead to 25 minutes, 40 seconds. After Powell’s speech he joined a media Q&A and I grabbed this really short video clip of Powell talking about what it’s been like to work with Kleiner Perkins. It’s not the best camera work and he gave me about a minute before he left the room, but I thought I’d post it anyway:
Here’s a clip that Mashable took of Powell answering a question during the media Q&A on whether Powell had talked to the military about using Bloom’s server:
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Gordon Robertson won a gold medal in the 1952 Olympics, but even he couldn’t land a ticket for Sunday’s big game.
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Although it continues to face criticism from European privacy authorities about Street View, that hasn’t stopped Google from adding features to the service. The latest to launch is a kind of user-generated layer to Street View that uses photos uploaded by individuals to create a pseudo-3D panorama of a specific spot. Although there aren’t going to be enough user photos to do this for every site or building, it’s an additional way to get different perspectives on popular landmarks.
If the new feature sounds familiar, that’s probably because it is very similar to a photo feature launched by Microsoft in 2008 called Photosynth, which also takes user-submitted photos of famous sites that have been shot from all different angles and generates a 3D panorama from them. The main difference between the two is that Photosynth requires Silverlight — Microsoft’s competitor to Flash — which only runs on Windows (and Intel-based Macs). Although Google’s new feature doesn’t have a cool name like Photosynth (they just call it “navigating through user photos in Street View,” it offers the same basic functionality, and is available to anyone with Flash).
Google started incorporating user photos into the Street View part of Google Maps last year. It started with photos from Google-owned photo service Panoramio (which has been an option within Google Maps for some time) and more recently added support for Flickr photos as well. But all that did was show you specific photos (if they were geo-tagged properly) when you looked at a location in the regular Google Maps view. With the new feature, which is described in a video embedded below, the photos are superimposed on a Google Street View of the location, and you can easily switch from one to the other.
The benefits of this are obvious when you take a browse through one of the locations that Google has implemented the feature for: the Plaza Orologio in Prague. Street View gives you a view of the street taken from the Google car, but it is static — when you click into the user photos of the plaza, you can easily move from one view of the buildings to another, seeing them from different angles and perspectives, and you can even zoom in on details of the various buildings. The pictures appear in a row superimposed on the street view, so you can click to advance from one to the next, or there are also navigational controls built into the page as well. Another example is the Sagrada Familia in Barcelona.
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