Archive for November, 2008

Nimbuzz launches in the AppStore

Nov 30

Posted by richard ting in Mobility

The Nimbuzz native app is now available through the AppStore. Users can call, chat, text or send music, photos and files for free from their mobile devices. The app allows you to message with friends on all major IM communities and social networks — including Skype, Yahoo! Messenger, Facebook, MySpace, AIM, Windows Live Messenger, Google Talk, ICQ, Jabber, etc. Supposedly, Nimbuzz’s landscape mode is a huge point of differentiation with competitors like Fring, but I had zero success with it. Each time I flipped my iPhone into landscape mode, I was greeted with a buggy interface. Hopefully, Nimbuzz will put to good use that $15 million in second round funding that they just secured to iron out these remaining bugs. It’s definitely a nice mobile app for unified communications, but I would be hard pressed not to switch over to Digsby when they finally release their mobile offering since they have been a great desktop solution for me over the past year.

Check out Nimbuzz here.

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Play Games as you Watch TV.

Nov 29

Posted by richard ting in Advertising, Design, Interactive

[via RWW]
Yahoo’s new VideoTagGame lets users compete while generating tags within videos. Yahoo is trying to tap into that human machine through their new VideoTagGame, a game that encourages participants to tag sections within a video for better retrieval. The one-time experiment by Yahoo is now ready to be released to the public through the Yahoo! Sandbox. The objective of the VideoTagGame is to collect time-based annotations of the video which could then enable the retrieval of relevant parts in a video when a search is performed, rather than returning the entire video itself. These annotations are collected in the context of a multi-player game. To play the VideoTagGame, participants must sign in with their Yahoo! ID and join a new game. There will always be at least three players in each game. After a 3-second countdown, the video will begin to play. As it plays, participants enter tags that correspond to the various parts of the video. When two players agree on a tag (that is, they enter the same tag), they each get points. The closer together the tags were entered, the more points are rewarded. After the video ends, participants can then watch as it plays again, this time with the tags overlaid on top of the video.

Check out the Yahoo VideoTag game on Yahoo Sandbox.

Industry experts cite that approximately 40% of 20-year-olds are using the internet while they’re watching television. It’s a user behavior that I embraced several years ago given my fondness and dedication to Fantasy sports. There is no better way to watch a sporting event on your TV than with the power of the internet at your fingertips. We’re also starting to see more users adopt this type of behavior and as a result designers are looking to complement the traditional TV watching experience with some form of PC interaction.

Enter The Hills’ “Backchannel” experience where fans gather online to chat about The Hills as it happens. Users can chat about the show as it progresses. Other viewers can award points with a click of their mouse on the best comments posted. You earn points by predicting the comments you think will be the most popular. Backchannel is a next generation social game that utilizes “competitive chat”. It’s an online viewing experience that is about more than just watching The Hills, it’s about talking about The Hills. This type of interaction is something that feeds into an already changing shift in user behavior where TV watching is complemented by an online experience in a symbiotic brand experience.

Check out MTV BackChannel.

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Open Social A Standard For The Social Web

Nov 21

Posted by richard ting in Interactive

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: software technology)

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The Real Shaq is on Twitter

Nov 21

Posted by Richard Ting in Interactive

The big fella seems to have enough free time these days to keep his Twitter feed up-to-date. In his most recent tweets, Shaq complains about how his 8 year old son has a better free throw shot than him and how he helped a man push his car. Anyway, it’s good to see Shaq embrace the micro-blogging phenomenom. If anything it’s keeping his fans focused on the minutiae of his daily life and distracted enough to not talk about his rapidly declining skills on the court and his adverse effect on the suddenly anemic Phoenix Suns offense. Kudos to his PR team.

Check out Shaq on Twitter.

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TinEye Image Search is Hot

Nov 21

Posted by Richard Ting in Interactive

TinEye is the first image search engine on the web to use image identification technology. You can submit an image to TinEye to find out where and how that image appears on the web, or to find modified or edited versions. TinEye’s spiders crawl the web regularly for images. Using sophisticated pattern recognition algorithms, TinEye creates a unique and compact digital signature or ‘fingerprint’ for each image that is added to the index. When you submit a search image to TinEye, its fingerprint is analyzed on-the-fly and compared to the fingerprint of every single image in the TinEye search index. The result is a detailed list of websites using that image, or modifications of that image.

Check out the site.

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Exactitudes

Nov 18

Posted by richard ting in Design, Interactive

Next time you think you’re unique and special, go check out Exactitude.com and you might possibly stumble upon a collection of folks that are close replicas of your exact style and look.

[desciption lifted from the site]
Rotterdam-based photographer Ari Versluis and profiler Ellie Uyttenbroek have worked together since October 1994 and were inspired by a shared interest in the striking dress codes of various social groups. Over the last 14 years the pair have systematically documented numerous identities. Rotterdam’s heterogeneous, multicultural street scene remains a major source of inspiration for Ari Versluis and Ellie Uyttenbroek.

They call their series Exactitudes: a contraction of exact and attitude. By registering their subjects in an identical framework, with similar poses and a strictly observed dress code, Versluis and Uyttenbroek provide an almost scientific, anthropological record of people’s attempts to distinguish themselves from others by assuming a group identity. The apparent contradiction between individuality and uniformity is, however, taken to such extremes in their arresting objective-looking photographic viewpoint and stylistic analysis that the artistic aspect clearly dominates the purely documentary element.

Check out the site.

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FT.com’s new-look homepage

Nov 16

Posted by richard ting in Design, Interactive

Check out a snapshot of FT.com’s new-look homepage. Give it a look and let them know what you think. Visitors to the site can mouse over some key features of the new design for a more detailed description of each change. Amongst the changes are: a. choosing from up to 5 different regions, b. new pink masthead, c. dual search function, and d. new main navigation guides, to name a few.

Check out the detailed descriptions of each change.
Check out the actual site.

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MTVMusic.com and their API.

Nov 16

Posted by richard ting in Design, Interactive, Music

I know this post is a bit late to game, but about two weeks ago, MTV made some strong offensive moves against YouTube and posted every music video ever shown on it’s network. For those of us that have complained vociferously over the last few years that MTV has become more focused on bad reality show television than on showcasing music videos, well here is MTV’s attempt to redeem itself as the defacto source for all things music video related. The newly launched MTVMusic.com site is a full library of full length music videos with decades of archived videos for absolutely free. There are more than 16,000 videos, and some exclusive MTV concert footage and MTV Unplugged performances. In addition to the vast library of videos that MTV is providing, they are also taking a stance of minimal advertising which is a huge departure from the advertising riddled YouTube environment.

One aspect of the launch that has also got me excited is the new MTVMusic API that allows developers to build applications that make use of MTV’s content. Some of the examples provided on the site include creating a video gallery and social network apps.

Check out the site.

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The Future of Communication

Nov 16

Posted by Richard Ting in Design, Interactive

Interesting video that I found on YouTube about the future of communications. It speaks to the future of Google, Microsoft,Yahoo!, and Amazon as well as the death of copyright, the rise of the prosumer, the migration of all newspapers to the web, the proliferation of electronic paper, and the exponential growth of blogs in influence.

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