internet cool?!

As you well know by now I way in to all kinds of innovation when it comes to kids education and entertainment. So I was pretty stoked to find KiwiCrate recently. For $19.95 a month (includes shipping), KiwiCrate will send you an age-appropriate craft project for your child complete with all the materials and detailed instructions. The crafts are developed by a panel of experts in child development, science, art, and education and tested by the ultimate experts: real kids.

I signed my boys up a few months back for this one and so far all three kits we’ve received have been a total hit.

So are the boxes that have arrived are themed (they may be centered around a season, holiday or subject; IE Space & Planets). There are plenty of materials provided, and it’s good quality stuff. I was happy to see two activities in most of our boxes as well as plenty of materials so both my boys can participate.

Really digging the creativity here. Can’t help but think the best is yet to come in the subscription service world. What do you think?

This is the result of the Open Innovation experiment. It is an experience video showing the future of screen technology with stretchable screens, transparent screens and e-ink displays, to name a few.

The hands on the screen belong to James Paterson. He is using “Rhonda”, a 3D drawing tool developed by Amit Pitaru circa 2003.

The first half of the video shows James doing a drawing start to finish. In the second part James is cycling through various previous drawings, created between 2004 and 2005. For the last several years Rhonda has been shown in galleries, museums, festivals and conferences. We are excited to finally release this video online (about time!).

Freakin’ awesome.  Sign up for the beta here.

 

Great post from mr micropersuasion on how to stay on top of all new thats fit to geek. Of course, you’ll have to be a slave to your RSS feed like we are - so why not just follow me on Twitter and get the daily digest? (Ahem).  Either way, this list should get you started.  Rock on…

from the site
Want to know what’s cool and emerging? Me too. That’s why I subscribe to dozens of blog feeds from cool companies large and small. They include all the Google blogs, the Twitter, Friendfeed and Facebbook blog and many more.

I have decided to share these with you by rolling them up into single feed, which you can browse or subscribe or even download here… 

• 37signals Product Blog
• Aardvark Blog
• AdaptiveBlue Blog
• Alltop News and Updates
• Amazon Kindle’s Blog
• BackType
• bit.ly blog
• blog.reddit — what’s new on reddit
• blog.scoopler.com
• Bloglines | News
• Clearspring Community Blog
• CoTweet
• Daylife Blog
• delicious blog
• Demand Satisfaction!
• Digg the Blog
• Evernote Blog
• Everything TypePad
• Facebook Blog
• First Look
• Flickr Blog
• FM Blog
• foursquare
• FriendFeed Blog
• Google Labs
• Hulu Blog - Home
• Instapaper Blog
• Mahalo Blog
• MindMeister Blog
• My Yahoo! Blog
• Netvibes.com Blog
• OpenID
• Pandora
• Pipes Blog
• ProgrammableWeb
• Remember The Milk - Blog
• Ron’s Evernote Tips
• Six Apart News & Events
• The Acrobat.com Blog
• The Ask.com Blog
• The LinkedIn Blog
• The Mozilla Blog
• The Official Posterous Posterous
• the popurls blog
• The Scribd Blog
• The Technorati Weblog
• The Windows Blog
• The Yammer Blog
• TweetDeck’s posterous
• Twitpic Blog
• Twitter Blog
• Windows 7 Team Blog
• Yahoo! Answers Blog
• Yahoo! Answers Team Blog (answers.yahoo.com)
• Yahoo! Mail Blog
• Yahoo! Search blog
• Yahoo! Search Marketing Blog
• Yodel Anecdotal
• YouTube Blog

 

 

360° video isn’t new, necessarily (there are a lot of programmers who have done created similar executions). But this is the first time I’ve really seen making video like this get so accessible, so quickly.

Meet Yellowbird. BTW, their URL is “yellowbirdsdonthavewingsbuttheyflytomakeyouexperiencea3dreality.com” (which is awesome in it’s own right).

By using a Google Streetview-like camera, a system with six lenses, not as a photo but as a video camera, an all-encompassing picture is captured. From the point where the images were recorded, the viewer can look in any direction, let his eyes wander through the crowd, or stare at the ground or the air, which makes viewing a video an experience without boundaries.

Oh, and as soon you figure out how to strap your 6 iPhones together with Duct Tape, you’ll even be able to embed and share all your 360 videos with your nerdy, jealous friends.

You’re welcome. :)

 

This dude is making music with computers err trees errr both.  Whatever. It’s awesome. And nerdy. But not too nerdy. It’s kinda tree-huggy too. And that’s awesomer. Enjoi.

from the site

In the garden of my house there’s a tree with lots of randomly grown twigs. It looks odd and nice at the same time.One day I asked myself if I could create a piece of music with it.

To tune the tree I picked a fundamental note and tuned the twigs by trimming them with a pencil sharpener. I used two Røde NT6 and a NTG-2 as microphones, combined with a customized stethoscope.

I recorded the tracks live on a Pro Tools LE system. I didn’t use any synthesizer or sampler to create or modify the sounds. All the sounds come from playing the tree, by bowing the twigs, shaking the leaves, playing rhythms on the cortex and so on.

 

Below you can see the video and some pictures with more detailed descriptions from his posting on Behance.

Diego Stocco - Music From A Tree from Diego Stocco on Vimeo.

 

I modified a stethoscope by using some hose accessories.The connection between the plastic pipe and the microphone needed to be sealed in order to transmit the sound well.

 

Here I was recording the low frequencies coming from a big piece of cortex. I used this sound as a kick drum.

 

The two Røde NT6 attached to my fingers with rubber bands. I came up with this idea because mike stands are not very practical for certain locations and also because in this way I can move the microphones dynamically around the object I’m recording.

 

Tuning the twig by trimming it with a pencil sharpener.

 

This is the twig that I was using to play the bass note.

 

A little twig I used for high-pitched sounds.

The track is also available as an high-quality download on my Bandcamp page:
http://diegostocco.bandcamp.com/track/music-from-a-tree

 

My closest friends know how much of an evangelist I am interactivity in schools and the positive impact and potential it can have on our children and their education. I’ve had a number of children’s interactive projects over the years (the most recent being KideoPlayer, a family-friendly interactive YouTube filter) but nothing I’ve come across recently has the potential of this…  

Meet The Hidden Park, an iphone-guided scavenger hunt that uncovers trolls, fairies, tree genies, and other fantastic creatures skulking around actual landmarks at your local park. You read that right. It’s awesome. And my boys and I are doing it this weekend.  :) 

Convincing kids to spend an afternoon away from the PlayStation is a tough sell with the promise of xBox and Wii sitting in your living room. (Nature? Booooooringi!) Use your children’s video-game obsession to lure them outdoors where the best games always come to life. 

The ‘augmented reality game‘ can be played in a growing number of public spaces across the globe, including New York’s Central Park, Boston Common, London’s Kensington Park, and Ueno Park in Tokyo. Tapping into your iPhone’s GPS, the app leads families on a quest to help the Magical Wildlife Protection Association prove the existence of magical beings in the park, which is in danger of being bulldozed by money-grubbing developers. (But imagine the themes, and geographies we could bring to this idea? This is just the tip of the iceberg). Does anyone have an land they want to donate? :) I’ll make the app!

The map the game supplies is also enchanted; as you move past specific landmarks, it throws out riddles and puzzles to clue you in on where to go next. The cool factor comes into play when your kids use the iPhone’s built-in camera to document their discoveries. Just like magic, the park’s mystical denizens make their presence known.

                              

Maybe fresh air isn’t overrated, after all.

Get it here:  The Hidden Park $6.99 at Apple iTunes Store

Learn more here :  The Hidden Park

The following is an homage to an awesome post I found over at Rubbishcorp. Go read it. Or read it here. Or whatever. Either way, its the best compilation of the affects of Augmented Reality on your fancy pants mobile device. It’s about to become as big a deal as Ron Burgundy…

Augmented Reality technology isn’t new, but it is taking on a whole new meaning in your mobile device. As positioning and recognition technology strengthens it will find a much more mass audience. Devices sporting geotagging, triangulation, recognition, wireless and compass technology have raised the virtual/physical mobile experience bar as they all work seemlessly together (behind the scenes) to now serve everyone with masses of information layered over the ‘real’ world.

No longer will you have to haplessly unfold a map at a museum, search endlessly for the semolina in a supermarket or not know exactly how much further to go before you reach your a bar, train, resturant, etc.

Your face is even free game! This TAT demo shows your social network(s) profile, media, personal data etc. all hovering around your noggin’ when someone points an at you.

Nokia are in on the act with their indoor location systems as well as Point & Find and apple has also raised the bar by getting involved with this little beauty.

Add to that ViPR technology which has been around for a while and can recognize actual objects (via a connected database) and best not forge RFID that registers objects within close proximity and again can pull data from a connected online source.

Time people spend with mobile continues to rise and compete with other sources as a direct result the increasing usefulness of the technology in making connections in the ‘physical’ space. And the raft of Augmented Reality applications that make use of a devices enhanced positioning and recognition capabilities are not limited to phones - increasingly gaming devices and MP3 players use the technology.

Screen-based experiences are increasingly overwhelming our experience of the physical world making, further blurring the lines and making the virtual a very “real” part of our lives. Social networking has already transformed our relationships and Augmented Reality looks to be the thing that does the same for shopping, traveling, culture, drinking, language translation and pretty much everything else.

Like the MP3 player and camera before it location and recognition technology will soon be ubiqutous on mobile devices. The influence that has on our lives cannot be underestimated, it will be massive.

 

Holy Mother of Awesome. Meet CloudContacts.

You send them that stack of business cards you are collecting in a box and they scan them. THEN they connect each card with social networks and backing it all up on a cloud server so you can always get to your contact information.

Here’s an interview with Allen Stern (the guy behind CloudContacts), from CenterNetworks in New York. He tells us how he does it, and even spends some time talking about the latest web stuff, too. Nerdy!

I found this posting this AM from Guy Kawasaki on a new service called Twitterhawk. Basically an app that turns The Tweet into direct marketing on steroids. I for one am not a fan of the Twitter Ad-douche gold-rush, but I must say - there are some compelling points in here. What say you?

from the Twitterhawk site:

TwitterHawk is a real time targeted marketing engine…with true CPC link tracking…that will find people talking on twitter now by your chosen topic and location, allowing you to really hit your target mid conversation with ease. It will periodically search twitter for you and either auto-reply or generate a list of matches for you to respond toor reject from your twitterhawk account.

from Guy’s article:

Twitterhawk is a “real-time, targeted-marketing tool”—or the ultimate spam machine. First, let me tell you why I’m telling you about it: Because it can help you use Twitter as a marketing tool. Second, let me tell you how it works. You create keyword searches like what you can do at Search.Twitter.com.

For example:

• “Fashionweek”
• “Homeschooling”
• “SEO” within 50 miles of 94031
• “Audi” within 50 miles of 94031

Then you compose up to five responses to the tweets that it finds for each search condition and schedule the search intervals. An Audi dealer in Palo Alto, for example, can use this to find sales or maintenance prospects on Twitter. Twitterhawk will then tweet your responses for when it finds the right keywords in the right area.

Essentially this is a way to monitor public conversations for keywords without being the NSA while Dick Cheney was running things. In other words, this is as good as it gets for targeted marketing. The closet analogy I can think of is how Gmail searches your email and inserts ads based on the words it finds in your messages.

This is when the panic ensues: “Holy kaw, if many people started using Twitterhawk, it would mean the death of Twitter as a means of social networking and communication!” Let me tell you why this isn’t true:

1.  Twitterhawk charges $.05 for each tweet that it sends. What spammer can afford to pay $.05/tweet in order to ask you to help get money out of Nigeria or to sell you penis-enlargement products? By the way, Twitterhawk tracks how many times people clicked on the link, so that you can determine your per click cost.

2.  There is a blacklist of terms that Twitterhawk will not respond to. I don’t know what’s on the list, but I suspect words like “the” are probably on it to prevent too many matches.

3.  There is a limit of twelve fully-automatic tweets per day per search. At this rate, it will take a long time to find someone to help get money out of Nigeria or a man who wants to get his aforementioned penis enlarged.

4.  You cannot send the same person more than one tweet based on the same search. This means that the Audi dealer cannot send you a tweet every time you mention the word “Audi.” The dealer gets one shot at you.

5.  You can edit each outgoing tweet when you set Twitterhawk to manual approval. This means that you can use Twittehawk to find tweets to respond to and queue them up for individual answers. (The reason to manually approve each tweet is that you wouldn’t want to send a tweet such as “We’re an Audi dealer located in Palo Alto. We’d love your business,” in response to a tweet like, “I’m so glad I just sold my 1970 Audi. It’s given me nothing but trouble.”

At this price and at this rate, Twitterhawk is hardly a spam tool. It is, however, a very powerful marketing tool if you use it sparingly and precisely. The Audi dealer, for example, might find that it sent out 100 tweets at a total cost of $5 and got one oil change customer out of it. That’s probably worth it—particularly if the customer returns for more expensive work or buys a car.

Looking at it another way: How else can you find people within driving distance of your dealership who are interested in Audis? Radio, TV, and newspaper advertising? Don’t make me laugh. It’s certainly worth trying—although, in truth, you can try Twitter targeted-direct marketing without Twitterhawk by simply using Twitter’s search capability or most Twitter clients anyway.

I close with an interesting story. When I first heard of Twitterhawk, I went nuts and set up searches for mentions of text like “Fashionweek” which resulted in automatic tweets to visit Fashion.alltop. After sending a few thousand tweets like this (perhaps TwitterHawk created the twelve/day limit in my honor!), my @alltop account was suspended, so I’ve cooled it. Clearly, there is some danger in pushing the edge of marketing, and I’m figuring that out too.

See Guy’s original article on OpenForum here.