Google Wave – a new in-browser communication and collaboration tool for email and web

Although it hasn’t released out into public hands yet!

Google has just announced Google Wave, a new in-browser communication and collaboration tool that looks to be the next step to evolution of the email.

Created by two of the guys behind Google Maps with a small team in Sydney the concept behind Google Wave is to “unify” communication on the web.

Basically Google Wave is a hybrid of email, web chat, IM, and project management software. It features the ability to replay conversations because it records the entire sequence of communication, character by character. Because of this, discussions are also live in Google Wave: you will see your friends type character-by-character.

Other Features, Details are:
Google Wave also supports the ability to drag attachments from your desktop into Google Wave. It loads that file and sends it immediately to anyone in the conversation. It’s also embeddable, so you can embed Google Wave conversations on any blog.

it looks very similar to a Gmail, except it’s more focused on your contacts, whose faces you can see in your contacts sidebar on the left. As for conversations, different than anything seen before. You can reply and add your thoughts anywhere within a message. Communication within Google Wave is completely shared. =D

The key is faster line of communication. Attaching documents, like you do in email, is unnecessary in Google Wave. Real-time conversations and collaboration make it an ideal tool for business teams as well. Imagine an entire office having Google Wave open to quickly share and receive files. It combines some of people’s favorite aspects of many different web communication tools.

Now I am so excited & can’t wait for its release!

IC – @PenguinRage

Sources:

Mashable

Google Blog:

Google Wave: Live collaborative editing: (You Tube Video of David Wang)

Blogged with the Flock Browser

It’s True. Size Does Matter.

Well, at least when we’re talking about ad size.
Over the past months most of our entire industry have been playing around with ad sizes on homepages everywhere, from Yahoo to MSN and AOL.

This quick article on Compete.com gives us a little interesting insight into how users and prospective customers actually behave when presented with the same ad in different sizes.

I wont give the big secret away, but you might be surprised at the outcomes of some of the tests that were done, I definitely was.

Check it out here (it’s a quick two minute read)

Muscle March – Wii game from another dimension.

Remember those crazy Japanese TV game shows like Endurance? Well this new game on the Wii sets a new benchmark in the “What The…?” category. Whatever you do, don’t blink.

Eliss – Multitouch Game for iphone

Eliss is a multitouch game for iPhone and iPod touch (available at iTunes store).

Keep up harmony in an odd universe made of blendable planets. Touch-control multiple planets at once, join them together into giant orbs or split them up into countless dwarf planets, and match their size with the squeesars.

Via Computerlove

I haven’t played it yet, but if the video is anything to go by it’s a must.
Nominated for an IGF Award ‘Innovation in Mobile Game Design’

A human powered mobile – Don’t leave for a festival without one

This is a great product innovation from Orange and Gotwind that ‘harnesses kinetic energy and a foot pump’ to power your mobile whilst you’re say..er… at Glastonbury, or just away from a socket.

Now all they have to do is a) find away that you can get a signal when you are in the arse end of nowhere and b) stop some soap dodging thief from having a rummage in your tent. Then all my festival problems have been solved. Apart from the toilet one. Found via Treehugger

Interactive Video Clip – Cold War Kids – I’ve seen enough

This is great fun (here) – turn the band members on or off and change the instrument they’re playing (using the coloured bars at the top). In theory I this would give you about 256 different versions of the same song.

Only thing missing… the ability to download and buy the track you created

http://www.mtvmusic.com/artist/coldwarkids.jhtml

5 tips for creating your first digital design portfolio

At our 2009 Open Studio event I gave a short seminar about first time online portfolios. Here’s a recap of the points made:

1. Don’t reinvent the wheel (unless you’re looking for work
reinventing wheels)

A lot of effort is spent building portfolio sites from the ground up. Unless you’re specifically aiming to show off your ability to design and build a portfolio site (and are confident you can do this in a way that competes with the free industry standard options available) you might consider using some easier options to save time and assure a usable, professional presentation.

Here’s just one example of an off the shelf solution to the portfolio problem: Create your own free portfolio with bells and whistles at Krop’s Creative Database: www.krop.com/creativedatabase

Another simple option is to take advantage of the browser scroll bar. As long as the work is clearly displayed there’s nothing really wrong with a long scrolling page for displaying content. Works for blog posts all the time. Here’s an example: http://samegoes.com/ 

2. It’s about the content

What do these two objects have in common?

Aside from the fact that both of them are contexts for the presentation of visual communication, they’re both relatively minimal. Again, unless it’s really important that you demonstrate an ability to redefine the packaging your work sits in, remember the advice of erring on the side of minimal so the content jumps out.

(One exception to this that comes to mind which works well is the portfolio of a digital senior creative we’ve worked with where you have to play pong and then choose the correct holy grail from the fakes to enter the portfolio. It works because the nature of the intended role is one of redefining the rules. And it was well executed. Risky but good.) 

3. Edit and organise

There’s a natural tendency to want to include everything you’ve ever done. Sometimes a review can be going well and then one piece triggers a feeling of ‘wow, how did that wind up in here? It was going so well.’ Edit your main portfolio down to your strongest work, even if it’s not that many pieces. It’s always acceptable to have additional categories off the main area (additional albums, essentially) for displaying backup examples if the reviewer wants to drill down.

Consider leading with your strongest work and wrapping up with your second strongest to start and end with best impressions.

4. Know your objective

Know what type of work you’re going for ahead of creating your portfolio so you don’t wind up with something lacking focus. It shows.

Knowing your objective will also help you identify your intended audience which will help you make decisions when you edit your work, and when you choose your presentation platform.  

Think of your portfolio as a stage. The moment before it’s reviewed is like the moment before the curtain opens. Your audience really doesn’t know what to expect.

In this context, here are three example objective and material pairs to consider:

• Objective work: interactive design = work to display: screen mockups
• Objective work: ideas and art direction = work to display: sketches and rationale through to finish output
• Objective work: illustration = work to display: illustration in full and detail views, both in and out of context

5. Get the metadata right: what was the brief and what was your role?

It’s important for reviewers to know A) what the problem your work is addressing is for any given piece, and B) what exactly your role on a particular project was.

It’s best when this information is clear, concise, consistently structured and easy to scan.

——

Feel free to comment if you’ve got any questions or ideas on these tips.

Here’s a related blog post from ANidea: 10 Tips for Landing an Interactive Design Job

Razorfish Emerging Experiences blog and labs

If you’re into the next generation of devices, technology, multi-touch – check out the new Razorfish blog ‘Emerging Experiences’ – http://emergingexperiences.com – there’s some really fascinating content to explore. As we move from the GUI (Graphic User Interface) to the NUI (Natural User Interface) this is great first look into what’s coming.

Idea Theft

Tired of spending countless hours trying to conjure fresh ideas? Are there more important things you’d rather be doing with your life?  Like going bare-back horse riding? Twittering? Twittering about bare-back horse riding?

Well, now you can!

Steal Our Ideas is a blog by creatives Jon Kubik and Adam Noel, which provides daily, tongue-in-cheek ideas for the struggling creative.

Here are some:

Sure, there’s an underlying philosophical question as to whether it’s actual stealing if someone encourages you to take their property (intellectual, in this case). But quite frankly, it doesn’t really matter. The blog is a great concept and the ideas stand for themselves.

Interview with Stephen Wolfram Offers Details on Just What the Hell the Wolfram Alpha is

Episode 195 of the awesome tech podcast This Week In Tech had a fantastic bit of bonus content tacked on to the end of it this week. Leo Laporte was lucky enough to grab Stephen Wolfram – creator of the Wolfram Alpha Computational Knowledge Engine – for a 30 minute interview.

Stephen gives a fantastic explanation of the project and what he hopes to achieve with it. Basically, he wants to make all of the world’s knowledge computatable.

You can download the episode as an mp3 or read the text transcript. If you don’t want to listen to the whole podcast (you should, it’s great) then jump forward to the last 30-40 minutes.

WPtouch: WordPress on iPhone, iPod & Android

More than just a plugin, WPtouch is an entire theme package for your WordPress website. Modeled after Apple’s app store design specs, WPtouch makes your WordPress website load lightning fast on touch mobile devices, show your content beautifully, all while not interfering with your regular theme.

Find out more…

Wolfram Alpha Easter Eggs

If you haven’t heard about it yet, the new computational search engine Wolfram Alpha launched this week to much fanfare and attention.

I am not sure why people are comparing it to Google, because it is not comparable to Google at all. The service can calculate integrals, tell you the flying time between San Francisco and London, or even the (lack of) nutritional content of your M&M’s.

One great thing is the sense of humor or nerdiness that went into it.

here are a few of my favorites:

I found this on mashable and there are a few more here and here.

if you find any others, feel free to leave them in the comments.

Creativity past pen and paper

Browsing the web I came across these unusual collection of bus stops.

Promoting the football (soccer) World Cup

Anyone seen Yogi Bear?

This is what we need in Australia – its fully airconditioned

That’s what I call recycling

Interactive – Users waiting inside the bus stop could engage via a touch screen interface while pedestrians waiting outside could interact with a 6ft. custom LED display.

there are some more here.

NikePlus Race for unfit Twitter Users…

You know it makes sense… All that tweeting isn’t shaving any cm off the love-handles is it? OK, this is just a bit of fun… but at the same time if you can run 5km you’ll probably feel a bit better no matter what the time!

The Rules:
- 1 month – finishes on 14 June
- Open to all people who are unfit and on Twitter.
- No Treadmills – get outside!
- Open to international
- 1st Prize = Pride!

Instructions
- You’ll need an ipod/nano/touch and a Nike+ Sensor (they cost about AU$30)
- The challenge is here – you just need to sign in. 
http://nikeplus.nike.com/nikeplus/?l=all_challenges,2935985
- Use #5km as the twitter hashtag

New to NikePlus? 
Check it! You get to look at cool charts and stats and see how unfit you really are!

About Time: YouTube Setting Up to Try and Make Some Cash…

Hulu’s super fast rise to 2nd place in the online video market has forced the Google owned Youtube into coming up with actual strategies to make some money. Funny, I’d have thought it would be common sense that brought this on…

So, a few numbers:
100 Million – Estimated times Susan Boyle’s Britain’s Got Talent video has been watched.
0 – the amount of dollars made from those impressions.

I think those numbers are enough for now…

Google has stepped up actions to try and make some serious money from the worlds number one video site by ‘setting up partnerships with big media companies that would help it generate more advertising dollars from the millions of videos hosted on YouTube.’

Partnerships with Sony Pictures, CBS, Lions Gate and others are set to provide movie trailers, TV shows and music video content to the site in a bid to make it more attractive for advertisers. As it stands marketers are reluctant to advertise due to the unpredictable and often inappropriate content uploaded by Youtube’s users.

As it stands, ads only show up on between 3% – 9% of the sites’ videos. – eMarketer

To catch up with Hulu, Youtube’s gong to need to supply users with a lot of partner content that they’ll actually want to watch. Is this going to have the same repercussions for overseas users as it Hulu does? And if so, how do we get around this?
Surely Youtube’s customer base stretches far and above the USA, yet how to US only partnerships benefit this international userbase?

I have a lot of questions about this, and as we see, so do Google who’re doing anything they can to get out of their massive $471 Million deficit every year.

This handy Businessweek article (which prompted me to write) has some of the answers but also provokes a lot of other questions about the model which has yet to be tried and tested.

 

Read the full article

 

Discuss in the ocmments: Do you have any ideas about how Youtube might make some cash without alienating users?

From ‘Me’ research to ‘We’ Research

Mark Earls and Dr Alex Bentley have recently published this great article in Research Week discussing ‘How ideas spread?’ Not only is it another great view on ‘spreadability’ they highlight an interesting approach to research that may actually help us understand groups of people (we) and how they might spread our ideas. Earls and Bentley challenge traditional methods stating that they focus on individuals (me) and generally treat them as being isolated from the rest of the population and social influence.

So how do they define ‘We research’?

‘From asking individuals about themselves – who are poor witnesses to themselves and their behaviour – to instead asking them to play to their strengths in observing their peers’

It kind of makes perfect sense really. So much of what we do is still too focused on the me rather than the we, even though it is becoming more and more important to consider people’s extended networks. How are your briefs structure as one example?

I have a kind of love hate relationship with research. Whilst it’s great to be enlightened and uncover something new or interesting that inspires you, it seems to be happening less and less. Unfortunately I find a lot of research I come across to be particularly unhelpful these days and extremely ubiquitous. The output rarely justifies the cost.

And here’s a case in point. In a recent post a study by Jack Trout and Kevin Clancy was cited from the Harvard Review, finding that only two categories of product – soft drinks and soap – were becoming more distinct, but the other 40 were homogenizing. The authors also found that only 7% out of 340 prime time ads monitored included what could be considered a ‘differentiating message’. Now there is a hell of a lot of research and ad dollars being wasted just to end up saying and sounding the same as each other.

Unfortunately research is being used more and more to validate rather than innovate, particularly in this current climate so it’s nice to see a refreshing and common sense approach to research that will hopefully help us understand social influence and how our ideas might spread.

Adobe Flash vs Microsoft Silverlight

Smashing Magazine has quite the debate going on in their blog about Flash vs Silverlight  – at last count 205 rather lively responses debating the pros and cons of each program. The editors at smashing have made the comparison process rather simple by chunking it down to topics like:
Animation, File Size, Scripting, Audio/Video etc etc.

A good read and food for thought if you use either application for development or design.

View Article

Discuss in the comments: Which do you use and would you consider switching?

Twitter is Done? Tumblr is Next?

VS  

Andrew Davis over at Tipping Point Labs has some very interesting insights into Tumblr, Twitter and The Tweeters,Tumblrists and Technogeeks using them. He believes that companies will very soon start using Tumblr as they do Twitter – to communicate with their customers and the wider Tumblr community.

Andrew makes a case for Tumblr being a more sophisticated version of Twitter with much more room for valuable content and interaction between users.

Personally, I’ve been using Tumblr for a few months and am loving it as a blogging platform. It really takes the simplicity we love about Twitter and enables a much wider experience, more customisation and a very effective way of viewing and interacting with friends and followers.

Read Andrew’s Article

Amnesiacs Who Tumbl:
Jeremy – Senior Creative: Maybe, Definitely.
Mike – Senior Designer: Kleinmania
Heather – Social Media Advisor: Like OMG

Discuss in the comments: Is Tumblr the next Twitter? Do you Tumbl or Twitter or Both?

5 Recession Related Articles That Show Us Things Are Looking Up!

We’re being told to only invest in cash. To hold off on property. Interest rates are bordering on ridiculous and while the dollar is slowly climbing, we seem to have a propensity for feelings of despair.

Even with a fresh $900, burning a hole in the jeans i haven’t washed because i don’t want to waste too much laundry detergent, there’s still an air of worry, a mood of concern about.

So this week I set out to do something about it, I knew there must be an upside to the downturn and was determined to find it. What i found was a myriad of articles chronicling the happy side and upward trends that a recession brings us. And more, I learnt A LOT, which always makes me happy and, for the next few weeks, the lamest guy at a dinner party, sprouting off all my new found stats to anyone within earshot.

So, without further adieu:

#1 The Recession Culture
NY Mag shows us that ‘No money changes everything, from murder rates to museum attendance, from career choices to what you eat for dinner. And not all of it for the worse.’

#2 The Lipstick Theory
The New York Times gives us some fascinating insight into why you can follow a recession trend by watching lipstick sales.

#3 When Unemployment Becomes…Well…Employment
The Times again comes through with some awesome stats about the unemployment rates and how close they actually are to the number of jobs available. In February, 4.8 million workers were laid off, and yet, some 4.3 million were hired!

#4 Forced to Switch – When Getting Laid Off Pays Off
The Wall St Journal gives us insights into the world of freelancing with some very interest piquing statistics.

#5 How Has the Recession Affected Dating? – In A BIG Way!
In times of need, people have a heightened desire to connect and to share their money woes. Looks like we’ll all be going Dutch on dates from here on out!!

Discuss in the comments : Have you seen other evidence of good things coming out of the recession?

The Beautiful Word: stunning Scrabble videos

Pretty amazing creative from Ogilvy & Mather, France, using animation from Wizz. Nice work and pretty eye opening when attached to, of all things… Scrabble.

Makes www.scrabble.com look pretty ordinary.

More videos and full credits here on Motionographer.