Ecotab

This is the tablet of the future as it recharges just by touching it! No more running out of battery, looking for the power cable or charger everywhere! this new tablet is also very ecologic as doesn’t need electricity! You just need to press your fingers or hand on the touch screen and it transform the finger interaction into energy!
Can’t wait to have this in market!

The Heist: An awesome puzzle game with a tangible reward

Two things I love: slick puzzle games and discounted software. MacHeist, providers of the biggest and best of the charity-contributing Mac software bundles is giving you both with their new iOS game, The Heist.

The Heist is a fantastic collection of increasingly difficult challenges, spread amongst four different puzzle types. The twist with this game is the promise of a real reward at the end. What is it? In their words: “You’ll have to beat The Heist to find out… but it’s fun, and it’s worth much more than the price of entry.”

OK, you’ve got me. Back to it, then.

The Heist is on the AppStore for 99c in the US and $1.19 in Australia.

You might want to check this out.

Agencies should demand better briefs from their clients

I came across this interesting article in AdAge this morning so I thought I would share it with you ! Mainly about voicing your opinion to push your clients to do better!

The best advice I ever got about advertising wasn’t about advertising. During a company paintball outing, the referee offered this: “Don’t hide behind a rock and wait for someone to stumble into your sights. While you’re doing that, they’ll sneak up behind and shoot you in the ass. Go find them. Shoot them first.”

It reminded me of Casey Jones’ take on marketers who fail to provide their agencies with competent briefs, which generated a wealth of discussion earlier this week on Ad Age.

He’s right to point the finger at clients for shirking their responsibilities. But he’s only half right. As easy as it is for marketers to blame us agencies, it’s a two way street and blaming marketers is easy too. It’s the agency world’s national pastime. However, it’s also lazy and self-destructive.

So here’s my take in response to Mr. Jones’ argument. Agencies shouldn’t wait around for a brief that may never show up. They should go find it.

Nothing gets accomplished if all we ever do is nod our heads in client meetings, then bellyache about them at the bar afterward. It exposes the real problem: we don’t have the stones to expect and demand more from the client.

At every level of the agency, we have a responsibility to speak up. Account execs need to press clients for the information the team needs to do the job. Strategy and creative need to push back when a project’s missing the insight from client we need to focus our efforts.

If we’re not challenging marketers to be better, we’re wasting their money. Often, it’s our job to save them from themselves. To pluck them from their brand’s warm, solipsistic womb, shine a light in their faces and spank their bottoms to get them to breathe.

We need to be willing to stop a project in its tracks, and ransom it for a decent brief. If you have to, hold their hands. Baby-step them them through the brief. I’ve done it. Sometimes it can be surprisingly revealing. And, yes, other times, it’s just painful. But not as painful as being on the business end of a client tirade because your team blew threw a budget pursuing answers to questions that no one had the sense (or guts) to ask.

I was in a kick-off meeting with an art director not so long ago. She stopped the AE before he even had a chance to sit down. “Do you have the brief?” she asked. He had a pen. He had bagel. And he had a look of confusion. “This meeting’s over,” she said, standing up and walking out.

Now she had balls.

Admittedly, it’s all easier said then done. Persuading colleagues to stand up with you is daunting. You’ll need to sell them on the value of demanding more: When we challenge our clients to give us better insight, we ultimately save them money. We equip our team with the intel it needs to chase down relevant ideas, instead of scampering around like harried parents trying to appease a crying baby. And we give our ideas something to lean on in the pitch when the client scratches his head and asks why the hell we did what we did.

So let’s stop flinging low-hanging fruit by blaming clients. Instead, stand up and be better by challenging them to be better. If your clients wanted a pushover, they would’ve hired your competition.

Source: goo.gl/fb/Q2xH8

Get Perspective on the iPad 2

Alright, maybe that title is a little esoteric for the subject matter – but check out this coolness below.

This is the kind of 3D I’m excited about – the kind that removes the need for glasses. Sure, it might be hard to create 3D without glasses in a cinema setting where you’re unable to use head-coupling, but for personal devices? It’s great.

On a final note, something needs to be done about the term head-coupled. It’s gross.

Facehuggers, a modern classic example of head-coupling.

~@tali3sin

Finally a great AR system – Sony SmartAR

Augmented reality has been around for a while now and we have been using it in the past as well, but we always found it to be sluggish, laggy and unreliable.

Now it seems that there is a light at the end of the tunnel a Sony is holding the torch. Sony announced their SmartAR everybody thought that it is just another technology that has the same issues.

But check out the video below and prepare to be blown away – fast response times, markerless object recognition and original anchors can be out of sight and your virtual object just keeps animating.

There was no availability date announced yet, but I am sure AR will get a lot more coverage once it is out.

@maniac13

Google to take over the world – Part 2

Googles I/O event is in its second day and personally I was more excited about yesterdays announcements, but Google is not stopping with new and improved ideas.

Today they showed off their Google TV running a new honeycomb UI that will be released later this year.

You will be able to run your apps and widgets on the screen and there will be a much faster way to get back to your live TV.

The Google TV remote app was always a bit too complicated and Google announced today that the source code for it will be made open source (source code here) so anyone can make their own and improve it. The Anymote protocol code is also available (here) which means you can integrate it into phones and tablets.

More things to come as well as soon as Android 3.1 will hit the TVs – mentions of 3D support and Game Controller support for example.

The Android Market was another topic for Google today and they announced improvements on discovering apps – the market has grown to over 200000 apps and it is quite hard to find the good ones. Now there are 5 new features that will help you find the next Angry Birds:

New Top app charts – fresh new look and country specific
Editor’s choice section – apps chosen by Google
Top Developers section – a special icon next to the name of the developers that fit the criteria
improved related apps
trending apps – it shows you which apps are growing the fastest

Right now they are only on the web based version of the market, but Google mentioned that it will come soon to the phone and tablet versions of the market.

From June onwards the market will also support larger apps – up to 4GB – and it will give the developers the ability to exclude specific handsets – sorry HTC Magics

So what was left for Google? Chrome OS

The biggest improvements to Googles OS are that it will support Netflix and Hulu (can you please hurry up and establish yourself in Australia) right out of the box.

There will be new hardware – both Samsung and Acer models were shown off and they will include offline versions of Gmail, Google Calendar and Google Docs. They will probably hit the market in a few month.

Chrome OS laptops will cost you nothing upfront – instead you will pay a monthly subscription that includes regular software and hardware upgrades.

There was also a teaser that Samsung is going to build a desktop version called Chromebox that will run Chrome OS

And who would have guessed, but there will be Angry Birds at the Chrome Web Store – it is build in WebGL, but also has Canvas support so it should run in different browsers to Chrome, however it will get exclusive content like chromebombs.

If you have been left out of the Chrome Web store you will be pleased to know that it is now available worldwide.

 

another day of great Google news

 

@maniac13

Angry Birds – for Chrome.

Don’t have a smartphone, iPad or Android tablet? But you do want to play this “Angry Birds” thing that people keep talking about?

Chrome to the rescue!

The folk over at Rovio have ported their smashingly popular game to the Chrome browser, and it’s 100% built in HTML5. Very, very neat.

If you haven’t given this simple physics based bird-hurler a whirl, why not see what all the fuss is about? Won’t cost you a dime, and is playable in both standard and high definition.

Either click the picture above, or this link, and you’ll go straight there. Enjoy!

~@tali3sin

Google to take over the world

Google started as an online search engine that within month make a massive impact and took over the space and we all love googling.

Last night Google had their annual I/O event and the future seems to be all about everything you can imaging. Google will be in your life if you like it or not.

Android has been the big buzz word for a while now and with 200000 apps in the Android market, 400000 daily Android activations and a lot of manufacturers joining the Android hardware bandwagon, this train is not going to stop.

One of the big negative aspects of Android is its fragmantation and Google announced today that the new version of its OS, called Ice Cream Sandwich, will change all that. Hardware manufacturers had to promise that newly released devices will need to be capable of new instances of the Google OS for at least 18 month of the hardware release. The new OS starting with Ice Cream Sandwich will also run on both handsets and tablets and will be smart enough to adjust itself to the actual device capabilities.

It is the step in the right direction, but personally I don’t it will stop people like HTC and Samsung to take forever to release the new OS because they are customizing theirs so heavily.

But Android will not be limited to mobile devices anymore.

Google announced the Android Open Accessory API which is based on Arduino, the universal open source hardware.
This means that Android can live in any device you can imagine – fridges, medical equipment, exercise equipment and and and

This API will be available at the end of the year so next year we will be overrun with Android devices.

Google Music was announced today as well and Google is going after Amazon and Apple (even though apple isn’t ready yet) by offering a music locker that seems to be worth using.
It is really targeted at hard core music fans that can upload their nicely sorted and curated music collection to the Google cloud and then listen to it on any Android device they own.

 

Then Google announced something new – Home Automation with Android@Home

Their vision is to have little Droid doing all the work for you – Open source libraries will allow developers to create apps that are Android compliant. This way you can dim the lights from your couch, start the washing machine on your way home from work – all you need is a Android@Home receiver.

Another shot at Apple here too as the new libraries incorporate Google tungsten that will allow you to stream your Google Music collection to any speaker in your house – no more Apple Air play

 

This was only Day 1 of the I/O and there is more to come in the next 24 hours. We haven’t heard anything about Google TV or Chrome. Does Google have something bigger still to come?

Only time will tell – Let me know your thoughts on Googles announcements in the comments below.

@maniac13