Living in a digital world

Coming to a pub near you soon

Microsoft’s touch table keyboardless computer screen seems almost ready for market. Should be of real interest to lesiure, travel and hospitality trades. I think automative dealers might find it interesting too (ie – used in showrooms rather than printed material, the touchtable will offer a much richer experience.)

Take a look at the site if does seem very cool.

May 31, 2007 Posted by riksta | Uncategorized | 1 Comment

Digital digest

Every now and again I’ll link to some of the sites that, for one reason or another, are interesting me.

1. Netvibes
Very cool RSS reader with some added widgets (youtube and flickr) and neat search functionality (eg search and play podcasts within the site). Set netvibes as your homepage and you’ll rarely need to go elsewhere for your news. It helps that it looks very swish too.

2. John Peel tapes
He might be dead, but the music lives on. Listen to vintage Peel tapes and annoy your co-workers with a mixture of teutonic nose-bleed death techno and shoegazing indie twee.

3. Create your own TV channel with Ustream
If you’ve got a web-cam and an internet connection, Ustream provides a platform for you to broadcast live video to a global audience. Stickam lets you do something similar and embed your tv channel in your own blog, so now as well as boring people to death with random musings like this, you can also let them watch poorly produced footage of you picking your nose. Veodia does the same. All three technologies are part of what’s known as lifecasting – basically digitising your entire life by putting blogs, photos and videos online.

4. Digital design chart
It can be hard to track down the very best digital design, but this weekly chart does a better job than most. Always good for inspiration and with a really useful archive feature.

5. 118 118 80′s heroes.
Maniac propisition brought to life through music, legwarmers and lunacy.

6. Twitter
It might be pointless, it might just be a craze, or it might become a cornerstone of social networking. Twitter lets users answer the question ‘what are you doing right now?’ Interestingly twitter widgets are now popping up on facebook profiles, blogs, etc. Gives a glimpse of what’s happening with the convergence of web and mobile.

7. Shozu – send pics and videos straight from you mobile to the web.
Shozu is probably the most useful mobile application around. It’s a really user-friendly technology that does a number of things. Eg Take a photo on your mobile and upload it to a flickr (or other photo-site) account with one button press. You can do the same with video to youtube, or to the bbc (if you’ve got some interesting news footage). Shozu also back-ups all your phone contacts, so if you lose you mobile, no prob. If also has mobcast functionality so you can download tv shows and news clips direct to your handset.

May 29, 2007 Posted by riksta | Uncategorized | Leave a Comment

Blowing off Mac users

Sheba Nation tell how Microsoft have shown their contempt for PowerPC Mac users by confirming that their Flash challenger, Silverfish, won’t provide support for that platform. Intel Macs are fine, but the reality is over half the installed Mac user base won’t be able to use Silverfish.

Lazy developers, huh? The thing is though, if you’re launching an app aimed at the notoriously Mac-loving creative community, disregarding past generations of Mac users sure doesn’t feel like the smartest business strategy.

May 26, 2007 Posted by riksta | Uncategorized | Leave a Comment

Very cute work from Christian Aid

Really nice digital work from Christian Aid. Integrates with above-the-line campaign. Excellent flash and aftereffects work. Really uses the digital channel to good effect. Clever white-labelling of ask.com to generate 4p per user search.

May 25, 2007 Posted by riksta | Uncategorized | Leave a Comment

Microsoft takes pop at trad advertisers

The trad ad agency man gets one in the eye in this great video by some guy from Microsoft. It’s a great film looking at the changes taking place in our industry.

Now they’ve bought Avenue A/Razorfish are Microsoft about to take on WPP and Omnicom? Interesting times.

May 25, 2007 Posted by riksta | Uncategorized | Leave a Comment

Murdoch sniffing web lit users

Flush with the success of the Myspace acquisition, Newscorp has been sniffing around the online literary scene. 3:AM magazine, by far the webs most interesting space for new writing, has been approached, but has so far held out against the lure of riches.

The move confirms what many in the publishing industry are starting to wake up to. Words are the new music and video.

May 25, 2007 Posted by riksta | Uncategorized | Leave a Comment