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City of street art. Continue reading
on Trademark symbols: are they polluting beautyful logos? what’s the point?
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I have seen an intriguing article by logodesignlove on polluted logos with trademark or services mark logos. And I can’t agree less.
I completely understand and the argument of visual pollution that occurs on the brand material at the expense of the security of cross-border legal rights of the brands (corporates in this case). But these logos go to places where brands might not even be aware of and these logos are their own only safeguard. They exists to remind the legally aware (or anyone with some self respect) that they just have to sit in front of the drawing board a bit longer. There can be set-ups offering completely different (see below this yogurt shop in Central London feeling Googlelish) or competitive services-(ie Goojje Google Knockoff Surfaces In China)
Spotify Introduces App Finder
Having heard that the Spotify had something else left in their sleeves after marrying Facebook. I was a bit surprised and the views online indicated that they should be preparing web interface, because that’s where they should be going next… Disagree, a browser-only platform would completely be a wrong direction for Spotify as they already have apps installed on the operating systems where the browsers would reside. I congratulate Spotify for not causing redundancy in their ways of offering their service. They instead introduced an Appplatform, (No, i don’t think this is an iTunes-killer feature.) which indicates to the interest in cultivating their own development ecosystem, instead of relying on what Facebook already has.
Ensuring a more superfluous user experience within your application/ hardware more and more relies on the users’ separation from their search (information, entertainment) on the Internet (see, Apple with iOS and OS, Amazon with their own Android App market…). This increases their level of immersion to the medium and engaging them with an offer that’s made believe to be stronger.
Spotify already has a strong presence in the space of having a developer eco-system with the help of web based apps. Seems to me that they are taking their engagement with these users a step further with the possibility of direct engagement with their apps.
How does biology explain the low numbers of women in computer science? Hint: it doesn’t.
Extremely good presentation (both design & wording) on why it’s bullshit to be gender biased in terms subject.
View more presentations from Terri Oda
Avoiding the Grey Area
This is more of a reminder to myself (and to Luke) on how to change a situation to a decision.
See the orginal FlowingData post here.
How Disney Targets a World Audience
Few days ago I had the chance to see most of the female protagonists (should i call them franchises?) of Disney at one post. The post itself was on the artistic quality of these drawings, but it allowed me to see how, unsurprisingly, articulate Disney has been with their story telling. How they brand their products to be more precise.
We were told before our Visual studies class that “This lecture will ruin your whole movie experience” so did this blog post.
‘Free’ as in think twice
Free wi-fi in central London promotion launched
In this bulletin you can see & be happy about what expenses Nokia is making for the sake of giving Londoners free access to Internet via their Wifi access points. This is beautiful news, this should be where the information age should be going with strong data infrastructures and be available to everyone.
What keeps me on my toes about this initiative is this;
“The trial is going to help us understand what people are using it for so we can improve it in the future,” said Craig Hepburn, Nokia’s director of digital and social media.
We all care about usage statistics to improve our services, but to “understand what people are using Internet for” (see how Facebook does this.) might be the just right amount of motivation to provide London free WIFI.
I will be the first to read their Privacy policy, in full.
Twitter’s Room for Improvement
Approximately 6 months ago, before the Tumblr-ization of the user-base of Twitter (aka increasing teenage users in twitter), the things that are trending in my homepage were almost matching the global news headlines. This allowed me to understand why a topic is trending. With the increasing amount of Twitter usage by different demographics the current UI is incapable of offering options to niche user types to enhance their experience.
The solution I would suggest without forcing users to too much learning. Is adding and ‘x’ button that replaces irrelevant trend with something else (a relevant trend to what that user talks about maybe?). I would improve this change with a trends page that aggregates Top X trends for whatever segments that can be used with demographics information that Twitter already has.
Imagining Away/ Contextually Targeted Advertising
I am not offering this solution only from UX perspective, having each user to administrate what they are/not interested will present a database of user interests to Twitter. Looking at the bigger picture, this is a the dream microtasking project, it will provide Twitter software a lead in analyzing what their users are interested in and equates to highly targeted contextual ad offer to their B2B clients.
I understand that Twitter gets 120000 different kicks out of suggested trends, but let’s face it that’s just another billboard to ignore.
Safari the browser
I have given up on using Safari the browser, until Apple puts as much effort in it as Facebook is putting in this ‘web experience’ (which they funnyly claim to be my life). Apply have done this for ‘Mail’ with Lion and as i have no intention to postone the experince of the safari of the web until they claim they have invented.
Posted from my Firefox.
Future of Collaboration in Mass: Sugar Coated Micro-tasking
Consider each knot on a carpet is knit by different people who are at different places, and the carpet being put together after everybody is done. A task that a single person is accomplishing in this case would be a micro-task, and the carpet would be a task that’s spread around the globe via world wide web. Widespread usage of internet not only allows information to be shared instantly but also facilitates platforms to distribute the micro-task load of unmanageable amount of content across human kind.
Creating a game from a never been solved puzzle allows scientists resolve a molecular puzzle within the matter of days (See news article here).
The monkey-virus puzzle was one of several unsolved molecular mysteries that a colleague of Khatib’s at the university, Frank DiMaio, recently tried to solve using a method that took advantage of a protein-folding computer program called Rosetta. “This was one of the cases where his method wasn’t able to solve it,” Khatib said.
Fortunately, the challenge fit the current capabilities of the Foldit game, so Khatib and his colleagues put the puzzle out there for Foldit’s teams to work on. “This was really kind of a last-ditch effort,” he recalled. “Can the Foldit players really solve it?”
They could. “They actually did it in less than 10 days,” Khatib said.
The further connected institutions are (say; corporations, governments, academics) with their user base, there will be lesser amount of unresolved issues constraining the improvement of society. In this case we don’t have scientist working on a virus, we have scientists sugar-coating a problem for people with different motivations and skill set able to cure the monkey-virus. And their success is empowered with their capability in communicating a problem to the right community with the right approach.
Bonus
Have you ever noticed ‘Stop Spam, Read Books’ during your daily routine of filling out captcha forms? That’s the biggest project that you and I have ever been involved. During the process of digitising books when the OCR comes across a word that it’s can not be sure, it asks humans to decipher their scanned image, and this task is also sugar-coated with our ever endless quest to verify ourselves online. Read more on reCAPTCHA here.