Converse is back again with another great track and video by three artists. All Summer features Kid Cudi, Rostam Batmanglij from Vampire Weekend and Bethany Cosentino from Best Coast. Summer is not over yet!
Xide Mood is a great site for Carlsberg that generates a custom mix of You Tube videos based on your mood and music genre preference. What do you get if you mix 100% Hits with 100% Swedish Summer…? Find out here.
Strangers in Stereo serves as a hub for syndicated posts by 25 of the world’s most influential music blogger’s; it features original editorials and a now playing weekly section. Launched in March with a SXSW showcase it recently added Ireland’s own Nialler9 into the collective.
Y&R Chicago and Die Hard batteries partnered with Zoo Films director James Frost (OK GO and Radiohead music video fame) to create a keyboard made of cars powered by 1 battery for Gary Numan to perform his 70’s hit “Cars.” on. This is awesome.
Apple’s iOS 4 (fourth version of its operating system) was released today ahead of the launch of the iPhone 4, which becomes available June 24 Stateside and will come to Irish shores in July. iPhone users can update to the latest OS via iTunes, but some features will not be available for the iPhone 3G and the update is not available at all for the original iPhone. iOS 4 will not be available on the iPad until this autumn.
The biggest new feature is multitasking, which Apple says is going to be the “best” implementation in the smartphone space, though it’s obviously not the first. App switching is activated by double tapping the home button, which pulls up a “dock” of currently running apps, and Apple claims it can do this without hurting battery life or performance for the front app. Unfortunately, multitasking won’t be available for devices older than the 3GS and new iPod Touch (sign, yes, you might need to upgrade).
Key Features include:
Multi-tasking.
Spell check (like on the iPad).
Bluetooth keyboard support (again, on the iPad).
User-defined wallpaper (a jailbreak favorite).
Tap to focus when recording video, just like with photos, and a 5x digital zoom for the camera.
Playlist creation and nested playlists.
App folders for sorting apps! You can even put an app folder in the dock.
Enhanced mail: You can have a merged inbox view, switch between inboxes quickly, and sync to more than one Exchange account. There’s also threaded messaging and in-app attachment viewing
iBooks: just like on iPad, only smaller. You can wirelessly sync books between platforms, a la Kindle
Enterprise features, including remote device management and wireless app distribution.
Game Center: It’s like Xbox Live, but for iPhone games. Includes achievements, leaderboards, and match making.
But beware….take your time in accessing their fourth version. As with the launch of any new software, there are glitches in the system, resulting in the wiping clean of individual’s music and/or contacts off their iphone!
http://www.kreiselberg.com/
Kreiselberg is a creative agency from Toronto whose digital paintings are truly awesome, check them out!
http://follownoone.com.au/
Are you a dedicated follower of no one? The New VW Polo website uses a really cool and imaginative interactive navigation that has a great focus on detail.
http://www.onitsukatiger.com/en-uk#/home/
Great interactive website to showcase the new campaign for Onitsuka Tiger, lots of unusual things to discover within a wooden shoe…
http://sosapplesos.com/
By public suggestion this ‘experiment’ by Mat Bisher made it to this week’s Best of the Web. There are good arguments put forward as to why Apple won’t support Flash, but this is still funny!
In response to growing concerns about privacy, Mark Zuckerberg, the founder and CEO of Facebook has announced changes to the privacy controls on the site. They will become simpler and easier to use. The roll out begins soon. Here Zuckerberg makes a rare video appearance to explain the new system, apologize for the mistakes they made with the old one and remind us he’s a CEO at only 26.
Last October, German display innovator Evoluce unveiled its 47-inch multi-touch LCD HD display screen which can register an unlimited number of simultaneous contact points from both stylus and human touch.
This week the company unveiled geo-spatial gesture functionality, where users can control actions on the screen at up to a meter away from the surface of its huge display. Mid-air scrolling, rotating, stretching, shrinking, or pivoting motions of a user’s hands are immediately registered and translated into screen actions such as pinch and zoom, screen transition or application dismissal.
According to Wolfgang Herfurtner of Evoluce, the technology is useful for “collaboration, product and industrial design, business intelligence, information visualization, medical imaging, and command and control functions. The possibilities are truly mindboggling.”
Mindblogging is right – just check out the video for a glimpse of the possibilities it provides.
Big news at last week’s Google Developers Conference with Google announcing they are bringing search to your TV viewing experience with the launch of Google TV.
As more and more TV content is available online, and as homes move to digital TV, the actual convergence of these platforms is now a reality.
The impact on how we consume video content in the very near future will be immense and as Google ‘open source’ the Google TV platform this will stimulate significant innovation by developers.
You will of course need a set-top box to facilitate this and an Internet enabled TV.
Google will initially partner with Sony and the service will be available in North America later this year.
On the back of Facebook’s open graph announcement and Zuckenberg’s vision to create meaningful relationships between people and things on the Internet, the theme of the semantic web dominated lunch-time discussions yesterday.
As timing would have it, we later came across a brilliant video explaining the social web, posted on Mashable’s website. The video was created by student Kate Ray, a journalism/psych major at NYU who has done extensive research on the semantic web.
This 14-minute documentary, Web 3.0., is a brief but high-level overview of the semantic web, what it is and why it matters to all kinds of Internet users.
Ohh! Ahh! Wow! Cool!…..were the general sentiments to be heard in Cybercom’s office this evening with the arrival of our iPad.
We’ve already been busy playing with it. Video clarity is amazing as is the ease with which you can type on its touchscreen. Unfortunately, the absence of flash becomes glaringly obvious even within a view minutes of interacting with it – sigh, when will Apple and Adobe become friends?
It was a little smaller then we imagined, (actual size modeled by the lovely Amy Lyons), which means we shall all be popping the iPad in our bag for some out-of-office adventures!
So far 2009/10 has been an exciting period in the carving out of the digital world. The explosion of Social Media and the arrival of a real mobile internet have agitated heated power-plays between industry giants and opportunistic upstarts alike. We have also seen some typically conservative institutions take extraordinarily progressive moves which clearly demonstrate a trend towards integration.
One of the keystones in the media strategy for last week’s 2010 Masters Tournament was the official website Masters.com. The website was developed as a media channel through which fans can follow the tournament with real-time video streaming. This experience is enabled with a live network of cameras deployed onsite and hooked up to the website using an IT infrastructure provided by IBM, one of the three official sponsors of the event. The website also includes enhanced features for viewing highlights, tracking individual players and accessing exclusive media galleries.
Beyond the technology itself a real effort has been made by the event organisers to deliver content that provides online users with a fairly unique level of engagement with the tournament. No doubt this will have an impact on how other major sporting events tackle their online strategy.
Over the last couple of years the Golf world has proven to be a particularly fertile growth area for online communities and business models. This has already had a major impact on the gaming industry. See previous post: Online Golf Games Doing Serious Business.
During the iPhone 0S 4.0 unveiling late last week, Apple officially confirmed their plans to launch a centralised platform for in-App advertising. The platform will enable a rich media brand experience to be delivered seamlessly within an iPhone App, without the need for users to be redirected to the browser. The adverts will be sold and hosted by Apple who will take a 40% cut with 60% going to the Application developers.
“On a mobile device, search is not where it’s at, not like on the desktop. They’re spending all their time on these apps ”
Steve Jobs, Apple CEO
It remains to be seen if application based advertising has the ability to become the dominant engagement channel on mobile devices. The race to acquire the mobile advertising technology has certainly heated up with Google pipping Apple to the post with their 750m acquisition of AdMob (see Bloomberg article). Three months later Apple acquired a rival platform, Quattro Wireless for approximately $300 million.
One thing worth noting is that Apple currently enforces a ban on using location information for advertising. A recent statement however, said that Apple is clarifying the rules for allowing developers to serve advertising to users based on location.
The iAd integrated advertising platform will provide an attractive commercial model for small development companies to produce high quality free Apps for the iPhone; a win-win for both iPhone users and developers. An announcement regarding how iAd will be deployed on the iPad is expected in the autumn.
