One App to Rule Them All…groan….

Rulerphone is a simple yet very useful iphone application for using your iphone camera to get darned accurate measurements. Simply place a credit card next to the object to be measured and overlay the image of the credit card with the Rulerphone template in order to determine a ‘ground truth’. With this known size established you can measure anything in the scene with uncanny accuracy.
In my experiment with their free Rulerphone lite I was able to get within 1/2″ accuracy of measuring my laptop screen size with very little effort.

Add A-Level from Posimotion to get a spirit level and you’ll wow the crowds at Home Depot with your geeky prowess.

Rulerphone has a $3.99 version that allows you to measure objects further than 1.5ft away and will work just as well on the iphone touch as it does on the iphone.

The spawn of twitter

By now everyone has heard about twitter, but I want to deepen your understanding of a few twitter related products and ideas that are coming to the forefront because of the services growing popularity as well as that of social media in general.

hashtags

These are the #xyz stuff you see on twitter. This week and last, with the Iranian election protest in the front of every newspaper and cable news channel, “#iranelection” is on the tip of everyone’s twitter tongue. Hashtags are used by twitter users all over the world to identify a common topic, to unite the millions of tweets so that there is one “channel of conversation” The reason so many people can instantly tap into the latest news from the iranian protesters is because they are all searching for the #iranelection hashtag on twitter. There are many ways to do this, but I do it on my twitter client of choice, which is TweetDeck on the iPhone, and DestroyTwitter on the desktop. These clients perform a search every so often, so that any new tweets matching the #hashtags shows up pretty quickly.

The ringleader for hashtags is hashtags.org, which gives you a good view of the most popular topics that are being discussed on twitter. This is a tremendously useful tool now that twitter is the de facto hive mind, and #hashtags usage is basically a measure of what are the top topics in the collective consciousness. It’s a marketing tool to measure the public sentiments that will be useful to many.

For example, check out how the #iranelection hashtags spiked right after the election results were announced on the 06/13.

bit.ly and other url shorteners

URL shorteners like tinyurl has been around for a long time, mostly to solve the problem of multiple-lines-long urls that people are sick of cutting and posting into email and documents.

But Twitter’s presence really fueled this trend, because now your space restrictings isn’t about having the URL wrap the line in your email, but having to fit the entire message into 140 characters. URL shorteners are now essential if you use twitter at all.

Bit.ly, a relatively new url shortener service, has managed to grow tremendously, and recently received a $2MM investment. Supposedly one of the reason why it’s gaining is because “bit.ly” saves 5 whole characters over “tinyurl.com”, giving you that much more room for the tweet!

Seriously, however, as more shared URLs go onto shortening services such as bit.ly, the statics that they are gathering can become qutie a good data gold mine. These links are not just being visited; for those you just bookmark them. These are links that are being passed around, being communicated and trafficked from one person to the next. I’d love to get access to these data, so that we can do Google Trends type of analysis on them.

bits into atoms

Here at 8ninths we are seeing a trend towards increased commercialization of rapid prototyping (aka 3D printing) technology and think it warrants a deeper look into the phenomenon, as well as the consumer services being offered.

Eroded Landscape #2, by Mark J Stock, available on Shapeways.com

Rapid Prototyping is nothing more than taking a 3D CAD file, drafted up on modeling software such as Google Sketchup, Rhinos3D, etc., and turning them into real tangible objects that one can hold in your hands. Just as “Desktop Publishing” revolutionized how thoughts turned into printed material, the promise of rapid prototyping is that we can just as easily turn thoughts and ideas into real stuff.

Rapid Prototyping rides on two trends: First is one  we’ve mentioned before, the DIY movement. As we increasingly become abstracted away from the physical labor of production, folks are finding satisfaction to work with their hands again, and are taking to sewing, knitting, woodworking, and plain ol’ making stuff like never before. The second trend is the proliferation of 3D software, such as Google Sketchup, which is free or easily obtained, and is much more user friendly than ever. The combination of these two trends have caused more users to design 3D objects on their PCs.

While it’s nice to be able to drag your mouse and right click your way to a design on screen, and zoom and view them from any angles, for most scenarios the ultimate goal is to produce the object in a tangible form. And it wasn’t always easy to do that. Rapid Prototyping completely changed the economics proposition. Now, you can design something for just yourself, and then send it off to a web site such as Shapeways, and have them made a single copy for just yourself. They use laser cutters, or 3D printers (think inkjet printer except it’s ink that solidifies), or any number of techniques to turn them into real atoms.

Shapeways, for example, is leading the way with 3D one-of-a-kind objects that you can design, such as the Ringpoems that you can build with YOUR poem (or rip off Wordsworth if you like). But others are making pendant lamps, robot parts, braille labels, wine racks, and many other creative, wacky things.

The ability to produce objects in one-off versions through rapid-prototpying, as well as the ease of the software design tools, have also transformed industrial designs in general. Because of the ease of production, many designers have sprung up to offer niche and unique designs that were just previously too limited in its appeal. What the rapid prototyping tools have done is to unleash the Long Tail of Design, one that many people, from trained i.d. professionals to teenage hackers, can participate in. Where Long Tails spring up, open source is usually not far behind, and thus web sites such as Thingiverse have sprung up to provide a place where folks can make their own designs freely available which you can pay Shapeways to produce.

This is a very exciting time for non-industrial, one-off productions of STUFF. Customization and individualization is a mega-trend that is happening in real time, and is a direct reaction to the mass production of goods. How rapid prototyping technology will shape our culture is a largely under-stuided subject that’s well worth continuing to watch.

Sure I backed it up…

Crashplan is a great execution of an idea that has been knocking around for years and has surprised me that no one has executed on it as a business proposition until now.

Here’s the deal. Unfortunately hard disks are not made of magic. They’re made of spinning magnetic disks, electrical components…and magic. Like everything else in this world, one day your disk WILL fail and there’s a pretty good chance that everything on it will disappear with a click and a whimper. Of course we all make daily backups that are backed up to multiple underground locations in case of geographic catastrophe or electrical magnetic pulse so there’s nothing to worry about….

Everyone talks about backups but only the most compulsive of us deal with it. It’s hard to do, expensive and just not fun.

This is where Crashplan comes in. If you’re a self respecting geek you probably have hundreds of Gigabytes of hard disk storage lying fallow as you await the day where you decide to download the entire interwebs for kicks. Disk storage is cheap and there’s more and more media to consume, but most people have a lot to spare. Crashplan lets you and your friends take advantage of the unused space on each others hard drives to store backups of your data. The likelihood of all your friends hard drives crashing at the same time is relatively unlikely so by distributing data across the group everyone should be safe. To prevent your best friend sneaking a peek at saucy holiday snaps, all data is 128 bit encrypted which means that unless they work for the NSA they won’t be able to see a thing. It’ll just be a blob of data sitting on their hard disk.

Crashplan works in the background pushing the data to the friends you specify and you pretty much forget about it. They offer a free service that will manage up to 50 gig and have a variety of pay for services that will enable you to store on their central servers or make faster restore and backups (essential if you’re a small business).

Crashplan works on a variety of platforms and I’m planning on giving it a whirl with William soon.

Check it out and give yourself a little more peace of mind before the magic ends.

gadget blogs *are* mainstream media

Being a geek, I’ve been a reader of the top two gadget blogs for as long as I can remember. And being an old geek, I remember them as as upstart, grassroots blogs that burgeoned onto the scene around 2001/2002.

While I still read one of them on an almost daily basis, I’ve noticed that not all their content is interesting to me anymore. So much of it has gone from the gee-whiz discoveries of new gadgets and technologies into just talking about more consumer electronic stuff, like the next iteration of the Canon digital cameras, the next version of Blackberry. In other words, they are getting boring.

And so I recently decided that I’m no longer going to read them daily, or even put them in my A-list of RSS feeds. But as a geek, I need to justify the decision and back them up with data. And so I did a bit of tallying and charted it up:

I went thru one week of posts by one of the two web sites above (frequent readers can probably figure it out easily enough) and counted up what the post was essentially about. It wasn’t a strict taxonomy nor was it supposed to be, it was just a rough count. But it confirms my suspicion that I tend to skip over at least 2/3 of the posts that this site puts up, due to the repetitive nature, or for topics I found uninteresting, or just became overloaded on some particular semi-interesting topic.

A few observations:

• It was the week of iPhone 3GS’s release to retail, so there were alot of Apple coverage. But still, a full QUARTER of the posts were about Apple and iPhone. I love my iPhone as much as anyone else, but it was just too much to bear even for a self-professed fanboy.
• Apple, on the other hand, should be incredibly happy about the free publicity it’s getting. It would be hard to overestimate what this publicity is worth. And even keeping in mind the currency of the iPhone during launch week, it was STAGGERING compared to the attention that Palm Pre or Blackberry are getting. Oh, Microsoft didn’t get a single mention of Windows Mobile, sigh.
• I was surprised how many articles were basically regurgitating product press releases. It’s like someone just took PR Newswire and just ran it through a translator. I wonder about the editorial selection for these posts: were they selected because of the public interest or something else? (Likely answer: Both)
• Increasingly the “rehash” posts are become common. They are posts that either cross promote for other sibling sites, or just “Best of the Last Week” posts. While they are no doubt useful to some readers, they are also cheap to produce for the blog.
• Some companies have probably done a Jedi Mind Trick on the blog’s staff. Brando.com.hk, a small mail order firm in Hong Kong that sells USB gadgets, consistently get their new offerings covered. Are they really that interesting to the gadget blog readers?
• Editorial obsessions: I don’t know if they are doing something to get so much coverage, but Lego is one of those evergreen topics that’s always on this blog. I love lego as much as the next guy (everything I learn about engineering I learned from lego) , but the blog does get obsessive with the topic. It’s endearing, up to a point, but the threshold was crossed a long time ago.

As a reader, I’m finding that these gadget blogs are too mainstream for me now. I am going to try find more gadget blogs that exercise a bit more curatorial/editorial selection. But as an entrepreneur, the fact that these blogs are consistently the most read blogs on the web means that I would love to get my products covered on them, since they are so popular. And the fact that they are quite accommodating to commercial messages mean that the chances of getting coverage is better than ever.

mom was right: you gotta earn your media

Okay, I might have the saying confused with “You gotta eat your veggies” or “You gotta wash your hands”. But like a lot of Mom’s sayings, they are all great advice.

“Earned Media” is fast becoming The Meme of the marketing world. And I think it is spreading fast because of its validity.

Let’s start by defining the opposite of Earned Media, the Paid Media. The bulk of Paid Media is basically what Madison Avenue does: Advertising, whether it’s on TV, Radio, Newspaper, Magazines, Outdoor signage or the Web. They are placed on these locations because your company PAID for their placement on the medium. Pretty much everyone outside of a selected few living in the Borneo Jungle are familiar with advertising. What’s more, everyone is well aware that you are trying to sell them something via the ads, and have long developed a sense of skepticism and cynicism around the message you want the consumers to hear. Which is not to say they can’t deliver the brand message, but the well documented fact is that they are fast becoming less effective, particularly with the media savvy younger generations. “New and Improved” won’t do it anymore, now you’ve got to bring out something like the Subservient Chicken to shock people into listening to you.

Diagram from David Armano, and along with his article on Earned Media, are a must-read.

Earned Media, on the other hand, are organic and grass root. Your company still seeds the message, but you are working in concert with the media and consumers to develop awareness of the product or service that you want folks to adore. The resultant publicity and awareness is based on positive, non-sponsored coverage of your brand. The classic example of Earned Media is Public Relations, where PR professionals work to get your brand and product into the hands of the media and journalists, who then can do news coverage or product reviews. The PR folks help convey the message you want out there, but ultimately the messages are told via the journalists or news personalities. Whereas a poorly designed product can still be touted with fanfare on a Clear Channel billboard if you buy the space, a crappy product that offers nothing new or worthwhile will not see much coverage, no matter how many PR firms you hire.

The most exciting space for Earned Media, however, is social media. Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, MySpace and many other web properties are fertile ground for organic, user-driven messaging. One only needs to look on Twitter’s public stream to find frequent mentions of brands and products. Brands need to listen, engage, and participate in these mediums to make sure the desired brand attributes are what customers are experiencing and talking about.

As I feel that I have much to learn and much to think through about Earned Media, let me leave you with what I think is the best discussion of Earned Media I’ve come across: Fred Wilson, a VC partner at Union Square, recently gave a talk on Ad Age Digital Conference, and his slides are available for viewing here.

sixtyone summer fun

WHAT IS IT ?

the sixtyone is a site for discovering great new music from new artists. A band can upload their tracks and using a ‘wisdom of crowds’ model the best of the submissions are surfaced by the sixtyone community in a similar way to social news site digg. Users are given a limited number of ‘hearts’ to vote on music each day and can bolster this number along with their general reputation in the community by selecting songs that others ‘heart’ and bringing new members into the fold.

The reputation system is exceptionally well done with great little alerts prompting you to interact in an unobtrusive way and almost game like feel where you can unlock new statuses and features based upon your standing.

You can select by genre or mood and credits may be purchased to download tracks, tip the bands and purchase merchandise.

WHY IS IT RELEVANT?
I’m a big fan of Pandora both for at home listening and on the go with the iphone application. However, I often find myself feeling a little bit disconnected from the emerging music scene. Sixtyone does a great job of providing a lot of the functionality that makes last.fm and pandora great in a slick interface. I found myself instantly enjoying a lot of the music that had been surfaced by the community and being able to select by mood or genre was a perfect way to find something to work to today.

Another example of an attempt to capture market share in the constantly shifting music industry vs. the web these guys are doing a lot of things right and I’m impressed with the UI, tone and layout.

Hope to see more great things from the sixtyone team.

nature knows best

WHAT IS IT?
AskNature is an open source project dedicated to sharing information on how nature elegantly solves problems.

Imagine 3.8 billion years of design brilliance available for free, at the moment of creation, to any sustainability innovator in the world.

Imagine nature’s most elegant ideas organized by design and engineering function, so you can enter “filter salt from water” and see how mangroves, penguins, and shorebirds desalinate without fossil fuels.

Now imagine you can meet the people who have studied these organisms, and together you can create the next great bio-inspired solution.

The Search prompt asks the simple question ‘How would nature…’ leaving the user to pose questions that might be relevant to their field like:

‘How would nature…store information’ - http://asknature.org/search?category=&query=store+information

‘How would nature…solve conflicts’ - http://asknature.org/search?category=&query=solve+conflict

The Featured Pages, provide some really interesting starting points for exploration and if you’re interested in learning more about biomimicry you might want to check out this great talk by Janine Benyus, ‘12 sustainable design ideas from nature’.

WHY IS IT RELEVANT?
I’ve enjoyed looking at insects and animals for inspiration in software design for many years. When I first joined Microsoft I decided to rig up about 8 ant farms together around my office with tubing interconnecting them around the circumference. Late nights of coding would be interspersed with sugar water feeding sessions and watching the latest burrowing endeavors. It used to bring in a good audience and there was only one ‘great escape’ incident….clearly planned by the hive mind for months.

The point was as I thought about memory management, garbage clean up, functions and data models I had a real world inspiration in front of me. A microcosm that would allow me to think a little differently about problems or inspire me to try something new. Their synchronized efforts working in unison to achieve their goal of sustaining the colony (unfortunately somewhat futile as there was no queen).

Too often in our societies we’re forced into narrowly defined roles in order to reach perceived success. You’re a programmer or a lawyer, builder, nurse, teacher. The opportunity to think outside of the box or work with experts in other disciplines on the same problem is the exception as opposed to the rule. But sometimes when it happens it leads to incredibly fruitful results. A combination of know-how and a different perspective brought to bear on a new problem. The rise of the web and the fluidity of our conversations and interconnectedness have made these kind of interactions more common but sites like AskNature are really providing a great service by providing a focussed way for people from multiple disciplines to contribute and learn about design based upon the greatest teacher of all…the natural world.

johnny mnemonic meets the minority report

First, Keanu Reeves in Johnny Mnemonic gave us a view of what a virtual user interface looks like. He put on a pair of bulky VR goggle, and a pair of heavy VR gloves, and manipulated data objects on screen, “physically”, just as one would wooden blocks on a table. But who wants to don the goggle and a pair of silly gloves?

Seven years later, Hollywood improved the on-screen technology, and Tom Cruise in Minority Report put on a pair of lightweight woven gloves with LEDs, which presumably are tracked via some kind of sensors so the computer can tell what his fingers are doing, and got rid of the goggle altogether. Good improvement, and looks sexier too.

Well, Hollywood, eat your heart out. Microsoft folks in Redmond has gotten you beat; not only with fake technology exclusive to high power elites in the fictional world, but with real products that anyone can own within a year and use in their own homes.

Project Natal takes the momentum and popularity of Nintendo Wii, which allows you to hold a controller in your living room and swing a virtual racket, and improves on it by removing the controller altogether. Not only does it track what your arm and hand is doing, but it tracks the movement of your entire body, so not only can you virtually karate chop your opponent on screen, but you can deliver a roundhouse kick as well.

I have to admit, when Project Natal was announced at E3, the first day I thought it would be vaporware. They only showed a professionally produced demo video, and while it was very impressive, I thought there would be too many problems with it. But next day, the hands-on reports from gaming and gadget bloggers started streaming in, and the reviews were spectacular.

And certainly, the gaming aspect of this is tremendous: You can now bowl, bat, swing, fight, and drive without mashing buttons on hardware controllers, and that’s not to be taken lightly as a giant step forward for gaming experience. But what I believe will be even more significant is that the same technology can be applied to the computing world. Imagine being able to flip through pages of reports by a wave of the hand, or “click OK” by a small nod of the head. Pinch to Zoom can be done in mid air; rotating a photo can be done by turning with your hands rather than some crazy mouse movement.

And having all of this be accomplished through relatively low cost hardware (supposedly just a couple of webcams) is just incredible, and is beyond the wildest dreams of most of the technology industry.

Good work Redmond. This is a tremendous step forward for the industry. Now ship it (coming 2010) so I can play with it!

seven deadly signs that apple is zeroing in on the mobile game market

image from Apple Iphone Games Blog

Not going to rehash what the Deep Dive has already said about the iPhone Gaming potential, but do want to provide some more evidence that Apple is winning this war against Nintendo and Sony PSP:

1. Since the original launch, Apple has included a Graphical Processing Unit (GPU) in the iPhone, putting it well ahead of its competitors. The iPhone’s gaming success is now prompting other manufacturer to include a GPU in their new lineup of smartphones.
2. Apple has seeded the App Store with games of their own, including the Top Game of 2008, Texas Hold ‘Em poker
3. Apple hired away a key chip designer from the graphics engine maker, ATI (now part of AMD), whose credentials include designing the chip for the Nintendo GameCube
4. iPhone sales has grown to rival the install base of any portable gaming platform, and is poised to outsell the leading Nintendo DS line in 2009, reports Business Week.
5. iPhone game sales from its App Store exceeded 86MM in Q1 2009. In the second half of 2008, since App Store launched in July 08, Apple has already garnered 10% of the mobile game market.
6. The upcoming iPhone OS 3.0 has some killer features for the game developers, but most interesting is the ability to sell virtual goods, where in-game items such as additional levels or weapon/gadgets can be sold, increasing revenue for the game developers.
7. Apple has done a good job on the iPhone SDK to a new group of developers, making possibly an army of smaller developers who can build a game by themselves or with a small team.