Thursday, September 30, 2010

Many Eyes

Upload your data, visualise, share and discuss. A great storytelling tool! Check it out at Many Eyes. See also Journalism in the Age of Data.

The Power of Story In Social Movements

A newer generation of scholars has begun to go beyond framing, recognizing that story telling may be what most distinguishes social movements from interest groups and other forms of collective action. Storytelling is central to social movements because it constructs agency, shapes identity, and motivates action.

Read more here.

Wi-Fi Seen As Critical To Relationships, Life In General

For young adults, Wi-Fi-enabled digital devices are now more central to life than television. Two-thirds of respondents in the U.S. and four-fifths of those in China reported they spend more time on Wi-Fi than watching television. Almost half of U.S. respondents (44 percent) first used Wi-Fi when they were 17 or younger. Almost 70 percent of respondents spend four or more hours on a Wi-Fi connection daily. In another telling statistic, 84 percent of respondents in the U.S. and 93 percent in Korea were more likely to carry a handheld digital device than a watch.

Read more here.

Picking the Most Important Features & APIs for Your Mobile App

The survey, conducted by Appcelerator and the International Data Corporation (IDC), found that of nearly 2,000 developer responses, 91% of them felt a native experience is key to their app's success. Conversely, just 48% said that a Web UI is a critical feature. The next highest ranked feature is having a local database (not a cloud-based database) at 81%, and following that is the use of push notifications at 74%.

Read more here.

5 Wi-Fi Management Tools for Small Businesses

With the growing number of Wi-Fi enabled devices, wireless connectivity has become the go-to standard for both individuals and businesses, making network management and security a must-have. Small businesses sometimes store customer information and rely on continuous connectivity, so here are five Wi-Fi tools that can help keep your company safe and operational.

Scripto

Scripto is a light-weight, open source tool that will allow users to contribute transcriptions to online documentary projects. The tool will include a versioning history and full set of editorial controls, so that project staff can manage public contributions.

Scripto

New Learning Institute

The New Learning Institute delivers engaging, personalized, project-based digital media programs to young people and educators. We work in classrooms, after-school centers, museums, and cultural institutions, or wherever learning takes place. Using the latest mobile technologies and digital media practices and tools, we help young people explore their interests, direct their own learning, and better prepare themselves for living and working in the 21st century.

Homepage | New Learning Institute

GPS Tour Commentary

National Byways and scenic driving routes such as the Creole Nature Trail in Louisiana to the Rockies Scenic Byway in Colorado are tourism motivators for travelers seeking scenic adventure, new experiences, and learning. These scenic driving routes offer a rich history and vibrant culture amongst its people and communities - and they enrich people’s lives with memorable travel experiences.

But what is lost for many travelers who drive on these routes are the great untold stories that offer a finely woven tapestry of heritage and culture. These stories, like threads, weave together the people, places and events that have shaped a scenic route's vibrant culture and heritage.

Read more here

Tuesday, September 28, 2010

Mobile Trends 2020

Food for thought. Presentation on Slideshare

mHealth for Development

This report examines issues at the heart of the rapidly evolving intersection of mobile phones and healthcare. It helps the reader to understand mHealth’s scope and implementation across developing regions, the health needs to which mHealth can be applied, and the mHealth applications that promise the greatest impact on heath care initiatives.

Download the report here.

Creating Sustainable Businesses in the Knowledge Economy

Today, following an unprecedented increase in access to mobile communications, developing countries have an opportunity to establish innovative companies in the sphere of mobile applications development. Entrepreneurs in emerging markets are well positioned to benefit from the boom: mobile devices, rather than computers, are likely to become the primary way of accessing the Internet in these regions, and factors like large market size and strong latent demand for mobile applications make developing countries a fertile ground for innovation in this space.

More at infoDev.org

Cognitive Slaves

The companies that have created the most new value in the last decade, are Internet companies like Facebook, Google, etc. They've created hundreds of billions in market value, driven by billions in financial profits. Good for them, but bad for us.

Why? IF these companies represent the most valuable new industry of the early 21st Century, where are the jobs that will provide prosperity for millions today, and potentially tens of millions in the future? They don't exist. These companies create few real jobs.

The distressing part is that in reality these companies actually employ hundreds of millions of people, particularly young and otherwise un or underemployed superusers. People that work for them day in and day out for free: finding, sifting, sorting, connecting, building, etc.

More at Global Guerrillas

Twitter, Facebook, and social activism

Gladwell vs Shirky at The New Yorker

Theories and models of and for online learning

For many years, discussion of online learning, or e–learning, has been pre–occupied with the practice of teaching online and the debate about whether being online is ‘as good as’ being offline. The authors contributing to this paper see this past as an incubation period for the emergence of new teaching and learning practices. We see changes in teaching and learning emerging from the nexus of a changing landscape of information and communication technologies, an active and motivated teaching corps that has worked to derive new approaches to teaching, an equally active and motivated learning corps that has contributed as much to how to teach online as they have to how to learn while online, with others, and away from a campus setting. We see the need for, and the emergence of, new theories and models of and for the online learning environment, addressing learning in its ICT context, considering both formal and informal learning, individual and community learning, and new practices arising from technology use in the service of learning. This paper presents six theoretical perspectives on learning in ICT contexts, and is an invitation to others to bring theoretical models to the fore to enhance our understanding of new learning contexts.

Full article here.

Storify.com

Storify demo from Burt Herman on Vimeo.

Link web content and annotate to weave a story. Looks great! The blog is here. The app is here.

Monday, September 27, 2010

The State of VJing Today

Via the people who want to organise the world’s information for us (google.com/insights/search), a few insights about the world of VJing and motion graphics, comparing results between 2004 and 2010 at Skynoise.

Pandorum




Audio clips in Ableton, Video clips in Resolume, Akai MPD24 controller, OMAR EOX is ready for live gigs! 

Friday, September 24, 2010

Tapworthy: Designing Great iPhone Apps



So you've got an idea for an iPhone app—along with everyone else on the planet. Now, with Tapworthy (O'Reilly Media, $39.99 USD), you can learn to set your app apart with elegant design, efficient usability, and a healthy dose of personality. This lively, accessible guide by expert Josh Clark shows you how to design exceptional user experiences for the iPhone and iPod Touch through practical principles and a rich collection of visual examples.

Buy it here

Storytelling – A Powerful Tool When Branding Your Organization In Social Media

When we talk about social media, it’s the same as talking about connecting and making conversation. Via social networks people all over the world are able to interact, share content, valuable advice and also recommend products to each other, for example.

Social media is also a particularly useful tool for businesses that want to brand themselves, market a new product etc, as social networks allow them to meet their current and potential customers at close hand.

Here, it is therefore vital that a business is transparent in its communication, and the use of the concept storytelling can be an effective element, when wanting the customers to know more about the business and the people behind it.

Read more at Mindjumpers

Web Video Is The New Television

Video overwhelms the Web. And it should.

There is plenty of evidence to suggest that the Internet, at one time the plumbing that connected pages of text and occasional images, is rapidly transforming itself to be a network of video publishing and viewing.

At first glance, this seems quite terrible. But in fact the emergence of the Video Web is critically important, intellectually exciting, and entirely inevitable.

Read more here

Thursday, September 23, 2010

Multi-touch floor

From iPhone to multi-touch tables, the leap has now been made to a touch-sensitive floor.

Science & Technology | Deutsche Welle | 21.09.2010

The innovative use of mobile applications in East Africa

From the executive summary:

“The ‘killer application’ in East Africa is peer to peer communication, i.e. voice, SMS and beeping. The number of subscribers who use their phones to access internet is however steadily growing, which opens up for a whole range of new applications and possibilities. Many of the existing SMS based applications that could benefit the poor the most are still in their infancy in the region. A few successful cases, namely mobile money transaction systems and various health related solutions are being used at scale, but the fact remains that the number of scaled-up mobile services are still few and/or limited geographically.

So, what hinders the take off of mobile applications for economic and social development in East Africa?

Download the report here

Tuesday, September 21, 2010

2010 Horizon Report

Museum Edition: identifies six key emerging technologies for the next one to five years and describes trends and challenges surrounding their adoption. The technologies to watch for museums include mobiles, social media, augmented reality, location-based services, gesture-based computing and the semantic web.

Download it here.

Emerging Classroom Technologies: Application of the 2010 Horizon Report to K-12 Education here

Engaging Digital Natives With Web 2.0

The Case for Digital Learning by Jennifer Carrier Dorman

The Social Layer

via RWW on Slideshare

Stories of Mobile Innovation in Emerging Markets around the World

Graham Brown at Youth Research Partners

Paper.li

Paper.li enables users to create a daily newspaper from the Twitter stream of a given user and the people who follow him or her, a Twitter hashtag, or a Twitter list.

The #storytelling Daily on Twitter

Storyplanet

A printing press for interactive stories

With broadband came a new breed of documentaries, educational stories and advertizements that are interactive, rich audio-visual experiences. But until now these projects had to be build from the ground up by people with design and programming skills. Not anymore. Storyplanet wants to introduce an easy way to mix media, design and online services into interactive stories that can be published to multiple platforms and devices.

Storyplanet

Monday, September 20, 2010

Crowdmap

Crowdmap allows you to...

* Collect information from cell phones, news and the web.
* Aggregate that information into a single platform.
* Visualize it on a map and timeline.

Check it out here

The 8 Best Places to Live For Fast Internet

The average Internet connection speed in the world is just 2 mbps, a speed that may sound good until you find out that other internet users are connecting at thirty times that speed and paying only pennies for the privilege. Much work needs to be done to give all people equal access to the internet. Until then, the best chance for getting better and more affordable service may be to move. Here you’ll read about the 8 best places to live for fast internet.

MyStory

Imagine standing in a laneway. A laneway that you've never explored or one that you've walked down hundreds of times before, and from your mobile phone, an author reads you a unique story set in the very place that you're standing. Welcome to MyStory

How to Use a Writing Frame

By Chris Brogan

Saturday, September 18, 2010

Syphon API Opens Up Visual Collaboration

In the audio realm, piping audio and MIDI between apps is commonplace. But imagine if you could take textures and frames from one app and share them, live and real-time, with another app. That’s the vision of Syphon, a Mac-only, open-source framework that promises to share graphics and live video between any visual app on the platform, from 3D apps to live VJ/video tools.

More at Create Digital Motion

Piperoid



Make cool Robots with these paper tubes.

How To: Create a Flip Book Animation

A flip book is a book with a series of pictures that vary gradually from one page to the next, so that when the pages are turned rapidly, the pictures appear to animate by simulating motion or some other change.

Check out the video and see the step by step guide on how you can create a simple animation with stick figures.

Mobile Cinema

Vintage Bus Turned Into Stunning Movie Theater.



•Epson EH-TW3500 LCD Projector
•Pioneer BDP-320 Blu-ray Player
•Mordaunt Short Aviano 6 Floorstander Speakers
•Mordaunt Short Alumni 9 Subwoofers
•Five center speakers and three surround speakers

Check it out at Bit Rebels

Friday, September 17, 2010

20 Free Open Source Web Media Player Apps

Free Media Players (Free MP3, Video, and Music Player ...) are cool because they let web developers and bloggers embed MP3 Players/FLV Olayers and build customized JukeBox on the websites. With these online Media players, you can add a list of songs easily and embed the given Javascript code to your website. Most of these players are customizable and you can have your won skin that suit the web design. Check out the list at VisonwidGet

Open Source Video Platform

Kaltura's platform supports ingestion of all forms of rich media (including video, images, audio, PDF, SWF files), and allows publishers to define different transcoding profiles, depending on their publishing needs. Additional transcoding flavors can easily be added for publishing across different devices. Kaltura's transcoding decision engine supports more than 60 video and image formats as well as 140 video and audio codecs.

The upload process also includes metadata ingestion, and enables defining additional meta-data fields as needed.

Kaltura: Open Source Video Platform

How Do People Use Their Smartphones?

The report is the result of the company’s Mobile Apps Playbook survey of 4,000 people, which Nielsen embarked upon last December. It opens with a dose of realism, saying that “most Americans can’t imagine leaving home without their mobile phones,” and pointing out that one in four of the respondents own a smartphone that is “more powerful than the computers initially used to send men to the moon.”

Thursday, September 16, 2010

Search Engine Optimisation

A Comprehensive Guide for Beginners here.

Technology for Business Success

Interview with Patrick Dixon, Europe’s leading futurist and strategy guru at Globalchange.com

Omeka

Omeka is a free, flexible, and open source web-publishing platform for the display of library, museum, archives, and scholarly collections and exhibitions produced by the Centre for History & New Media. Download it here.

Example site: Elvis at 21

VendorDemo.com

I found some useful videos here

Open Source Video CMS and Podcasting Platform

MediaCore is an open source platform for publishing audio, video & podcasts which makes distributing media on any website so easy.

The platform supports many media formats like FLV, M4A or MP3 which can also be played via the integrated FlowPlayer.

It can pull media from any source (Youtube, Vimeo, Google Video, etc.) & a site-owner can publish media from the administrative interface or let users create the content via the upload interface.

MediaCore has RSS feed support for iTunes & Feedburner.

It can display the page views, comments or how many viewers “liked” a video to the end users like Youtube.

And, a powerful admin panel helps controlling all the system from managing media to approving comments & much more.

The application is built with the TurboGears Python Framework and MooTools Javascript Framework.

Download it here

15 Opensource Blog Tool and Publishing Platforms

A roundup of the opensource blogging tool and publishing platforms here

How to Self-Publish

I'm investigated Trailmeme and found this.

3 Simple Ways to Get Paid More by Clients

As freelancers, we all want to make more money. But freelancing doesn’t scale, so there’s always a ceiling. There’s a limit as to how many clients you can take on, right? So how do you make more money, if you can’t or don’t want to take on more clients? Well, if you’re better than average in what you do and can put in just a little bit of extra effort, you can get paid more by clients.

Yep, there are 3 simple ways you can get paid more by clients – the same clients you’re currently contacting. You’ll be expanding vertically rather than horizontally, as they say. No, there’s no scammy tricks, or magic pills, or sleazy sales tactics. There are simple tweaks to what you’re already doing that’ll make your clients want to pay you more – either by you being able to charge more now or raise the price for the next project.

So without further ado, here are 3 simple ways to get paid more by clients...

See also: 5 Mindset Shifts That’ll Get You Paid More by Clients

The Rise of Apps Culture

Some 35% of U.S. adults have software applications or “apps” on their phones, yet only 24% of adults use those apps. Many adults who have apps on their phones, particularly older adults, do not use them, and 11% of cell owners are not sure if their phone is equipped with apps.

Among cell phone owners, 29% have downloaded apps to their phone and 13% have paid to download apps.

“An apps culture is clearly emerging among some cell phone users, particularly men and young adults,” said Kristen Purcell, Associate Director for Research at the Pew Internet Project. “Still, it is clear that this is the early stage of adoption when many cell owners do not know what their phone can do. The apps market seems somewhat ahead of a majority of adult cell phone users.”

“This is a pretty remarkable tech-adoption story, if you consider that there was no apps culture until two years ago,” said Roger Entner, co-author of the report and Senior Vice President and Head of Research and Insights for Telecom Practice at Nielsen. “Every metric we capture shows a widening embrace of all kinds of apps by a widening population. It’s too early to say what this will eventually amount to, but not too early to say that this is an important new part of the technology world of many Americans.”

Full report here

Now Any iPhone App Can Be an Augmented Reality Browser

Augmented reality (AR) is a fast-growing trend for mobile application developers, but few tools exist that make including the emerging technology in an app quick and easy. Many popular brands have published content on various mobile AR browsers, but it's not too surprising that they might want to include the technology in their own apps. Layar, the most widely used mobile AR browser, is looking to fulfill this need with the release of Layar Player - a few lines of code iPhone developers can use to embed full AR Layar content in their apps.
More...

Tuesday, September 14, 2010

Monday, September 13, 2010

Adobe tool allows developers to make a single app for different platforms

A new Adobe tool in Adobe Air could revolutionize the way developers produce applications.

Developers are able to build a single code-base for a single application, and utilize the tool to essentially convert the application to run on multiple operating systems (including mobile operating systems) that support Adobe Flash. No additional code needs to be changed to support the different platforms.

Adobe says the tool is the first of its kind, and no other technology currently allows developers to maintain the same code-base without any modifications to the initial code to run on a variety of platforms.

The core app code is contained within the action script, the tool then instantiates a new app and adds it to the display list to have a platform specific configuration, according to the Adobe programmer, Christian Cantrell, in the embedded video.

More information here.

New Economy, New Wealth

We are entering a post-industrial age with a very different economy and needs for a different view of wealth. What does this mean for us?

Presentation here on Prezi

Thursday, September 9, 2010

Telling stories with games

This essay by Joe Cutting looks at how games can be used to tell stories in a museum setting.

iHub

infoDev is proud to announce the successful bidders to host the African Regional Mobile Application Laboratory as part of the Government of Finland and Nokia program, Creating Sustainable Businesses in the Knowledge Economy program. The mobile apps labs will be focal points run and used by Africans working to increase the competitiveness of innovative enterprises working in mobile content and applications. There will be one lab each in East and Southern Africa where local companies, technologists and experts can collaborate to develop locally relevant applications that meet user demands and build sustainable businesses.

infoDev announces the successful bidders to host the African Regional Mobile Application Laboratory *iHub_

The Next 5 Years in Social Media

Over the last five years, social media has evolved from a handful of communities that existed solely in a web browser to a multi-billion dollar industry that’s quickly expanding to mobile devices, driving major changes in content consumption habits and providing users with an identity and social graph that follows them across the web.

With that framework in place, the next five years are going to see even more dramatic change. Fueled by advancements in underlying technology – the wires, wireless networks and hardware that make social media possible – a world where everything is connected awaits us. The result will be both significant shifts in our everyday lives and a changing of the guard in several industries that are only now starting to feel the impact of social media.

More at Mashable

Wednesday, September 8, 2010

The Great App Bubble

My app library--littered with exactly 87 apps I used once and never touched again--now reminds me of a graveyard of defunct company logos from the dot com boom. Like the go-go days of 1999 when everyone had to have a Web site, today everyone wants an app. iPhone, iPad, Android apps for all, plus Blackberry for the very ambitious.

Here are eight signs we're in an app bubble

Designing for Mobile

Our world is evolving. New technologies and new researches are giving us more opportunities to develope internet-based applications for several, and different, devices. In particular, taking a look to the new telecommunication frontiers, it seems to be clear that the challenge is to provide a lot of services on mobile phones. The next level, so, will be to communicate in mobility.

I’m not speaking just about WiFi on your iPhone or Android-based phone, but about a mobile network technology that will allow us to browse our favorite website and use our useful web-apps everywhere (WiMAX, Long Term Evolution and so on).

Moreover, new features, hardware upgrades and cool applications are trasforming our mobile phone in a productivity machine. These are the main reasons that should drive us, web designers and developers, to digg into the fantastic world of the mobile web design and development.

It is a field relatively new, but, as said, it isn’t science fiction to think in few years a good percent of internet users will browse using brilliant and versatile mobile phones through a stable mobile network.

More at WebGraphics

How to Write an Effective 'About Me' Page

The "About Me" page is what many potential clients look at either right away, or at least the second thing they look at when viewing a freelance portfolio. As a solo worker, providing potential clients with information on yourself and your work is essential, because nobody wants to hire just anyone off the street. It is reasonable that a bit of research on the individual should be done, and an about page can make or break relationships with leads. As a result, an about page can make or break an entire freelancing business....

More at Onextrapixel

20 Powerful Time Management Tools

20 Powerful Time Management Tools | inspirationfeed.com

Tuesday, September 7, 2010

55 Awesome Online Photo Editors

Need to crop or colour balance an image but don't have the software? Fear not - there are plenty of online options available here.

Monday, September 6, 2010

20 Useful Free PDF ebooks for Designers and Bloggers

More at Speckyboy Design Magazine

Introduction to PhoneGap Development

PhoneGap is an open source framework for building cross-platform mobile applications with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. This is an ideal solution for web developers interested in mobile development as it allows them to leverage existing skills rather than start form scratch with a device-specific compiled language. This is also an ideal solution for those interested in creating an application that can run on multiple devices with the same code base. In this tutorial, you will learn how to setup the PhoneGap development environment and learn some of the fundamental development considerations of the platform.

More here.

The Essential Guide to Digital Photography

The Essential Guide to Digital Photography is for readers wanting to learn digital photography for the first time or build upon existing skills.

This 59 page guide is for readers who want to take photography beyond the simple point-and-shoot experience to more advanced skills and techniques. Its an introduction to some essential things you need to know to get started and outlines further resources that you can use to grow as a photographer. With this free guide you will also receive daily updates on new cool websites and programs in your email for free courtesy of MakeUseOf.

The Essential Guide to Digital Photography | Orphicpixel

Phases of App Maturity: Roadmapping Your Startup's Mobile Strategy

One of the best ways company looking to expand into mobility can roadmap their products is to understand what Appcelerator calls the "application maturity model," which consists of three distinct phases.

* The Information Phase - The first step for many companies is to dip their toes into the mobile sector with basic read-only apps that provide one-way information to the user. It's in this phase that many first timers build familiarity with the platform, its capabilities and possible business models.
* The Participatory Phase - In this second phase, apps begin to allow for two-way communication, pushing and pulling information between the device and the cloud. Companies begin to realize the potential of the platform and its native functions, like location, photos and social networking.
* The Business Operations Phase - In the third phase, a company finally begins to use their apps as a new way to drive revenue and loyalty from their customers. It's not just a side project, it's now a critical part of the the overall strategy.

More at ReadWriteStart

The Case For Open-Source Design

Can design by committee work?

In celebrating the merits of free software and the excitement over this radical networked production method, an important truth is left unspoken. Networked collaboration shines in the low levels of network protocols, server software and memory allocation, but user interface has consistently been a point of failure. How come the networked collaboration that transformed code production and encyclopedia-writing fails to translate to graphic and interface design?

The following is an investigation into the difficulties of extending the open-source collaboration model from coding to its next logical step: interface design. While we’ll dive deep into the practical difference between these two professional fields, the article might also serve as a note of caution to think before rushing to declare the rise of “open-source architecture,” “open-source university,” “open-source democracy” and so on.

More at Smashing Magazine