Sunday, February 24, 2008

PicLens - Cool firefox addon

PicLens instantly transforms your browser into a full-screen 3D experience for viewing images across the web. Our new interactive "3D Wall" lets you effortlessly drag, click, and zoom your way around a wall of pictures for an extraordinary viewing experience. The new search box lets you search the Web in full-screen using Google, Yahoo, SmugMug, Flickr, Photobucket, and DeviantArt. Just type a query and view all the results in the PicLens wall.

Piclens is currently works on:

* Flickr, Smugmug, DeviantArt, Photobucket, Picasa
* Facebook, MySpace, Bebo, Hi5, Friendster
* Image search on Google, Yahoo, Ask, Live, and AOL
* A growing number of Media RSS-enabled web sites

Works with:
Firefox Firefox: 2.0 – 2.0.0.*

Download -> https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/downloads/file/23348/piclens-1.6.1.1029-fx-win.xpi

Android Demo

Sergey Brin and Steve Horowitz discuss the availability of the SDK, that it will be open source in the future, and demo applications on the Android platform.

Thursday, February 21, 2008

OpenUsability for Students

OpenUsability for Students

OpenUsability's mentored student projects are an excellent way for usability, user-interface design, and interaction design students to gain experience in the interdisciplinary and collaborative development of user interface solutions in international software projects.

See the official website for further information.

Season of Usability

Season of Usability is a series of sponsored student projects to encourage students of usability, user-interface design, and interaction design to get involved with Freee/Libre/Open-Source Software (FLOSS) projects.

Inspired by Google's Summer of Code™, OpenUsability joined up with FLOSS Usability, Aspiration and the Open Society Institute to offer a number of sponsored student projects. Other than the Google projects that address developers, they aim at students of usability, user-interface design, and interaction design. Students will experience the interdisciplinary and collaborative development of user interface solutions in international software projects while getting into OSS development.

The idea of the student projects is to establish a close collaboration between the student, a key developer from the software project (technical mentor) and a usability mentor. Students learn how to develop design solutions in agreement with the whole team to learn how to obtain solution-oriented results. During a three-month cooperation, students will closely work together with experienced professionals and get insights in to their way of work.

The first Season of Usability took place from November 2006 to June 2007. Five student projects were successfully accomplished, including Basket, GeexBox, Open Printing, Okular and OpenWengo.

Progress and results of the student projects are summarised on the official Season of Usability website.

HOW design Interactive design awards

Interactive Design Awards
HOW Magazine's 10th Annual Interactive Design Awards
Enter your work in HOW magazine's Interactive Design Competition. All winning entries will be featured in HOW's huge April 2009 Design Annual and will receive a $100 discount toward registration for the 2009 HOW Design Conference.............

Wednesday, February 20, 2008

Design Competion

Nagoya Design Do! competition

Nagoya, Japan, a self-styled "Design City" since 1989's World Design Expo, is holding their bi-yearly design competition, "Nagoya Design Do!" The current theme is "The Act of Eating:"

Eating is Living.

Show us your ideas concerning eating through designs with new perspectives.

If the nutshell's too small for you, check out the full 500-word brief at the link below.

Deadline: Between April 1st and 30th.
Prizes: Millions and millions of yen (depending on where you place) and a ticket to the workshop in Japan.

Check out deets here!

Friday, February 15, 2008

Aha! -Notocot

French designer, Jean Marc Grady, has designed a service accessory range including buckets, drink cooler, bowl, candlesticks and platters. There is nothing to draw you right to a drink bucket in a dark night club like a sparkling bottle of champagne, literally glowing... and as soon as you pick it up from the base, the light stops. This one will certainly create quite the dramatic lounge experience.

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Wednesday, February 13, 2008

Interaction Design and ID -Core 77

Today, more and more industrial designers are being asked to design products and systems that incorporate interactive components. And since the level of complexity increases exponentially as a product gains more digital intelligence, a new kind of expertise is needed. Today, more and more industrial designers are being asked to design products and systems that incorporate interactive components. And since the level of complexity increases exponentially as a product gains more digital intelligence, a new kind of expertise is needed.

If product designers are facing a deluge of interaction design challenges (and they are), why is such poor attention being paid to bringing interaction design into the fold of the industrial design community?
ID as a historical design discipline has until very recently concentrated more on the balance of function and form only as they relate to visceral, visual aesthetics. But lately, "product design" education has steered industrial design programs to consider "context of use" as a core data set in guiding function and form.

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Sunday, February 10, 2008

Viral Marketing

You guys must have seen most of these. This is called viral marketing and this is how their makers - webchutney defines it - Viral marketing relies on spreading the buzz. It works because it is a self-sustaining word of mouth strategy, which is also easy on the bottom dollar. Once a viral is released, it will most likely spread itself without the marketer's constant backing.

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Designer / Model

http://www.designerslashmodel.com/

you have to see this!

thanks sharad for the link

Learning From Gamers -Datamation

Hardcore gamers have much to teach people in IT and business about how to run an organization. These gamers are often highly skilled workers who have mastered a wide range of very complex tasks with a combination of memorization, intuition and big-picture understanding. As a result, gamers have the right mindset for taking on important responsibilities within the IT profession. As videogames become more complex, nuanced and sophisticated, increasing numbers of people will rely on them for education. Already, tech start-ups in Silicon Valley are re-thinking how they can introduce elements of gaming into their organizations.

Gaming is fundamentally different from academics in that academics is about preparing for non-failure while gaming is about learning from failure. Gamers engage in massive repetition of tasks and enjoy the challenge of mastery, two traits that are not always found in academics. As videogames become more complex, nuanced and sophisticated, increasing numbers of people will start actually learning about history, politics, and other subjects through game play. In Silicon Valley, businesses are starting to learn from video games. The "failing softly" approach to generating new business plans is one of the reasons Silicon Valley is a leading innovation center. Business and IT leaders must learn how to incorporate failure into everyday activities, such that there is no longer a stigma attached to failure.

If you are a manager, you may discover new success if you are able to foster a video game-like culture of soft failure. Instead of firing the people who try something and screw up, for example, instead retain those now-educated people and fire the ones who never try anything new. Some organizations never punish failure. Others punish it way too harshly. In addition, figure out how to foster a culture of repetition, such that stressful or intimidating tasks become mundane.

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Saturday, February 02, 2008

Global Rich List - Where do you stand?

Every year we gaze enviously at the lists of the richest people in world. Wondering what it would be like to have that sort of cash. But where would you sit on one of those lists? Here's your chance to find out.

http://www.globalrichlist.com/

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