This morning I downloaded Intua’s BeatMaker iPhone app. This is the first and only iPhone app I’ve paid for, and it’s crazy. It has 16 pad sample triggering, sample wave editing, a sequencer, live performance capabilities (live pattern triggering and recording), a few effects, and the ability to import and export audio. I’m so excited about this app: I can finally make beats on the subway on my phone!
Some screenshots I took of the application’s various interface states are below. This is by far the most robust iPhone app I’ve installed, and the interface paradigms are inspired more by Reason and other sequencers than by Apple.
07/15/08 by mark in
music, technology.
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With the addition of applications for the iPhone and iPod touch in the new iTunes store there are many new social apps that leverage location aware technology. Techcrunch has a nice overview of several, including Loopt and Limbo:
Think of Loopt as a simple social network to find local businesses, message friends and send status updates with where you are (using the iPhones location technology). And a key difference with Loopt and many of the other networks below: you can meet new people who are nearby, if they choose to share that information. If everyone used this, you could see who’s single in a bar before you approach them (and flirt with them by phone first), and know the first name and job of everyone at that cocktail hour at the tech conference.
…
Limbo - Limbo is another geo-aware social network that behaves like a mashup of Twitter, Loopt, and Whrrl. One of the app’s most compelling features is its grid-like diagram that visually groups your friends according to what they’re doing (for example, all of your friends that are Out Drinking will be lumped together, even if they aren’t necessarily drinking in the same place). The app accomplishes this feat by forcing users to select from a predefined hierarchal list of activities (while this might sound restrictive, the list is pretty comprehensive). This categorization allows users to see what they’re friends are up to without having to sift through each of their messages.
On the geo-positioning front, Limbo allows users to interact users who are within a close radius (about a quarter mile), in a manner that is similar to Loopt.
I think of both as the 2008 versions of Dodgeball, a mobile social networking service developed by two guys at ITP years ago, that was acquired by Google in 2005, and left to dwindle until the founders quit Google in 2007:
It’s no real secret that Google wasn’t supporting dodgeball the way we expected. The whole experience was incredibly frustrating for us - especially as we couldn’t convince them that dodgeball was worth engineering resources, leaving us to watch as other startups got to innovate in the mobile + social space.
Back in 2005, Clay Shirky broke down why Google’s acquisition of Dodgeball made sense:
* Dodgeball uses the mobile phone as its native platform, someplace Google wants to further extend it’s reach.
* Dodgeball does a better job mapping to real-world social networks than Orkut, since there’s an actual reason *not* to friend someone in db, namely that you don’t want to get spammed with 100 SMSes a night.
* Google’s mapping work is good at “Where am I?” and “Where is the gas
station?” but not so good at the question “Where are my friends?” Dodgeball is really good at that.
Given that the core Dodgeball proposition — we can mix fixed information about places and fluid information about people to create new value — improves a) the more information you have upfront and b) the more people are using it, the addition of db to Google is really good news for db, and will provide a really interesting platform for G to experiment with.
Three years later, with the explosion of location aware social applications, Google sure looks like it slept on a great idea.
07/10/08 by mark in
social media, technology, web.
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Last night we watched Fire in the Sky, the 1993 film based on the story of Travis Walton’s disappearance for 5 days in 1975 in the Apache-Sitgreaves National Forest in Arizona:
On November 5, 1975, near Snowflake, Arizona, logger Travis Walton disappears mysteriously during an encounter with a flying saucer. Authorities treat with skepticism the outrageous story related by the only witnesses to the alleged event, including Walton’s co-workers and his best friend and future brother-in-law, Mike Rogers. They are suspected of foul play despite no apparent motive or knowledge as to Walton’s whereabouts.
A state lawman finds a tabloid newspaper in the crew’s pickup truck and quickly concludes that tensions had arisen between Walton and surly co-worker Allan Dallis, leading the lawman to conclude that a murder cover-up is under way. However, all of the suspects pass lie-detector tests and the case becomes stalled. Five days later, and just as mysteriously as he disappeared, Walton reappears, claiming to have been abducted by extraterrestrials and taken aboard a UFO. [link]
While the film is based on Walton’s book detailing his experience, the abduction scenes in the movie are the most memorable and the least consistent with Watson’s account of what happened to him. The image of Walton restrained on the alien operating table with a needle-like instrument piercing his eye, isn’t in Walton’s less terrifying and less dramatic account. Instead, he describes how there were two types of aliens, shorter ones with “huge luminous brown eyes” that seemed afraid of him and human-like ones that didn’t speak:
I stood frozen to the spot. He was a man about six feet two inches tall. His helmeted head barely cleared the doorway. He was extremely muscular and evenly proportioned. He appeared to weigh about two hundred pounds. He wore a tight-fitting bright blue suit of soft material like velour. His feet were covered with black boots, a black band or belt wrapped around his middle. He carried no tools or weapons on his belt or in his hands; no insignia marked his clothing.
I ran up to him, exclaiming, babbling all sorts of questions. The man remained silent throughout my verbal barrage. I was worried by his silence. He took me firmly but gently by the arm and gestured for me to go with him. [link]
The screenplay writer acknowldedged that the abduction scene was dramaticized at the request of the movie’s producers. It’s not surprising that the violent abduction and alien sequences in the movie received critical acclaim or that for the next ten years, the X-files played off of these kind of terror-inducing images of aliens. But if you believe Walton’s account, the supporting testimony of the men that were with him, and the consistency of their story over the past 30+ years, something very different and much more interesting happened that night to Travis Walton.
07/10/08 by mark in
odd.
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Four more years of the McSame, via Voltron.
07/10/08 by mark in
art, politics.
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A huge (and long overdue) update from Adobe enables search engines to better index content within multi-state swfs.
Although search engines already index static text and links within SWF files, RIAs and dynamic Web content have been generally difficult to fully expose to search engines because of their changing states — a problem also inherent in other RIA technologies.
“Until now it has been extremely challenging to search the millions of RIAs and dynamic content on the Web, so we are leading the charge in improving search of content that runs in Adobe Flash Player,” said David Wadhwani, general manager and vice president of the Platform Business Unit at Adobe. “We are initially working with Google and Yahoo! to significantly improve search of this rich content on the Web, and we intend to broaden the availability of this capability to benefit all content publishers, developers and end users.”
As Michelle Turner, vice president of the Platform Business Unit at Adobe Systems, notes:
The great thing is that this is retrospective - the millions of SWF files out on the web will be indexed by this new player, and content and app developers don’t have to do anything for their Flash-based sites to be picked up. Google is rolling this out on their production servers right now, and while it will likely take a while for the impact of this to propagate into search results, improvement should start to be seen in weeks. Yahoo doesn’t have this live yet, but is committed to using the technology and releasing it at a later date.
I think this is a really exciting technology release. Dynamic content searchability has been an issue for search engines for years. Flash content is so pervasive on the web, the fact that it couldn’t be thoroughly crawled and indexed in the past kept search engines from being able to access an enormous amount of web content. This will be great for increasing search accuracy over time, particularly as Google and Yahoo apply their secret sauce to the SWF results. This also has major implications for SEO companies, and I can imagine the new work springing up around optimization of Flash content. Many creative agencies have been asking for this for a long time, so we’re thrilled to see Google roll this out.
This is terrific news for rich media content publishers. I can’t wait to read more about how it works.
07/01/08 by mark in
technology, web.
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Brooklyn, NY
06/25/08 by mark in
photography.
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Wow. Even though I didn’t work with him directly, I’ve known Jerome Austria was a creative genius from my time at R/GA on the Nike Basketball account a few years ago. But this confirms that his character matches his creative talent. From AgencySpy:
As we hoped, more information on the AKQA situation we reported yesterday has come to light.
We told you about a creative director at the agency who walked out when some of his team was let go. Well, the mystery addie is Jerome Austria.
…
The move apparently had something to do with ECD Lars Bastholm, “who reportedly is horrible at managing people and does nothing but send cool web links and take credit for work he had no part of.”
It takes a lot of guts to stand up for the people you work with like this, especially in the commercial design world where it’s a lot easier to keep your head down.
Check out Jerome’s portfolio for some truly brilliant integrated advertising campaigns.
06/25/08 by mark in
advertising, design.
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Andrew Bush’s Vector Portraits are an incredible collection of “photographs made while travelling 50 to 70 mph in Los Angeles and other parts of the Southwestern United States” from 1989-1997. [via Neatorama]
06/25/08 by mark in
art, photography.
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