technology
Ok. The concept of making a font with a car through motion tracking is a bit gimmicky. But as the video shows, the process is actually interesting.
Zach Lieberman always seems to do original work with motion tracking (even for commercial projects). Plus the beat in the video by Cupp Cave is hot—I could live inside those bass + kick drum patterns.
You can download the font here. How many people can put “font driver” on their resume and actually have the experience to back it up?
Twitter’s growth is impressive: according to Hitwise, the Hudson River plane crash recently drove Twitter’s “market share of visits” in the “Computers and Internet” category higher than Digg’s.
If you can see past the PR and Twitter hype, there are lots of great new examples of Twitter being used effectively as a service or tool. Below are three examples of Twitter put to good use:
1. Twestival, a global networked fundraiser, seeks to raise $500K for non-profit charity:water through meet ups in 100 cities across the world. Micro donations are made through TipJoy
2. A New York Times interactive graphic maps the “location and frequency of commonly used words in Super Bowl related messages” on Twitter. This graphic is deceptively simple because it manages to create a clear narrative over time of the intersection of the game’s highlights and the themes of fans’ reactions across the United States.
3. Dell uses Twitter as an exclusive marketing channel, apparently producing “$1 million in revenue over the past year and a half through sale alerts”.
Ok, so the last example isn’t exactly good in the “common good” sense. But the exclusive-deal-through-Twitter is a strong precedent for brands looking for revenue opportunities through social media services.
Do you have other examples of Twitter used effectively as a social service or tool?
iHologram – iPhone application from David OReilly on Vimeo.
This video simulates a 3D animation art-as-iPhone-app that responds to rotation of the iPhone on a flat surface. It’s clearly a fake because the iPhone can’t actually measure rotation on a flat surface like this, but the video is very well executed.
So most of the coverage of Google’s new browser, Chrome, centers on it as a “Windows killer.” But this framing is a little off. Google isn’t trying to compete with Explorer or kill Windows, although I’m sure they’d love to. Google released a webcomic by the infinitely talented Scott McCloud to illustrate the story of Chrome, its goals, and what fundamentally differentiates it from existing browsers.
Chrome enables better memory allocation by treating processes separately (more like a modern os than a browser) and it’s open source. Handling processes separately is very important for Google because their web applications place more demands on memory usage than traditional browsers. And there’s a payoff for users too. If one web page or web app hangs, anything else you have open in Chrome won’t.
Google is investing in Chrome as an open source product not to compete with existing browsers but to encourage them to innovate with Chrome’s code to be able to better support the memory demands of Google apps.
Also, Google can now leverage their own browser on their mobile platform, Android, much like Apple is leveraging Safari on the iPhone. Hopefully this integration will result in a cohesive user experience across the new platform.
The fact that media coverage has overlooked Google’s stated positioning of Chrome, reflects the awkward choice of promoting the product with a 30+ page webcomic. I still think McCloud is a genius as a visual communicator (if you haven’t read Understanding Comics I highly recommend it), but come on Google. Why pick this medium that demands time to read and attentiveness for such an important product promotion?