Culture | All Hands March Madness Pool

Posted by Daniel Turman | March 16, 10:10 pm

 

 
BRACKETVILLE, U.S.A. – Despite the obvious inevitability of a Michigan State march to the promised land this year, the NCAA has decided to still hold a tournament to determine a champion in 2009.

As such, you can make “picks” on a “bracket”. Then depending on how well you picked the various results, you can be ranked against [...]

Digital culture | Playpower Distributes Educational Software in Emerging Markets

Posted by mstrickl | March 16, 11:30 am

image credit: Wired
Playpower.org is a group dedicated to Computer Aided Learning in developing countries, currently targeting $12 TV-computers already in sale throughout China, India, and South America.
Last week I went down to O’Reilly’s ETech conference to support Playpower during their presentation by playing some improvised beats off my PSP. It was a lot of fun, [...]

Art | Comcast Goes Indie, Artistic and Isometric

Posted by Jay Bain | March 16, 5:47 am

Got that new “C-O-M-C-A-S-T” song stuck in your head?  The catchy indie-folk tune is the only audio in a new Comcast TV spot about all the cool stuff you can do via their Triple-Play service package.  In the TV spot, people sing the song as they move around diagonally on a beautifully rendered isometric grid.
Online, [...]

Data Representation | What's a Twitter in Austin?

Posted by ssautter | March 13, 12:47 pm

PepsiCo wants you to be able to see what’s happening at one of the biggest idea forums this year. They’re not only a huge sponsor of this year’s SXSW in Austin, they’re running a Twitter-based “visualizer” of happenings and ephemera at the event.

Branded entertainment | Life Is For Sharing

Posted by mstrickl | March 12, 11:36 am

Editor’s Note: Yes… some things are worth sharing, even two months late. Originally a post sent around by Sam Cannon, praise for this fantastic campaign reentered my inbox this week from Adam Turinas as something his “70 something aunt in Canada emailed it to me. Hhhmh! This internet thing could be big”. Proving a [...]

Culture | NY Office Move: Week 2...The Walls Come Tumbling Down

Posted by Daniel Turman | March 11, 5:33 pm

 
 

NEW YORK — The walls come tumbling down…

As well as the cubicles and desks. See all that blue tape all around? Well, you need it to see the footpaths so you can get around.  The eastside is currently a destruction zone while the other side seems like a small city. 
Many new relationships are forming while [...]

Design and user experience | Projected, gesture-driven interface + Augmented Reality + Semantic Web = Never-ending Wows.

Posted by craigritchie | March 11, 11:02 am

MIT’s Pattie Maes revealed we’re quite a bit closer to usable, wearable tech than we realized at the TED conference this past month. Currently named “Sixth Sense,” it combines a projected gesture-driven interface with image recognition and a connection to the Internet, or potentially, the semantic web to create an augmented day-to-day experience that brought [...]

Art | Imitation Isn't Just Flattery, It's Entertainment

Posted by mstrickl | March 11, 5:15 am

Remixing is an often unappreciated art form, but there are some groups out there who take the art of remix to such level, there is no denying that it is exactly that… art.
I’ve always been a fan of the Emergency Broadcast Network, a multimedia group from the early 90s who use clips of news, music [...]

Culture | Java beans

Posted by ssautter | March 10, 10:30 pm

Coffee aficionado Mike Hudson swung through the D last week and brought with
him some of the West Coast’s finest. 
I was lucky enough to partake in a brew of each.   I
sampled the Four Barrel Colombian first – it was good…I mean real good.  If you are in the SF office, like coffee and
have not checked this [...]

Digital culture | Digital Democracy

Posted by kojanen | March 10, 11:30 am

image credit: Dead Air (Flickr)
The brainchild of an English soccer fan, myfootballclub.co.uk originally launched in 2007 with the aim of recruiting at least 50,000 soccer enthusiasts from around the world to donate £35 each to buy a real soccer team. The site collected the necessary amount of donations quite quickly, and in the beginning of [...]