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• January 2009 (4)

  View Source | January iPhone App Review: Cats, Puppies, & Rocks

  Posted by Marta Strictland | January 28, 12:27 pm

  Tsumineko Mew Mew Tower
  This charming game with a hand-drawn look is from B3 United (a Japanese iPhone developer) and is very simple for anyone to play. The Jenga-like stacking of as many cats as possible is made more realistic as you lean your iPhone to keep the tower from falling over (I’ve gotten to [...]

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  View Source | Streaming to the Sofa

  Posted by dneumann | January 13, 12:35 pm

  Based on what’s been unveiled this year at CES, I’m betting that 2009 will be the year when streaming video really goes mainstream. At least two big consumer electronics manufacturers, LG and Vizio, have announced networked TVs. Netgear has announced a router that streams HD video and Slingmedia is showing off its iPhone app. Add [...]

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  View Source | Getting Away from Facebook (with Facebook's help)

  Posted by mstrickl | January 9, 5:00 am

  As the old saying goes, “if you love somebody, set them free”. Do this with social networks and you might just get more love in return.
  Last May, Facebook announced Facebook Connect, an API that allowed “users to dynamically connect their identity information from Facebook, such as basic profile, friends, photos information and more, to [...]

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  View Source | A Look Back at Some Favorite iPhone Apps from 2008

  Posted by Jay Bain | January 1, 1:55 pm

  …here’s an informal list of ten favorite iPhone apps from 2008, as well as a short wish list for apps in 2009. With favorites from me and a few other Organics (thanks Casey, Lisa, Marta and Tracy), this is by no means definitive but might prove helpful or fun for you or an iPhone user you know.

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• February 2009 (5)

  View Source | How Big Brands Can Benefit from Public APIs

  Posted by mstrickl | February 27, 5:45 am

  This past Friday I attended The New York Times Developer Network’s inaugural API seminar. The event was aimed at promoting their roster of existing APIs and launching a new one, for their Times People social network. Organizers had hoped to use the event as a way to reach out to independent developers who would, in [...]

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  View Source | Recovery.gov is Built on Drupal

  Posted by mstrickl | February 24, 10:52 am

  The Drupal community is buzzing over the confirmation that the Obama Internet team has built the new Recovery.gov web site on the Drupal platform. This open-source CMS has built a reputation of innovation, stability and malleability that is unmatched. Drupal boasts thousands of modules for almost any type of digital presence, with a focus on [...]

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  View Source | Say Goodbye to Hulu on Boxee (For Now)

  Posted by Jay Bain | February 18, 5:15 pm

  Have you ever watched streaming content on Hulu.com? It’s okay if you haven’t but these days you’re increasingly likely to be in the minority.
  Hulu’s great Superbowl ad with Alec Baldwin promises streaming TV and movie content to “your mobile computing devices”. However, one application that truly broke new ground for Hulu’s distribution model, Boxee (see www.boxee.tv) is now no longer going to feature any Hulu content, at the request of Hulu’s content partners (i.e., NBC, Fox, et. al.).

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  View Source | WhatTheFont for iPhone

  Posted by mstrickl | February 12, 2:47 pm

  MyFonts has released WhatTheFont iPhone app based on their Web service of the same name. The site has been around for a while, allowing users to upload font images for machine or community identification. Now with the arrival of mobile app, design professionals and typography lovers are able to identify fonts anytime, anywhere.
  Here’s how to [...]

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  View Source | Evolving Our Understanding of Online Brand Conversation

  Posted by Hilton Barbour | February 9, 6:01 am

  As marketing and sociology continue to collide, we’re clearly witnessing the Cluetrain “markets are conversations” come to life.
  Social networks have enabled ubiquitous two-way communication
  between individuals and brands alike. How do we make sense of all the
  cacophony?
  (I’ve deliberately chosen to focus on brand conversations here but
  the majority of what I’ve written applies equally to individuals who
  are [...]

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• March 2009 (5)

  View Source | Diagnosis From A Kiosk

  Posted by ssautter | March 30, 5:32 am

  Since I work on a financial account, it’s cool to see something outside of banking that could impact everyday life just as ATMs did. Hence, I heard about an interesting device involving Medicine 2.0: The Virtual Practice Project. Massachusetts General Hospital is developing this computerized kiosk that physicians hope can help bring some relief to the [...]

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  View Source | Not All Apps Need To Be Killer

  Posted by mstrickl | March 27, 5:29 am

  The Conservation Fund, Organic’s carbon offset vendor, has partnered with iPhactory and Ecolife Apparel to launch iPhorest, a new iPhone app that helps the environment by planting real live trees.
  By downloading the app, the user activates a seedling both virtually and physically. For each virtual tree planted, The Conservation Fund will plant a native tree [...]

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  View Source | Fish Where the Fish Aren't

  Posted by Hilton Barbour | March 25, 5:26 am

  image credit: afagen
  Introducing an interesting out-of-home timewaster from Carnival Cruises (and Arnold Worldwide through Monster Media), popping up in various major cities around the country. Passers-by are first engaged by the motion responsive virtual marine life. Once hooked (sorry, couldn’t resist) they learn that they can create a fish of their own by dialing a [...]

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  View Source | Can the PCPM Save the (Digital) World?

  Posted by dneumann | March 24, 7:48 am

  Although not new, the notion of a personal CPM seemed to be threaded through more than a few panels at this year’s SXSW interactive conference. Popularized by former Forrester analyst Charlene Li, the PCPM can be loosely defined as the value of one thousand page views multiplied by an individual’s influence. More specifically, it’s the [...]

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  View Source | A New Code for Marketers, Retailers and Consumers

  Posted by ssautter | March 24, 6:22 am

  Barcodes and QR Codes could be a thing of the past. I’m betting Mobile Multi-Colour Composite codes (MMCC) will be the new “barcodes.”

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• April 2009 (5)

  View Source | Will Augmented Reality Change What You Post?

  Posted by ssautter | April 29, 6:42 am

  The Cloud Mirror from eric gradman on Vimeo.
  I’ve been drawn to the new augmented reality stuff that is going around. I think this is sure to be an up and coming technology that’ll be used a lot in advertising.
  I recently came across one in particular that raises many questions: The Cloud Mirror. It’s an art [...]

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  View Source | The Untapped Potential of Digital Out-Of-Home Media

  Posted by ssautter | April 28, 7:13 am

  image credit: stonebird
  I just came across an interesting digital out-of-home (DOOH) media and mobile story. Through a partnership with Impact Mobile, Adcentricity, an aggregator for over 80 DOOH networks, has just added a mobile component to its offerings.
  Just when the Outdoor Advertising Research Group is claiming digital signs aren’t distracting, the convergence of DOOH [...]

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  View Source | Rise of the XBMC-Based Media Center

  Posted by dneumann | April 27, 11:20 am

  I recently found some time to play around with two XBMC-based media
  center apps, Boxee and Plex, and I have to say that I’m impressed. Not
  only with their design and feature sets, but with their ability to
  deliver web-optimized content to a television.  Gaming
  consoles have long had the interaction model between users, the television, and a computer [...]

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  View Source | Is iPhoneTV Coming to Your Living Room?

  Posted by Fang Yu Lin | April 20, 3:55 pm

  For the past few days, the technology blogosphere has been buzzing about the upcoming Hulu iPhone app. About the same time, there is a widespread rumor proclaiming full HD output and iTunes streaming from next generation iPhone and iPod touch. It is not difficult to put two and two together, and see the enormous market [...]

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  View Source | Branded Short URL Generators

  Posted by ssautter | April 15, 1:31 pm

  TinyURL may have started the abbreviated URL trend, but others are capitalizing on it. Smart, the maker of those über-compact cars, encourages you to “use so-smart.be to park large url’s in tiny spaces.” Besides the obvious pun (get it? Smart cars are short.), this is a really interesting branding move by Smart. Local San Francisco [...]

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• May 2009 (5)

  View Source | How to Buy Innovation

  Posted by dneumann | May 28, 8:49 am

  T-Mobile has partnered with Bill Shrink, a startup that aims to help users lower credit card, mobile phone, and gas costs by analyzing their usage habits. They seem to have a solid recommendation engine that takes into account enough variables to produce a genuinely helpful result, at least in the cell phone and credit card [...]

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  View Source | 3 Ways That Web 3.0 Will Become Mainstream

  Posted by mstrickl | May 19, 3:42 am

  In honor of the Web 3.0 Conference going on in New York, I wanted to write a piece today not to answer the question “What is Web 3.0?” There are plenty of articles that try and accomplish that task, and to me the easiest answer still is: Who cares?
  It doesn’t matter what Web 3.0, [...]

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  View Source | Seven Brands Shaking Up Their User Experience With Accelerometers

  Posted by Jay Bain | May 14, 10:04 am

  (Please note that for this post I only researched accelerometer-based apps on the iPhone; time permitting I’ll post again soon on how accelerometers are being used on a wide range of other devices, vehicles and buildings)
  The recent “Baby Shaker” iPhone app controversy drew attention not only because it highlighted possible issues with Apple’s app approval process, but also because [...]

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  View Source | Looking Forward to Now at the ITP Show

  Posted by Evan Cordes | May 13, 10:50 am

  The ITP Show is billed as “a festival of interactive sight, sound and technology from the student artists and innovators,” and it is just that.  ITP, the Interactive Telecommunications Program, is an arts graduate program at NYU that continually attracts great people and delivers great ideas and work.
  This past Monday night, I got a chance [...]

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  View Source | From gimmicky to something fun and useful...

  Posted by kojanen | May 6, 4:01 pm

  Fanta Virtual Tennis on YouTube
  No doubt about it, augmented reality is one thing that’s on virtually everybody’s lips right now. That has been noted here on ThreeMinds earlier, and YouTube is bursting with clips showing examples of basic AR applications, both mobile and desktop. But so far most of those examples are either of the [...]

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• June 2009 (5)

  View Source | Buy on the tweet, sell on the fact

  Posted by Russ Hopkins | June 30, 8:10 am

  Tapping
  into the herd through social media has been a goal for investors for some
  time.  Collective Intellect (founded in
  2005 for this sole purpose) and Dow Jones Insights are listening platforms that
  specialize in this area.  Late last year Stocktwits became the first Twitter based service based on investment discussion and has been driving
  change in the way that [...]

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  View Source | Hunch, A New Kind Of Search Engine

  Posted by mstrickl | June 24, 7:00 am

  Caterina Fake, who previously cofounded the photo-sharing site Flickr has cofounded a new search engine named Hunch, which launched Monday 6/15/09.
  What differentiates Hunch from other search engines is that rather than focusing on delivering an answer to specific questions (Where can I get Chinese takeout, 10018) Hunch seeks to deliver recommendations to less defined questions [...]

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  View Source | Do Social Media Marketers Dream Of Monitoring Tools?

  Posted by mstrickl | June 19, 7:06 am

  There are a plethora of social media monitoring tools out there now. As they jostle and tousle with each other tantalizing potential clients with colorful charts, demos and trial accounts, I’m still left wondering where this technology will wind up. Will it go the way of the search engines and eventually wind up with [...]

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  View Source | AR on the move: SPRXmobile's Layar and Nokia's Point & Find

  Posted by kojanen | June 18, 11:00 am

  Dutch company SPRXmobile has launched Layar – “the world’s first mobile Augmented Reality browser”, as they call it – for Android. However, Nokia has a similar concept, Point & Find, that we first reported on Threeminds in last December, which is now available for download (in beta) in the US and UK.
  The basic concept of [...]

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  View Source | Are They Really Reinventing the Web?

  Posted by ssautter | June 16, 9:51 am

  Our little Norwegian-based company, Opera, is at it again with a bold claim that it will “reinvent the web” with its new Opera Unite service. Some of the features available to Mac, PC, or Linux/Unix users:
  • File sharing — securely share files direct from your computer • Web server — turns your home computer into a [...]

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• July 2009 (2)

  View Source | What if the norm is already an exceptional experience?

  Posted by ssautter | July 15, 5:00 am

  Or to paraphrase my grandfather, “If it aint broke, don’t fix it.” Microsoft has been promoting its new search experience, Bing, with an estimated $100-$300M advertising campaign.  Factoring in development costs Billions have been invested in this new product.  Now people are wondering if this was all money well spent.  As you’ve heard from me before, [...]

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  View Source | GDGT: It's Launched, It Here and It's Hawt

  Posted by Marta Strictland | July 7, 12:06 pm

  I’ve been waiting for this one to launch for some time now and it’s finally here.
  The guys behind Engadget and Gizmodo have teamed up to unleash what they are calling the biggest gadget database ( and hopefully community ) Ever. Known.
  I know I’ll be using gdgt (pronounced simply as ‘gadget’) for years to [...]

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• August 2009 (4)

  View Source | Augmented Reality Hits The iPhone Earlier Than Planned...

  Posted by Marta Strictland | August 28, 1:14 pm

  With Yelp's Monocle Easter Egg

  Editor’s Note: Augmented reality has been a hot topic on the blogs lately as the release of iPhone OS 3.1 is supposed to enable use of the camera, GPS, and compass to layer virtual data over our physical world. While this is not supposed to be live yet, Mashable just announced [...]

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  View Source | Why Twitter's Growth Is Fueled by the Over Thirty Crowd

  Posted by ssautter | August 26, 8:56 am

  image credit: WilLiao
  Today’s New York Times business section features an article on Twitter. Specifically, it discusses how much its growth in popularity is being fueled not by teens – the usual source of exponential growth in new Internet technologies – but by adults, more specifically those over thirty. My colleagues have been pointing this out [...]

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  View Source | Unplug the Plug-ins

  Posted by ssautter | August 13, 5:33 am

  image credit: Tom Lin :3=
  An experiment by 9elements demonstrates the potential of HTML 5 to help developers offer up rich interactive experiences in your browser* –without flash, without plug-ins.
  They’re serving up scripted particle-based animation + interactive motion + Twitter integration + music. Totally sweet if you’re using Firefox 3.5, Safari 4, latest Google Chrome beta, [...]

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  View Source | Banking Is Nice, But What Do We Want Our Phones To Do Next...

  Posted by mstrickl | August 12, 6:53 am

  Unlikely innovator USAA Bank has pushed the bar in the financial industry and in mobile banking by allowing customers to remove one of the final paper roadblocks in an otherwise fully digital banking system: depositing a check. USAA Bank will now let customers deposit a check by taking a picture on their iphone and [...]

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• September 2009 (4)

  View Source | RIP: Why We Don't Need QR Code Campaigns

  Posted by Marta Strictland | September 29, 1:45 pm

  Marketers often ask why QR code technology for mobile phones (and other 2D barcode tech) hasn’t made it to the mainstream in North America. There have been a few notable efforts, some of which are still ongoing, but for the most part the technology remains esoteric and unused.
  There’s a very good reason for this. In [...]

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  View Source | IE Might Be Googling Their Way Out of Existence

  Posted by ssautter | September 24, 8:36 am

  image credit: Wessex Archaeology
  That appears to be Google’s tactic. A few days ago they announced a new plugin for IE 6, 7, and 8 called Chrome Frame. It’s available now as a developer preview so you have to prepend “cf:” before the “http” in all URLs, but for a first release it’s admirably cohesive and [...]

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  View Source | I Thought This Was Kathy Griffin's Job

  Posted by ssautter | September 23, 6:58 am

  Watch out! You may be outted on Facebook.  MIT students claim that they can tell which guys are gay by checking out their friends on Facebook. Students created an algorithm that first analyzed networks of people who publicized their sexual orientation on Facebook.  Then they looked at men who did not state their sexual orientation on [...]

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  View Source | Google Fast Flip News Reader

  Posted by mstrickl | September 18, 5:07 am

  In a great example of actually thinking through the experience of reading news, Google has again made a revolutionary new interface (read more at Google Labs or the NY Times). Basically, the site rasterizes the news into low rez and high rez images and allows you to use the now endemic “swipe” gestures and [...]

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• October 2009 (2)

  View Source | 2D Barcodes: You're Doing it Wrong

  Posted by dneumann | October 6, 8:22 am

  This post is in follow-up
  to an earlier post titled “RIP: Why We Don’t Need QR Code Campaigns.” Several
  critical points made by commenters merit further examination. These are:
  Many URLs are too long to be easily input, even
  with a QWERTY keypad.
  In the end this will go
  down to individual comfort levels, but there is some powerful anecdotal
  evidence to [...]

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  View Source | A Google Wave Interview: Organic's Collective Stream of Consciousness

  Posted by mstrickl | October 1, 7:30 am

  Twitter and the web at large is up in jubilation over the release of Google Wave today. So much so that the beta invitations have run out and the opportunity to take a “test drive” is selling on eBay for $70 a pop. If you don’t already know what Google Wave is Mashable offers a [...]

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• November 2009 (4)

  View Source | Breakthrough for mobile video calls?

  Posted by kojanen | November 26, 7:30 am

  Many smartphones have for years featured front-facing VGA quality cameras, in addition to the better back-facing cams for snapping (more or less) better photos. However, there aren’t very many places in the world where video calls between mobiles have really taken off, and bridging video calls between phones and computers has been virtually impossible.
  Fring is [...]

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  View Source | An Item For Your Christmas List: Livescribe Pulse Smartpen

  Posted by mstrickl | November 24, 5:05 am

  I am currently singing the praises of the Livescribe Pulse Smartpen. It ranks right up there with my iPhone, mino HD Flip videocamera, and TechSmith’s Morae software …. in making my life simpler; yet, significantly more productive. If you aren’t familiar with it, you can see a full demo of [...]

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  View Source | Esquire's Augmented Reality Issue: Going Beyond Digital Print

  Posted by mstrickl | November 10, 9:48 am

  This month, Esquire Magazine launched their anticipated Augmented Reality issue. The issue features an AR cover, where Robert Downey Jr. performs an intro and also a pitch for his upcoming Sherlock Holmes movie. In addition, there is other content, such as a fashion supplement where the weather changes based on the way the user tilts [...]

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  View Source | Will Paying With Your Cell Phone Stick This Time?

  Posted by ssautter | November 2, 6:41 am

  image credit: wynlok
  RFID chip payment systems — such as poll passes, subway cards, key chain tags you swipe at certain gas stations — aren’t anything new. Though Bling Nation hopes to market its branded chip sticker so that consumers can pay at checkouts with their cell phones.
   How It’s Different1. You can leave your wallet at home. [...]

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• December 2009 (3)

  View Source | What Might Make Augmented Reality Apps Really Take Off

  Posted by ssautter | December 28, 4:38 am

  Since the OS 3.0 release for iPhone last September, the number of available mobile augmented reality (AR) apps has grown quite a bit.  We’ve talked about a few of them on threeminds throughout the year:• Yelp’s app  • Nokia’s Point and Find  • Virtual Tennis 
  AR is a new type of UI (and user experience), [...]

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  View Source | Need More Outlets in the Maternity Ward

  Posted by mstrickl | December 18, 5:58 am

  Editor’s Note: Congratulations to Jonathan Cohen on the birth of his daughter
  In the past few years, numerous businesses have popped up offering innumerable products and services for the Internet catering to the business traveling set. As a pretty frequent business traveler, I have benefited from services like GoGo inflight wireless as well as Wi-Fi [...]

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  View Source | Google Goggles: Will AR Finally Go Mainstream?

  Posted by Russ Hopkins | December 15, 5:48 am

  Google recently released Goggles which is arguably the broadest reaching AR program available to date. If you are not familiar, it allows you to do two things:
  1. Snap a photo of anything and automatically search for results based on images and text within the photo
  2. See location and direction specific google maps results by [...]

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