This morning I saw a demo on Venturebeat.com of a new native iPhone app from a Seattle-based startup called Urban Spoon. Urban Spoon is a client of my firm, so I have had some exposure to their original website, which aggregates information about restaurants and allows users to vote on which restaurants they like.
Urban Spoon has an iPhone application in the wings that looks to be a great way to add some spontaneity to your dining plans. The application (demo embedded below) uses the iPhone’s location awareness and provides you with a slot machine style wheel of fortune for picking restaurants. Shake the iPhone and a recommendation is made. Don’t like the pick, shake it again.
Tonight I read about a widget for blogs intended to make it simpler for readers to give feedback on what they would like to see on the site. The company that offers the services is called Skribit, and if you are interested in what they do, you can check out their widget at the bottom of my sidebar.
Can’t say much about how effective the product is yet, but I would love it if readers would submit some thoughts on what they would like to see on my site. I will update this post in a week or so with some overall thoughts. If you have any feedback on the site, would like to make a submission, or simply drop me a line, you can also send email to submissions (****at****) thisistech.com.
Skribit helps you get suggestions from readers and then others can vote for them. For example, one reader could suggest that you video-blog and other readers who like the idea can vote for it. Readers have a chance to easily drop in their questions/interests, and you get benefit as a blogger too - yes, you can get ideas for posts! Skribit can aid in beating writer’s block.”
At this year’s Web 2.0 Expo, Clay Shirky gave an entertaining talk on how the ‘Cognitive Surplus’, or the collective spare brain power of everyone, is shifting from passive to more active engagement.
…We watched Gilligan’s Island. We watch Malcolm in the Middle. We watch Desperate Housewives. Desperate Housewives essentially functioned as a kind of cognitive heat sink, dissipating thinking that might otherwise have built up and caused society to overheat.
And it’s only now, as we’re waking up from that collective bender, that we’re starting to see the cognitive surplus as an asset rather than as a crisis. We’re seeing things being designed to take advantage of that surplus, to deploy it in ways more engaging than just having a TV in everybody’s basement.
Last night Seattle artisan software developers Jackson Fish Market launched their latest web application, Carbon Grove. Sponsored by Microsoft as a demonstration of Silverlight, the web app allows you to sign up to receive periodic tips on how to become more carbon neutral, and every time you respond to the reminders you cause virtual trees to grow on your page at the Carbon Grove site. The only downside is that it only runs on IE, so firefox users will need to launch Internet Explorer to give it a try.
The United States has moved up 3 places to 4th in the rankings of the World Economic Forum’s “Networked Readiness Index”.
Covering 127 economies, the index is meant to measure not only networking infrastructure, but all aspects of a country’s use of information and communication technology to benefit its citizens, businesses, and governments. Because of the study’s broad scope and focus on innovation, the report is considered the most authoritative assessment of a country’s ability to innovate and compete in the global market.
I am prone to believe this even though it is April 1st, if anything because it would be an incredibly lame joke. Document sharing site, Scribd, has apparently rolled out a program offering to convert your paper to its iPaper format for free. You mail your documents to them, they scan and ocr them and post them to your account on the site. According to the site you can send whole books to be scanned without destroying the binding. The catch, you need to be willing to publish the documents on their site for the word to read, and be willing to wait.
Scanning documents is a pain, and can be expensive to farm out. Not sure how much this policy will cost Scribd to implement, but there is no doubt that it should jump-start its content acquisition efforts.
If you are looking to kill some time listening to music on the web, check out a personalized web radio service called Musicovery. They have a easy to navigate interface that lets you specify whether you are looking for music that is positive or dark, calm or energetic. You can opt in or out of various genres, and the resulting player shows a nice map of the music you are listing to an how it relates to similar artists/songs. There are some great existing services in this space that appear to be more in depth than Musicovery (e.g., Last.fm and Pandora), but for fast easy and entertaining access to music online Musicovery is an worth a look. Screenshots below:
Tuesday, June 17, 2008
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