Google in 133t Calls Its Ads Sp4m

A funny "localized" version of Google with its interface translated into 133t stays in character and calls its ads what the real haxorz are calling them - "sp4m".

Favorited Tweets

Roger Sterling has a book out.

A very important white paper: "3D Printing, Intellectual Property, and the Fight Over the Next Great Disruptive Technology"

Punchcut: "Traditional TV UI models are basic, disconnected, one-dimensional and linear. The new mobile, social and interactive contexts of use demand new UI solutions."

Along the same lines, an official guide for designing for Google TV.

Audio map of accents from around the world.

A big list of Foursquare badges.

"7 Awesome Ways Barnyard Animals Are Like Communism" and other classic book titles optimized for traffic.

Can you tell Arial from Helvetica?  20 challenges

A new breakthrough in holographic displays - full color, refreshed at 2 seconds.

There are 3300+ more of these in my favorites list on Twitter.

Gender-Specific Shampoo Usage Instructions

If you are one of those people who read instructions on shampoo bottles, and you share a bathroom with a person of the opposite gender, you might have noticed this striking stylistic difference in how directions for shampoo usage are worded for men and for women. Here, it's eight words on one bottle and forty on the other. Reminds me of how men and women shop differently.

Should instruction manuals for products that are even more complex than a bottle of shampoo be written for a particular audience and accounting for gender and perhaps age differences?  How about different levels of domain knowledge?  You know how they include multi-lingual booklets with gadgets these days. It would be kind of like that.

On a related train of thought - in his post on investing, Mark Cuban wrote this: "Wall Street has done an AMAZING job of creating conventional wisdom . 'Buy and Hold' is the 2nd most misleading marketing slogan ever, after the brilliant 'rinse and repeat' message on every shampoo bottle."

I kept thinking about the awesomeness of the "rinse and repeat", started to poke around and dug up this Fortune article back from 1999: "In Benjamin Cheever's novel The Plagiarist, a marketing executive becomes an industry legend by adding one word to shampoo bottles: REPEAT. He doubles shampoo sales overnight."

Finally, Bookmarkable Banner Ads

The big Monday press release was about the unveiling of AdKeeper, a company whose technology adds a "bookmark" (or "keep", as they call it) button to banner ads of participating advertisers. The idea is based on the fact that people do bookmark advertising if a) it's easy, and b) there is an expectation of future value. Clipping coupons, for example, is both. Until today, banners haven't really been designed for any kind of delayed gratification, being instead all about "click here now" reward mechanism. With AdKeeper, users will be able to clip online banners into a repository for later viewing, which probably means that the creative can be updated with new offers depending on the history of interactions with the ad.

An excellent idea, which I hope takes off.

Here's the demo video:

iPhonebook for Children Hits Stores

The amazing children's book peripheral by Mobile Art Lab that turns an iPhone into an interactive reading device is now selling on Japan's Amazon and a couple of other stores (Rakuten, 7netshopping) for about $30 in yen equivalent. You might have seen the video of the project last year when it was getting its well-deserved share of oohs and aahs. The companion app is available in  the Japanese app store, although not in the US one, it seems.

Google Needs a "Try Again" Button

I wish Google had a "Try Again" button that would fetch a new set of results based on the algorithm's different set of assumptions about my search intent. The button would come in handy when I am stuck, can't think of another way to rephrase my query, and don't feel like manually combing through pages and pages of search results. Kind of the opposite of "I'm feeling lucky."

(I wonder why all those pages are even there if 94% of people don't ever venture past page 3, and those who do obviously aren't impressed with the first 30 results.  On the other hand, I'm also very curious about what site ranked last "of about 1,340,000,000" for "love", but Google won't go past page 80. It's so far down the list it must be filled with hate. Or indifference.)

 To go back to the regular button or to revisit the original set of results, I would just empty the search box.

Projector Turns Surfaces Into Touch Screens

A follow-up to the post from earlier today about student experiments with projected interfaces:  "Light Touch is an interactive projector that instantly transforms any flat surface into a touch screen."  Not for sale yet, but apparently available to potential partners.
- via

Skinput Body Interface Listens for Taps on Skin

CNN Labs (?) runs a story about Skinput, a prototype interface that appropriates the human body as input device, developed by a Carnegie Melon grad student and Microsoft researcher. "Skinput can tell whether a person tapped a middle finger or an index finger, because the two moves sound slightly different to the springy receivers."

Related:  some other work in this area as well as the now-famous Sixth Sense prototype from MIT.

Student Projects Explore Projection Interfaces

Five student projects at Uni of Washington explore "projection of interfaces on any surface suitable for display and interaction in the home of the future." Pictured above is an interactive cooking coach. I also like their solution to losing things around the house

Future: Cell Phones As Personal Information Filters

This article was originally written for and published by Canvas8 in November 2009.

Pay no attention to the man holding the receiver; it’s the phone itself you’ll need to impress.

A small army of editors, programming directors, critics, censors, librarians and curators have shaped choices of entire generations.   But just like factory workers of the 19th century found themselves inevitably replaced by the more efficient machines, human gatekeepers are giving way to a new breed of automated tastemakers – sophisticated software that separates the information wheat from the chaff and whose influence is growing as fast as the amount of information we produce.

That is, pretty fast.

In 2002, the amount of new information was estimated to double every three years.    Today, it is doubling in size every 18 months. IBM expects that soon the amount of information will be doubling every eleven hours.  47,000 radio stations around the world pump out 70 million hours of original radio programming; 21,000 TV stations create 31 million hours of news, dramas, and reality shows; and printing presses roll out over a million new book titles, 25,000 newspapers, 80,000 trade periodicals and 37,000 academic journals. (source)

Finding a needle in this haystack of information requires superhuman powers. It is likely that in the near future these powers will come packaged in a slick portable device that stays awake around the clock, knows your tastes, detects your mood, programs your TV, fills your earbuds with infallibly pleasing music, and instructs you what to have for dinner and where, what books to read and what clothes to buy.

It will probably be a (really) smart phone.

Nude Photographs for the Blind

Tactile Minds (around $200) includes 17 2-D tactile photographs created by Lisa J. Murph who "has photographed, sclupted, thermoformed, & self- published a book of nude photographs for the blind."

If the price is too steep, there's always the free nudie audio or the back issues of Playboy in Braille.

Timing Visibility of Display Ads on a Page

This is pretty nifty. An ad network called World Web Network created launched technology that "monitors the visibility time of each banner on a Web page. [The technology] measures the amount of time that a banner is visible on the page and the web surfer is active. Time is only tallied when the script detects a regular mouse-keyboard activity. After ten seconds of idle time, the tool will pause until activity returns, ensuring a reliable metric." (source: press release).

Try the demo and see for yourself: it detects when you are below your screen's fold and can't see the banners.

I don't know if this has any real application in ad sales -- it matters little how "visible" the ad is if the average fixation (dwell) time for a banner is about one second --but I see it being useful in page content analysis. Too bad the tech is proprietary.

Correction: The technology was created by Alenty, not WWN who licenses it from the creators.

Nikon: Say Cheese To Zoom In

Nikon has launched a site to showcase the touchscreen on a new Coolpix camera and it lets you scroll and zoom through image galleries by moving fingers in front of your webcam -- a gestural interface of sorts. Only it's a bit wonky (or maybe it's my cam), and if you position your mouth inside the "zoom" circle, you can zoom in by smiling and zoom out by pursing your lips. I bet it's a feature and not a bug, too.

Telling A Story With Fantasy Interfaces

Here's a recent quick interview on NPR with Mark Coleran, the designer behind FUI (fictional user interfaces) that have appeared in many well-known movies: "What [a movie character] sees on that monitor looks nothing like what you have on your home computer. That's because it wasn't designed to surf the Internet or do your taxes."

AdLab's earlier coverage of Mark Coleran's work and the subject of FUI, including an academic paper.

Checkmarks vs. Crosses

Seen on a price comparison page of a web design outfit -- why not use green checkmarks instead of red Xs? Xs here are supposed to mean that the feature is available, right?

Esquire AR Issue Hits Newstands

The December issue of Esquire with the augmentedly realistic Robert Downey Jr. on the cover has finally arrived to our news store. Too bad I can't see anything since the AR download (?) requires a PC with a stand-alone graphics card. Maybe they should've given those away in addition to webcams.

I still have a bunch of copies of their eInk issue from last year, although the screens have long ran out of power. If you watch the intro video, you'll see that the copy behind their chief editor is dead, too.

That Entertainment Weekly with video inserts?  Still over $60 on eBay, and there are only one or two copies at a time for sale.

Update (Nov 16): So, I got home and tried the AR thing again, mostly because I hadn't seen a print ad with an AR component before, and Esquire has one for Lexus.




The ad has a cool part where it shows off how some kind of radar works, and turns your camera to "infrared" and activates face tracking.

That download file is 68Mb zipped. Would love to know the "engagement" stats one day. 

And yes, AR is the new Second Life (+part II)

Google Wave and Advertising

Google Wave is too pristine: a couple of mentions of advertising among largely unrelated public waves, hardly a single search result for "branding". But despair not, we've got you covered with plenty of illustrated ideas on how to bake ads into this hot new medium.

I really hope Wave takes off; we are way overdue for some innovation in email (that's how I see it, as the next generation of email). But I also see how it can easily remain a marginalized medium akin to newsreaders, or become a 5-9 tool like Outlook with its calendar, to-do lists and other features that only are rarely used after you've checked out for the day.

Visual Search for Cameras is Useless

I definitely get how Bing's new visual search can be helpful in finding products where visual features are the main differentiators -- say, purses -- but I still don't understand how it's going to help find you the right digital camera, unless it's a display of cameras' output.

Also, check out an Amazon affiliate browsegoods.com that took a similar visual search approach to online shopping a couple of years ago.

Email Links With Delicious

A useful and long-overdue new feature on Delicious I've always wanted -- send links to others by email. Hope they will also let people create groups of recipients.

This is how I imagined it would work in this crude mock-up back from January:

How PowerPoint Degrades Decision Making

"Unfortunately, as soon as they graduate, our people return to a world driven by a tool that is the antithesis of thinking: PowerPoint. Make no mistake, PowerPoint is not a neutral tool — it is actively hostile to thoughtful decision-making. It has fundamentally changed our culture by altering the expectations of who makes decisions, what decisions they make and how they make them."
-- Armed Forces Journal