Remember the Pesi Refresh Project? As I recall, Pepsi was going to fund socially conscious projects that people voted on or something like that. Well anyway, it looks like it’s still going in some capacity and The Sound of Football is the beneficiary of some those sugary sweet dollars. Using camera technology developed for the 2010 World Cup to track players in action on the pitch, a team of European technologists(?) have re-purposed the technology to create a navigable soundscape. In the video above this amazing concept allows blind athletes to navigate and play a game of sightless soccer pretty well. The broader applications of such technology could be quite amazing and inspiring.
The London based designers, innovators, and all around rad peeps at BERG plan to release the Little Pinter in 2012 to help better bridge the gap between the digital and analogue. This silly little receipt printer turned curated news source, has a lot of deep thinking behind it – particularly around interaction design and trying to break away from the impersonal digital experiences many of us now rely on everyday. Rather than spamming you with updates all day long, this little guy will print out customized reports curating your social media and news at times you deem convenient. In a world jam packed with information, this device seeks to pare down and inject some whimsy into our daily lives.
McDonald’s ran a pretty rad billboard in Stockholm. It’s an amazing piece of interactive marketing. Swedes in the public square are invited to challenge the billboard in a game of pong via their smartphones in order to win a coupon for a free item at the local McD’s. Surprisingly, there’s no app to download. It’s based through the browser and GPS. Pretty cool.
However, what I’m most impressed by is how fashionable the Swedish John Q. Public is, or should I say Sven Q. Public. You’re not going to find that level of sartorial flair anywhere in the US.
It’s getting a little too confusing for Curt and I to both manage the same Twitter account. You can continue to follow Curt @grizzlymodern, and I’ll be tweeting @mrsgrizzlymod! Follow me!
Chew on this. Four years ago the iPhone didn’t exist. The pinnacle of wild cell phone success was the Motorola Razr. Remember the Razr? That super thin (in relative terms) flip phone, YES, flip phone, that everyone HAD to have. There was no app market. Most people didn’t have Internet on their phones and those who did were getting it at dial-up speeds. Compare all that to what we have today. Pretty crazy, huh!?!
Now peep this video by the Swedish user interface designers at TAT. This video is an imaginative look at our world four short years from now. As the price of capacitive touchscreens goes down, motion scanning technology gets better, and microprocessors continue to get smaller and more powerful, the world around us is going to start getting a lot “smarter” very quickly.
Besides this video, a lot of the technology I’m hearing about and seeing from my clients at work is pretty exciting.
If you haven’t already made the switch from Firefox to Google Chrome maybe the wacky speed test video below will git-cha movin’. I’m really surprised by the creativity shown in the Chrome ads. Google has always been the geeky engineer type ruled by function over form and despite the MythBuster type feel, these ads seem like Google might be coming out of its shell a bit.
I’ve been using chrome on my work PC for over a year now and love it! I made the switch on the mac once I finished building the blog at the start of the year. The Mac version is still a little buggy in places ( it’s still in beta, so I cut it some slack), but overall I find the browsing experience more enjoyable.
I sure don’t want to be the Apple employee who lost his iPhone 4G at a Redwood City, CA bar. As you can surmise, said iPhone 4G has now landed in the clutches of Gizmodo, the capital city of tech geek-dom.
I’m totally digging these cozy MacBook cases by Davey Sommers of the Chicago art collective, The Post Family, even if you may never need a laptop again now that the iPad is on the loose. You can grab a laptop sweater for yourself for $20 at their shop along with some other pretty sweet goodies.
- Curt
