SensoryMetrics

A favorite theme of ours is the “naming of startups”. Back in 99, we named our company “anbiun” – an upside down version of “unique”. San Francisco-based Xobni (backwards for inbox) is worth watching. They’re mashing up analytics and email to create a more intelligent inbox.

[tags]xobni, email[/tags]

Popularity: 29%

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Innovation, User Experience email, xobni

Actually, you’ve got to be crazy for NOT starting an internet business. Austin-based NaturallyCurly has just announced a big investment. The site, which claims 10,000 readers a day is dedicated to all things hairy & curly. The site even has a kids’ section. Apparently the founders have no plans for an “adult” section.

[tags]VC, NaturallyCurly[/tags]

Popularity: 22%

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Business NaturallyCurly, VC

How many toolbars can you install before your entire screen is toolbars?? There’s no shortage of them… search, Alexa, StumbleUpon…

Here’s Bzzster – it makes it “easy” to share links with your friends. No need for a toolbar!

[tags]Bzzster[/tags]

Popularity: 24%

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Usability, User Experience Bzzster

So here’s Sloog … great logo, great name. Its existential purpose? Providing social bookmarks for Second Life. Yes you can tell (virtually) everybody that indeed you visited the virtual Toyota dealer! Yeesh!

[tags]Sloog, Second Life, yeesh[/tags]

Popularity: 21%

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User Experience Second-Life, Sloog, yeesh

There’s an interesting new study published by HP’s Information Dynamics Lab: Novelty and Collective Attention. It’s a mathematical analysis of Digg. The authors attempt to predict the attention span of a mob of diggers, and how long they keep a new “front page” story on the front page. The conclusion: 69 minutes.

Reacting to this study, Andy Warhol is quoted, “69 is the new 15″.

[tags]HP, Digg, Andy-Warhol[/tags]

Popularity: 26%

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User Experience Andy-Warhol, Digg, HP

Launched today at CTIA, ZenZui was incubated by Microsoft’s internal VC program. It’s an appealing UI platform (shown on right) that assembles a number of tiles that the user can “zoom” left, right, up and down. It’s an old concept. Until now mobile devices didn’t have the horsepower to do this.

The basic principle is that if you place the user in the center of the grid, you reduce the number of steps to find something. In the ZenZui screenshot you’re one step away from 4 apps. If this was a linear list – you’d have to scroll four times to access the fourth item.

The “big blue dot” concepts shown below were shown at the CHI conference last year. It will be interesting to try out ZenZui in a production environment.

[tags]Microsoft, ZenZui, CHI[/tags]

Popularity: 32%

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Innovation, Mobility, User Experience CHI, Microsoft, ZenZui

So you’ve just created a new Powerpoint deck entitled “Our Secret Corporate Strategy” – and you’re damn proud of it!! So why not share it with other PPTphiles and enter a “slide contest”. Don’t worry about that employment agreement you signed – there’s an XBOX 360 up for grabs!!

Powerpoint is the point behind SlideShare. It’s a “Digg” for slide decks. I wonder if there’s a site for sharing the best spreadsheets???

[tags]Powerpoint, SlideShare[/tags]

Popularity: 23%

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Business, User Experience Powerpoint, SlideShare

Everyone knows that if you’re serious about playing basketball, you need $300 sneakers, right? Not according to Stephon Marbury – New York Knicks $17million a year superstar. On April 1st (apparently it’s not a joke) he’s releasing his new line of Starbury sneakers. They’re all available for $14.98. He could have made a few extra millions by branding a Nike shoe – but he wanted to do something constructive for kids – those kids who get beaten up or killed by bullies who want their expensive sports gear.

To prove the point that there is no performance difference between his $15 shoe and the more expensive ones, he wears them himself on the court. I’m glad to see that it’s possible to offer good design and performance without gouging the consumer.

[tags]cost, performance, Starbury[/tags]

Popularity: 36%

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Business, Geek Wear, User Experience cost, performance, Starbury

Sometimes as a new website owner you want to see how much more traffic your site can handle. Instead of waiting until you really do get hit with a ton of traffic, why not fake it and see what happens? Please keep in mind that the traffic will be completely useless as no real eyes are looking at your site! It’s just a bunch of machines scattered around the internet that will ping your site. If you buy enough of it, it could actually take down your site (not good).

We’re not going to mention the name of the service we bought $10 of useless hits to our site with, but needless to say we could tell right away that the traffic was bogus. No one clicked very much which is a dead give away because our regular visitors click like mad, usually 6 or more page hits.

Be careful as some of these ‘more traffic’ sites advertise the promise of real traffic by real people but actually rip you off! We’re also pretty sure that our host provider identified the traffic as fake and kept it from attacking our server. Thank you Bluehost for keeping SM alive and kicking! Technically, this was not a DoS attack as it did not do really nasty things like try to hang connections or flood the site with way too many hits. It was more like a gentle ping shower with a couple of spikes (you think they’d have at least distributed the fake hits more evenly).

If you’d like to know how to fight distributed denial of service attacks, read more here at the Sans Institute. If you want to know still more then also check out Backtracking Spoofed Packets.

[tags]DoS-attack,more-web-traffic[/tags]

Popularity: 32%

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Pirates DoS-attack, more-web-traffic

Without a doubt, Kathy’s Creating Passionate Users is my favorite UX blog. I really want to see her speak someday – and I am trying to get her to Ottawa… What she posted yesterday was shocking! As an “A-List” blogger she is open to criticism – but not death threats. Especially really vile sexual violence! As a result of recent threats she wisely dropped out of an O’Reilly talk. This abuse was apparently sparked by the now-defunct site meankids.org which skewers A-list bloggers. The abuse and threats to Kathy were absolutely disgusting. The blogosphere has been soiled. I’m glad that the police is taking this very seriously!

In a serendipity moment, Seth Godin repeated a plea to remove anonymity from the internet. Great move. Everyone needs to be responsible for their contributions.

Perhaps OpenID should become a blogging requirement…

Meanwhile, Baxter has been placed in the Witness Protection Program – just in case!!

[tags]Kathy-Sierra, Create-Passionate-Users, Blog-threats [/tags]

Popularity: 24%

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Pirates, User Experience Blog-threats, Create-Passionate-Users, Kathy-Sierra