SensoryMetrics

Being a former DJ, I love the idea of this site: YourSpins.com lets you remix the tracks of existing music and post your “noob” creation on yourspins page, or on your own web page or blog – you can even download it as your ringtone.

How does it work? A bunch of artists have allowed their work to be available for remix – Moby being the most famous – the others are fairly obscure UK acts. You have access to the .di file that breaks down the tracks of the song. From there remix the beats, mix it up and save your “masta-piece”. The artist license allows you to legally use your remix for personal use.

There’s of course a YourSpins community that votes on best remixes. The more mixes you create the more points you get. Every DJ gets ranked – from “noob” to “barmy blender” to “moiling mixmaster” to the ultimate “Omnipitent Grand Overlord” (sic).

Coincidently. today’s word of the day from the Urban Dictionary is “Hip Replacement”

The process of introducing a formerly cool person to a product or idea that attempts to make them cool again. Reinventing an individuals public persona through assocation or action.

Joe just had a hip replacement – he ditched his 20 year old CD Walkman for a new IPod.Quentin Tarrantino gave John Travolta a ‘hip replacement’ with Pulp Fiction.

[tags]YourSpins, social-media, Moby, Urban-Dictionary[/tags]

Popularity: 38%

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Innovation, Long Tail, User Experience Moby, social-media, urban-dictionary, YourSpins

For those who know me – or have heard me speak – you know I’m very passionate about innovation and the patent process. Rarely do I talk about the bad side of patents(mostly because so many others do.)

Here’s the typical process… You get a nifty idea, and prototype it. Looks good to the company you’re working for and they decide to build it into product. If the company is smart they’ll also spend money to protect the intellectual property. As the inventor, you interact with your company’s law firm and eventually write a patent application. The law firm files it with the US patent and trademark office. After that, your work is pretty much done. But a lot goes on behind the scene in the four years it will take for that patents to be granted.

Many examiners will research and review the patent applications. They may have questions that will be communicated back through the law firm. Maintenance fees have to be paid – these are managed by the law firm and billed back to the company. If a corresponsence is ignored or a payment not made, the application dies. Since the company owns the patent (usually) and not the inventor, it’s up to them to keep the process going.

In a bizarre case a couple weeks ago – the Chicago/Dallas law firm Jenkens & Gilchrist that prepared and filed two of my patents (for a previous employer) suddenly shut its doors after paying out $76 million settlement due to fraud charges (as reported by the Dallas Morning News).

So – as an inventor, there’s no joy in having your patent applications die before they are granted. Hopefully, the assignee company will track the patents and nurture them to granting.

[tags]Jenkens-Gilchrist, patents, fraud[/tags]

Popularity: 34%

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Innovation, Patents, Pirates fraud, Jenkens-Gilchrist, Patents

For 175 years Hammacher Schlemmer has been selling unusual merchandise – typically cool but useless gifts. I occasionally look at their catalog and find myself acting like my kids… “I want that! I want that!! I want that!!! I want that!!!!”

I’ve never been able to justify buying anything – and arguably this sort of consumerism is destroying the planet. But – it’s still fun!

…and so… because it’s Sunday – here’s my favourite HS new product – a $330.USD remote control 4 foot long pirate ship!

Faithfully detailed to resemble an 18th century merchant vessel, this remote-controlled pirate ship has sails that hoist, a retractable plank, and 12 cannons.

…and it has a range of 500 feet…

Do you think civilization (as we know it) is in danger of collapsing? I hope not – otherwise there’s a cannonball with your name on it!! (ok – its a small plastic cannonball…)

BTW – only four and a half months until “Talk Like a Pirate Day”!!!

[tags]Hammacher-Schlemmer, consumerism[/tags]

Popularity: 21%

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Innovation, Pirates consumerism, Hammacher-Schlemmer

I’ve never been a big fan of speech recognition as a primary interface. No matter how good the technology, controlling machines by talking to them is awkward and time-consuming. You need a thousand words to describe a picture.

I guess some angel investors wouldn’t agree with me – Waterloo-based Voice Enabling Systems Technology (that’s a mouthful) or Vestec – just closed a round of financing. Vestec claims to be different than past voice UIs by not requiring any user/system training, and being able to understand natural phrases in many different languages. I’ll believe it when I hear it!

A more useful and reliable “voice” interface is text to speech translation. There are many applications for this: reading out warnings and notifications, accessing documents or messages remotely… For a demo, try out Bruce Tsuji’s SpokenText

[tags]Vestec, SpokenText, angels, speech[/tags]

Popularity: 25%

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Usability, User Experience angels, speech, SpokenText, Vestec

Since he called me on it… Matt Roberts points us to the awesome industrial design of Lenovo’s Torch for the Beijing 2008 Olympics.

While I was on the Lenovo main page I noticed something odd: their list of hot support topics. Top three: Battery Recall, Windows Vista, Drivers. Exploding batteries – problem! Missing drivers – problem! Vista…

[tags]Matt-Roberts, Olympics, Lenovo, Vista[/tags]

Popularity: 35%

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Events, Innovation Lenovo, Matt-Roberts, Olympics, Vista

Back in 2005, I was really happy to hear announcements such as this one about Hybrid Electric/Diesel Buses recently, we’ve purchased new buses here in Hull.
Last night, I was driving along the highway when I was passed by a speeding Hybrid bus that must have been doing about 120 km/hr. It made wonder if the fuel economies which these buses are expected to deliver are true. If you dig around on the web, you’ll find stories about how Hybrid buses aren’t delivering on their promise of fuel economy, that they actually fair worse than what they are replacing. I’m not sure I believe that, if nothing else their emissions are probably lower no matter what. My guess is that perhaps the buses aren’t being used as they were designed to. I wonder which routes these buses are being put on? Hopefully the ones that don’t require too much highway travel.

Further, it occurred to me this week while I was riding the bus in to work that there is an easy way to improve the fuel economy of the current fleet of buses with very little effort. The solution is so simple, that I spent the morning looking for people out on the web talking about it but couldn’t find a thing. So what’s the secret? Well, most mornings the ride in to work for me is standing up. Standing up you really notice the difference between a good bus driver and a bad one. A good bus driver slowly accelerates and watches the traffic flow ahead so that they don’t need to stop quickly. The ride is nice and comfortable, you get to work in exactly the same amount of time, because, it’s traffic that determines how long it’ll take, not speed. So, I know, you techies are thinking why don’t we just slap a device on the buses that would prevent such wasteful acceleration? Well, you could and it’d probably cost about a hundred bucks per bus and it’d probably save thousands of liters of gas per bus per year.

But why spend the money on more technology when all it would take is a decent education program for the fleet of bus drivers out there? It could be taught by means of a brochure, a video or a face to face meeting. The difference in the user experience between a good ride to work versus a really bad ride where the bus driver keeps knocking over the passengers as though they’re a bunch of cattle is enormous. In fact, I just don’t understand why this is even allowed. It baffles me. However, I also have the feeling that talking to the bus driver about his/her bad driving skills probably wouldn’t go over that well.

I say, send out the notice to all bus drivers that they really should not accelerate quickly and break like a jerk and then enforce that by hiring some college students to ride the buses and report the quality of the experience (so that individual bus drivers can be rated). If it weren’t for the fact that there are a handful of brilliant bus drivers on my route, I’d probably have never clued into this. The good drivers must be saving dollars for the bus companies, not to mention the environment. They’re certainly making the whole experience of taking the bus that much more bearable even when standing up in a crowd. You’d think that the bus company would be interested in ways to reduce costs and increase customers. Am I the only looney out here with this idea?

[tags]hybrid,bus,fuel-efficiency,fuel-economy,save-gas,save-the-planet[/tags]

Popularity: 36%

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Environment, User Experience bus, fuel-economy, fuel-efficiency, hybrid, save-gas, save-the-planet

On the web, you’re never more than about two clicks away from anything and everything. You can’t control who talks about you nor who links to your site. However, you can control who you link to, unless you use Google’s AdSense or the equivalent. At SensoryMetrics, we’ve resisted the temptation to generate cash using this random link method. If we advertise something, we want to be the ones to choose what that product or service is. We want to be in control of what shows up on SM. We also know from past experience that the click through rate even on very popular sites is very low. Of course, even a low click through rate on a high traffic site will generate some cash.

A few weeks back you may have noticed that we enabled Snap on the site. It lets you preview links to external sites. You just rollover the little icon next to a link. It works by popping up a little image of the site’s page before you actually go to that site. I really like it, the visual previews quickly provide context.

Unfortunately, we’ve just noticed that Snap has now added random links to other sites into the snapshot previews. I can see why they’d want to do this. However, I wish they’d give us the option to buy the SnapShot service for our readers without the random ad links (or allow us to choose what is linked). It would be another way for them make money (from us control freaks). In the meantime, we’re now looking for an advertising free alternative to Snap. Please let us know if you know of (or have built) such a solution.

[tags]Snap,snapshot,advertising,links[/tags]

Popularity: 33%

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SaaS, User Experience advertising, links, Snap, snapshot

the Worldwide Lexicon Project is up and running. Well at least they translated our tag line into french… Can someone figure out this thing???

[tags]Worldwide-Lexicon[/tags]

Popularity: 17%

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User Experience Worldwide-Lexicon

Being interested in all things Apollo; I was quite interested in testing out APOLLOGAMES.CA It sounded like a pretty cool game idea. Unfortunately, I couldn’t get past the sign up using Safari. Flipped over to Firefox and all seemed to work fine.

Apollo Games comes from Guelph Ontario.

Our aim is to entertain and educate simultaneously, with equal attention to both these aspects of any game; and we recognize that games are an important but substantially underused way of learning effectively. We are community-based, collaborative, and committed to producing the highest quality games for young minds that can be found on the web.

It’s a slow load even for a high speed connection, well a few minutes. I guess that isn’t bad for what you get. I couldn’t get past the initial spaceship shoot em up part, maybe I’m showing my age. At any rate, I hear the game gets better. Perhaps you’ll have more patience than I did. I’ll have to get a kid over here to help me skip past the boring bits that require eye-hand coordination. The game needs an adult mode.

[tags]Apollogames,gadgets[/tags]

Popularity: 20%

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User Experience Apollogames, Gadgets

Here’s another product in the category of “great technology – terrible product”. StrikeAlert builds a pager type device to warn you about nearby lightning strikes – up to 40 miles. Great. That gives you plenty of time to find a big tree for shelter!

Now, how obsessed and fearful of being struck by ligthning would someone have to be to carry around this thing 24 hours a day?

Maybe a better idea is to mash this up into an ipod – which could be triggered to play “stormy songs”.

A good application of this technology would be a power bar that reacts to potential hits before they happen. Maybe the “early warning” power bar would have a USB connection that would warn of approaching lightning! Now that’s worth it!

[tags]StrikeAlert[/tags]

Popularity: 19%

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Gadgets, User Experience StrikeAlert