SensoryMetrics

The Yeti a.k.a. the Abominable Snowman is reported to be an ape like cryptid that roams throughout the Himalayan regions of Tibet and Nepal. For me, the most memorable horror movie appearance with a Yeti is in the Creepshow’s short ‘The Crate’.

Rumour has it that a Yeti will make an appearance in the upcoming Mummy 3 (Aug. 2008) Incidentally, Rob Cohen’s production blog is most excellent! Now that’s how you do a blog! Excellent design, super clean interface and no ads! Well, ok, so the whole thing is an ad for the movie, nevertheless totally choice UX and well worth checking out.

It would seem that every continent has its own version of the Yeti, for instance, in North America we’re all familiar with the Sasquatch a.k.a. BigFoot. Bigfoot is typically thought of as a friendly gentle creature that is nevertheless quite skittish and hard to catch on camera.

In Australia, there’s the Yowie which is said to come out at night and eat anything it can find, even perhaps take a nip at a person. Scotland’s version is named the ‘Fear Liath‘. Vietnam has the ‘Nguoi Rung‘ or ‘forest people’ which are said to be all harry except for their knees. The list goes on and on please feel free to add your local favourite to the comments below.

[tags]Abominable-Snowman, BigFoot, Fear-Liath, Movies, Nguoi-Rung, Sasquatch, Yeti, Yowie[/tags]

Popularity: 28%

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Movies, User Experience Abominable-Snowman, BigFoot, Fear-Liath, Movies, Nguoi-Rung, Sasquatch, Yeti, Yowie

X17online.com is one of the leading paparazzi celebrity stalker sites now making itself a spot on inter-web. Surprisingly, although there seem to be a gazillion of these celebrity photo sites, X17online is holding a solid 4K Alexa ranking which is pretty impressive. For instance, although SM has dipped as low as the 70K mark on Alexa, we’re currently holding a frigid 347K Alexa ranking which is, just a little better than X17’s agency site. but we’re a massive ways off from the popularity had by X17online and its sister site X17video.

So what’s the overall X17 eXperience like? Is it worth a regular visit? Well, for the star struck obsessed, no doubt, you shouldn’t live a moment without seeing the latest gossip and candid shot of Britney Spears walking down the street (uh yet again but in a different outfit!) Unfortunately, the presentation of the site, is the same old mix of bad advertising banners. I mean, would you click on these ads that read “You are the 999,999th visitor congratulations you WON“?

I guess the point is, no one is looking at the ads, they’re looking at the celebrity photos and video clips. The layout is stark to say the least and there’s no apologies about it. Perhaps the point is to make the celebrities look real and as drab as possible; who would expect any less?

My one big beef with this site is that it tries to make it seem as though the photos that have been taken by X17 are not to be copied and certainly not to be distributed. Uh, WTF? Haven’t they heard of viral advertising? They’ve even gone so far as to make the right click disabled on the site. Of course, just about anyone knows, you can simply take a screen-shot to get around this limitation they’ve built in.

However, who would want a snapshot of Katherine Heigl eating her lunch in public? I’m sure there are plenty of photos of her that are far better which you could use for your desktop background if you were so inclined. To top things off the banner ads are so intrusive on this site that they actually freeze up your browser when you visit this site. It’s the ‘pièce de résistance‘ that caps the overall eXperience to be as sleazy and trashy as can be. When you visit, you should feel just a little dirty and a somehow ripped off.

[tags]x17online,celebrity-blogs[/tags]

Popularity: 21%

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Pirates, Usability, User Experience celebrity-blogs, x17online

The web – as we know it – is used for all kinds of things… commerce, knowledge sharing, communications. Sometimes those activities are not so good… identity theft, child abuse, spam. Sometimes the web is just a tool to show off one’s arrogance.

Consider the case of Yann Martel . If you’re not familiar with The Yann, he’s a Canadian author famous for writing the one-hit-wonder “Life of Pi”. This 2003 book won numerous international awards. It was later discovered that sections of the book appeared to have plagiarized a book by Brazilian autor Moacyr Scliar . I guess Yannoo has run out of inspiration lately – so he’s turned to the web creating the site “What’s Stephen Harper Reading Now?” The premise is that he sends the Canadian Prime Minister his favourite books insisting that he reads them. Yann has been whinning a lot lately because apparently the PM isn’t taking up the offer. And why should Harper read his stupid books? How arrogant of Martel. I used to send some of my favourite Grateful Dead albums to Jean Chretien, but I never expected that he’d actually listen to them!

In fairness to Mister Martel, I’d like to help him through this difficult time. That’s why we’re launching the “What tech-book is Yann Martel reading now” program… helping Yann to become as smart as we are.

So dig out your old MS-DOS for Dummies, Using WordPerfect 3, Your Guide to OS 7, and COBOL Made Easy… and mail them to:

Yann Martel
c/o McClelland & Stewart Ltd.
75 Sherbourne Street, 5th Floor
Toronto, Ontario
M5A 2P9

I’m kicking it off with this rivetting page-burner: ASP .Net 2.0 AJAX!

[tags]Yann-Martel, WhatIStephenHarperReadingNow, Tech-Books[/tags]

Popularity: 18%

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Environment, Pirates, User Experience, Web 3.0 Tech-Books, WhatIStephenHarperReadingNow, Yann-Martel

SM is based in Ottawa Canada – birth home to comedian Tom Green. (A good friend of ours BTW ) Ottawa is also home to some significant business activities in the green sector. I’m not talking about “green-washing” – but real technological solutions. One VC firm based here focuses on green business plans. At a local networking meeting tonight (The Ottawa Network – TON), Gordon Echlin of Venture Coaches talked about his strategy for investing in business segments that are relevant. Ottawa was formerly known as an epicenter of telecom expertise. Now the telecom folks are applying themselves to fascinating crossover ventures. One great example is EcoVu – using photonics to purify tainted water. Next up for EcoVu… turning water into whiskey![tags]TheOttawaNetwork, Venture-Coaches, EcoVu, VC[/tags]

Popularity: 35%

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Business, Environment, Events, Innovation, Media EcoVu, TheOttawaNetwork, VC, Venture-Coaches

Do you ever get frustrated at really stupid or offensive banner ads? (True.com are you listening??) The folks at BrandJury
are about to launch a private beta of their “collaborative” advertising platform. They allow consumers to give feedback on ads. From a web console, advertisers can assess consumer attitudes to their creatives. We’ve signed up for the beta – if done right this could be a great opportunity for advertisers to reconnect with web users.

[tags]BrandJury, advertising[/tags]

Popularity: 25%

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Business, User Experience, Web 3.0 advertising, BrandJury

On most Tuesday evenings, I spend some quality time looking at my collection of old “Teen Beat” magazines. Last night I came across this favourite… Dreamy, isn’t he?

source: Scopes

[tags]Teen-Beat, Gates, Scopes[/tags]

Popularity: 15%

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Business Gates, Scopes, Teen-Beat

Classmates, the grand-daddy of social net sites is going for the big IPO play: hoping to market cap itself at $600 million… pretty low in today’s standards. Complicating this transition is an FTC investigation into its “auto-renewal” practices. Give out your credit card once, and it’s charged monthly forevermore! Bad user experience. Some users won’t even realize their cards are being charged – so Classmates remains a winner, financially. It’s current balance sheet reports $170m revenue with $1.7m net. Classmates’ UX is notorious for baiting you with “free” services, then emailing you constantly trying to entice you into the paid service.

I wouldn’t be writing this post if they’d stop telling that some girl I liked in grade 8 wants to chat… LOL but I have to pay to find out who it is…SM’s recommendation: Don’t invest in a predatory user eXperience!

image… South Park of course!

[tags]Classmates, IPO[/tags]

Popularity: 14%

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Business, Pirates Classmates, IPO

SM friend Alec Saunders announced yesterday that his Ottawa-based company iotum secured funding from VERDEXUS as well as appointing chairman Randall Horward. Now iotum has two Horwards!

iotum has had great success in the past few weeks with its Facebook application Free Conference Calls. It offers a super easy interface to schedule a call, announce a topic, and invite participants. Calls can be private or public. The later is especially interesting – you never know who’s going to join the party!

The app is also gaining traction – Alec says they’ve quickly grown to 30,000 registered users. Facebook says that 888 of those are regular daily users.

[tags]VC, iotum, Facebook, Free-Conference-Calls[/tags]

Popularity: 50%

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Business, Innovation, Usability, Web 3.0 Facebook, Free-Conference-Calls, iotum, VC

Microsoft once again teams up with IDSA (Industrial Designers Society of America) to host a design competition for the next generation PC… The contest is worth $10,000 to the winner. Here’s the official challenge:

Influence tomorrow’s digital lifestyle with your vision of the Next-Gen PC. Change the way people pursue their passions by designing the ultimate Next-Gen Windows-based PC. Give them everything they need to do what they love, easily, powerfully, and enjoyably.

So $10k doesn’t come easily… the big hurdle – you have to make it work on Vista! Don’t tell anyone… I’ve found a way to win without all the hard work… This is my submission.[tags]Microsoft, IDSA, Next-generation-PC[/tags]

Popularity: 23%

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Bones, Business, Innovation, User Experience IDSA, Microsoft, Next-generation-PC

From Accoutrements, 3 great products to enliven your dreary cube:

1. Legos are for kids. With The Cubes you can recreate any corporate cubicle environment! New to the collection is the IT department. The “sensitivity consultant” is hilarious!

2. Having trouble making decisions. Just give the severed arm a spin to answer “What would a Zombie do”.

3. Speaking of zombies… We’re big fans of them here at SM. Brighten up your workplace with a complete Zombie Playset! Nothing helps boost Employee Satisfaction scores than eating fresh brains. (please confirm this with your HR manager!)

[tags]Cube-gifts, accoutrements, zombies[/tags]

Popularity: 26%

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Business, Gadgets, User Experience accoutrements, Cube-gifts, Zombies