Captchas are those twisted letters and numbers some sites make us type in to prove we’re human. As I’ve written before, captchas do not help the visually impaired. I was really pleased to notice that DIGG quietly adopted an optional audio captcha. Kudos.
Tags: captchas, DIGG
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During the web’s early days, a couple interesting print magazines were born: Wired and Mondo2000. They were a bizarre mix of technology, art, opinion and culture – definitely NOT your grandma’s Popular Science. Wired was fun and sometimes hard to read – still is. Mondo was… well Timothy Leary meets the Net. It was a georgeous looking magazine (obviously expensive to produce) and unfortunately lasted only a couple of years. One of the principals was RU Sirius (aka author Ken Goffman). He’s a spaced oddity that can arguably be described as a net visionary. (I did say arguably…) As head weirdo of the MondoGlobo Network, he hosts some interesting webzines including 10 Zen Monkeys and 10zm.tv which just launched a couple weeks ago. It’s a bizarre mix – technology, policy, Scientology, acid and ecstasy. Not your average blog… errr sorry…webzine. The “video love” tech interviews on 10ZMTV are worth watching…
Tags: RU-Sirius, Mondo2000, Wired, 10-Zen-Monkeys, 10ZM.TV
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Although I’m not a big user of Instant Messaging, I just signed up to beta trial Iminent. This start-up out of France allows users to create or upload tiny bits of video that you can use instead of winks and emoticons on Messenger (example – Arnold’s Hasta La Vista, baby). It’s a cute idea. On a more profound level, it’s another example of how all media will eventually be integrated.
Tags: Iminent, IM
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It seems that iotum’s Talk-Now is getting some well-deserved traction! Unfortunately for me, just before I was about to try Talk-Now on my Pearl, I lost the device to our dev team… the sacrifices we make!! But, I’ve seen Alec demo the service a few times. If you’re a BB user – it’s worth trying.
Think of it as an “availability wizard”… It uses your contact list from your device, mashes it up with your scheduling information and assigns an availability code to each person or group. The codes include available, not available and interruptible. That’s what your caller sees before they attempt to call you. Talk-Now even incorporates some cross-media functionality with the option of sending a “Call me now” email directly from the contact list.
Managing the Talk-Now service is super easy – from a simple and well-designed web portal.
From an information architecture perspective, the flow of Talk-Now is non-disruptive, efficient and effective.
As for the mobile user experience – I have a wish list! Being a J2ME app – the designers have a lot of flexibility in the GUI. There’s not as many constraints as you’d find in a Windows Mobile environment for example. So… spice up that UI! The only major problem with Talk-Now’s design is the sole use of color as a coding mechanism. Color alone is not very salient for users – and it breaks any compliance to accessibility rules (ADA 508 etc…) It’s an easy problem to fix!
Overall – a very promising solution!
Tags: iotum, Talk-Now, Blackberry, J2ME, ADA
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It’s assumed that Bush&Son and Bill Clinton would have different opinions on things like war, social responsibility, and oral (not)sex… As reported in an earlier post G. Bush (sr) and Bill Clinton were keynote speakers at CTIA – the huge wireless conference! Their speeches were recorded by eWeek. Apparently, old George just raved about his Blackberry (Go RIM!) and Clinton agreed and suggested that wireless should be more accessible in developing countries. that’s it?? anti-climactic???
I guess we can all retire as friends after all.
Tags: Bush, Clinton, CTIA, Wireless
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BarCampOttawa3 held on Saturday at Carleton University was superb. Thanks to the organizers for a very slick [un]conference! Thanks as well to the participants that attended my early morning session “SAS your SaaS: Giving your software a competitive edge with transferable compliance” – yep – pretty dry topic on the face of it, but we had a good discussion during and after the talk. For those of you who asked, here are some web references on this topic:
NEXT STOP: DemoCampOttawa4!!
Tags: BarCamp, SAS70, DemoCamp
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Powerpoint has become ubiquitous as presentation software, but Microsoft has been asleep at the wheel driving new features. Venture Capital news hound The Alarm Clock reports today that RockYou has raised $11 million in new financing. The site lets you combine content from a number of sources into a presentation. You can then plugin a bunch of widgets to spice up the experience: Countdown Timer, Fun notes, Group corkboard, Glitter text, Shout-outs, even voice mail. My favorite is Scratcher: Pick an image and scratcher covers it up (much like a scratch and win ticket)…
Still in its My Space 2.0 infancy, we don’t expect RockYou to challenge Powerpoint’s corporate base. But this kind of mashup innovation won’t allow Powerpoint to “play dead” forever!
Tags: Powerpoint, The-Alarm-Clock, RockYou, Venture-Capital
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