Global browser stats

An interesting global view on browser stats from Net Applications. IE has dropped below 70% for the first time with Firefox solidly crossing 20% with a one point gain in a single month. Safari continues to trickle up and stands at 7%.

A good sign that we're heading for lean times...

Is a venture-funded, money-saving tips site! However, www.wesabe.com is slightly different.

To start with, Wesabe encourages you first upload statements for your bank or credit card account, prompting you for some further information to help integrate your monetary habits.

Once you're set up, the site allows you to tag all your outgoings and income, which helps you create a picture of your spending habits...for better or for worse.

For example, Wesabe will show you a merchant with whom you have spent money recently, and then allow you to tag them accordingly i.e. TFL can be tagged with transport.

In true, thrifty spirit, you can join up with fellow scrimpers, as Wesabe has the obligatory Web 2.0 community section, featuring numerous support groups of hard-up people, giving tips on frugal living.

It's definitely a great idea - not sure how they intend to make money from it though. Although, if they follow the advice on their forums, they may not have to.

Cooliris browser plugin + iPhone app

Cooliris transforms your browser into a visually stunning experience for searching, viewing, and sharing online photos and videos. Our "3D Wall" lets you effortlessly search and zoom your way around thousands of images, videos, movies, news feeds, and even online retailers. To share stuff with friends, just drag and drop.

Developers : your website can be quickly and simply enabled to Cooliris to be fully compatible with this very promising plugin.

Cooliris is also available as free application for iPhone and iPod Touch. Cooliris makes finding news and search a breeze by displaying them as an endlessly streaming 3D Wall, complementing the touch screen perfectly. Search across Google, Flickr, Yahoo and muche more faster than ever before with the flick of a finger…

Next time your ring a friend...

...why not try it through the medium of Arnold Schwarzenegger's soundboard!


http://www.albinoblacksheep.com/flash/arnold

Check it out! You'll keep your friends entertained for hours!...

Avatars : AI : emotional response

As we’ve been discussing avatars (re coke / web 3.0) recently, I’ve come across this example, showing emotional responses in an animated avatar.

I really like the clean style of this, expect to see this type of thing quite a bit in the next year or so...

http://www.electronic-motions.com/

Soundcloud

Just trying out a new thing called soundcloud, which seems to be a very nice way of hosting mixes and music. you can even embed their player across other web pages.
www.soundcloud.com

a Quiet Evening In by inputJunkie

Restaurant with touch-sensitive tables, colorful menu projectors

A chic London restaurant and bar called Inamo is making patrons' dining experiences digital by projecting colorful menus and aesthetic patterns onto touch-sensitive tabletops. When browsing, patrons can preview the food as if it were on the plate in front of them -- only flatter. They can also order their meals, look up neighborhood services, and select one of seven visual vibes without ever interacting with carbon-based lifeforms.

More here and here

Powerpoint on the web via ajax

No flash here, just ajax.

http://280slides.com

http://www.yearbookyourself.com/

Very clever online flash app, which can lead to somewhat amusing results...
http://www.yearbookyourself.com/

Hey kids time to show off you geekiness!!

Thanks to this site you can now proudly display you coding skills on your chest http://www.myskillscloud.co.uk/. Just select the levels of platforms and code bases: Flash, PHP, HTML, .net, Mac etc. and drap them around until you are happy with your design. When you are ready you can get it made into a T-shirt in small, medium, large and extra large.

Sorry John but they don't do 'extra tight painted on white on black'. Have to get that sourced elsewhere or possibly by extra request?

Nice marketing site for a recruiter - great to see some one do something that is fun, useful and quite forward thinking.

Ms. W

Waterdrop

A rather beautiful installation which is going to be displayed at the 100% Design show, Earls Court, 18-21 September.

More info here

Watch the skies

Recent rainbow spotted over Clapham:




More shots here

Web fonts suck...but for how long?

Interesting article about the future of web fonts. Typical scenario in that the tech's already here, but lack of willpower from certain vested interests, and a lack of infrastructure mean that the promised land is still a way off.

Google & Flash

Further to John's post...
Whilst it is early days yet, this interaction between Google and Adobe could be the start of a significant shift in the way that we build websites. For the time being however, I saw this SEO article and thought that it gave a good summary of where this now leaves us. You'll need to read the article for detail but 3 key points are:

1. These changes only affect text and links. Images, videos, animation and graphic text are still not indexed.
2. Flash development practice will need to change i.e. The benefit of separate URLs for each set of content within the Flash experience is the best way to get content indexed.
   
3. SEO best practices still needs to be followed because the amount of text on a page (or in a Flash file) still contributes heavily to the relevance and value search engines attribute to a page.

I'd be interested in your views...

Indexed Flash from Google

This could have real implications on a lot of sites we work on. Everyone should have a read of it here.

Nice take on web chew

Make it so.

Simple concept, excellent execution

This is some excellent brand work combined with clear execution and good user interaction. It does something simple and fun, keeping you coming back to the site. I think it is a really effective piece of marketing.

http://www.makethetea.com

Visually searching the web

Worth having a look at this one, a flash based web app that will return seach results in a visual interface, many views, plugging into flickr, google, last.fm etc...

viewzi

and a somewhat slicker coverflow type variant at:

searchme

Cross media marketing - Old School vs New School

I just finished a series of (childrens) books called Maximum Ride, pretty decent actually. Anyway they make direct reference to the website in the books and have had a blog going for years which is really active. In fact, the blog becomes an integral part of the story.

I think it is a really effective piece of cross marketing.

http://www.maximumride.co.uk/links.php

Some interesting data tools from Google

These tools and a few others have just been released.  Interesting and worth a look I think:

The google trends tool is here:

Google AdPlanner is here which is targeted at agencies.

Interesting article on both is on The Register.

Accessibility Checklist

Here's a very good article on Accesibilty, quite a nice design to this site as well

http://northtemple.com/1608

festival for the summer?

Quick note to let you know about a small music festival (1500 capacity) called 'Festinho'.



Festinho is a boutique outdoor music festival, held in the heart of the beautiful Suffolk countryside – showcasing an eclectic mix of new and established music and creative talent from the UK and Brazil.

The festival is one of the few (if not only) in the uk that is run entirely for charity, with all the profits going to the abc trust (www.abctrust.org.uk) , who are dedicated to helping the most vulnerable children and young people of Brazil.

The line up is still be sorted at the mo, but amongst others, The bays, Hexstatic, James Yuill and The blockheads are confirmed to play.

Lots more info, tickets, location etc available on their rather lovely website : http://www.festinho.com ... wot i did build :)

....more useful / interesting sites

Here a few I rather like also. Some geeky, some pretty, all pretentious...


Kitsune Noir, hoovers up lovely design , photography, music etc. Also posts some mixes.

We make money not art has a range of interests. Some interesting takes on uses for new technology. Likes RFID stuff and robots if I recall correctly.

Spinning tunes

hello. I've gt a guest DJ spot at 'fluidnation' at the Big Chill House (Kings Cross) this Wednesday it's a fairly mellow affair but as I've got the late slot I might bung in a sprinkling of drum nbass.

free entry, pretty good food and cocktails 7pm-midnight.

A few useful resource sites

Here's a short list of some sites that might be useful to you:

http://www.smashingmagazine.com
A blog featuring tips, tricks, techniques and tutorials.

http://www.cpluv.com/
Good showcase of new and experimental design work

http://bestwebgallery.com/
Collection of all the nicest new sites/flash/ajax etc

Brand Tags

See what people think about brands:

http://www.brandtags.net/browse.php

Try guessing the brand from the tags - many funz0rz and internet points if you win!

Sharing cool stuff you find on the web

Cool stuff. The web is choc full of it. And we, as a team, should be sharing any cool stuff we find with each other.

The problem is how; email is great and instantaneous, but not always convenient and often gets ignored. A better solution would be to leverage some of the news aggregators' sharing functionality and have someone else do the hard work for you.

Google Reader is my first choice - I can share stories and append my own notes, even when I am not currently logged into the app, through using a handy shortcut in my shortcuts bar. This creates a web page that is dynamically updated with all the items I choose to share from my feeds.

If I add you as friends to my account, then I can view all your shared items when I log into Reader, so we can all share in the goodness (and the badness) of the web.

There are some other options that I haven't explored in any depth yet: del.icio.us, Twine; which introduces tagging and a pseudo-semantic element into the mix.

So, don't be shy: set yourselve up with Google Reader and add 'richard.fort@carlson-europe.com' to your buddies (you have to do this by adding me as a contact in GMail or in Google Chat), and I'll start sharing my favourite LOLCATs and FAILs...

Midweek fun

The Agency and M&C Saatchi are battling it out as to who can sell better. See for yourself and decide.

Trust advertising - NEVER! Advertising men are the Devil's spawn.

W

Litmus Apps - web page and email testing

http://litmusapp.com/

Cleverly renders as JPEGs your web page or HTML email as they would appear in all the major browsers (IE7/7, Firefox, Opera, Safari etc.) and email clients (Outlook 2003/2007, Thunderbird, Mac Mail, Entourage etc.)

Beats loading multiple browsers onto your machine any day of the week - blegh! There's a 1 hour trial version available, so go forth and...err...testify!

Facebook and psychology

Interesting article here on the psychology behind Facebook. Whilst my opinion may differ from the article, it is an interesting read none the less.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/7357934.stm

AJAX things

AJAX and Web2.0
Easy to say but not always easy to figure out or explain. I think we need to make it more simple. To that end, we are going to be building up a library of AJAX/Web2.0 'thingys' to make our sites better.

Examples would be:
Calendar that updates on click without refreshing the page
Image swapping without refresh
Postcode lookups
Collapsing/Hiding forms (yes, we did this one!)

Each time we see one we like it should be logged here and we'll work towards building something similar that we can easily re-use and re-brand. Web2.0 - it's all about enabling. :-)

Adobe Flex release

Adobe today announced the immediate availability of Adobe AIR, a new platform for building rich internet applications (RIAs) across different platforms, including Mac OS X.

Adobe AIR enables developers to create RIAs on the desktop using the skills and Web technologies — such as HTML, Ajax, PDF, Adobe Flash and Adobe Flex — they already employ. Applications deployed on Adobe AIR have the advantages of browser-based RIAs, such as speed of development, ease of use, and access from virtually anywhere. Yet they also have the benefits of desktop applications, such as the ability to read/write local files, work with other applications on a user’s computer and maintain local data storage on the desktop.

Adobe points out that AIR makes use of various open source technologies including WebKit, the Apple-sponsored rendering engine behind Safari.

Also released is Adobe Flex 3 software which provides a framework for developing applications based on Adobe's Flex and AIR frameworks.

Flex is a free, open source framework for building highly interactive, expressive RIAs. Adobe Flex Builder™ 3, an Eclipse™ based development tool, accelerates Flex application development and includes new capabilities for deploying RIAs on Adobe AIR. Adobe Flex Builder 3 integrates with Adobe Creative Suite® 3 software making it easy for designers and developers to work together more efficiently. Powerful new testing tools, including memory and performance profilers and integrated support for automated functional testing, speed up development and lead to higher performing RIAs.

The Adobe AIR and Flex SDKs are available as free downloads from Adobe's website and is available for Mac OS X. Commercial versions of Adobe Flex Builder are also available.

Cool uses of google maps

Murph sent through a link a few weeks back with some interesting uses of google maps.
You can see his list on this 100 things to do with Gmaps page.

A particular few I found interesting are:

http://www.thomasscott.net/realworldracer/
http://www.mapmsg.com/

I think all of them are great uses of maps and whilst you can tell it is google maps with a mashup you think more about what you or the app is doing than the fact that it is google maps. In essence it is all about the app and experience - I think that is a good place to be.

Nice bit of semi-viral

Check out this site from Hasbro on Global Monopoly. Basically you vote for the top spot on the board and get 10 votes. Even better you get 10 votes - per day. This brings you and friends back to the site to achieve the top spot. Brilliant and simple. Also note the clear call to action at the end of the registration process telling you to come back and where to find more information on Monopoly.
See it here: http://www.monopolyworldvote.com/en_GB/world/leaders

Nice technology integration

Check out this recent post on a BBC blog.

BBC Blog

I think it is a really good example of 'do as you say'. All of us in technology are quick to tout the benefits yet often have few examples. This blog (linked to from the BBC homepage no-less) has the speed of content and immediacy of a blog coupled with a interview taken on a smartphone and embedded via YouTube. Blog, SmartPhone, Video Capture, Video Upload, YouTube all come together in a rather seamless way to produce quite a compelling and informative piece of content with very little effort. I also admire the way BBC are willing to try new technologies and embed content with different qualities and in new ways on their site. Nice!

Magazines

I asked the design possy what mags they would like to have, and here is a the range of the suggestions I got.

grafik
baselne
eye
grafikmagazine


creative review
New Media Age
Computer Arts
Wired

Add your own prefered magazines in comments, then John will know what is desired. 

Corporates can try too

If you have never seen it check out the BT Beta site.

I think it is a really good example of a large company dedicating some resource to new ideas and concepts. It gives them the ability to innovate and have a bit of a sandbox to play in. Since it also draws in a large number of customers they also get valuable feedback on what is working and what is not. Several features have already gone public from the Beta site. Whilst companies like Google are well known for having business integrated Beta programmes, large corporates, particularly in the UK, are not. I think this is a great step in the right direction and it makes good business sense. Thoughts?

Win free stuff

Our group of companies is giving away free stuff because we are 70 years old. Nothing like a good 'ol bday knees up! Go here to win:
www.70greatprizes.com

Google docs syncing with your desktop

For those with a PC, a company has just released a cool little app that syncs all your Word, Excel & Powerpoint docs on your desktop machine with Google docs. Any changes made on your desktop OR on Google Docs get synched to the other environment. Works with Open Office as well.

http://www.docsyncer.com

Hopefully it goes without saying, but Google Docs should not be used for any confidential documents or sensitive information. Duh! :-)

A blog in a blog

Was looking up hours for my local waitrose the other day and stumbled on the blog of the "chubby grocer". It is the blog from the MD of Waitrose. Thought it was kind of a interesting concept and seems to be getting loads of views.

http://www.waitrose.com/blog/index.aspx

Interesting or crap?