Planner Reads

Fully draggable, zoomable, Zelda-like map of NYC…this is awesome. But where are the Octoroks? (via waxy)

Tags: maps   NYC

Here’s looking at you, data point.

via http://www.tumblr.com/dashboard/67/428271747faved by Melissa

via http://www.blameitonthevoices.com/2009/08/8-bit-lebowski.html

Me and Jeff Bridges

Every place and object in the world has a secret past: who lived there, who passed by, who touched it. The secret lives of objects are filled with such details. If only you could make them talk. But what if you could give any physical object a story simply by sticking a barcode on it and appending a message to that barcode? The message could be a photo, a text message, a video, or a voice note. All anyone would need to unlock the message is a phone with a special barcode scanning app.

Stickybits is that app. Founded by Billy Chasen (the original programmer behind Chartbeat) and Seth Goldstein (chairman and founder of SocialMedia), the startup just closed a $300,000 seed round from Polaris Venture Partners and Mitch Kapor. Officially launching this week at Austin’s SXSW festival, stickybits is a new mobile app for both the iPhone and Android. It lets you scan any barcode and attach a message to that physical object.

The barcode in a greeting card , for instance, could trigger a video message from the sender. One on a ...

People are drawn to existing competitions like moths to a flame.

It’s precisely the wrong way to succeed.

Lots of journalists take significant detours in their careers and their writing in order to win a Pulitzer. Maybe not to actually win one, but to be in that class, to have peers that have won one. Mystery novelists stick to the center of the road, because that’s where the road is. Movies are written and released in order to win an Oscar. Once there’s a category, a ranking, a place to battle for supremacy, we run for it. 

Do you go to trade shows or enter markets or submit RFPs or push for a GPA or even gross ratings points because there’s a list of winners or because it’s what you actually want to do? Most bestseller lists and prizes measure popularity, not effectiveness.

I wonder if real art comes when you build the thing that they don’t have a prize for yet.

Chris Harrison’s “Skinput: Appropriating the Body as an Input Surface” is one of the coolest, most amazing and innovative interface concepts we’ve ever seen, skillfully combining art, design and science.

Harrison’s concept–which works, by the way–uses the body as a sort of echo chamber. Which is to say, when the user taps a particular part of their body, a sensor worn around the upper arm can tell if the tap-point was at a particular spot on the forearm or on one of the individual fingertips, by assessing the vibrations sent throughout the body by the tap.

Paired with an on-body projector, this means our already-shrinking personal devices can get even smaller, as we’ll use the body as an input device:

Harrison is a researcher at Carnegie Mellon University and worked on the project in conjunction with Desney Tan and Dan Morris at Microsoft Research. “Skinput” is schedule to be presented at the 28th Annual SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems at Atlanta, Georgia, from April 10 – 15, 2010.

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Oscar sez, “Pancakes never looked so weird. Is it the balloons without context? Is it the mood music from the Moog soundtrack? Is it the chipmunkesque singers or the voice-of-God-narration that makes this late sixties IHOP commercial look as if it was made from visitors from a distant land? Apparently the sixties were not only good for hippies and rockstars but also for ad creatives, too. Don’t waffle on this one, pass the syrup, click and enjoy…”

Jesus Christ on a jetpack, what the hell is this?

Creepy 1969 Commercial For IHOP

I posted this eight years ago (!) but a reader asked for an encore.

…are we stuck in High School?

I had two brushes with higher education this week.

The first was at a speech I gave in New York. There were several Harvard Business School students there, invited because of their interest in marketing and exceptional promise (that’s what I was told… I think they came because they had heard that Maury Rubin would make a great lunch!).

Anyway, they asked for my advice in finding marketing jobs. When I shared my views (go to a small company, work for the CEO, get a job where you actually get to make mistakes and do something) one woman professed to agree with me, but then explained, “But those companies don’t interview on campus.”

Those companies don’t interview on campus. Hmmm. She has just spent $100,000 in cash and another $150,000 in opportunity cost to get an MBA, but…

The second occurred today at Yale. As I drove through the amazingly beautiful campus, I passed the center for Asian Studies. It reminded me of my days as an undergrad (at a lesser school, natch), browsing through the catalog, realizing I could learn whatever I wanted. That not only could I take classes but I could start a business, organize a protest ...