Trackmania

It's old but still fun to show



More: 1
Official page

Portable computer 2.0 - 6th sense

This demo, from the Fluid Interfaces Lab of Pattie Maes at MIT, and spearheaded by PhD student Pranav Mistry, was the buzz of TED. SixthSense [pranavmistry.com] is a wearable device with a projector that paves the way for profound interaction with our environment. The innovative device allows to literally overlay everyday objects with real-time visualizations, in order to inform users about normally invisible information relevant to the objects in view. Imagine ingredient pie charts beamed on top of apple pies. Imagine Facebook comments projected on people's foreheads.

Source: Information Aesthetics

Create your own music - Dub FX

Dub FX, is a beatbox artist who street performs all over Europe. Watching him construct one of his multilayered compositions is impressive—he throws some pitch-shifted bass underneath ethereal treble highlights and solid hip-hop vocals:

Here are some more samples, 2, and just Mr Woodnote.

Roam Bi - from Xcelsius

RoamBi transform your existing data from a variety of sources into state-of-the-art, interactive visualizations for the iPhone. Explore and analyze your data with the ease of playing a video game and the power of an enterprise reporting tool.

And for now, It's Free to Try.

Just register, then use RoamBi.com to start turning your own data into dynamic visualizations for the iPhone.

Santiago Becerra behind RoamBi also started Xcelsius (another software I have written about). Buy Xcelsius

If you have time please check out Antivia, mentioned as Bi 2.0. I think it too early but it's a step in the right direction. , i

Source: Information Aesthetics

Why do we organize?

Probably genetically related. Which in turn relates to human values rather than a coincidence.

Source of picture: Donation Coder

TED - spreading ideas

"TED stands for Technology, Entertainment, Design. It started out (in 1984) as a conference bringing together people from those three worlds. Since then its scope has become ever broader.

The annual conference now brings together the world's most fascinating thinkers and doers, who are challenged to give the talk of their lives (in 18 minutes).

This site makes the best talks and performances from TED available to the public, for free. More than 100 talks from our archive are now available, with more added each week. These videos are released under a Creative Commons license, so they can be freely shared and reposted."

TED mission: Spreading ideas.

Here are some talks that I found both interesting and fun:
John Doerr, Ken Robinsson, Richard Dawkins, Hans Rosling,2, Tony Robbinsson, Jill Bolte Taylor, William McDonough, Robert Full, A.J. Jacobs, Robert Ballard, Jay Walker, Juan Enriquez, Shai Agassi
For the best talks, select the most discussed or e-mailed talks.


New visual interface

Since I still find TED very interesting, I bump the post (From July 2007 to 2009 March).

World Builder

World Builder from Bruce Branit on Vimeo.

Quite interesting
"The movie above entitled 'World Builder by filmmaker Bruce Branit. World Builder was shot in a single day followed by about 2 years of post production. We really like it, its not often you get a story weaved around the creation of 3D worlds."

Source: Digital Urban

Traveling

Before you go, you might want to take a sneak preview of the highlights.

"Arounder takes those virtual walkthroughs you see on real estate sites to another level, creating 360-degree, full screen panoramas of locations around the world. The current application is primarily travel- enticing you to picture yourself on the shores of Waikiki, or in Parma's Teatro Farnese. But the ability of Arounder to create an enveloping sense of place could serve many planning applications in the not too distant future."

Source: Planetizen

Plastic Logic - 1 year left

New Demo
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=4838446848396478916

The Compartmentalized Desktop

Kseve has put together a workspace-oriented desktop with a few programs.

This desktop is a combination of several tools including layered wallpaper to establish boundaries between items, previously mentioned Fences to further enforce those boundaries by creating the gray corrals around the icons. Rounding out the computer-as-real-desktop theme is Launchy, skinned with a sticky note skin. The final tweak comes courtesy of Start Killer, which removes the start button in Windows Vista. The widgets are native to Vista, but Windows XP users can install the sidebar too.

Kseve's Work Desktop [Flickr]

Modified copy from Lifehacker

OLAP Cube for Excel

Articles:
1. Create OLAP Cube
2. CUBE Functions 4: Deconstructing the PivotTable
3. Creating data cubes with Excel and a database

And the Winner is .... the European Union

The European Union won most medals in the Olympic games and Paralymipic summer games 2008.

In the Olympics, EU won 2-3 times as many medals as China and US.
In the Paralympics, EU won 2-3 times as many medals as China and 5 times more than US.
Compared per inhabitant China is far behind and US is slightly behind.

Now the interesting is when the media use this information. Will this trigger Euro-nationalistic feelings? The "We won" syndrome.
Does this say anything about Several countries compared to Several states compared to One large country?

Some Software

Screen Capture
BB-Flashback Express

Screen share
Mikogi
Yuuguu

PDF
Best PDF-writers
PDF Split & Merge, Gios PDF Splitter & Merge
PDF to Excel (or Word)

Transfer large files
EatLime

Software lists
Freeware lists & reviews (Gizmo's)
Best freeware sites
Open Source ALTernative
Sourceforge Software List


Other
Zipeg, Peazip, 7-zip
MultiMonitor
Media Decoder, FLV editor
Password managers
Zoho, Office live
Desktop Screen stream
Feed creator
Disk Defragmenter

Screen recorders +/-

Camtasia
+ used by many professional. Has everything
+ good Learnings center: High Quality and Small file size
~ $299 30day trial

Jing - what is it
+ On-line freeware. 5min limit
- Can not zoom.

BB Flashback - get started
+ Appear sometimes on "Giveaway of the day"
+ Simple to use
- Can not zoom
~ $225

Instant Demo - Tutorial
+ Easy to get started
+ Very small file size and still High quality (0,1Mb/min). File type .swf
+ Demo version can be used indefinitely
+ streaming playback
~ $299 watermarked endless trial

CamStudio - Blog
+ Open source/Freeware. File type .swf
- Can not zoom
- still sound problems?

Links

Quick Note:
Teach2000(memorycards)
Automatic 3D-models
How to surf sites that are blocked by your ISP or a company firewall
Fleshmaps, Bedpost
Ubiquity, 2
Teddy
Google redesigned
Report portal OLAP/OWC

Mymagazines.com

Mygazines is a site that could turn out to be too good to be true. It allows users to share magazine articles by uploading them to the site. This then allows for anyone to view those magazine articles free of charge. It is very easy, and possible, to read an entire magazine right on the site. The folks running Mygazines say that they, “take great pride in providing a platform for people and businesses to share articles and magazines in an interactive and fun format.”If you thought for a moment that this doesn’t sound like it’s particularly legal, that’s because it’s not. They are encouraging their users to infringe on copyrights.

Despite the legal issues that surround the site, it may be hard for anyone to shut them down. CNET points out that the site is registered in Anguilla, down in the Caribbean, and that it is hosted in Sweden by PRQ. PRQ happens to be owned by the same crew that runs The Pirate Bay . Given this, we imagine Mygazines could potentially be around for a while.

Source: CybernetNews

RoofRay Determines the Solar Potential of Your Roof

This is quite interesting:

"If high energy prices have convinced you that solar energy might be the ticket to cheaper bills, head to web site RoofRay to determine the solar potential of your roof.

As you can see from the video demo, the web site lets you draw the area you're interested in adding solar panels to on a Google Maps mashup, determining everything from surface area to slope.

RoofRay will then estimate the power potential of your roof. It may not be the most accurate estimate you can get, but if you're considering harnessing the power of the sun, it seems like a good starting point."

Looking forward to see a program that can use Google maps to auto detects roofs(+angles) and link that to Weather sites with seasonal light hours and starts to calculate community potentials. Same thing would be possible for other natural energy sources. Interesting spot market.

Source

Box office graph

a visualization of the 2008 US movie box office revenues. each graph shows the trends in the top 25 movies at the box office for each weekend in a year. the color is based on the movie's debut week so that long-running movies gradually start to stand out from newer movies with different colors.
Source, Artist

Discussion forum

Here is an interesting example of how to visualize the Discussion arenas:

Here is one example of a Discussions arenas, where People are willing to speak or discuss:

Facts providers
TheGapminder just released Trendalyzer - OECD Factbook 2008. Trendalyze - Classic is still available. Many Eyes has a forum for OECD Factbook 2007.
Combine the Discussion arenas, Easy access to facts and Visualizations of the effects*, and you will have a powerful Lobby machine.

*The Effect can viewed in the Presidential election chart, under Trends.

Comparison of Spreadsheet functions

This is a Comparison of Spreadsheet Functions between Excel, Google Spreadsheets, EditGrid, ThinkFree - Calc, OpenOffice Calc and Zoho Sheets made in July 2007. It consists of more than 500 unique Spreadsheet functions.

It took some time to compile this list since the quality of the Suppliers Spreadsheet functions lists are far from flawless. Also the interpretation of what category a certain function belongs to varies. Since then I have not attempted an update.

Still, I think it is the most complete Spredsheet function comparison list right now.


Update June-2008:
EditGrid just took a great leap with the introduction of 41 External Data Retrieval Functions. They now have more then twice the amount of functions compared to Google, and more the 50% more the Excel and the other competitors. Here is one example what you can do with the new external data retrieve functions.