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eMail roulette?

I’m always hunting for new/interesting social web games. There is so much stuff out there that people are already playing (and we can learn A LOT from). I just discovered this tonight and haven’t had a chance to play, but it actually seems pretty interesting. Email Roulette could be a great way to meet people (blind dating meets forum lurking?) or at the very least give you a few hours of random entertainment.


from the site:

When you sign up for Email Roulette, you provide your email address and choose a user name. For security reasons, your password is emailed to you automatically. Upon receiving your password, you have log in to start playing. When you submit your message, it gets sent randomly to another player who has signed up. They have the option of responding to you or not; you won’t know who it went to unless they write back… so you better make it interesting! Of course, it goes both ways. If you want to send emails, you have to receive them as well. When you get a message, it will tell you the username and email address of the sender. You can choose whether to write back or not - the sender does not get any information about you unless you choose to provide it. One way we try to keep Email Roulette interesting is making everyone send at least one Email Roulette every six months. If you go past that time, your account will be deleted.

I think I’ll try it. Anyone wanna play?

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fabrication, fashion, and futurecraft: the new "sweat"

Hokay soh, I’m not much of a fan of virtual worlds though I’ve dabbled here and there. You prolly already know this. But  recently discovered Stephanie Rothenberg’s latest project doublehappinessjeans, a Second Life sweatshop that produces designer denim by the underpaid labor of virtual avatars; producing the goods in both physical and digital form. Wait.  What?  Yeah.  Watch:

Unfuckingbeliveably mindblowing opportunities for discussion around Personal Fabrication (the ideas that one day manufacturing of complex products will be conducted digitally, through digital fabrication machines, while only bits (design information) would be transferred around the world.) Basically designs would still be centrally distributed while manufacturing will become clean and compact enough to happen anywhere. Doublehappinessjeans suggests that the sweatshop endures regardless of the sophistication of design or manufacturing.  Through the virtual world, low-cost labor continues to be exploited, whether to design or fabricate real or virtual goods, either through ‘gold farming‘ or simply because design itself creates interesting / easy / creative opportunities for the “workers” to produce monetizeable stuff. I need to stop thinking about this before I explode.  Incedentially, tweet my business partner @neonarcade for more on gold farming.  He’s well more versed in its ins and outs than I.  Rock on.

From the site:

Invisible Threads is a mixed reality performance installation created by Eyebeam artists Jeff Crouse and Stephanie Rothenberg. The project explores the growing intersection between labor, emerging virtual economies and real life commodities through the creation of a designer jeans sweatshop in the metaverse Second Life. Simulating a real life manufacturing facility that includes hiring Second Life “workers” to produce real world jeans sold for profit, the project provides an insider’s view into current modes of global, telematic production.

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google olympics

I’ve never really been much of an “Olympics buff” and I suppose if I were to pick a game I’m most into it would probably be the Winter Games. So I was just as surprised as you are when I really got into the Beijing games this year. The much awaited Beijing Olympics 2008 have started, and funny enough, I had a trip to Mexico planned  right in the heart of the games. I was a bit worried about how I was going to stay on top of the Beijing Olympics action.  

Well, between http://tvgratis.tv  and a slew of awesome stuff by Google, I’ve genuinely aggregated enough Summer games content to keep my fix. Here is a collection of Google’s updated maps, gadgets, videos, sites, searches, 3D images and some Google powered Chinese sites that are purely dedicated to serve Olympics.

Google has designed a seris of web pages for the Summer Games. Among them, the home page for China has a bit more pizazz than our US home page, but both offer a stream of updated Olympics news, links to associated articles and video. The updated interactive US page offers a collection of Olympics related Google apps in the form of gadgets, maps, news, one box search and videos.
I’ve embedded one of the apps below.  Click the tab to expand the map.

Google has updated its maps for Beijing Olympics. If you cant make it to Beijing than track it through Google maps by exploring 3D stadiums, tracking medal counts and watching live sport results. They have also recently released a new Mobile search tool that allows its users to enjoy sports results at the top of every search results. On typing sports name or medals in your search query by heading to Google.com from your mobile, it will return all the details with respect to Olympics. In true Olympic fashion, the tool is multi-lingual (36 languages in over 60 countries) and covers almost all the different events.

Rock on.  I’m off to the beach to score an Olympic-sized Mojito. 

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nerd patches: QR CODES for your jacket

P8tch We’ve all heard of qrcodes by now - basically - TinyURLs for mobile. Well, these you can wear! Each two-by-four-inch, velcro-backed twill p8tch has a Mysterious Commando Design on the top, and a QRCode on the bottom. The QRCode on the p8tch contains a URL. If you scan the code with your iPhone, Mobile Safari will take you directly to that URL. Or, if it’s a Google Maps link, directly to the Google Maps app. Or, if it’s a YouTube link, it’ll show a movie. Cool, right?


Neat!

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commuters unite!

537861-1372388-thumbnail.jpgHmm. Here’s another Twitter app. IMHO, (sorry Foamee, which i kinda dig) this is a much better use of what Twitter has to offer. And frankly (did I just say “frankly?”) it really speaks to me seeing as I spend somewhere between 8 and 20 hours week held hostage by some sort of train or car.


Hokay soh, you’ve heard of navigation systems now with updated traffic info, yeah? Cool.

but what if they crowd-sourced that data?

Enter Commuter Feed is a free service that lets you post reports on traffic and transit delays in your local area using Twitter.


For those of you in NYC - heres the feed for our area. Nothing much up there yet - but as it goes with crowd-sourced data the machine relys on user input. Let’s see how this one goes…

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track and share your reading

Meet BookTagger.

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Each BookTagger profile is a graphical representation of your physical bookshelf on the internet. The bookshelf can then be shared with friends, family and others searching for the next good read. People congregate into book clubs and share reading experiences and catalogue all your books and track to whom they’ve been lent - kinda like personal library.

Could be an amazing idea for a company like Hyperion or Penquin…

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you owe me a beer or six

Hey peeps. You owe me a friggin’ beer. Pay up.

537861-1256543-thumbnail.jpgSo I found this pretty neat little web toy called Foamee a while back. It is a free service that helps track who you owe beers to (and vice-versa) using Twitter.  And Yay! Foamee now has support for coffee! Just follow @ioucoffee or @ioubeer on Twitter (you are Twittering by now, right?) and follow these steps:

 Send someone an I.O.U. for coffee or a beer likey here:

@ioucoffee @meat99 for being like, totally awesome.

Then keep track of those I.O.U.s (for beer and coffee!) on your people page (here’s mine). Kinda a fun Twitterati way to send a thanks and a smile while using twitter the way you always do. Interneato!

cool geek note:

You automatically get a profile on Foamee once you actually “Tweet” a beef, coffee, etc. What’s more, it has a little script that instructs Foamee to follow you once you decide to follow it.<p>

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cheap hackery makes pretty

I love this thing: Its the new Asus Eee PC 4G. Small, capable, very cheaply made and get this:

* Weighs about 2 pounds
* Has WiFi
* Runs Xandros Linux - no frills and totally hackable
* Has an integrated webcam, microphone and speaker jacks
* Gets the job done

UM. Yeah - it costs $399. (Your iPhone was 400.00).

537861-1254577-thumbnail.jpg My favorite part (and why this is relevant)? This thing is small, light, and cheap. The perfect hackable toy for use in interactive installations in or out of the home or office. I predidct this little guy is going to change everything.

Oh and one more thing. Seeing a trend people? More value, less money. We’re all in love with the latest gadget - true, but not everyone is prepared to spend 800.00 hundred dollars to own a new Kindle, when for the same money, you could have a computer that does it all.

Non profit agencies have been fighting for the low cost computing market for years. The truth is, it all should be low cost and with a price tage (and functionality) like this, this thing will get hacked, designed, re-designed, mounted to someone’s refridgerator, slapped on a remote control car, mounted to the back of an SUV on Pimp my Ride and could quite possibly run be the engine that put digital pants on your ass and this table in your living room.

2008 will bring more product designers to the realization that hacking and adapting technology is an important component in development of new ideas.

Related post: interactive snow projection

 

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