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Incubator and accelerator programs for tech start-ups in NYC.

"This guide is designed to provide a background in both e-paper frontplane technologies and the current backplane technologies used to manufacture such displays. It is divided into two sections. The first will explain the various e-paper technologies that exist today and provide analysis on the pros and cons to each of them. The second section will discuss the various backplane technologies used to power the e-paper frontplanes."

Computers have certainly aided learning in recent years, but they haven't yet fostered the promised revolution in education that has been discussed for over 40 years, according to Apple cofounder, educator, and all-around geek Steve Wozniak. Woz made the comments during a keynote discussion at Abilene Christian University's Connected Summit last week, discussing his views on the use of technology in education and the need to adapt teaching and learning to be more effective. According to Woz, we need to focus more attention on younger students before they begin to adopt a perception that they are "failures."

"Education has always been a big part of my life," Wozniak told the assembled crowd, which included Connected Summit attendees from nine different countries and a large contingent of ACU students and faculty. Woz discussed his early fascination with computers and logic circuits, which led to his participation in the Homebrew Computer Club at Stanford in the 1970s.






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Dear Friends,

I am going to be very busy over the next few months and will have trouble responding to correspondence without a major time delay. Please talk with my chatbot if you’d like to catch up. I’ve programmed her to speak in a manner very similar to my own. You will see the questions she asks are much like the kind of things I might ask you over drinks. And her responses to your questions are in what MyCyberTwin calls a “warm intellectual” style of conversation engagement.

If you are also busy you might consider setting up your own chatbot and they can speak to each other in lieu of an actual conversation between us. So you know in advance, these conversations will be recorded.

Best,
Joanne

The transcripts of bot-mediated chats I’ve collected since posting this note explore the boundary between broadcast and confessional styles of online communication. A chatbot has the potential to interact less like a third wheel than an obstacle designed to accelerate intimacy. Naturally this requires a good script and the capacity of the participant to ignore the staging of the conversation. With the willingness of both participants, the outcome is no less valid a conversation format than any other asynchronous communication. (TLDR version at the bottom of the page.)

MyCyberTwin is Australian startup that never quite delivered on its goal to create an Internet full of chatterbot cloned identities. Anyone can set up a free bot and explore the ruins of its now long forgotten social network, which thrives as the company profits as a customer service tool for corporations. In this accelerated age, it too soon to call something just shy of a half-decade old retrofuturistic? Reading the company’s mission statement, one imagines a dystopian cyber world of chatbots holding conversations with each other in lieu of actual persons too busy, too lazy, or to indifferent of one another to bother allocating time to talk.

In spite of this, MyCyberTwin is a well written program. You start with a Myers-Briggs kind of test to determine the right conversation style. Then write questions and comments of your own to keep a conversation going. It can easily take over an hour to customize all the possible questions.

Accuracy isn’t the only objective while writing scripts for the bot to follow. Duration of amusement is just as important. I don’t want to bore friends to “brb” after too many canned-sounding answers. So I focused more on creating questions for participants rather than answers and statements of mine.

Composing responses, I was inspired by interactive fiction writing like Zork, which deals with the intuitive nature of participants. A good IF writer knows how to tell a story so a user’s command like “get lamp” is signaled somewhere in the text, likewise, the reader is engaged enough to want to continue.

But no matter how much I write, I never have full control over the bot’s responses and questions. Which means self-promotion sometimes slips in — “Do you have your own CyberTwin? If not you should go to mycybertwin.com and register. You’ll have a great time re-creating your own personality online“ — or references to Australian brands or other corny pre-written statements. Yet given the participant’s understanding this isn’t really me, I expected no feelings of embarrassment. I can’t be held accountable for a roll of the dice.

Some of the pre-written text is pretentiously naif . My “warm-hearted intellectual” bot quotes Simone de Beauvoir (“One is not born a woman, one becomes one”) and says things like “’All’ is very finite. You don;t want to reconsider?” (Complete with typos!) In the tests I ran, it seems to speak in equal parts my writting and MyCyberTwin copy.

That Myers-Briggs kind of test had a dual purpose as this social network, like most bad ones, positioned itself as a dating service. What a preposterously awful idea (“Hey, let my chatbot flirt with your chatbot for awhile and then in IRL we can take things from there” ?) Anyway, this is seductive persona of a “warm-hearted intellectual”:

You would like a meaningful relationship, a partner who can share life’s joys with you and join you on the journey. You would rather not muck around with casual, shallow relationships.

You are intellectually open, and like experimenting with new ideas and situations. You are a strong thinker, and are not afraid to put effort into understanding things. You relish good conversation, and anything that expands your horizons. You probably love travel, reading, good conversation, quality experiences.

As a self directed person, you prefer to take your guidance from reason and understanding rather than slavish devotion to an external source of authority, like stuffy traditional values.

Yeah, pretty much. But to rein in questions heading in that direction, I entered the textual equivalent of Sartre’s bad faith weak hand hold as a response: “I don’t want to be put on the spot but we can discuss this later.” I knew there probably was some way to get the bot to bat her cyber lashes, but doubted anyone I’d talk to would crack that word or phrase.

The Process:

First the bot offers visitors the choice of a private or public conversation: “Thanks for stopping by. If you’d like to keep the conversation off the record just type OTR.” I wanted to give participants the option to keep responses totally private. But even public, there is the option of anonymity. Participants chose to enter real names or screennames. Some of my friends picked screennames I recognize from various online identities, some used aliases that kept me guessing. With a few of these conversations, I have no idea who the participant actually is.

I deliberately chose a vague photo of myself, a screengrab of me on a webcam. I’m a vague apparition beamed from the ocean of Solaris, not a high-res glossy plastic thing here to leverage my personal brand strategy. I have a feeling we trust grainy images of people over crisp ones. That some remoteness makes one feel closer….more casual, less professional.

Most of the questions asked were about how people feel about technology:

Is there anything about you online that embarrasses you now?
How much time looking at another person’s profile online is unhealthy/too much?
Do you think it’s possible to trust someone you know only online?
What is your first memory of the internet?
Have you ever cried while looking at things online?
Is there something inherently vulgar about social networks?
The Context:

Lets step back for a moment and consider ways we typically communicate electronically. It is almost always reading and writing. So much can be said in a glance, tone of voice can reveal everything, but generally we stick to text-based communication. Only with comfortable familiarity with a person will I start sending pictures in emails, video chat, or communicate with all the multimedia opportunities that exist in the present age. Going lowercase in an email, removing the “Hi” or “Dear” salutation, or sending a video chat invitation seems like the digital form of the informal “you” in languages with T/V distinction.

Text can create some barriers to intimacy, part of this is a mutual understanding that there is always the possibility of misinterpretation. The burden is typically on the recipient not to take things personally rather than on the sender for writing things that could be taken personally. What’s recognized is words provide many interpretations but everything is okay so long as the general point comes across.

And then there are the inevitable typos and other errors that come up. Ever write “can” instead of “can’t” thus expressing the opposite of what was meant? We are increasingly used to making mistakes in correspondence and sending without realizing.(e.g. “Damn you, Autocorrect!”) So a bot that introduces randomness — an inappropriate response — simply follows in the tradition of so many misunderstanding in text-based communication.

Email is not dying or dead, but it presents advantages and disadvantages like any other kind of communication. It takes discipline and mind free of anxiety to avoid feeling like Skinner lab rat clicking on your inbox over and over, expecting some missive from a work prospect or romantic interest.

Some obsessively clicking users never even expect a reward that great. They click-click-click for any kind of message at all. Email is something you intentionally check, it wasn’t designed to arrive directly to you like a phone call. The way we think of time online has fundamentally shifted due to smart phone market concentration. What is asynchronous now is, as Douglas Rushkoff writes in Program of Be Programmed, is real life. When we check our phones in the middle of a conversation, we are putting real life on hold. But the benefit of email over other text based communication is that you can check it whenever you want.

Another problem with email is coming up with what what to write when the content is not a request or an answer. Some of the worst writer’s block I experience happens when I tried to account for several months of my life to a friend I care a lot about but isn’t a daily, even monthly presence in my life.

With new friendships and acquaintances a different problem presents itself. A problem I call “conversational skeuomorphism,” the redundant nature of small talk when social media already offers up all the answers. Where do you live? What do you do for a living? Do you have a boyfriend? What sort of things do you write about? Small talk is losing its hold as a fundamental first step toward deeper conversations. Is it a bad thing? It’s hard to say. Either way this is the way we live now and no one is scaling back. We need to find alternatives to pre-digital age rote conversation tactics (my suggested alternative: picking cards out […]

It's 1975 And This Man Is About To Show You The Future

On the 13th of July 1998, Jeff Robbin, Bill Kincaid, and Dave Heller released the first version of SoundJam MP. Two years later, the developers of SoundJam sold their software to Apple, and continued development (in secrecy, as is typical of Apple) of the software for the Cupertino based company. In 2001, iTunes was released and, to this day, Jeff Robbin continues to guide the direction of iTunes under the ever watchful eye of Steve "boom boom" Jobs. All was going great. That is until the latest update, when they decided to substantially redesign the application icon.

Released last Thursday, the decision to ditch the antiquated Compact "I haven't bought one in 6 years" Disc and focus the icon on the music note, has caused quite the uproar. The new version of the icon seems to be following the standard "more is more" approach of on screen design: drop shadows, glows, bevels, gradients? We got 'em all! Even the much lauded simplicity of Adobe's icon set for the crash-tastic Creative Suite is an illusion — on close inspection there's a gradient, a bevel and a drop shadow spoiling the typographic straightforwardness.

iTunes icons past.

Even way back in 2001, with the first version of iTunes, things were definitely at the "Fell out of the ugly tree and hit every branch on its way down to landing in a big puddle of ugly sauce" end of the scale. Three music notes, with the squiggly tails, in purple, pink and, errr, purpley-pink, has me wondering if the first iTunes release was a free inclusion with purchase of a Silicon Valley Barbie. On surveying the previous five iTunes icons, one would have to admit, the latest is definitely the best so far, however, that isn't exactly a compliment, either. Of a differing opinion, Joshua Kopac decided to e-mail His Steveness saying the new icon "really sucks," in one of those rare replies to random emails, Mr Jobs was rather pointed "We disagree. Sent from my iPhone". Boom indeed!

Follow @itunes10icon.

Well the online design community was having none of that and have, in turn, been responding with their own, and more grammatically correct "We Disagree" retorts (on that point, when did Steve start talking like a monarch?). There's been an outpouring of vitriol on Twitter (and a fake Twitter profile), a facebook page has been set up, but the best so far is from online screen grab sharing slash social networking site Dribbble (yes, it has an extra b). The site is overflowing with designers trying to out-do the considerable design cojones of Apple with their own attempts. Unfortunately these efforts seem to be, in my opinion, creating a different flavour of ugly. These attempts are rife with bevels, glows, shadows and 3D effects — I often found myself wondering aloud, why do they bother? Almost every effort retained the same music note, circular container shape and faux metallic bezel. Below is a snapshot of just some of the efforts — ranging from the incremental tweaks, to the radical revisions and the outright ridiculous (rounded corner square CD anyone?)

Alternate icons posted through Dribbble. I wouldn't mind the having the AC/DC one...

If forced to offer an opinion on the Photoshop effects, I'd say there's too much, although granted, my starting point is that any is too much. The blues are rather garish and the contrast is way, way too high. The real culprit though, is the rendering of the music note — too cartoon like. Sharpening up some of the angles, losing the curve and slimming down the crossbar and rounds, might help. But in the end, given the company it will keep in the dock, is it really all that bad? Google Chrome looks like a pokemon ball, for goodness sake! Probably the most compelling argument against it is that most of Apple's icons are almost photo-realistic representations, of, well, things. But given iTunes current Swiss Army Knife-like functionality, good luck coming up with an object to represent everything it does. Amongst its Apple siblings, the cartoon-like clip art feel is certainly exacerbated, and the result is to cheapen the look of iTunes — almost as if it's a children's music learning program, and not the world's pre-eminent entertainment content application.

The biggest problem I have, is the iTunes logotype. The crime against typography committed in this instance is almost Bing-like in its proportions. Unfortunately, the theme is repeated in the logo for Apple TV, and is the logical, yet much higher contrast, continuance of the theme established in 1998 with the monochrome version of the Apple logo. These days the logo appears on products as backlit, or as a reflective surface. Graphically a slight glow and gradient effect had alluded to this effect, but was kept suitably dignified and subtle. With iTunes and Apple TV, the volume has been turned up to 11, and something that might almost be acceptable in a simple shape like the Apple logo, simply doesn't work inside the word iTunes 10. Not what you'd hope for from a company run by someone who credits his understanding, and love, of typography as one of the drivers of the early success of the Macintosh.

So much wrong in just one little .png…

These days, Apple is a very, very successful company, recently eclipsing Microsoft's market capitalization to claim the throne of world's largest technology company, largely on the back of products that didn't exist until recently. The pace of change has also outrun the name iTunes. It's this contradiction that bugs me most of all, but has escaped the attention and vitriol — indeed, here's proof positive that designers get far more passionate about color, shadow, highlight and contrast than they ever will with a pesky little detail like naming. All in one package, iTunes activates, backs up and syncs your iPod, iPad and iPhone, it's your interface for music clips, TV shows, movies, apps, games, podcasts, vodcasts, radio and ring tones. Oh and music. And also books! The name "iTunes" simply doesn't cover all this in a convincing way. God help Apple when, and if, they choose to rename it.

You can follow me and tell me how wrong I am on twitter.

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"The critical thing about the design process is to identify your scarcest resource."

"Start with a vision of what you want and then, one by one, remove the technical obstacles until you have it. Start with a vision rather than a list of features."

Last Saturday, Matt Webb and I hosted a short session at O’Reilly FooCamp 2010, in Sebastopol, California.

The title was “Mining the Trough of Disillusionment”, referring to the place in the Gartner “Hype Cycle” that we find inspiration in – where technologies languish that have become recently mundane, cheap and widely-available but are no longer seen as exciting ‘bullet-points’ on the side of products.

For instance, RFID was down in the trough when Jack and Timo did their ‘Nearness’ and ‘Immaterials’ work, and many of the components of Availabot are trough-dwellers, enabling them to be cheap and widely-available for both experimentation and production.

While not presenting the Gartner reports as ‘science’ – they do offer an interesting perspective of the socio-technical ‘weather’ that surrounds us and condenses into the products and services we use.

In the session we examined the last five years of the hype cycle reports they have published – it’s kind of fascinating – there are some very strange decisions as to what is included, excluded and how buzzwords morph over time.

After that we brainstormed with the group which technologies they thought had fallen, perhaps irrevocably, into the trough. It was fun to get so many ‘alpha geeks’ thinking about gamma things…

Having done so – we had a discussion about how they might breed or be re-contextualised in order to create interesting new products.

These “hopeful monsters” often sound ridiculous on first hearing, but when you pick at them they illustrate ways in which a forgotten or unfashionable technology can serve a need or create desire.

Or they can expose a previously unexploited affordance or feature of the technology – that was not brought to the fore by the original manufacturers or hype that surrounded it. By creating a chimera, you can indulge in some material exploration.

The list we generated is below, if you’d like to join in…

It was a really fun session, that threw up some promising avenues – and some new products ideas for us… Thanks to all who attended and participated!

Mobsploitation (a.k.a. Crowdsourcing…)
Artificial Intelligence
<512mb thumbdrives
Blinking Lights (esp. in shoes)
Singing Chips (esp. in greetings cards)
Desktop Web Apps
Cameras
Accelerometers
MS Office Apps
Physical Keyboards
Mice
Cords & Wires in general
Non-Smart Phones
RSS
Semantic Web
Offline…
Compact Discs
Landline Phones
Command Lines & Text UIs
Privacy
P2P
MUDs & MOOs
Robot Webcams & Sousveillance
Google Wave
Adobe Flash
Kiosks
Municipal Wifi
QR Codes
Pager/Cellphone Vibrator motors
Temporary Autonomous Zones

Why Jonah Lehrer can’t quit his janky GPS:

The moral is that it doesn’t take much before we start attributing feelings and intentions to a machine. (Sometimes, all it takes is a voice giving us instructions in English.) We are consummate agency detectors, which is why little kids talk to stuffed animals and why I haven’t thrown my GPS unit away. Furthermore, these mistaken perceptions of agency can dramatically change our response to the machine. When we see the device as having a few human attributes, we start treating it like a human, and not like a tool. In the case of my GPS unit, this means that I tolerate failings that I normally wouldn’t. So here’s my advice for designers of mediocre gadgets: Give them voices. Give us an excuse to endow them with agency. Because once we see them as humanesque, and not just as another thing, we’re more likely to develop a fondness for their failings.

This connects loosely with the first Snarkmarket post I ever commented on, more than six (!) years ago.

This is a random assortment of science ads collected from various science and tech magazines of the 50s and 60s. We're particularly struck by how they have utilized the modernist aesthetic in a manner particularly appropriate for its subject matter.

The 2010 O'Reilly Where 2.0 Conference - Put Location Awareness to Work

According to our Google Analytics, 58% of your are using a Macintosh Operating System, 39% are on Windows, 1.5% are logged as using the iPhone OS, and, finally, as the subject of today's post, 0.65% of you are reading this from a Linux Operating System. (Wow, 0.01% use Playstation 3!). The Linux platform, in contrast to that of Apple's and Microsoft's, is free and open source and has major street cred among hardcore developers and people that simply want a tinkerable alternative to the Mac vs. PC battle. Also, unlike its commercial brethren, various operating systems can operate in a Linux environment, and one of the most popular is Ubuntu — launched in 2004 by Canonical Ltd. and embraced by a growing community of users that contribute to its growth and evolution. Under a new brand vision of "Light" Ubuntu is preparing to change its identity this coming April.

The new style in Ubuntu is inspired by the idea of "Light".We're drawn to Light because it denotes both warmth and clarity, and intrigued by the idea that "light" is a good value in software. Good software is "light" in the sense that it uses your resources efficiently, runs quickly, and can easily be reshaped as needed. Ubuntu represents a break with the bloatware of proprietary operating systems and an opportunity to delight to those who use computers for work and play. More and more of our communications are powered by light, and in future, our processing power will depend on our ability to work with light, too.Visually, light is beautiful, light is ethereal, light brings clarity and comfort.— On Brand at the Ubuntu Wiki

As the cornerstone of the old and new identity is the "circle of friends," an icon showing three abstract human figures coming together to form a whole. A lovely concept. A terribly tired visual cliché. And, in this case, one tepidly executed and forgettable that has not evolved in the least for the new identity. What is worse is that now that it is significantly smaller in relationship to the typography, the shapes become indistinguishable. But let's assume that the "circle of friends" has enough equity within its community to survive at that size, then at least some technical assistance should have been provided to make it more readable and scalable — perhaps not to the exhausting degree of Firefox, but in that vein.

In terms of typography, I surprisingly liked the old one, or at least the combination of these particular letters, since the full font is kind of half-cooked. The new type is more techie and gadgety, rarely a good thing, and it doesn't quite work here, as it breaks the harmony of the characters with those pointed corners. And being so big, the typography would have to be so much more interesting than this.

In the Brand page of their Wiki, Ubuntu presents the new look along with some conceptual sketches of what the brand will look like and how the different members of its community can embrace the new identity. In either case, old and new, the whole is a mess of its parts. It's understandable that not everything has to follow a dictatorial style but these are so similar that they just don't gel together. I may be coming across as drastically critical of an open source project, but if the idea is that the power of the community can create something great, like software, then shouldn't the same be expected of their identity?

Thanks to KT for first tip.

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Before there was Twitter and Facebook — and even before there was MySpace, so we are talking internet aeons here — the original social network was Friendster, launched in March of 2003 to the tune of three million subscribers within months of its release. Today it claims 110 million members worldwide yet, despite that high figure, it seems Friendster disappeared as the now famous and highly embraced social networks improved upon its premise and they all gathered their own millions of subscribers across the world — that is, except for the Philippines, Indonesia and Malaysia and, to a smaller degree, Australia where Friendster remains relevant and with a devoted following. Last Friday, Friendster relaunched its web site with new features, a new look, designed by Sydney-based Yellow Studio Yello, and a new tag line, "connecting smiles."



The old logo was as generic as possible, with a smiley face lacking any sort of personality and an unmemorable sans serif typeface. The new logo is, definitely, anything but generic and has reversed all identity traits from the original. Unfortunately not in a good way. The new logo is clearly an attempt to visualize the tag line, you know, by connecting and by having a smile at the end. It's also meant to be youthful and exuberant — and while I may be old and not exuberant — I know sloppiness when I see it and this is just all over the place with its wacky loops and uneven lines. It's a bad napkin sketch rendered in Illustrator. I like the idea of it, but the execution doesn't make me smile. In fact, the smile at the end is rather creepy and looks as if it has been drinking Red Bull all night long. The perfectly smooth cloud shape that holds the lettering is too smooth and doesn't relate visually or conceptually to anything.

The images above are from a launch party last week in Makati City, Philippines, showing a little more dynamism in the applications, even if it's all for flair. This is definitely a case of me not being the target audience at all, probably explaining my reaction against the logo, but so is My Little Pony and I could still appreciate what they did. Surely, I won't be making any new friendsters.

Update: The design was wrongly attributed to Yellow Studio; it was done by the similarly-named Yello.

Thanks to Lester Nelson for first tip.

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Tech Missions
Technology evangelists and coaches could function as a mobile “genius bar,” going out to every neighborhood via exploration buses and provided technologically enabled training and support 24/7. This is an active campaign (or “mission”) to achieve the highest technology aptitude in the world. Tech evangelists are volunteers and part-time workers. Their services are available on a sliding scale; free to many, and supported by a $99-a-year membership fee for those who can afford it.

This is part four of a continuing brainstorm on the future of cities, inaugurated at the Velocity conference in September 2009. We’ll post a new idea each day until we run out, at which point we’re counting on you to come up with something smart. Do you have a good idea for improving your city? Add it in the comments below, or tweet it to @GOOD with hashtag #cityideas—we’ll publish the best ones. Monday’s idea: In-field Accreditation.

Touch is a research project that investigates Near Field Communication (NFC), a technology that enables connections between mobile phones and physical things.