One of the challenges of having decades of experience is it’s easy to become complacent and think you’ve seen it before. It is easy to jump to conclusions, so it’s important to remain open-minded and to look for fresh perspectives. Here are some of my favourite ways to try and stay curious: A playful spirit Playing games is seen as a childish activity, but it requires the ability to learn… Read More »On a mission to stay curious
Alice Taylor, Commissioning Editor for Channel 4 (and Wonderland blog) talked recently at Game Based Learning, looking at how gaming enables Channel 4 to engage with their target audience of 14 to 19 year old. But also looks at how gaming mechanisms can be used to engage large numbers with an educational agenda. Video of Alice Taylor To see the full selection of videos go the the Games Based Learning… Read More »Games Based Learning: Alice Taylor
Pivot is a tool for browsing large collections of data, such as Wikipedia, and really shows the value of a good API and semantic data. It contains a filtering system on the left to help you dig into and out of the data, combined with a smooth zoom interface as we’ve seen implemented before in Seadragon and Photosynth and some very familiar browser elements such as tabs, most visited history… Read More »Pivot – interesting data navigation from Microsoft Labs.
I loved the Google Wave demo, but probably for all the wrong reasons. I loved the fact that it was an honest demo, ok so that means it breaks, but I prefer to forgive a few bumps in the demo than see canned demos that are so slick I'm left wondering if it was all faked up. Google Wave made a lot of noise when the demo video was released,… Read More »Google Wave
Microsoft have released a demo of Photosynth that allows you to create your own experiences. It still only works in Internet Explorer and requires a plugin to view. But I've been waiting for ages to have a play with this technology. It is amazingly simple to use, you just add a selection of photos of your subject and you are away, there is no labourious stitching of photographs required, it… Read More »Create your own Photosynth
Managing our money is dull, so it is only when the situation is dire that it becomes important enough that most of us are actually willing to do it. Usually it sits on that long list of good intentions, somewhere under painting the bedroom. Unfortunately in a recession we need to manage our finances and anything that can make that task easier is fantastic. I have already talked about services… Read More »Banking as a Service
Microsoft has released it's first iPhone application and its a good one. Some of the more interesting things that are coming out of Microsoft labs are Photosynth and Seadragon, you can see an excellent demo of this at a TED talk from 2007: In brief Seadragon allows you to zoom quickly and smoothly through a great deal of visual information, so much information infact that when I originally saw the… Read More »Seadragon on the iPhone