Voici un excellent exemple de comment pourrait se décliner la presse papier sur de nouveaux supports numériques. Au moment ou les tablettes tactiles sont plus qu’imminentes, l’expérience conçue par The Wonderfactory en collaboration avec Time est vraiment bien pensée et innovante.
Quand Pentagram décide de pousser le concept de netbook à bout, voici ce que çà donne :
Finalement, ce que j’aime le plus à propos de ce netbook, c’est qu’on sent une réelle démarche de designer derrière : ils ne se sont pas arrêtés à l’idée qu’un netbook c’est juste un ordinateur en plus petit. Ils ont proposé en lien avec l’usage de ce type d’ordinateur : des spécifications matériels, une interface graphique dédiée, etc.
Plus d’infos sur le site de Pentagram
[Mise à jour] Le voici en vidéo. Merci Lucie.
Voici l’idée plutôt intéressante d’une agence de design pour répondre aux nombres grandissant des bulles rouges – avec le nombre de nouveautés – disséminés aux quatre coins de votre iPhone, voir même sur les X pages d’applications. Il s’agit en fait d’une nouvelle page d’accueil du mobile – comme l’écran de recherche spotlight nouvellement arrivé – qui prendrait la forme d’un newsfeed des applications afin de vous délivrez textuellement et directement les informations/appels manquées. L’idée est également de pouvoir insérer cette page directement en écran de veille afin de ne même pas avoir à déverrouiller l’iphone. De plus, il est possible de sélectionner quelles sont les applications qui viennent enrichir ce “homenewsfeed”.
source : teehan + lax blog
Augmented reality should not be constrained to putting transparent labels on the objects you see through your phone, nor to actually yourself being the only viewpoint. Techcrunch reports on several new ways of applying augmented reality: panoramic and bird’s eye-zooming.
My mobile phone (a compact, nicely designed, easy to handle Nokia) makes really shitty photos. It makes excellent phone calls, though, which I cannot say of my photo camera.
Our phones have been getting smarter and smarter in these past years. Taking pictures and videos, surfing the net, recording our friend’s addresses and our appointments, synchronizing our real lives with our lives on Twitter, Facebook etc., our phones are rapidly becoming all-in-one devices. In an earlier post The future of mobile phones? It’s South Korea I have written about the mobile phones becoming an almost exclusive mean of payment for various transactions. This is simple, user-friendly and it seems people would be more likely to forget their wallet at home than their mobile phone.
And what happens when a device is involved in (online) financial transactions? Right. Somebody tries to hack into it and steal your data.
This article describes a somewhat frightening scenario of a potential iPhone botnet. Our PC’s have been a target for a long time already and now it is the turn of our mobile phones.
Depuis quelques temps on pouvait voir fleurir des initiatives d’applications de réalité augmentée. Pour la plupart de simples “joujous” en Flash.
Mais voilà l’Iphone 3Gs, ses capteurs et sa caméra vidéo. Acrossair, une société anglaise démarre en trombe et se lance la première dans une application de réalité augmentée enfin utile…
“Sortir de l’ennuyeuse carte 2D du métro” pour proposer un guide du Tube Londonien “réel”, telle est l’idée de l’équipe d’Acrossair. La démo vidéo sur YouTube semble y parvenir…
Mais ce que je trouve intéressant dans cette news, c’est que cette agence, plutôt que de créer un énième gadget, à pris le parti de faire une application utile et de démontrer que la réalité augmentée pouvait très concrètement nous apporter un bénéfice dans notre quotidien.
A tester bientôt donc, à condition d’avoir un Iphone 3Gs, d’être à Londres et qu’Apple très vite l’inscrive dans son AppStore…
Highly recommended: this article in New York Times In South Korea, All of Life Is Mobile. It describes how the younger – and also less younger – generations in that country use their mobile phones for… well, practically anything. Identification, pocket money, payment in stores, television set, book reader, magazine, music player, internet, yellow pages and so on and so forth. The number of things they can do with phones is dazzling. I especially like the example of sending your friend a gift, a pre-paid Starbucks coffee, which she then can pick up by showing the gift icon on her mobile at any Starbucks. Paying by mobile instead of cash or credit card is called T-Money.
A university lets their students use mobiles as ID cards, because, as all students, they would much sooner forget their ID card than leave home without their mobile. No need for a wallet (a relief for those whose wallets, like mine, have been stolen) and I am quite sure they have inventive solutions for stolen phones. I wouldn’t be surprised if a stolen phone becomes useless by itself, or engages in self-destruction, or takes the thief to the closest police station because it knows exactly the thief’s location – and that of all the police stations in the city.
The fact I found most fascinating is that a young person in South Korea changes his or her phone once a year. I don’t quite see it happening around here. Yet.
A Yahoo survey conducted in Italy shows that cellphone (affectionately called “telefonino” in Italian), internet and e-mail are nowadays more important to Italians than coffee. 43% of Italians would not accept to live without a cellphone, against 24% who would not accept to live without coffee. 61% of Italians say to feel lost without a cellphone when traveling.
Having recently traveled to Sicily and back I could witness this mobile phone addiction of Italians. What is the first thing any person does after the airplane touches ground and the “fasten seat belt” lights go off? Correct, switch on his or her mobile phone. As I was waiting in the ail to go to the exit, with my mobile in my hand, I looked around me and saw an Italian women get not one, not two, but three different mobile phones from her purse. She switched them on one by one and then checked the messages and the missed calls – one by one. I turned to my left and saw an Italian man holding not one, not two, but three cellphones (all different, of course), which he was switching on and checking one by one. The guy next to him was not quite as advanced: he was looking only at two cellphones and feeling no doubt suddenly inferior to his neighbor. But definitely superior to me.
Shai Agassi, a former SAP Products and Technology President and now CEO of an Israeli startup Better Place, has a world-changing ambition: to liberate us from our dependency on oil. Better Place is designing the new electric car. The New York Times article Batteries not included describes the challenges Mr. Agassi is trying to overcome. The moment could not be chosen better: global warming, recent oil crisis, financial crisis leading to difficult times in the traditional automotive industry. And if Mr. Agassi cannot make us switch to clean cars, I don’t know who can.
One of the problems in owing an electric car is the need to recharge its batteries. But in an “aha” moment Mr. Agassi comes up with a paradigm change: “The auto industry’s conceptual error, he says, is in regarding the battery as a built-in component of the car, like a gas tank. Instead, you could think of the battery as more analogous to gas itself — an entity that goes in and out of a car as needed, owned not by the driver but by the company that sells you the fuel.”
If you like reading novels by great Russian authors of the 19th century, you probably know that before the railroads Russia had a vast system of horse-powered coach traveling. Russia being a big country one set of horses was not enough to travel from, say, your main house in St. Petersburg and your summer house somewhere in the country. For this existed a large network of mail stations, where passenger and mail coaches could change their horses, which were state property. The horses were fed, allowed to rest and got to ride the next coach. This system was commonplace in the whole of 19th century Europe and already existed in Roman times, the changing stations known as “mutationes”.
A truly good idea never runs out of batteries.
Orange is introducing Tabbee, a multimedia tablet for “everywhere around the house and all the members of your family.” It has a 800×600 touchscreen and looks a little bit like a Macintosh display reduced to small size. Reading the text on the introduction website made me wonder about the underlying use scenarios.
The tablet can be carried around in your house and gives access “at any moment” to a range of information services, internet included. How often do we have the urge to consult the weather or our calendar while walking around our house? And even if you decide to walk around your house carrying the tablet wouldn’t you sit down to surf the net? And is a 800×600 screen then not somewhat on a small side for viewing websites?
The tablet can connect to your PC by wi-fi (so you DO still own a PC), on which you find your own stuff. I am not sure the tablet can store any stuff by itself and if not, it becomes an expensive PC remote viewer. Why then not carry around your laptop if your want to watch a movie quietly in your room?
The site does mention one believable use case, however: having the internet recipe before your eyes in the kitchen. Now there, I say, Orange did their user research well. You see, an average kitchen in Paris wouldn’t fit you AND your computer at once. It hardly fits you AND your kitchen equipment at once and you have to be truly creative in using the space. But then you would want to hang the tablet on the wall, because the wall is the only place left. In my kitchen, anyway. 