Emily Chang – Designer

Kevin Kelly on maximizing the opportunity of others…

In every aspect of your business (and personal life) try to allow others to build their success around your own success. If you run a hotel, what can you do to permit others–airlines, luggage retailers, tour guides–to be part of your network? Rather than viewing their dependency on your success as a form of parasitism, or worse, as a rip-off, understand this tight coupling as sustenance. You want to entice others to create services centered around the customer attention you have won, or to supply add-ons to your product, or even, if it is a new-fangled idea, to create legal imitations. This is a counter-intuitive stance at first, but it plays right into the logic of the net. A small piece of an expanding pie is the biggest piece of all. Software is especially primed to work this way…

Via New Rules for the New Economy.

8-Bit Trip is a stupendous stop-motion Lego tribute to classic video games (chiptune soundtrack, of course) filled with wicked in-jokes. It reportedly took 1500 hours to create. I believe it.

Via BoingBoing and PicoCool

I’m so excited to have bought the OneLessDesk just now, in red!  I posted the OneLessDesk by Heckler Design in PicoCool a while back and it’s often crept up in my mind (side note, look for the PicoCool logo at the bottom of their page. That was a nice surprise :).  When we first moved to SF, we bought two used DWR stainless steel Quovis work tables from our building landlord at an amazing price.  We’ve always used them as desks at Ideacodes and loved them. But over the years, especially with the increase in monitor size (30″ display), I’ve started to realize just how close the screen is and how there’s just not enough depth to accommodate the screen and my keyboard.  Since it’s a work table on wheels, it’s also a bit too high for a keyboard.  Enter the OneLessDesk, with it’s sleek minimalism, and free-standing keyboard table.  Since I’m also obsessive about hiding cords, I also love the built-in, vented cord shelf in the back of the desk.  When we’re not working (yeah, that happens occasionally), we can slide the table underneath the other to save space. The Quovis tables will now become a big conference table.  Can’t wait for the new desks to arrive.

The Apple and tech blogs have been buzzing with this week’s early arrival of Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard, available this Friday, August 28, 2009. We’ve already pre-ordered our family pack upgrade. If you haven’t yet, it’s worth the upgrade at only $29 for an individual (or $25 at Amazon; $43.99 for the family pack upgrade at Amazon). Why? David Pogue covers this in his review today.

Either way, the big story here isn’t really Snow Leopard. It’s the radical concept of a software update that’s smaller, faster and better — instead of bigger, slower and more bloated. May the rest of the industry take the hint.

Via David Pogue’s State of the Art – A Leap Forward With Snow Leopard – NYTimes.com

Update Aug 28: If you’re unsure whether your software will be compatible with the upgrade, check here.

While it’s probably some time before Augmented Reality (AR) is part of everyday practice, it’s good to see that some applications are coming to fruition.  Today, Marshall Kirkpatrick at ReadWriteWeb posted that Metro Paris Subway (iTunes link), a French app from PresseLite has appeared in the iTunes store.  A commenter on Marshall’s post, Tim, speculates that Apple will take the app down because “there’s a Chromeless image picker the iPhoneARKit guys used that made it possible to do image overlays in 3.0, but it was rumored Apple was rejecting the majority of the apps that used it.”

There are already several AR apps for Android phones as well as other demos for iPhone. ReadWriteWeb wrote yesterday about five key obstacles that Augmented Reality faces in becoming mainstream.

There’s also work in this area being done by Pattie Maes from MIT Media Lab’s Fluid Interfaces group.  See my post from February, Our Sixth Sense: Wearable Fluid Interfaces.