Thursday, October 25, 2007

Banner-Blindness

Web users tend to ignore everything that looks like advertisement and, what is interesting, they're pretty good at it. Although advertisement is noticed, it is almost always ignored. Since users have constructed web related schemata for different tasks on the Web, when searching for specific information on a website, they focus only on the parts of the page where they would assume the relevant information could be, i.e. small text and hyperlinks. Large colourful or animated banners and other graphics are in this case ignored.

Source: Banner Blindness: Old and New Findings

Fraud-B-Gone: ATM Card Comes With Its Own Keypad

from Gizmodo by Wilson Rothman

For people whose paranoia leads them to believe that there are boogeymen actually living inside ATMs, this invention from Innovative Card Technologies and eMue Technologies lets them input their PIN—and presumably encrypt it—before they approach the machine. Cool as it is, I have a problem: I only remember my PINs from muscle memory, so this would need a standard telephone numberpad to work for me. How many problems can you spot with this admittedly slim piece of high technology? [Gizmag via OhGizmo]

NEC touts "world's fastest vector supercomputer"

from Engadget by Donald Melanson

NEC looks to have earned itself some new bragging rights in the supercomputer club with its new SX-9 model, which it claims is the "world's fastest vector supercomputer" on the market today. Helping it earn that distinction is a peak processing performance of 839 teraflops, and a peak vector performance of more than 100 gigaflops per single core (apparently a first for any supercomputer). That, NEC hopes, should make the SX-9 ideal for a wide range of uses, including weather forecasting, aerospace, the environment and fluid dynamics. No word on what it'll cost, but those looking to check out all that teraflopping for themselves should head to the Supercomputing 2007 expo in Reno, Nevada next month, where the SX-9 will make its public debut.

[Via Physorg]

Rollup Screen: Samsung Demos World's First Bendable OLED Screen

from Gizmodo by Charlie White

Samsung is cranking out the ideas with OLED displays lately, and now adds the world's first bendable OLED screen to its stable of coolness. This 4.3-inch screen's rocking 480x272 pixels, and Samsung claims it's capable of a contrast ratio of 1000:1. Demonstrated at the FPD International 2007 Forum going on now in Yokohama, Japan, this prototype is in the early experimental stage thus far, but if Samsung can build one they can build a million of them. There's no word on how soon the company will be able to do that at a reasonable price, though. Anyway, we can't wait for the day when we can carry around cylindrical objects that open up to huge screens, using up very little energy while entertaining us everywhere. [New Launches]

Facebook: My Take

Since Microsoft paid $240 million for 1.6% of Facebook, I thought I'd make a comment.

Open wins.

Facebook opened its platform for developers to make apps for it; their efforts which were zero cost to Facebook made it more valuable for users. Now everyone is opening their network through APIs and trying to be a "platform" even MySpace -- but it's too little too late.

Palm made Palm OS something that developers could develop apps for and thus make the product more valuable at no cost to Palm.

But ...

It is not necessarily sustainable forever. Palm had its day in the sun, but it too failed to innovate along with user trends -- it's heyday was before phones became PDAs, cameras, and MP3 players.

In mid 90's Yahoo solved a particular large need as the web was starting to get unwieldy -- a directory of sites curated by humans which helped organize the info into a yellow-pages like directory. It had its day in the sun.

Then as the amount of information continued to skyrocket, a more efficient way was needed so help users get to what they wanted. Google came along with a better search algorithm, and also did a nice thing for users -- made the homepage so simple it contained only 1 textbox (what a concept!). It quickly took the crown from Yahoo and users switched since there was little to zero switching costs (even the Yahoo personalized homepage which I invested time into was not enough to keep me on Yahoo). Google is having its day in the sun -- but what's next?

The next "pair" of "contestants" is MySpace and Facebook. As users spent more and more time online, their real-life social interactions were also desperate to have an outlet online. MySpace was one of the earliest to solve it, specifically for the younger set of users who practically grew up online. They had their day in the sun, but also failed to innovate along with user trends. MySpace was the "web 2" version of GeoCities but lacked better social functions.

Then Facebook came along (after they opened membership to the public, rather than just alums) and the killer feature was the sharing of apps and the open platform. The sharing helped amplify the reach and speed of the social interactions. Facebook is having its day in the sun -- but what's next? Microsoft is desperate and definitely paying a premium to play catchup. Facebook has a shot at building sustainability but as it moves towards an advertising revenue model it risks offending and alienating the very users it seeks to serve.

It will be interesting to see whether Facebook can avoid the same fate of Yahoo and Palm (and MySpace) despite being such a huge success thus far.

this is how it gets REAL (for advertisers) - consumer power

These Young Girls Are Flipping Your Brand Into the Dustbin

Women of 3iYing Launch a Viral Effort to Tell You How Bad Your Ads Are

By Ken Wheaton Published: October 22, 2007

This is one viral sensation you don't want to be part of. It's called Flip. The premise is simple: A young girl films herself flipping your brand into the dustbin because its advertising is offensive, insulting or just plain stupid.

Girl tested, girl approved: Heide Dangelmaier (center) brainstorms with 22-year-old Natalie Rodriguez (l.) and Rosaura Lezama, 20.

Girl tested, girl approved: Heide Dangelmaier (center) brainstorms with 22-year-old Natalie Rodriguez (l.) and Rosaura Lezama, 20.

Photo Credit: Andrew Walker

There are 190 such videos on a dedicated YouTube channel as of this writing. And 3iYing, the all-girl creative consultancy behind the effort, says it's received 400 entries and counting since opening up the concept to the public more than a month ago.

Brands that have been flipped include Lifestyles, Sony, Candies, MAC cosmetics and Lot 29 Juniors. Many get hit because the ads seem tailor-made not for girls but rather the lads who read titles such as Maxim or even Penthouse. Said a girl complaining about Christina Aguilera's sexed-up appearance in a Candies ad: "Christina Aguilera getting down and dirty with herself is a guy's fantasy, not something a girl wants to see." And 12-year-old Selina holds up an ad she found in a tween magazine and wonders why Lot 29 Juniors is trying to sell her jeans by featuring what appears to be a D-cup temptress (R&B artist Brooke Valentine) striking come-hither poses.

Leopard prints and pink laptops

Even when the product is for more-mature women, the advertising wildly misses the mark. One doesn't know whether to laugh or cry as 20-year-old Jennifer, with the help of other young women, takes down an ad for a Lifestyles sensual gel. The product is designed to give women better and more-frequent orgasms. So what's the problem? It features a bottle-blonde in a leopard print unitard. The copy reads, "Release your inner beast." Words the women used to describe this pictorial representation of their inner beast: "hooker," "slut," a "very low-end porno girl" and "total whore." One says the ad seems directly aimed at men. So much for the target audience. "It ended up turning girls off before it ever had a chance of turning them on," Jennifer says. Sony gets hit for featuring a pink laptop on the beach. Says 19-year-old Emily, "First of all, you would never bring your laptop to the beach." And even if you did -- and it matched your bikini -- you wouldn't leave it unattended to run off into the water.

According to a Sony spokeswoman, "While we understand 3iYing's take on this Vaio ad, we believe that ads are subjective and shouldn't necessarily be taken literally. The Sony Vaio shown in this ad is one of our best-selling models, and we think conveys the message that Vaios (especially in colors like pink) are fun and liberating." She also pointed out that the pink Vaios are part of Sony's pink-product lineup developed to support the Breast Cancer Research Fund. (Neither Lot 29 nor Lifestyles returned a request for comment by press time.)

Of course, there is a business angle to this. "We want to be advocates for girls, but we're not a nonprofit," said 3iYing founder Heidi Dangelmaier. She declined to discuss billings but said the company, which offers marketers a girl-centric mix of strategic planning, new-product creation, brand positioning, package design and creative treatments, makes money from licensing deals as well as projects.

Ms. Dangelmaier is fast-talking and passionate, someone who was pushing social networking back in the '90s, long before it was a buzzword, and throughout her consulting career has been an advocate for the girl audience. It's little wonder. She worked on her Ph.D. in the geeky but testosterone-laden field of robotics at Princeton, where she found that guys weren't necessarily sexist; they simply had no idea how women processed information or approached creativity. Not surprisingly, she went on to work with such marketers as Sega, Electronic Arts and Samsung.

Surviving 'boot camp'

For the past two years, she's been running 3iYing as a creative consultancy for brands. The company is made up of Ms. Dangelmaier and a group of girls and women ranging in age from 16 to 22, many of them recruited from art and design programs in the New York area. The girls must have the necessary skills and go through a "boot camp" program, and they're paid to work.

It's not the giggling gab-fest a cynic (or a man) might expect. And 3iYing isn't set up to be a trend-spotting shop. A recent visit to the SoHo office of 3iYing found two girls quietly working away on redesigning Varsity.com, the website for anything and everything related to cheerleading in the U.S.

Cheerleading, despite what some might think, is a big business, and it's taken seriously by the millions of girls who participate. Yet the old design is heavy on pink and a multitude of fonts -- a decidedly Web 0.5 affair. It looks like something someone thinks a girl should like rather than something a girl might actually like.

The company also has worked for brands such as Playtex, Rubbermaid, Merck and Unilever, doing everything from new-product development to package design. One notable project was a "modern-girl makeover" for Jones Apparel's L.E.I. denim line that included branding, positioning, identity, packaging, activation and advertising concepts. Said Ms. Dangelmaier: "It gave us a chance to show that even in an area as bloated with competitors as the denim industry, you can still create something fresh that stands out above the clutter."

Backfiring ads

The idea behind the Flip campaign -- aside from promoting the company and snagging more work -- is to help advertising stand out above the clutter for the right reasons. Marketers, Ms. Dangelmaier said, are not only throwing massive amounts of money away on bad advertising; they're angering the target audience. It isn't so much the tawdry, oversexed nature of some ads or the reliance on pink in others that they find offensive; it's just plain old-fashioned stupidity -- a creative outcome that could come only from the minds of people who have no inkling about what girls actually think.

Indeed, listening to Ms. Dangelmaier speak or watching some of the videos on the site, they're not suggesting anything radical. Get past the fact that she's a bit of an eccentric science type and that most of the girls aren't old enough to drink, and you'll hear a mix of best practices culled from traditional and Web 2.0 advertising.

The consumer is in control. Priorities have shifted to the audience -- in this case, girls. The ads and spots should be something she wants to see. The website has to be a place where she wants to spend time.

In one video, Jennifer (of the Lifestyles takedown) offers marketers and agencies an idea of what a girl wants from an ad: design, humor, intelligence, originality, truth.

Different generation

"Forget girl power," she said. "How about good ideas? That's what we want."

Beyond that, of course, is the fact that they're girls of a much different generation. It's no longer about geography or even demographics. There is a fairly dramatic difference in a 25-year-old woman who's likely just a little too old to have "grown up" with MySpace and YouTube. For those 22 and under, it's an entirely different world.

"It's not geographic borders that divide us. That girl in Ohio isn't locked away in isolation anymore," Ms. Dangelmaier said. Indeed, there's a bit of international flair to the Flips. Rosauro Lezama, a 20-year-old native of Mexico who moved to the U.S. and intends to major in marketing and graphic design, works for 3iYing and has done her fair share of Flips. The problems, she said, are universal. "They have the same problems in Mexico. I thought it would be different here."

Girls can now find their own niches, make different circles of friends. They're socializing and sharing -- and, yes, oversharing -- online. Where the 25-year-old may have written some autobiographical poetry on LiveJournal, the 20-year-old is using video to get her point across. In the process, she's learning a thing or two about media. Since these kids are using some of the same creative tools the professionals use, they have first-hand knowledge of the manipulation and editing that goes on. Dove's "Evolution" in other words, may have been a revelation to their parents, it was nothing new to girls in that age group.

Of course, there's a thriving industry built around telling marketers and advertisers how to advertise. It would probably be naïve to think a group of girls will get anyone to listen with a video camera and righteous indignation. In fact, none of the videos have approached true viral status yet.

Still, Ms. Dangelmaier said, "the humanity of the Flips might start changing their minds."

Vegetable Marrow

from IDEAS IN FOOD by Aki Kamozawa & H. Alexander Talbot

Today was great with discovery. I have wanted to figure out the functional viability of brussel spout stalks. Aki has cooked up broccoli stems and has me trained not to get rid of them no matter what. I have seen cauliflower stems used in dishes at Alinea and McCrady's. Yet I was curious about the large stalk which brussel sprouts grow from.

I spent the morning in the city at the green market. I picked up a number of great ingredients from sunchokes and wild watercress, which I have somehow lost, to brussel sprouts sold on the stalk, my initial reason for going to the market. When they sell the sprouts on the stalk, there are some beautiful specimens as well as a number of sprouts which have gone past their prime. The variety in quality did not deter my want and need for procuring the brussel sprout stalk.

When I returned home I trimmed the sprouts off the stalk and then watched my knife bounce off the stalk itself. What the heck had I gotten myself into? I then pulled out a serrated knife and tried to cut through the stalk. When I was halfway through the stalk I tried to break it. Silly me. Now my leg is bruised. I used the knife to cut all the way through the stalk and what I found was well worth the effort. The center of the brussel sprout stalk is tender and a mirror image of bone marrow. As it turns out I was cutting through brussel sprout bones. So, we cut the stalk in several different ways and then pressure cooked the pieces to tenderize the vegetable marrow.

After ten minutes in the pressure cooker what I imagined as vegetable marrow had the silky rich decadence and texture, without the fatty quality, of true bone marrow.

I am not sure how we will use this marrow, though a dousing of anchovy butter and some grilled toast would not be a bad place to start. I suppose we will also look at traditional methods of serving and preparing marrow and adapt them to our brussel sprout marrow.

Gigapan Project Brings Gigapixel Panoramas to the Web

from TechCrunch by Erick Schonfeld

The Web is getting more visually immersive all the time. For a peak at what a gigapixel pannoramic image looks like on the Web check out Gigapan, a project at Carnegie Mellon University. Using a rotating stand that it sells for $279, anyone can use their digital camera to take panoramic pictures stitched together from multiple shots. You can zoom in and zoom out with amazing clarity, and really dive deep into the pictures.

Cellphones: Samsung F700 Coming to Verizon?

from Gizmodo by Sean Fallon

According to the folks at Crunchgear, a variant of the much hyped Samsung F700 will be making its way into the open arms of Verizon users sometime in the near future. Outside of that, no other details exist and an official announcement has yet to be made —so try and keep your excitement in check. [ CrunchGear]

Yes, Plz: Netflix Considering Distributing Movies Via Consoles, Set-Top Box

from Gizmodo by Matt Buchanan

During its mostly positive Q3 earnings call, Netflix CEO Reed Hastings dropped word they're looking at "internet connected game consoles" and "dedicated internet set tops with a variety of partners, trying to understand the best ways to provide inexpensive viewing of online content on the television." Hey Reed, we're with you 100 percent—we even laid out exactly how you should do it. You can thank us by actually making it, which should also help shake the doubters on your long-term prospects. No, no, it's cool, we're here to help. [ Gamasutra via Gaming Today ]

Design Concept: Disappearing Wall Stairs Should Be In Every Millionaire's Home

from Gizmodo by Adrian Covert

Aaron Tang's wall stairs are meant for living areas that are short on space, but they're so awesome that I'd want them even if I had 1,000,000 sq. ft. house. They work by having the frame of the stairs slide out from the wall, powered by hydraulic pistons, and having the stair planks fold over the frame one at a time. When finished, the stair frame slides back in the wall and the planks stand straight up, flush against the wall. Imagine, next time you're at a mansion/estate/castle party, you walk into the foyer to find no stairs at all. Then the owner hits a button on a remote and stairs appear from the wall. I'm pretty sure your mind would be blown. [Aaron Tang via Architechnophilia via TreeHugger]

Apple and Sony, like peas in an iPod

from Engadget by Thomas Ricker

Funny huh? We knew something was a tad too familiar with those Sony DSC-T2 Cyber-shot cameras announced yesterday. Now, Engadget Japanese reveals why. Those pictures are official, un-doctored press shots from both Apple and Sony. The former (and we mean former) comes courtesy of archive.org since it's been supplanted by Apple's new nano. Of course, Apple's no saint in these matters either. Flattery at its finest, eh? Sony, like.no.other.

LCDs: Hands on Samsung's LED Backlit HDTV LCD (Verdict: LN-T4681F Best Ever)

from Gizmodo by Brian Lam

The LED backlighting on Samsung's 1080p 81-series makes it the best LCD I've ever seen. You've been hearing about such a screen's advantages for months—that it can turn off individual LEDs section to section, moment to moment, keeping blacks blacker and brights brighter—but over the last few weeks with this TV I'm sold on the tech. Even without running test discs, it's clearly blacker than the last LCD I tested, the 65 series Samsung, and I suspect it's blacker than the Sharp 92 series TV I tested before that, which is one of the best LCDs ever made in this regard. But unlike both of these great LCDs, it does not sacrifice shadow detail or brightness when tuned black. It has no problem whatsoever maintaining the greys from washing to nothingness. UPDATE: Great memory, haragr, The Qualia 005 was first, at $15k. There's more great feedback in the comments.

I tested using an HDMI splitter from Gefen, Blu-ray and HD DVD titles like 300, Batman Beyond, and Xbox games like Halo 3, Halo 3, and Halo 3. I don't think that motion handling was improved over the last generation LCD, and plasma still has the advantage here. But the picture is as life-like as I've seen on a TV like this generation. It is a big jump. But not perfect. Although Sound and Vision and CNet liked this TV's predecessor a lot, and are bound to love this one, a quick standard def HQV test disc test showed that the TV is running the same level of upscaling performance as the 65f. PC mag didn't love that about this TV and to my eye, it was a middling performer at best. Color seemed even to me, uncalibrated, when viewing a simple color bar pattern. Like all the glossy screened Samsung TVs, it kicks up a lot of glare, and the case itself is a dust magnet. It has an 8ms response time, which is twice that of the 65f series, but that didn't bother me a bit; I've never been able to directly qualify 120hz or sub 8ms response times as something I could notice. (Unlike the contrast of this TV.)

The LED count behind the screen is in the hundreds, and there are dozens of sections that can be individually controlled. The dimming occurs in many degrees, and because LEDs can be turned down with a greater degree of control than CCFLs, its easy to get lighting to be pretty close to zero without dropping to complete black. That helps gray detail. The controls are pretty bad-ass, too: Full touch controls for everything, and the power switch is the round semi circle under the logo. Very slick.

The TV itself isn't cheap: For a 46-inch set, you'll pay $4000 at Crutchfield, but like anything, they'll drop in price soon enough.

So far, this is the best LCD I've seen yet. Highly recommended. I'll either match this up against a Pioneer Kuro or a Olevia LCD next. [Stats at Samsung]

Wednesday, October 24, 2007

Create your own polls

Lifehacker Top 10: Top 10 Google Products You Forgot All About

from Lifehacker by Gina Trapani

Living in the shadow of Gmail, Reader and Calendar's got to be tough, but that's what a slew of useful Google products do every day. We give Google's front-running applications a lot of ink (or pixels, as it were), and the rest a passing mention in the fast-flowing river of news. Today's top 10 pays homage to the little brother and sister Google products that you forgot all about.

10. Google Code Search

Mostly of interest only to programmers, Google Code Search is a pretty incredible mechanism for finding and browsing the innards of countless open source projects. Use the lang: operator to limit your results to a certain language, and search by developer name, file name, or comments. Here's a search for the words "nasty hack" in PHP code—lang:PHP nasty hack—and here's a search for Javascript authored by Gmail Macros developer Mihai Parparita.

9. Google Base

Easily publish and find recipes, classifieds, vacation rentals and job listings at Google Base, a no-web site way to get data online and into Google's search results. What's great about Base is that it offers data type-specific search operators. For example, you can search recipes by ingredient, or vacation rentals by location and features like how many bedrooms, and what type of property it is (cabin, cottage, hotel, villa, house, etc.)

8. Google Trends

Compare the "world's interest" in certain words and topics at Google Trends, which charts the number of times a word or phrase appeared on the web over time. Great for checking out the history of popular neologisms and brand names (like iPhone or lifehacker), you can also pit terms against one another. You can see from the image above that the phrase "getting things done" has been around a lot longer than the word "lifehacker." (Pit GTD vs lifehacker at Google Trends.)

7. Google Alerts

Make your web search results come to you with Google Alerts, email notifications of new web pages search terms pop up on as the Googlebot discovers them. Google Alerts automatically hands me Lifehacker story ideas every morning, and it's also great to ego search your own name, web site title or product name, too. To get results for several term searches in one alert, separate them with a pipe (|) or combine terms with AND, like wildfire AND "San Diego".

6. Google Book Search

Remember those rectangular objects that you used to read by turning a page from one side to the other? Ah, those were the days. You can still get your books online at Google Book Search, whose book-scanning elves add to the digital library all the time. Flip through pages of the books scanned into Book Search, and add books to your personal virtual library as well. Along those same lines, academics won't want to forget about Google Scholar for searching papers, theses, abstracts and articles, from academic publishers, professional societies, preprint repositories, universities and other scholarly organizations.

5. Google Page Creator

When Aunt Martha and Uncle Skip ask how to set up a web page? Point 'em to Google Page Creator, a totally web-based, WYSIWYG web site creation tool that hosts up to 100MB of files for free.

4. Google Notebook

We all find snippets of web pages, quotes, and images all over the web we want to copy to a personal library, and Google Notebook is a powerful way to do just that. Whether you're researching a particular project, capturing ideas as you come across them online, or Getting Things Done, Notebook (especially coupled with its companion Firefox extension) is a powerful, useful tool.

3. Flight Simulator in Google Earth

Ok, so Google doesn't make a flight simulator, but they do hide one in the latest version of Google Earth. Download Google Earth 4.2 , and to enter flight sim mode, hit Ctrl+Alt+A (Mac users: Cmd+Opt+A), choose your plane, airport and runway. Google Earth's flight simulator isn't a walk in the park for newbs, so here's more info on how to take off and navigate the friendly, virtual skies .

2. Keyboard Shortcuts Experimental Web Search

Hidden deep in the bowels of Google Labs is the Keyboard Shortcuts flavor of web search, which takes your mouse out of web search entirely. Once you're using Keyboard Shortcuts search (just add "&esrch=BetaShortcuts" to your Google URLs), use J and K to move up and down a search results list. Open a link using O or the Enter key; bring your cursor to the search box using / (forward slash), and Esc to get out of the search box. Here, install the keyboard shortcuts version of Google search into Firefox or IE7's built-in search box for easy access.

1. SketchUp

Free 3-D modeling program Google SketchUp lets anyone virtually architect their dream house, remodeled kitchen, office, spaceship or skyscraper. Download Google SketchUp for free, for Mac or PC.
This was a tough list to winnow down, as Google's full product list is long and prodigious. In fact, we're still having regrets about leaving Patent Search, Google Moon, and Google Mars off the list. What's your top lower-profile Google app? Shout it out in the comments.

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