David Emery OnlineAnnouncing Little Printer and BERG Cloud
Little Printer lives in your front room and scours the Web on your behalf, assembling the content you care about into designed deliveries a couple of times a day.
You configure Little Printer from your phone, and there’s some great content to choose from — it’s what Little Printer delivers that makes it really special.
This is just a little bit magical. There’s something incredibly compelling about a device that takes the modern internet – Foursquare checkins and all – and makes it something physical.
Also, the design and accompanying video are perfect:
Visit ➔The Wired.co.uk Podcast 52
We'll cover the week in Wired news as normal, including stories about the first lab-grown hamburgers, airmiles for cyclists, batteries that charge in 15 minutes, wine bottles made from paper and Mongolia's plan to cool itself with giant blocks of ice.
And we'll also look back at the last year of trends we've covered on the show. Nate, Duncan, Katie and Liv each pick their favourite topic and we bring a whole host of special expert guests onto the show to discuss how those trends will evolve over the next year.
At about 31mins in you can hear me talk a little bit about music apps (and it turns out I don’t at all sound like I think I do).
Visit ➔Responsive Advertising
Recently at Mark Boulton Design, we’ve been working on a redesign of the global visual language for a large sports network. Like many web sites delivering news and editorial content, they rely on advertising for their revenue — either through multiple ad slots on the page, or from video pre-rolls.
Early on in the project, we discussed Responsive Web Design at length. From an editorial and product perspective, it makes perfect sense. Who wouldn’t want their content adapting to a device their reading it on? Who wants to pinch-zoom again and again? From a business and product perspective, we’ve seen this from multiple clients who want to take advantage of certain interactions on certain devices — swiping for example — for users to better engage with the content in a more native way. All good. And then advertising comes along and things get challenging.
Really great post on the pitfalls of integrating advertising in responsive sites. Seems like this could well take a lot of time to fix properly – most sites just don’t have the leverage with their advertising provider to be able to shift their advertising around.
Visit ➔ExtendNY - New York City Extended
The Manhattan Grid extended to every point on earth
So awesome.
I’m on 63,741 st and 10,869 Ave. Taxi fair to Williamsburg might be a bit much from here though.
Visit ➔Sting’s iPad app cost “in the low seven figures” to develop
Earlier this week, we reported on the launch of Sting 25, an iPad app celebrating Sting’s solo career. But how much did it cost to make? More than one million dollars. This is according to the Wall Street Journal.
The app itself – if you’re a Sting fan – is pretty nice, but over $1million to develop is just plain ridiculous. A quick glance at the credits – which is several pages long – tells you why: when you involve big agencies, they’re very good at spending your money.
I find it interesting that Chevrolet and AmEx feel they are getting enough value from having their logos slapped on the splash page to finance such an endevour (assuming that is that they’re together stumping the cost). By then, sponsorship is the only way to go if you’re spending that much money on an app like this as you sure as hell aren’t going to sell 100,000 copies at $9.99.
Visit ➔Google+ Launches Pages, Opens Floodgates For Brands (And Everything Else)
And then there’s the feature that leads to my biggest gripe: Pages have both a +1 button and an ‘Add to Circles’ button. The latter is what permits the Page to start sending you updates. And the +1 button? It does essentially nothing, at least as far as users are concerned.
It’s not exactly surprising that Google have launched brand pages for Google+ but I do find it pretty surprising that they seem so bandy thought through. They seem to be the bare minimum that they could have launched with, which would be fine if there wasn’t a very developed alternative dominating the market already.
I have my concerns as well over the inevitable land grab that will happen as soon as everyone can make these brand pages; one of the big things they’re pushing is the integration with Google search, but I really don’t want a Google+ brand page showing up as one of the top results for one of our artists (as it’s almost the last place I’d want people to go) – to the point that actually, maybe it’s worth steering clear for that reason alone.
Checking my Google+ feed now shows the last post as being from 4 days ago, and if I go 10 posts down it’s almost a month ago. I have pretty much the same set of people loaded into it as I do on Facebook, and the latest activity there is 2 minutes ago. I do wonder where Google is going to go with this…
Visit ➔Some thoughts on Facebook
“Boom!”
It came about a third of the way into Mark Zuckerberg’s F8 keynote, but it was obvious far earlier that he was putting on his very best Steve Jobs impression. And, to be honest, he didn’t really do that bad a job of it; sure, his presentation style needs a lot of work – he really needs to stop laughing as much at his own jokes for a start – but the products they announced definitely had an Apple feel to them.
The new timeline profile is the perfect example of that – great visual design, coupled with innovation and a willingness to cast aside something extremely popular for something completely different, but better. I’ve so far been quite unimpressed by Google+, but what Facebook are doing now just makes them look silly – they are leagues ahead, with Google struggling to catch up to where they were a couple of years ago (again – see also Apple versus other tablet makers).
So, what about the music elements? Another constant around Apple keynotes are the wild rumours that fly around before hand, that don’t quite get fulfilled, and we had the same here. The talk of a service-agnostic playing system, where it...
Read more ➔Two Key Features Of Facebook Music: Scrobbling And Track Unification
One thing we’ve heard from a very good source is that a key aspect of the service will be “scrobbling”. The term, made popular by Last.fm, means that when you listen to a song, it gets sent to your profile without you have to do anything. I assume there will be a way to turn this off, or a way for you to selectively share songs, but this is a key to the service.
I’m loath to speculate on rumoured products like this – who knows what it’ll actually be – but this sounds like it could be massive. Facebook is already the biggest single driver to artist websites, and this will just make it even more powerful.
It also – sorry to say – sounds like it could be the final blow for Last.fm; why have a social network just for music when the biggest social network has most of the features (that mainstream users want, at least).
Visit ➔Amazon in Talks to Launch Digital-Book Library
Amazon.com Inc. is talking with book publishers about launching a Netflix Inc.-like service for digital books, in which customers would pay an annual fee to access a library of content, according to people familiar with the matter.
Or: Spotify for Books.
I think I’ve blogged before how I think this is a potential killer product; people only read (most) books once, so a rental model rather then a ownership model makes way more sense.
There’s also nothing stopping them replicating the ad-supported free service as well, or how about you get a year’s free service when you buy a Kindle? Could be very interesting indeed.
Visit ➔