Back in December, Empire Magazine wrote something along the lines of “In a perfect world, every movie would be made by the Coen brothers.” This prompted a discussion between /Film reader Angela Diaz and her friends about who the Coens would cast in their version of Star Wars.
A few hours and a photoshop session later, we came up with the attached picture. We love reading your blog and thought you guys might want to post it and spawn some more discussion.
Check out the full photo cast list after the jump.
Click on the image below to enlarge:
The stuff of nightmares. Every hour, Jack breaks through the door and announces himself to the accompaniment of Shelly Duvall's screaming. Fear the top of the hour! (By designer Chris Dimino, via IWatchStuff .)
The Best Links:
As location-based apps proliferate, so does the need for umbrella services that can aggregate data from multiple networks. Tweetsii, which is being introduced at SXSW, is one such service that looks promising. The app exploits Twitter's location-tagged data stream to tell you who's Tweeting nearby, and it also ties in Gowalla and Foursquare data too.
The way Tweetsii's Web site explains the app is almost adorable: "Tweetsii connects people and places across networks. Tweetsii is breaking the wall between the real world and the digital world, where power of the Internet is in real time to have more fun, meet more people, and do more cool stuff ... " But it's undeniable that the app really is trying to break down the barriers between location-based social networking/gaming apps like Twitter and Gowalla and Foursquare because as well as being primarily focused on showing you who's Twittering nearby your location, it also synthesizes all local data from each of these other LBS games into one stream.
And it also goes one further than the simple information-light "check-in" systems that drive Gowalla and Foursquare, by offering its own place-creation code, as well as data-rich upload powers like tagged photos and comments. That means a Tweetsii check-in location can reveal far more to you about who else is checking in there than the simpler systems exploited by Foursquare, for example. It also offers a localized trending topics feed, for hyperlocal news and event alerts.
Essentially Tweetsii is trying to out-Twitter Twitter, while simultaneously lacing in feeds from your other LBS games--and thus turning itself into a one-stop shop for LBS-based social networking. This makes it sound pretty clever...but will the gamble work? It may do, for rabid fans of location-based smartphone gaming who prefer to use Twitter as their primary gateway to the LBS social net world.
[Tweetsii]
T-Mobile (NYSE: DT) has tweaked the prices of its mobile data plans and introduced its first HSPA+ USB modem. This is cool stuff because it could potentially get you 21 Mbps on the go.
The webConnect Rocket USB laptop stick will be sold for $99 with a two-year contract and it will get you souped-up 3G and access to T-Mobile’s WiFi hotspots. The HSPA+ network is already live in Philadelphia, and the fourth-largest U.S. carrier is going to expand this technology to the rest of its 3G network.
The pricing will be:
Even More webConnect data plan (two year contract):
· $59.99/mo. for 5GB per month ($0.20/MB overage)
· $29.99/mo. for 200MB per month ($0.20/MB overage)
Even More Plus webConnect data plan (no annual contract):
· $49.99/mo. for 5GB per month ($0.20/MB overage)
· $19.99/mo. for 200MB per month ($0.20/MB overage)
Related News from IntoMobile:
katamaran78 has created “Galactica: Sabotage”, a remake of Spike Jonze’s now classic music video for the Beastie Boys song Sabotage, but edited together using footage from Battlestar Galactica. I was very impressed how the video was copied almost shot-for-shot, so much so the creator also released a side by side comparison of the two videos. Both of which can be viewed, after the jump.
Galactica: Sabotage:
Side by Side Comparison video:
via: laughingsquid
Designer Chris Dimino created a cuckoo clock themed after Stanley Kubrick’s classic The Shining. Dimino was challenged to create a cuckoo clock in which the clock itself, the cuckoo motion, sound, and the pendulum capture a moment in time fitting these elements to a concept. The solution was the classic moment from The Shining in which Jack Nicholson as Jack Torrance comes crashing through the door wielding an ax.
The clock mimics the moment from the film, and every hour Jack breaks through the door and the famous line “Here’s Johnny” plays followed by a scream by Shining co-star Shelly Duvall. Check out the full clock after the jump.
Unfortunately, the clock is just a one-off concept, and is not being mass produced or available for sale anywhere. If it was, you’d see one on my wall. Although I think the scream of Shelly Duvall would get annoying real fast, especially at a rate of once an hour.
Cool Stuff is a daily feature of slashfilm.com. Know of any geekarific creations or cool products which should be featured on Cool Stuff? E-Mail us at orfilms@gmail.com.
via: Nerdcore
When Blippy launched a few months ago, the idea was to get the site up there as bare-bones as possible so it was simple to people. That makes sense since the idea of sharing your credit card transaction data was (and remains) highly controversial. But despite the controversy, users have embraced Blippy. So now it’s time to give it a fresh coat of paint — and a new privacy feature.
Today, Blippy has undergone a massive redesign. Previously, Blippy was a stream of your friends’ transactions and little else. Now, it’s much more robust. In fact, it looks very similar to the most recent redesign of Facebook. You’ll notice the new update indicators next to the logo that get badged with a number when there is an update. You’ll also notice a search box front and center (for now, this is only to search for businesses or users).
More important than the redesign is the new feature Blippy is launching. Starting today, you can manually review each purchase before it’s displayed on Blippy. This is an important step in the direction of better privacy controls. Previously, you could pick and choose which sources you imported your transaction data from, but it was an all-or-nothing proposition. You could remove items after they appeared in your stream, but not before. Now you can do that by approving each one. A bit of a pain? Sure, but for some who are really concerned about privacy, this is a welcome addition (of course, you may wonder why they’d be using Blippy in the first place, but hey, people are weird).
This new setting will be displayed when users hook up their credit card or e-commerce account for the first time to Blippy.
Blippy has already streamed about $15 million in purchases, co-founder Philip Kaplan notes. “Today, thousands of people are automatically sharing purchases on Blippy. I think of it as ‘a stream of cool stuff my friends are buying.’ The additional level of control we’re introducing will make it even easier for people to share just want they want to share — whether a new iPhone app, movie from Netflix, favorite bar or restaurant, or grocery store run,” Kaplan says.
In January, Blippy raised a $1.6 million round of funding. The company is also getting some traction with retailers — though not all of them.
Blippy Gets A Facebook-Inspired Redesign And An Important New Privacy Feature
- Louis GrayBlippy Gets A Facebook-Inspired Redesign And An Important New Privacy Feature
- Rob DianaSocialMash:> Blippy Gets A Facebook-Inspired Redesign And An Important New Privacy Feature http://ow.ly/16LIFC
- Jim WilkersonSocialMash:> Blippy Gets A Facebook-Inspired Redesign And An Important New Privacy Feature http://ow.ly/16LIFD
- Jim WilkersonBlippy Gets A Facebook-Inspired Redesign And An Important New Privacy Feature
- Sarah Perez
According to a new piece at The LA Times, Warner Bros. are currently looking to push ahead with one of their two, long-in-development takes on the Wonderful Wizard of Oz story; meanwhile, Collider are reporting that no movement has been made on either project in over a year and that the Times piece is simply repackaging old information with no real reason to be doing so right now. In fact, they even call it ‘hit whoring’.
Who’s right? I guess we’ll have to wait and see if there’s any action in the next few weeks or so, but I personally wouldn’t be surprised to find Warners chasing after Alice in Wonderland’s big box office with the nearest thing in reach.
The two projects supposedly in contention are the Josh Olson version, and another one from Darren Lemke, writer on the upcoming fourth Shrek as well as Bryan Singer’s Jack the Giant Killer and a New Line take on The Nutcracker.
Meanwhile, Universal have their Wicked film (based on the Oz-related musical of the same name) somewhere along the pipe, and there’s also a John Boorman-directed CG version of Oz that hasn’t been heard of for a while, though is still said to be progressing, if slowly. The future is looking more than a little Baumy.
Here’s a little distraction for you, something to play with for a couple of idle minutes. In order to promote the DVD and BD release of Saw VI (out since January in the US, in UK stores this week), Lionsgate have whipped up a little Where’s Waldo-style picture with Jigsaw’s creepy tricycling puppet Billy hidden away amongst several Saw and Waldo characters and in jokes. You can see the full picture after the break.
The picture was created by Daniel David Freeman who has had some rather hip shows in London and done work for a series of similarly hip clients.
Guilherme Martins wanted a simple Arduino-compatible board that he could use as a robotics platform, so he designed one. Called the Motoruino, he took a standard Arduino board and added an H-Bridge chip so that it can control two motors directly. Of course, you could certainly get the same functionality using an add-on board such as the MotorShield (or even by making your own on a breadboard). If you know you are going to be making a robot, though, I can certainly see that having everything together on a single piece would help make your project smaller and more reliable.
He is working on some final tweaks, and plans to release the project under the Creative Commons license. Cool stuff! [via Lets Make Robots]
In the Maker Shed:
FlowingData have converted some of the most famous movie quotes in this history of cinema into an infographic. Check it out, embedded after the jump.
Anyone who’s been involved in web development for any length of time has likely encountered the Developers VS Users situation. It’s a mistake that can often lead to expensive problems down the road. So what exactly is the problem? And how can you spot it–and solve it–before it derails you project and causes you to make a costly mistake? Here’s how…
Most developers became developers because they want to work on and build cool stuff. Like everyone, they want to build things that gain the respect of their peers. This aspiration is where the problems get started. Unless you happen to develop for an extremely technical audience, users don’t want cool stuff. They just want stuff that works and makes their life easier. For example, let’s say a developer wants to build a weather dashboard with real time satellite video feeds, an AJAX module that show the latest temperature, barometric pressure and wind speed/direction, the sunrise/sunset times, and tidal data. A regular user, on the other hand, just wants to know “is it going to be sunny or cloudy and do I need a jacket or umbrella today?”
We’ve seen several examples of this played out in public in our little tech-bubble-blogosphere in the past year:
So how do you recognize when you are in this situation? If you, your developer, or anyone on your team makes these kind of statements, chances are strong that you are on the wrong path:
What can you do to prevent this kind of mistake from ruining your project? Here are some ideas:
At the end of the day, you and everyone involved needs to understand that, for your project to succeed, it needs to solve a problem users have first and foremost. Stroking the ego of the CEO, making the marketing department look clever, or making a developer feel stimulated are not real goals.
Advertisement: Ezilon.com Regional Directory – Check to see if your website is listed! #5
This post originally came from Michael Gray who is an SEO Consultant. Be sure not to miss the Thesis Wordpress Theme review.
Developers VS Users
Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.
It seems that recently all the attention has been going to the iPhone or the Android platform. There will soon be an uproar with Windows Mobile as they will be doing away with all the old installation packages and there will be no upgrade path to Windows Mobile 7.
Well we felt that we were missing out on showing our Blackberry users a little love. So here, without further ado, is a list of 6 free Blackberry software applications to download and install that will essentially trick out your mobile phone and make it do what you want it to do.
I tried very hard not to include any of the free Blackberry software we already covered here in this post from Grant.
The first application we will cover is the free Blackberry Kindle software. The free Kindle application can be downloaded first to your computer or over the air on your Blackberry via this link. You will be able to link to your Amazon account and any eBooks you have already purchased as well as being able to buy paid and free books via Amazon as well.
This is a nifty feature to add to your Blackberry, essentially making it a eBook reader. Nice!
Next up is an application called StockView and as you can guess it displays NYSE (New York Stock Exchange) and NASDAQ quotes. There are loads of stock applications for the Blackberry but most of them are either charging $29.99 for the application or a monthly fee. This application is totally free (at least for now). The site lists it as a trial but it will work indefinitely.
Now let’s make your Blackberry into a powerful money sending/accepting machine. Paypal has provided an application via the Blackberry Appworld Store that allows you to log into your Paypal account and view your balance, check your history and send money. This is very cool stuff! Check if that payment came in right on the spot before you continue working…
You can download it via this link.
And of course if you have full access to your PayPal account why not your eBay account as well?
Well from the eBay App for the Blackberry you can pretty much do anything you can do directly on eBay’s website without having to be in front of a computer! No more waiting around for that auction to end and you can search auctions on the go!
Now how about having the power of Directory Assistance without having to make a phone call? The application is called Beyond411 and can be downloaded from here.
I first saw this on the iPhone and it looked great. Beyond411 is a service for information that goes one step beyond basic 411 information. It allows you to drill down and find what you are looking for. You set your location so it returns local stuff and it goes on to provide, in addition to the directory searching on Yellow Pages, support for maps, driving directions and white pages.
The last application, and certainly not least worthy, is a program called WorldMate Live. WorldMate Live has a free and a paid version. The free version allows you to view and modify your travel itinerary, see world clocks, weather forecasts and there is even a currency converter in there.
Consider this a traveler’s best friend or assistant. It will hold your information down so you don’t lose or misplace it. You can go Gold (paid) to have flight alerts and status automatically updated on the go. All in all, after using this application, I don’t know how to travel without it.
Did I leave out your favorite free Blackberry application? Well than hit us up in the comments!
Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!
Teefury’s t-shirt of the day is a great LOST parody created by Spanish artist Naolito titled “Desmond’s Replacement”. Anyone who watches the television series Lost will understand the reference. And what is a Lost reference without a Polar Bear?
The good news is that the tee is available for only $9 plus shipping. The bad news is that the tee will only be available today (March 9th 2010). At midnight eastern time, it will disappear forever. So get it while you still can.
Cool Stuff is a daily feature of slashfilm.com. Know of any geekarific creations or cool products which should be featured on Cool Stuff? E-Mail us at orfilms@gmail.com.
Paramount Pictures and Marvel Entertainment have released high resolution images of a new Iron Man 2 in theatre standee and two new character posters, both of which you can probably find in your local multiplex beginning this week. They have also released a new production photo from the film. Check it out, after the jump. And as always, click on the images to enlarge.
The internet is abuzz that a new Bill & Ted movie might be in the works, but sadly the source of the speculation isn’t that substantial. On the red carpet for the Academy Awards, MTV asked Keanu Reeves if we’d be seeing a new Bill & Ted sequel in the future. Reeves laughed and responded by saying “I’m trying, I’m trying.”
MTV journo Josh Horowitz asked if he was joking, to which Reeves responded “I’m not…” Alex Winter and Keanu Reeves back together again? “We’ll See.” You can watch the clip from yourself embedded after the jump. It’s very hard to tell if Reeves is just trying to appease the MTV interviewer or is actually serious about his reply. Either way, I think another Excellent Adventure may be years and years off.
jQuery is not always as it appears. There's a lot of cool stuff going on under the surface, and there are many methods just waiting to be discovered, and many potential usages of jQuery's API that you may not have considered before. In this article I'll be taking you through a few of the not-so-obvious things I've discovered about jQuery.
When you call 'jQuery' what happens?
The jQuery function itself is very simple:
jQuery = function (selector, context) {
// The jQuery object is actually just the init constructor 'enhanced'
return new jQuery.fn.init(selector, context);
};
Under its skin, the jQuery function (commonly referred to as the "wrapper" function) simply returns an instantiated jQuery object — i.e. an instance of the 'jQuery.fn.init' constructor.
This is useful to know; with this information we know that each time we call 'jQuery' we're actually creating a totally unique object with a set of properties. jQuery is clever in that it gives you an object that can be treated as an array. Each of your elements (all together, commonly known as the "collection") is referenced within the object under a numerical index, just like within an array. And jQuery also gives this object a 'length' property, just as you would expect from an array. This opens up a world of possibilities. For one, it means that we can borrow some functionality from 'Array.prototype'. jQuery's 'slice' method is a good example of this — modified from the source:
/* ... jQuery.fn.extend({ ... */
slice: function() {
return this.pushStack(
Array.prototype.slice.apply( this, arguments ),
"slice",
Array.prototype.slice.call(arguments).join(",")
);
},
/* ... */
The native 'slice' method doesn't care that 'this' is not a real array– it'll be fine with anything that's got a 'length' property and [0], [1], [2] etc.
There are some other interesting properties within this jQuery object — '.selector' and '.context' will, most of the time, reflect the arguments that you pass into 'jQuery(…)'.
var jqObject = jQuery('a');
jqObject.selector; // => "a"
One thing that's important to note is that jQuery will sometimes give you new jQuery objects to work with. If you run a method that changes the collection in some way, such as '.parents()', then jQuery won't modify the current object; it'll simply pass you a brand new one:
var originalObject = jQuery('a');
var anotherObject = originalObject.parents();
originalObject === anotherObject; // => false
All methods that appear to mutate the collection in some way return a brand new jQuery object — you can still access the old object though, via '.end()', or more verbosely, via '.prevObject'.
Central to jQuery's DOM capabilities, is its element creation syntax. 1.4 brought with it an entirely new way to create your elements quickly and succinctly. E.g.
var myDiv = jQuery('<div/>', {
id: 'my-new-element',
class: 'foo',
css: {
color: 'red',
backgrondColor: '#FFF',
border: '1px solid #CCC'
},
click: function() {
alert('Clicked!');
},
html: jQuery('<a/>', {
href: '#',
click: function() {
// do something
return false;
}
})
});
As of 1.4 you can pass a second argument to the jQuery function when you're creating an element — the object you pass will, for the most part, act as if you were passing it to '.attr(…)'. However, jQuery will map some of the properties to its own methods, for example, the 'click' property maps to jQuery's 'click' method (which binds an event handler for the 'click' event) and 'css' maps to jQuery's 'css' method etc.
To check out what properties map to jQuery's methods, open your console and type 'jQuery.attrFn'.
jQuery provides a method that you can use to serialize all of the inputs within one or more forms. This is useful when submitting data via XHR ("Ajax"). It's been in jQuery for a long time but it's not often talked about and so many developers don't realise it's there. Submitting an entire form via Ajax, using jQuery, couldn't be simpler:
var myForm = $('#my-form');
jQuery.post('submit.php', myForm.serialize(), function(){
alert('Data has been sent!');
});
jQuery also provides the 'serializeArray' method, which is designed to be used with multiple forms, and the 'param' helper function (under the jQuery namespace) which takes a regular object and returns a query string, e.g.
var data = {
name: 'Joe',
age: 44,
profession: 'Web Developer'
};
jQuery.param(data); // => "name=Joe&age=44&profession=Web+Developer"
jQuery's 'animate' method is probably the most flexible of jQuery's methods. It can be used to animate pretty much anything, not just CSS properties, and not just DOM elements. This is how you would normally use 'animate':
jQuery('#box').animate({
left: 300,
top: 300
});
When you specify a property to animate (e.g. 'top') jQuery checks to see if you're animating something with a style property ('element.style'), and it checks if the specified property ('top') is defined under 'style' — if it's not then jQuery simply updates 'top' on the element itself. Here's an example:
jQuery('#box').animate({
top: 123,
foo: 456
});
'top' is a valid CSS property, so jQuery will update 'element.style.top', but 'foo' is not a valid CSS property, so jQuery will simply update 'element.foo'.
We can use this to our advantage. Let's say, for example, that you want to animate a square on a canvas. First let's define a simple constructor and a 'draw' method that'll be called on every step of the animation:
function Square(cnvs, width, height, color) {
this.x = 0;
this.y = 0;
this.width = width;
this.height = height;
this.color = color;
this.cHeight = cnvs.height;
this.cWidth = cnvs.width;
this.cntxt = cnvs.getContext('2d');
}
Square.prototype.draw = function() {
this.cntxt.clearRect(0, 0, this.cWidth, this.cHeight);
this.cntxt.fillStyle = this.color;
this.cntxt.fillRect(this.x, this.y, this.width, this.height);
};
We've created our 'Square' constructor, and one of its methods. Creating a canvas and then animating it couldn't be simpler:
// Create a <canvas/> element
var canvas = $('<canvas/>').appendTo('body')[0];
canvas.height = 400;
canvas.width = 600;
// Instantiate Square
var square = new Square(canvas, 70, 70, 'rgb(255,0,0)');
jQuery(square).animate({
x: 300,
y: 200
}, {
// 'draw' should be called on every step
// of the animation:
step: jQuery.proxy(square, 'draw'),
duration: 1000
});
This is a very simple effect, but it does clearly demonstrate the possibilities. You can see it in action here: http://jsbin.com/ocida (this will only work in browsers that support the HTML5 canvas)
jQuery's Ajax utility functions ('jQuery.ajax', 'jQuery.get', 'jQuery.post') all return an 'XMLHttpRequest' object which you can use to perform subsequent operations on any request. For example:
var curRequest;
jQuery('button.makeRequest').click(function(){
curRequest = jQuery.get('foo.php', function(response){
alert('Data: ' + response.responseText);
});
});
jQuery('button.cancelRequest').click(function(){
if (curRequest) {
curRequest.abort(); // abort() is a method of XMLHttpRequest
}
});
Here we're making a request whenever the 'makeRequest' button is clicked — and we're cancelling the active request if the user clicks the 'cancelRequest' button.
Another potential usage is for synchronous requests:
var myRequest = jQuery.ajax({
url: 'foo.txt',
async: false
});
console.log(myRequest.responseText);
Read more about the 'XMLHttpRequest' object and also be sure to check out jQuery's Ajax utilities.
jQuery has a built-in queuing mechanism that's used by all of its animation methods (all of which use 'animate()' really). This queuing can be illustrated easily with a simple animation:
jQuery('a').hover(function(){
jQuery(this).animate({paddingLeft:'+=15px'});
}, function(){
jQuery(this).animate({paddingLeft:'-=15px'});
});
Quickly hovering over a bunch of anchors and then hovering over them again will cause the animations to queue up and occur one at a time — I'm sure many of you have witnessed this queuing effect before. If not, check it out here: http://jsbin.com/aqaku
The 'queue' method is similar to the well-known 'each' method in how it's called. You pass a function, which will eventually be called for each of the elements in the collection:
jQuery('a').queue(function(){
jQuery(this).addClass('all-done').dequeue();
});
Passing just a function to 'queue' will cause that function to be added to the default 'fx' queue, i.e. the queue used by all animations done by jQuery. Therefore, this function will not be called until all current animations occurring on each element in the collection (in this case, all anchors) have completed.
Notice that we're adding a class of 'all-done' in the function above. As outlined, this class will only be added when all current animations are complete. We're also calling the 'dequeue' method. This is very important, as it will allow jQuery to continue with the queue (i.e. it lets jQuery know that you're finished with whatever you're doing). jQuery 1.4 provides another way of continuing the queue; instead of calling 'dequeue', simply call the first argument passed to your function:
jQuery('a').queue(function(nextItemInQueue){
// Continue queue:
nextItemInQueue();
});
This does exactly the same, although it's slightly more useful in that it can be called anywhere within your function, even within a mess of closures (that typically destroy the 'this' keyword). Of course, pre-jQuery-1.4 you could just save a reference to 'this', but that would get a bit tiresome.
To add a function to a custom queue, simply pass your custom queue's name as the first argument and the function as the second:
jQuery('a').queue('customQueueName', function(){
// Do stuff
jQuery(this).dequeue('customQueueName');
});
Notice that, since we're not using the default 'fx' queue, we also have to pass our queue's name to the 'dequeue' method, in order to allow jQuery to continue with our custom queue.
Read more about 'queue', 'dequeue' and 'jQuery.queue'.
jQuery provides a way for you to namespace events, which can be very useful when authoring plugins and third-party components. If needed, the user of your plugin can effectively disable your plugin by unbinding all event handlers that it's registered.
To add a namespace when registering an event handler, simply suffix the event name with a period and then your unique namespace (e.g. '.fooPlugin'):
jQuery.fn.foo = function() {
this.bind('click.fooPlugin', function() {
// do stuff
});
this.bind('mouseover.fooPlugin', function() {
// do stuff
});
return this;
};
// Use the plugin:
jQuery('a').foo();
// Destroy its event handlers:
jQuery('a').unbind('.fooPlugin');
Passing just the namespace to 'unbind' will unbind all event handlers with that namespace.
So which ones did I miss? Any helpful features that you feel jQuery doesn’t document well enough? Let’s discuss in the comments!
So I'm in Kilkenny, Ireland for WordCamp Ireland, and I'm having a complete blast, thanks in large part to the great organization done by Sabrina Dent and Katherine Nolan. The tech track is absolutely blowing my mind: it's really techy!
The people here are great: I met a lot of awesome people, basically to be separated in two groups. Group one are the Automattic people: Donncha, Jane Wells, Sheri Bigelow, Hanni Ross & John Godley. Some of the other people worth mentioning because they did cool stuff: Daryl Koopersmith gave a great talk on WordPress themes, Andrea Trasatti did another superb presentation on WordPress mobile plugins and themes (and got me to actually work on yoast.com and get me a decent mobile plugin going). Thank you, all!
Lastly, I'm always amazed that even though I mostly live in a Google world (actually, I had lunch with Fili Wiese and colleagues in Google's EMEA HQ last friday and Luisella Mazza from Google is here on WordCamp Ireland too), the people from Microsoft I meet on these conferences almost always turn out to be absolutely awesome people: Josh Holmes and Martha Rotter: you rock!
So I gave a presentation myself on saturday, which has been filmed and will probably appear on WordPress.tv, but these are the slides:
There was recently a little skirmish on the web regarding the question of whether or not Microsoft has stopped innovating — whether the internal corporate culture there has thwarted new ideas, and so on. Well, I think we can all agree that Microsoft hasn’t exactly been an innovation machine in recent years; although, with as little currency as the word “innovation” has these days, that’s not saying much — but the fact is that its products haven’t shown as much ingenuity as its competitors in nearly every arena. And like a dragon guarding its hoard, it has striven primarily to maintain its stranglehold on enterprise, which makes up the vast majority of Microsoft’s treasure intake. Who can blame them? You wouldn’t give up a goose that laid golden eggs either. But the the goose is getting old, and people are getting tired of eggs. What’s the next step?
Gates once famously said his greatest fear was “someone in a garage who is devising something completely new.” So the solution is simple: start building garages.
Of course, we must be fair to Microsoft and say that they probably have as many metaphorical garages as anyone else in the world. Microsoft Research and Microsoft Labs, among many other experimental sections, employ an immense amount of people, and frequently come out with really cool stuff. The trouble is that something in the structure of Microsoft’s complex interlocking-teams method of management prevents these things from being anything other than great ideas. Look at Google. Their “release early, release often” strategy not only familiarizes people with the products, but also inures them to the “beta” process (some more than others), and lastly, allows Google to gauge the weight each project should have. It’s not a failure when something like Orkut doesn’t take off: it’s a successful risk assessment.
The trouble, I feel, lies in the middle layer of the cake — as it does so often in real life (damn the jelly). The issue is that the best ideas often occur on the lowest levels, as much because those levels are highly populated as that they are the youngest and freshest, and these ideas must trickle up. That is, from what I understand of Microsoft (very little), in fact how it was designed. Good projects gain members and budget by degrees and snowball until they reach product status. The idea is that the whole process is smooth and practically automatic. And isn’t it pretty to think so? Unfortunately, when you factor in the inevitable corporate friction, you’re looking at years of development for a product which may or may not even be worthwhile. By the time the sausage is made, everyone has already moved on to quail. If there were an easy solution to this I’m sure everyone would take it, but Google’s seems to be the best approach when you’ve got a steady supply of golden eggs, as both they and Microsoft do in the form of advertising and enterprise revenue respectively.
Microsoft is simply too big and too inflexible to really push truly interesting products out the door as fast as they need to. This isn’t any sort of big revelation, but it’s a problem with a solution: turn the company upside-down. Give the people with infinite power to crush and elevate projects direct access to the “garages” (or rather, give the garages access to them) and let them rule their arbitrary way. If they’re really as smart as they should be in order to hold a position of such power (no guarantee there), then you’ll nip non-starters in the bud and get millions into the market-breakers. The Microsoft method of slowly advancing employees’ responsibilities has created so many middle men that there is hardly any other kind of person working there any more.
The best examples for this are also the best examples of the current system failing. I’ll be honest: these are in fact my favorite pet projects of Microsoft’s and are by no means successes yet, though in my fantasy alternate universe they might have been.
Item: Surface
Item: Courier
Pop quiz, hot shot: the entire tech world is buzzing with the idea of a tablet device by one of your primary competitors. Someone leaks video of a project that is totally original and totally doable, and the internet goes wild (kind of). What do you do? A: shower the team with gold and see how fast they can whip out a prototype, which you can show at CES, pre-empting your competitor? or B: continue working on a boring design with a vanilla PC maker, that is in fact something no one wanted when you showed it last time. To be fair, it seems that Microsoft may have done a little bit of both. But Ballmer himself professes ignorance of the Courier project, and we still have yet to see one in the wild. This could have taken a lot of bit out of the iPad announcement.
We had word yesterday that the Courier is running Tegra 2 and will implement some Zune stylings. Well, that puts it at least on a hardware par with the iPad and it fits with the increasingly Zune-reliant design of Microsoft’s handheld devices. Unified interface? Office applications? E-book functionality? Check, check, and double check — but instead they lay money on an awkward and underpowered shrink-down of Windows 7. Again, who made this decision? Some board room jockeys likely voted 7 to 4 to “emphasize existing properties.” If there was an informed and alert adjudicator with a nice big slush fund, this thing might have been hands-on at CeBit.
Item: Multi-touch mice
What can I say? Get a team of talented, creative people, refuse to settle on a design, and watch your competitor put out the exact product you were thinking of. All it would take is for someone to walk into the same room I did, get the same demo I did, and then point with his index finger. “That one.” Call up in-house prototyping and you’ve got a working model in two months. It’d break a few hearts to scrap the excess designs, but how many designs do you think Apple scrapped for the iPod? Those heartbroken designers now live in houses of solid gold. And they eat pearls for breakfast. Not an exaggeration.
Item: Windows Phone 7 Series
What better icon for Microsoft’s inertia than Windows Mobile? Every release has been more and more out of date, by reason that its competitors moved faster and didn’t have quite the legacy install base to worry about. When you make a big deal out of something like 6.5 years after the iPhone, and when Google is putting out Android 2.0, you might as well be selling telegraph poles. Meanwhile, slouching slowly towards release is Windows Phone 7 Series (yeah – they’ll need to change the name), which while still behind the times (and getting more so every day it’s released in Q4 2010), is a shot in the arm for Microsoft’s entire mobile division. A whole new design aesthetic! Apps! A decent media player! They knew they had a winner on their hands sometime before the launch of the Zune HD, which they rightfully called part of a new platform.
Once again: whose idea was it to wait until WinMo 6 had completed its graceful conversion into a complete wreckage? Well, someone worked real hard on the 6.5 app store and Today screen, and they wouldn’t want to steal 6.5’s thunder (cough) by announcing its successor at the same. Here is where, a year and a half ago, a smart person with a free hand might have said “sorry guys, you’re polishing the knobs on the Titanic. Finish what you’re working on, then you’re going to App development for the new stuff.” No sales would have been lost, and 7 would have launched (consulting arbitrary number calculator) six months earlier. Or something.
What I’m seeing, though, is that maybe Microsoft is starting to get this. The projects above were major breaks from Microsoft’s staples, but are finally getting the juice they deserve. I feel like I’m at a “mandatory innovation seminar” saying this, but taking a few serious risks is the only way Microsoft will be able to stay competitive for the rest of its dwindling lifetime. If they can put their trust (and their war chest) into the hands of a few worthy idea wranglers, they’ve got a fair chance of turning Microsoft Research into Microsoft Pile Of Money.
The bad news for Microsoft is that the only products anybody is excited about are the ones most unlike what they’ve been doing for 20 years. The good news for Microsoft is that they’re making products unlike what they’ve made for 20 years, and people are excited about them. It might just be too late and every project I mentioned will be torn to shreds by Apple, Google, and the other wolves pawing at Microsoft’s door. But I think that at the final accounting, people will be able to look back and say “Well, it didn’t save them, but towards the end there, they actually started to get it.”
It looks like these mobile applications aren’t a fad, as a new report from research2guidance said the global app market could generate $15.65 billion in revenue in four years.
This is great growth from the $1.94 billion apps generated in 2009 and the customer base for these apps is expected to grow from 100 million in 2009 to 970 million by 2013. We all know apps have been around for a long time but you have to give Apple (NSDQ: AAPL) credit for kicking off this surge of interest with its App Store. Now, every major player has its own centralized app store and consumers are demanding these programs on their devices. While we’re seeing extreme success stories like Plants vs. Zombies, the money in apps is not quite enough yet for a large, thriving ecosystem. It looks like we’re not too far away from that though, so be prepared for some really cool stuff to come to your handsets.
[Via TechCrunch]
Related News from IntoMobile:
What would the offspring of Shrek and a Na’vi from Avatar look like? Latvia-based graphic artist Alexander Bickov created this mash-up he titled Shrevatar. You can download high resolution computer desktop wallpaper featuring the image on moinid.com.
If you’ve been reading /Film for a while, then you know about my love for old vintage behind the scenes featurettes. Some of the ones we’ve featured in the past include The Goonies, The Making of the computer graphics for Star Wars, The Shining, and Ghostbusters II Slimer Suit/Puppet Test Footage. Today I bring you a 10-minute behind the scenes making of documentary for Star Trek: The Motion Picture. Watch the video now, embedded after the jump.
via: Fanboy
So here's the deal. Yesterday the image above (center one) popped up on an accessory and parts supplier website labeled as OEM Blackberry Pearl 9100 Keyboard Keypad Black. I think the notion of a full qwerty on a Pearl caught everybody by surprise, including me, though conceptually it could be pretty awesome - more intuitive than SureType and if they get the keys right it could be easy to type on. So plausible, but still "rumor." Over the course of the day though, I received confirmation from a couple of sources who verified that the Pearl would in fact be offered in two keyboard configurations - SureType and Full Qwerty, and hence updated the original post to say that it looks like we will in fact someday be seeing a Full Physical Qwerty on a new Pearl. Cool stuff.
But dreaming on it last night and also looking at some emails we received from CrackBerry readers (having the same dreams and thoughts as me apparently - thx to Michael for his great email in particular), this morning we took another closer look at what we were seeing. And what it seems is that this new keyboard that showed up yesterday would look MUCH more at home on a PEARL FLIP device than on a PEARL CANDYBAR device. Note how the button configuration around the trackpad matches the original Pearl Flip as does the more rounded corners above the buttons. Looking at the image on the far right that surfaced previously of the Pearl 9100, the new full-qwerty keyboard (at least the one shown in the image above) wouldn't fit so smoothly onto the candybar style. The candybar design puts the buttons in a row and it's a much straighter line across the top below the display. Also, the current Pearl Flip uses the "guitar frets" -- akin to those on the BlackBerry Bold series -- so there is more Pearl Flip precedent for the look of this new full qwerty keyboard to go on a Pearl Flip than it does on a Pearl candybar which we have already seen in 9100 candybard photos does not feature the frets.
So all that said, it could be what what we're looking at here in the months ahead is not only the release of a BlackBerry Pearl 9100 in candy bar configuration, but also the release of a BlackBerry Pearl Flip 9100 (or 91xx) that features a full physical qwerty. We really haven't heard anything previously about a Pearl Flip update though with so many codenames "out there" it's hard to keep things straight, though it does make sense that RIM would put out a new revision at some point to the flip form factor. Heck, with 3G, a Full Physical Qwerty and OS 6.0 with Webkit browser, it might even be a pretty nice phone to carry around in your pocket. Going with this theory of a new Pearl Flip that uses this new keyboard, looking at the photos above you can see that the new keyboard/button assembly would take up less height that than current Pearl Flip layout - meaning it could be a tighter device and not look so monsterous when you crack it open. But also the fact that the whole assembly is so tight also lends to RIM likely being able to toss a full keyboard onto the standard keyboard if they want to. So there are a lot of potential options here for what you could see get released down the road. Maybe it's just a Pearl 9100 with SureType. Maybe it's a 9100 with your choice of SureType or Full Qwerty. Maybe it's a candybar and a flip, with the flip getting the full qwerty and the candybar getting SureType. Or maybe it's both candybar and flip and you can have your choice of keyboard on either.
It's a thought anyways that makes for some Friday Fun Speculation. Let us know what you think in the comments!
CrackBerry.com's feed sponsored by ShopCrackBerry.com. Friday Fun Speculation: Could RIM Also Be Working on an Update to the BlackBerry Pearl Flip?
