One of my good intentions this year is to spend less time on Facebook – and I’m not the only one. To make sure it’s not the road to hell I installed Chrome Nanny. If you find yourself killing a little too much time on sites like Reddit, it can help you keep focused by partially limiting or outright blocking distracting sites. The add-on is not brand new but it can help you out in the new year.
Nest is a self-programming thermostat that learns the schedules and temperature preferences of its owners in order to save energy. It can also be controlled remotely by smartphone. Besides that it looks way better than that ugly white box I have in my house right now!
is the world’s first robotic ball controlled from your smartphone. Weave in and around obstacles or feet, or just try to outrun the family pet.
Here’s a nice and interesting project by French web developer Benjamin Netter. My Next Trip uses FourSquare’s API to help you plan your next weekend city trip. With this project Benjamin won the grand price in FourSquare’s ‘Global Hackathon’.
It is ‘the world’s first and only fully customizable, multi-touch software for professional DJs and producers’. The movie looks great, curious if you don’t miss the physical buttons and sliders.
So after releasing Love Search and then taking on the banks, Google is now gearing up for the big fight, taking on Facebook with Google+. Invite only at this point but looks very interesting. You can find out more about the Pros and Cons of this new service at Mashable.
This kinda blew me away: soon we’ll all be able to refocus a captured image after the fact. It works with light-field capturing and the company bringing this to consumers later this year is called Lytro. It seems they’re planning their own standalone camera, but imagine this being incorporated in your iPhone. Awesome!
My colleague Tim Leberecht wrote a nice blog post around the air travel vision by Airbus. They just released a video and a series of images that envision air travel as a fully immersive, human-centered experience.
While everyone is waiting for an iPhone Nano, Nokia came out with it’s own version of the Nano. Here’s the Nokia N9. On first impression the N9 looks fresh and new. The Linux-based OS MeeGo looks minimal, with a strong resemblance to Apple’s iOS. I know most NW-ers have an unbreakable relationship with their iPhone, but what do we think of this phone?
The Nalden iPad app is available as of today - we hope you like it. Huge thanks to Vodafone for supporting our creative process – this has allowed us to share it with you for free. The app includes stories, wallpapers, galleries, videos etc. If you don’t own an iPad you can see the app in action in this Vimeo video.
Waternet, the local water supply company of Amsterdam, launched a free iPhone app for everyone who likes to navigate the maze of canals in Amsterdam. An app that comes in real handy with this warm weather to find a good route, a perfect terrace or to find out if your boat fits underneath a bridge.
If you are interested in the special effects made for TRON: Legacy, you might like this interview with the guys working for Digital Domain. JTNimoy and GMunk give an insight in the technical processes.
3Live Shop is a live online shop that works as a complementary service for the customers of the telecom operator 3, where they can interact with a real salesperson. In this video we see how it’s made by the Swedish agency B-Reel.
Start building robots robots that drive around on a tabletop, respond to light, sound, and temperature, and have surprisingly lifelike behavior with the cubelets building blocks. The standard kit comes with 20 magnetic blocks that can be snapped together to make an endless variety of robots with no programming and no wires.
This new iPhone and Android app aims to create a social experience that’s “native” to mobile and really takes advantage of smartphone technology rather than simply transferring a Web-based experience to the phone.
This looks interesting: Lifelapse is an experiment in which your iPhone (that you’ll have to wear around your neck) takes a picture every 30 seconds. This way it records and creates a summary of your everyday life and all the special moments you experience. Simple and really interesting. Sign op for the beta on their website.
Every day for years now, like many other people, I use my iPhone as an alarm clock. I’m never really happy with the fact that the first thing I do in the morning is look at my iOS interface to switch the alarm off. There are several alarm apps out there but you’ll never wake up more relaxed than with this (albeit cheesy) app.
This could be interesting: Frameratefest is a contest to make something ‘awesome’ in HTML 5. It’s an initiative from Microsoft to promote IE9. I’m very curious what the possibilities are of HTML 5 and who is able to make some creative and impressive stuff. So if you’re a creative developer, master programmer or supergeek, join the competition.
An old one but good to share. Create your track by placing real objects and race through with virtual cars .. Think of all the other games you could play like this.. WOW
I recently started using and loving this nifty little taskmanager by 6wunderkinder. The minimalist interface is straightforward and easy to use and the whole thing looks pretty too. Wunderlist is available for free for Windows, OSX and iPhone. Android app is coming soon.
The Geospatial Revolution Project is all about the world of digital mapping and how it is changing the way people think, behave, and interact. In this video we see how local governments and business use geospatial technology.
This app is really impressive. It lets you translate printed words from one language to another with your built-in video camera, in real time. I was a bit sceptical but I just tested it on my iPhone 4 and it really works like they show in the video. Translated text fits perfectly in, with (almost) the right perspective. Amazing.
A German company has created a sort of pole collar – a mechanized ring that clamps around a pole. You hook your bicycle on to it and use the remote control to have it climb up or down the pole. Eine gute Idee. And a clever way of making an ad for electronics webshop Conrad.de.
One for the Apple festishists out there. Want to bring back the shine to your now dull-looking iThing? Just follow these simple instructions…
i3DG is a playful analog extension to an iPhone or an iPodTouch, converting its 2D display into a layered 3D view.
Interviewing almost 50,000 consumers across 46 countries, including all BRIC and most N-11 markets, Digital Life is the largest, most comprehensive study of the Global Digital Consumer, ever.
Adobe is working on a new set of 3D GPU accelerated APIs that delivers advanced 3D rendering in Flash Player and AIR. This opens up a world of possibilities for online gaming. Take a look at these demo’s from the Alternativa platform and tell me: is flash dead?
While on a nice & crazy trip for the studio and working on three continents in one week I discovered a great service called Boingo. It’s wireless internet in a click on spots all over the world. Remembering the old days searching for hotspots on airports I couldn’t feel more thankful that it worked right away in New York. As a matter of fact, this is posted via a hotspot in Rio de Janeiro.
I’ve seen a lot of video’s with architectural projection mapping lately. I would like to share these two with you: AC/DC vs. Iron Man 2 and Kraftwork in Autostadt. Both created by Seeper, check out their site.