Life & Research Notes

http://www.detanicolain.com/ another nice hollenbach find. nice to have these design students acting as my agents in the field. she's right that the "world justified" is very good. visual web design maps typography

Pattern Foundry lovely set of patterns for licensing. simple exploratory ui. via kjhollen design web stock pattern illustration drawing

Alterlab Burak Arikan's new company. burak arikan burakarikan design art web network medialab mit

Search less, understand more - Evri wow, this looks promising. clearly this is some semblance of the semantic web vision, just developed in a more straightforward way without ridiculous committees or overwraught standards. i wonder what technology they're using to crawl and create connections. semantic web semanticweb search amazon

Streetline Sensors for gathering real-time city data, including parking spots! Apparently some MIT connection as well. From the site: "Streetline builds solutions to longstanding problems in city management and operations, through the customized design and application of new sensing technologies. Our parking management system offers cities the first real control and oversight of their complex inventory of on- and off-street spaces, and forms the backbone for other innovative sensing solutions that lower city costs and improve public services." urban city design sensors electronics future data visualization

FairSoftware: Start Your Virtual Online Business the future of distributed work? this reminds me a little of promiserver, but maybe actually practical. :p via oreilly radar's coverage of techcrunch50. web web2.0 business future startup

World Bank - Welcome to the World Bank Developer Network! via joe/swivel. "The World Bank's first API offers 114 indicators from key data sources and 12,000 development photos (see all sources). We are releasing this API because we believe this information can be mapped, visualized and mashed up in an unlimited number of ways that will help develop a better understanding of trends and patterns around key development issues." api developer data world economics mashup statistics

thematicmapping.org Nice resource of country borders map data. Handy for the current travel project… map data visualizastion gis

:*:OnionMap:*: i love this simcity style map. content is pretty sparse though. map visualization travel

Is it Sarah Palin? Vote Yes, No, or Maybe. Upload your own pics. Created by Jeevan over the weekend. :) humor funny tacolab politics appengine participation

Last week we quietly deployed the new Taco Lab website, and we posted a revision today. If you remember anything about the old old placeholder page (think giant Helvetica text and a horrible hand drawn taco guy), you’ll agree this new version is overall an improvement.

Our key design imperative with the new site is to balance clarity of vision, sincerity of our business (we’ve been working together for almost a year now!), and a sense of play and humor that we feel fundamentally distinguishes Taco Lab from other design and technology firms. We are also seeking to show the wide variety of mediums and technologies we work in, and to provide some sense for the types of services we offer.

So please check out the site. We already have a laundry list of improvements we’d like to make over the next few weeks, and any additional ideas or feedback would be greatly appreciated. Also, as we’re just ramping up full time now, we have some spare cycles to throw at cool projects, so any hookups or suggestions would be most welcome.

(Created by Jeevan over the weekend)

Fleshmap: Studies of Desire this is a new art/dataviz project by martin and fernanda from ibm research. i gotta say i was a little surprised by the content, and design-wise it's a little, uh, cheesy. but the visuals and the data are still fascinating. totally press/blog/digg fodder, which is probably at least part of the intention. also cool they have evidently moved to javascript for a lot of the interaction here, which seems like a step forward. visualization sex psychology data information

Emotionally}Vague: A research project about emotion, sensation and feeling. via arikan and kjhollen. survey project asking people to associate colors, words, and self-depictions with various emotions. cleanly designed, and the results are interesting to look at and more touching than i expected. visualization emotion psychology color design survey statistics

Tech Making Traditional VCs Obsolete From huned, a cool Wired article on the shift from traditional tech VC to angel 'micro' investing. "classic V.C.'s simply have too much money under management, and too expensive a talent pool, to waste time looking at investing anything less than $10 million in a project. Meantime, no entrepreneur wants to give up equity by taking in more money than he absolutely needs. So, when it only costs a few million to get a serious new company off the ground, how can the V.C.'s really play?" article wired entrepreneurship business startup technology venturecapital microfinance

JSC Digital Image Collection great nasa photo/image archive. i like that it includes pictures of people plus images from orbit. space photos science nasa history reference

www.24postcards.co.uk music designed for ringtones. i want this. from the record label: "An attempt an exploration of the ringtone as a vehicle for music performance , ‘24 Postcards…’ is an experimental work made up of 24 classically-composed ringtones, set to be premièred in various gallery spaces. The première is intended to be in the form of a series of installations where pre-registered audience members switch on their phones to receive SMS messages, each message alert playing back one or more of the tracks, so making up the performance. In tandem with this release, will be a micro-website hosting 24 photographic images, one accompanying each track." music mobile art cellphone phone mp3 ringtone future audio

Brad Neely’s JFK incredible genius brady neely goodness video politics humor jfk bradneely history

Veer: Products: Type: Burgues Script beautiful script typeface. i like the opentype variations. typography design font script

SpaceCollective pretty incredible set of images, but i don't quite understand the site/collective. ffffound fodder for sure. technology images photos science

OpenCalais Heard about this from Dan Schmidt. This Reuters service analyzes text and parses out entities! if this works well this is huge. "The Calais Web Service automatically creates rich semantic metadata for the content you submit – in well under a second. Using natural language processing, machine learning and other methods, Calais analyzes your document and finds the entities within it. But, Calais goes well beyond classic entity identification and returns the facts and events hidden within your text as well." web api semantic service media tools xml rest development innovation

A Fundraising Survival Guide "There will be a tendency, as a deal progresses, to start to believe it will happen, and then to depend on it happening. You must resist this. Tie yourself to the mast. This is what kills you. Deals do not have a trajectory like most other human interactions, where shared plans solidify linearly over time. Deals often fall through at the last moment. Often the other party doesn't really think about what they want till the last moment. So you can't use your everyday intuitions about shared plans as a guide. When it comes to deals, you have to consciously turn them off and become pathologically cynical." advice web business venturecapital startup entrepreneurship

blackaller on deviantART Luis Blackaller's deviantART page. Includes some of his OPENSTUDIO drawings. blackaller drawing art store

Dead Man Eating…Last Meals on Death Row a history of last meal requests of executed prisoners in the US. fascinating but sad. weird depressing prison food humor data

Mind Hacks: Digital drugs emergency - paging Dr. Beat hacking the brain into altered states. reminds me of the goggles/headphone setup kevin let me try way back when. potentially interesting medium to explore. drugs brain perception vision

http://thisisharrington.com/projects/nasa/index.html interesting, nostalgic photos of retro, decaying nasa jpl trailer equipment. i love the type. photos retro nasa space science design technology nostalgia

Escape to Detroit | Laughing Squid fascinating take on the emerging detroit renaissance, in particular the greening and gentrification of detroit. another sign of the urban/suburban shift? green detroit culture urban city future

Urban flight from Los Angeles | Straight outta Compton | Economist.com another article on the changing of suburbia, focusing on black flight. suburbia urban culture future

America’s suburbs | An age of transformation | Economist.com "America's suburbs are coming to resemble its city centres." Interesting economist article on the shift of suburbia. urban suburbia culture future

Software Studies social "control, communication, representation, simulation, analysis, decision-making, memory, vision, writing, and interaction" understood via study of software theory culture software code research programming design art blog ucsd

CultureVis received an email about this via swivel feedback. interesting new initiative by Lev Manovich at UCSD. visualization culture data graphics design

THE ORWELL PRIZE orwell's diary republished 70 years later as a blog. great project. orwell writer blogging

wordscapes by peter cho peter cho's new exploratory typography piece. very rich. via maeda's out.risd.edu blog. typography design interaction processing.org

mudd up! » archive » GAAN A BED rupture on the new "crunked out breakstep" music breaks breakstep dub dubstep ragga crunk audio

Git for the lazy - Spheriki git is the new svn. seems like the way to go what with the easier branching/merging and the cool local commits. tutorial versioncontrol svn wiki

Y Combinator: Startup Ideas We’d Like to Fund fun read. i can definitely identify a few of these that i have been thinking about and working on the past few years, both at Swivel and the Media Lab. startup ycombinator entrepreneurship advice venturecapital business web2.0

steve schofield – land of the free - © 2007 lovely surreal pics of scifi and other characters in mundane environments. vis vsl. vsl starwars startrek scifi science photos

Open Innovation | Innovation Management a marketplace for innovation. this is fascinating and weird. from the nyt article. business capitalism design economics innovation market participation research web

Project C-90 | Catalogue | Compact cassettes from tang. huge archive of cassettes. nice inspiration for nostalgic designs. cassette design inspiration nostalgia

Museum of Notebooks ooh this is a nice set of notebooks. blog book design print

Josef Müller Brockmann - a set on Flickr nice flickr set of images of brockman posters. very nice reference. some surprising colors. via coudal. brockman design graphics posters swiss

How to Live With Just 100 Things - TIME i would like to do this. via coudal culture home life simplicity stuff

YouTube - Andy Warhol paints Debbie Harry on an Amiga this is so lovely. thanks arikan and rocha. art computer drawing retro software video

pagetable.com » Blog Archive » 1200 Baud Archeology: Reconstructing Apple I BASIC from a Cassette Tape Listen to the audio from the “Apple I BASIC” cassette tape that came with the Apple I. apple audio basic history programming retro

CogWiki seems like good wiki resource for developing with embedded linux stuff. mostly about this guy's virtual cogs components, which seem cool, and use the i.mx21. development electronics embedded hardware linux virtualcogs

Anti-Terrorism Exercises in China - The Big Picture - Boston.com fascinating, somewhat frightening photos of chinese anti-terrorism training. the segway exercise photo is particularly riveting. urban combat of the future. via laughing squid china photos politics

0xDECAFBAD » Queue everything and delight everyone interesting blog post on architectures for scalability of microblogging and messaging/publishing. argues for queue systems over sql queries, which is reasonable. consider extensibility of the queue processors as the hook for new apps/innovations. article blog microblogging scalability twitter web

Let the microblogs bloom - RussellBeattie.com this guy is right. there are definitely opportunities for niche microblogs, and they don't need to suffer from the same scaling issues. think ning for microblogging, or twitter/plurk for workgroups. the shared timeline becomes a wonderful communal asset. blogging development future microblogging publishing scalability twitter web

Handwritten Typographers this guy sent requests to various famous typographers to get a sample of their handwriting. I personally prefer (and relate to) Söderström's messiness. :) from dave merrill. design fonts typography

DOWNTEMPO | Internet Product, Strategy, and Design andy volk's product, strategy and design company. design internet marketing product strategy web

HyveUp Web 2.0: Swivel: Cornerstone for the Information Age - Gerad Suyderhoud, Product Manager gerad is famous on the internets today. data friend gerad swivel video