Tag Archives: tech

World Touristiness Map

It’s the middle of Summer, when people either spend their holidays or are in offices, looking for holiday offers and places to visit. During my daily session of such discoveries I bumped into a map, collecting the world’s most touristy places – you may want to visit or avoid them, this map will be of use.


The map on Google Maps

The map has been created by Bluemoon, based on the meta tags of photos uploaded to Panoramio: “Yellow indicates high touristiness, red medium touristiness, and blue low touristiness. Areas having no Panoramio photos at all are grey. The analysis takes into account how many photos and by how many authors there are in a given area.”

How relevant it is for my search is hard to tell – probably not very. According to Facebook’s recent study on which social landmarks people visit the most, whatever masses think is worth visit is simply weird: what is there to see (or at least, check in for) at Kurfürstendamm?

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Touchscreens with something more to touch

Right after we got used to touchscreen keyboards and threw away our old devices full off buttons, a company wants to bring those keys back. Tactus Technology invented a user interface, where completely transparent physical inputs rise up from the touch-screen surface on demand, all controlled by the applications.

Tactus Technology Introduction from Tactus Technology Inc. on Vimeo.

One could say that for everyday users it’s completely useless to have buttons or physical feedback while typing: most of the people even switch off the haptic feedback while typing on Android. Nevertheless, it could be of use for people who need assistance, or work in a less ideal environment – say, a DJ playing and using an iPad on the stage, and with the Tactile Layer finds all the controls without looking.

We will see. Based on what the guys write on their webpage, the technology could come into our lives as soon as by tomorrow:

With the buttons enabled, users can push and type or rest their fingers as they would with any physical button or keyboard. When the buttons are disabled, they recede into the screen, becoming invisible and leaving a smooth, seamless flat touch-screen with maximum viewing area.

Our Tactile Layer technology easily integrates with today’s touchscreen-based devices (smart phones, tablets, personal navigation systems, gaming devices, etc.) by simply replacing the front layer of the display stack, known as the “lens”, “window” or “cover glass”. Our dynamic Tactile Layer component is the same thickness as the layer it replaces and requires no change to the underlying display or touch sensor.

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The future with Google Glasses

For the last ten years, if I want to see my inbox when on the road, I know to reach for my phone. This move for me is probably as natural, as it is for my father to check his watch for the time, or, for my future son, to check his whatever social network thing in his glasses. Yet, for me, for now, Internet in glasses is just proper craze.

If you give the task to engineers, to design a device that runs a distance between two points, they will most probably draw something with wheels. Similarly, if you want them to make something that’s connected to the Internet, you will get a screen of any size next to a modem in a soap shaped brick. Based on the proportions you will call it then a tablet or a phone or Galaxy Note.

And there are always those engineers out there who, with a twinkle in the eye, will keep developing those walking robots – until a point, when they are clever enough to actually be used. And then we have to get used to them.

I’m sure Google with the glasses is at this point now. These devices are so new that it’s almost impossible to imagine how we will get on with them: people still try to find out how the iPad fits into their lives, and that basically is just a big phone.

Hopefully by the time this new augmented reality and the non-stop connectivity arrives, we will be clever enough to know when to switch off and gain focus to things that actually matter. Otherwise, the network will have it’s greatest chance yet, to completely suck us in.

If you thought you are connected 24/7, now is time to think again.

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Baby’s birth on an MRI movie

The Charite University Hospital in Berlin recently released a video that documents the first birth in an MRI machine. (And it turned out that New Scientists has a video about how the baby got there!)


For the video, go to NewScientist’s webpage.

The video captures the active second stage of labour as the mother expels the fetus. The technique, called cinematic MRI, takes repeated images of the same slice of the body before joining them up to create an ultra-detailed video. It was recently turned on unborn twins for the first time to study a common complication where one fetus receives more of the blood supply and becomes much larger than the other.

By the way, there MRI video about the conception: Human sex from the inside out.

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Tweet embedding in WordPress

With the new WordPress version, quoting a tweet from Twitter is as easy as copying the direct link to the post’s body. The blog engine then pulls the text (or the whole conversation) from Twitter, and replaces the direct link with the whole lot.

That means, this: “http://twitter.­com/wmguk/status/213682841010192384” becomes this:

The tweets seem not to be truly cached and embedded in the post though: they will keep being displayed in the blog only until the original texts on Twitter are still in place. After deleting those, only the original direct link will be displayed in your live website, which makes the whole thing rather fancy – but not very usable.

Update: another downside, the text of the tweet seems to be the only thing displayed in the feed.

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Getting rid of Google Maps

Being dependent on someone else’s technology feels bad. Especially if that someone can an does change it’s pricing from time to time – more so, if those changes could completely bail you out of business. That kind of fear builds mountains – or, for iOS 6 a new Maps service that replaces Google Maps.

Every time I design products where we need to use the Google Maps API, I have a certain feeling: the maps are great, we can estimate the short term costs, but the fact is that we are dependent on one vendor. I’m really glad to see that another player is entering the game now.

That’s the business perspective of course. As a user, I’m simply curious. The first screenshots of Maps are not that great (keep in mind that in Europe, we probably will receive that 3D sugar much much later than users in the US), but by doing my research, I’ve found a really promising fact: the new software is based on the services of C3 Technologies, which is a research lab of the SAAB group.

That means, at least in theory, with this technology creating those high resolution 3D maps might be closer than we think. “Since the high-resolution maps are accurately georeferenced, coordinates can be extracted and used for leading indirect fire such as artillery, as well as close air support targeting.”

And, of course, locating the nearest Starbucks.

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Search for a missing one

When I had a short visit near Lilienfeld in Austria, the news were all about a young guy, who went missing after a concert on a school holiday’s evening. Franz Kendler has not returned home to this day, but there are other things to the search that are the mention worth.


Fotos: BI Werner Planer, FF Wiesenfeld (from this article)

The villages in the area are those small ones with only a few hundred inhabitants, and since this case was the most important news around, I heard the gossips right after crossing the town sign. Therefore, most of the information I had were guesses – ranged from optimistic to pessimistic, and even some dark ones involving pedophiles, a stranger immigrant girl’s family, alcohol overload, new kinds of drugs, and my favorite: the Chinese mob.

Gossips is nothing new though. What I’ve found interesting is how small part modern technology was playing here. Even in a world with smart phones, all day data and network connection, the most peaces of information coming from these devices was, where the phone was last connected to the network – for me, this was rather scary.

A few years ago, as an ad creative, I was working with a worldwide security services group on a product for parents: it was a simple alert system for young children, with a permanent GPS connection and a 15-minute response unit. Since then, this technology got really cheap: nowadays you can follow your friends on Latitude, check your iPhone’s position via iCloud, and there are apps specially designed for parents.

Only one thing left unchanged: if you are alone with no one listening to those signals, even after a few hours, there is not a lot of chance to track you down. It seems to be therefore that to be on the safe side, you are better of to take some friends with you everywhere – all those apps and fancy devices are good for gaining false confidence only.

Without friends looking after us, we better don’t get lost – otherwise the only chance left may be a milk carton campaign.

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Flash support

I dislike Flash websites, but I prefer being able to open them when I decide so. Therefore, I really like Android’s approach, hate Apple’s ignorance, and – hey, what the hell is Microsoft doing?

The Windows 8 Release Preview is out since yesterday, and one new feature is the Flash support in Internet Explorer. Because this operating system is already the one that will be installed on both tablets and desktop computers, it’s a good opportunity to see Microsoft’s strategy on the topic. The desktop version is less interesting (the browser has the full plug-in), but on portable devices Microsoft seems to share Apple’s performance concerns, and tries to solve the problem.

More than a simple integration, they worked together with Adobe to create a power-optimized, touch-friendly Flash player based on Flash 11.3. This stripped-down version will also have a video player and some more added features, but will miss out those which typically cause battery life problems. The interesting part is that it won’t work on every website: Microsoft will maintain a list of sites that are authorized to use Flash on Windows 8.

This is indeed an interesting concept, but it seems like the question is only about the attitude: weather Apple’s arrogance or Microsoft’s compromises, it’s just the matter of time for those old Flash websites to disappear completely. And although I would be surprised if anyone would dare to create a new Flash-only website now, I want to access them somehow in the meantime – therefore, I’m glad to see Microsoft’s efforts.

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The run of McAfee

The founder of McAfee Antivirus went on the run in Belize after his house was ransacked during the search for drugs and guns – and he kept posting from under cover. Regardless of how the story ends, there’s something important to take home here: the freedom of information is great.

“For those of you who follow the news in Central America, you will know that I am in hiding in an undisclosed location in Belize. Hiding out is no fun. I’ve always wondered why people on the run turn themselves in in many cases. I now know the answer – boredom.” – posted John McAfee. (Quoted from the article explaining what happened on Gizmodo.)

For our age, the Internet is an every day tool: we use it to share data, to connect with friends, to have some fun in the evenings. But it has a greater thing to it that can only be seen in times when someone is in trouble. Because weather it’s soldiers having fun killing civilians, a Cuban blogger who wants to share thoughts from behind the curtain; or, hackers want to prove that Sony is pretty careless with its users’ private data – the information will be out there. And this freedom of information, eventually, will make the world a better place.

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The power of Facebook

There is a project, started a few years ago, where everything is about smiles: parents get professional photos of their kids, shopping malls get new visitors – and the website of the project gets lots of attention. After we integrated Facebook this year, it got five times more.


Image from MosolyOlimpia.hu

SmileOlympics is a one week event in shopping malls, where children and their families are photographed in the old-fashioned way. The picture taken is a gift for the parents, and there is a smile-wall set up in the venue where visitors can browse through the whole gallery.

After the event there’s an online competition, where users can vote and the photo with the most votes receives a prize. The website was designed in 2006, and not much happened since then: users could register, log in and vote for any pictures they liked. Of course, on an event like this, the customer support had loads of work – people registered with fake e-mail addresses faster than the moderators could delete them, and most of the mothers wanted to know how the other ones kid can have ten times more votes.

As this year the project will become a road show rather than a once-a-year event, we had the resources to improve some bits – and we integrated Facebook in order to prevent multiple registrations. Dumping all the user data we had (well, not quite… but you get the point), we decided to go with Facebook login, and we replaced the voting system with Like buttons. To make sure that users can’t vote before or after the one week competition, we created a database that is synced with Facebook only in that period.

At this point we were afraid of losing users: since it was possible to vote on Facebook without even seeing the website, some users had no reason to do so – to get around this, we had two things in mind. First, we created a Facebook page to reach more users, and provided information and the customer service there as well. Second, we made another competition running: whoever liked at least five photos on the website, could also win a prize.

The results were astonishing: on the first day of the competition, we registered five times more users than in the previous years, 90 precent of whom came from Facebook (compared to about 10 percent in 2011). From Monday to Friday evening Google Analytics registered 30K unique visitors, and after the first two weeks, at this moment there are 2450 likes on the Facebook page. All this without changing anything else on a 6 years old website.

That’s another smile here.

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