The Panic Status Board
March 12, 2010 // Design + Technology

Having an entire board dedicated to statistics based around your business is such a rad idea, and Panic has created a beautiful monster called the Panic Status Board. What they’ve done is created a way to track all of the major things they do, like emails to return, their status on products and even a feed of their Twitter updates.

This seems like something every person could use. Imagine if you had a board like this to keep track of your life? Sure, you could say that we have things like computers and iPhones that do that kind of stuff, but I like that this board is dedicated to just certain statistics. Imagine if it kept track of the contents of your fridge, or when your bills are due, or when to pick up your kids from their playdate, so on and so forth. An entire board dedicated to keeping track of your life.

Bobby

Curious Displays by Julia Yu Tsao
March 4, 2010 // Technology

I’m a sucker for futuristic devices that could make our day-to-day a little bit easier, and these Curious Display definitely seem like a great idea. Created by Julia Yu Tsao, these tiny robots feature vibrant displays on their backs, and cluster together like ants or bees, helping each other out to create messages, locate items or even transform into a display to watch movies (I don’t use the word “television” anymore, it’s really not very true anymore, especially in this case).

I love the idea of having these little robotic helpers basically giving me status updates in real life. It’s the idea of bridging the digital and physical world that I find so interesting. And if they’re adaptable, say being able to climb up walls or transform to complete a particular task, then that makes them all the more valuable. A really great idea which I’d love to start seeing more of.

Bobby

How Can We Save Newspapers? Make Them Personal.
February 22, 2010 // Design + Technology

In the most recent issue of Monocle there’s a story about the Swiss Post that got me thinking. The first few paragraphs talk about how the Post has teamed up with a start-up called Syntops which “greeted their customers (“Guten Morgen Herr Graf”) and offered an individually tailored mash-up of the day’s stories.” Which led me to this idea: If old school news wants to survive, they need to become personalized.

In my mind there are two big reasons why newspapers are failing. The first is that there’s no reason to pay for your news, not when it’s free online, and the second is that by the time it hits your doorstep it’s already old. But what if your morning paper was custom tailored to just the things you wanted to read, much like the Swiss Post is doing?

For example, when I got to The New York Times website (I don’t read the actual paper) I tend to browse the front page, then head over to the arts section, browse technology, hit up Fashion and Style and end with T Magazine. Sometimes I might even check Food & Dining and Science if I’m bored. But, I don’t own stocks, so I don’t visit the Business section, and I don’t live in New York, so I don’t really care what’s going on there… you get the point.

So imagine a profile page, or something like Google Reader, where you could choose from a list of sections that you’d like to have delivered to you every morning. Take that idea even further and you could create a list of people, places, things that you enjoy that would be pushed to the front of your news. Or on the flip side, you hate hearing about the Octo-mom or Jon and Kate so you exclude them from your news. Perhaps based upon your selections there are articles that are suggested based upon your interests, and even the advertising is sorted to fit your likes.

It could also be interesting if you could add or reduce content to the paper, which in turn would add to or decrease the cost of the paper accordingly. Everyday you could manage the flow of news coming to your doorstep, so while it may be old, it would be exactly what you want to read.

I’ve obviously overlooked the technical limitations of how papers are printed or problems like the newspaper boy delivering the wrong paper to the wrong house, but the idea is far from impossible. This discussion is meant to be about possibilities, not about naysaying, and if print wants to keep going they’re going to need to start innovating.

Bobby

MousePath
February 15, 2010 // Technology



This fun little app has been floating around my circle of Twitter friends for the past week so I thought I’d share it here. I’m not sure if it’s officially called MousePath but that’s what I’ve been seeing it called, so we’ll stick with that. This mini-app allows you to track all of your mouse movements and clicks for as long you want to record it. After awhile you start to see patterns emerge, such as you can see in the two images above.

The images were created last week over the course of a night. I was mocking up a website in Photoshop so that’s what most of those lines are. It was probably around 4 to 6 hours of mouse moving total. The first image was probably around 3 hours in and the second about an hour later. I don’t really know what you’d do with these images but it’s interesting to see your own work patterns.

To try it yourself download it here:
For PC / For Mac

Bobby

QR Lovecodes by Laszlo Kovacs
February 12, 2010 // Apple + Technology


Sending paper valentines is so 20th century. These days you can email awesome looking Valentine’s Day cards with custom QR codes that reveal secret messages. My friend Laszlo Kovacs created the illustrations you see on each of these which I think are really fun and totally adorable.. I tried downloading Semacode for my iPhone to read the code but I couldn’t get it to work. It might also be that I have a first-gen iPhone, and the camera sucks, so hopefully you’ll have more luck.

To send your own look up “QR Lovecode” in the App Store, and for more info visit yellowapp.

Bobby