David Lidsky's Blog, page 4718

Boom Boom! Spreads Good Karma, One Card at a Time

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Mary Beth Campbell made it her mission to create an "uprising of guerrilla goodness" by launching Boom Boom! Revolution in January 2009. After working as a high school teacher for 10 years, Campbell was inspired to build a socially responsible company built around the concept of being nice. Taken from the concept of boomerangs, the Boom Boom! team maintains that whatever actions or words are put out into the world will eventually make their way back to the initiators, but not before...

Jonah Evans' CyberTrackers Mark Their Territory in Wildlife Counting Clash

On a foggy winter morning, the shoreline of San Diego's Torrey Pines beach resembles a forensic crime scene investigation into the animal kingdom. A series of red, orange, and yellow flags mark fresh outlines in the sand around various bird, insect, and animal tracks and scat. About a dozen people in shades of green and khaki huddle around them, getting down on their hands and knees to stare intently. They are taking a CyberTracker certification field test through NatureTracking.com, one of...

Infographic: Nike Puts NBA Playoff Teams in a Twitter-Based Battle Royale

A real-time Twitter visualization, perfect for NBA fanatics.

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Stamen--one of the best firms working today in the burgeoning field of interactive information design--has just dropped their latest project, a real-time Twitter interface for Nike.

It's a pretty simple affair: Tweets about the eight NBA playoff teams are shown in real-time, in what amounts to a huge bar chart. You can read the tweets as they're posted, but the more tweets a team is getting, the larger its tile appears.

There's...

Fact Checking Steve Jobs: Apple's Entire Behind a Free, Open Net

Steve Jobs has pronounced his definitive views on why Adobe's closed, proprietary Flash software is such bad news. But does his claim that Apple promotes open standards ring true? In the absence of a riposte by Adobe, we've had a look for you.

Apple lies, Adobe's a-okay: The iPhone is as closed as a closed thing can be

Many a Flash supporter and Apple hater will be trotting out arguments like this in the coming days, aggressively geeking-out over the rigid locked-down control Apple exercises...

Beyond Camel Orbs: The Sweet Tradition of Drug-Themed Candy

In a study by the Harvard School of Public Health published Monday, researchers examined child poisonings related to the ingestion of "novel smokeless tobacco products" such as Camel Orbs, highly-addictive mint- or cinnamon-flavored candies made of ground tobacco and filled with nicotine. The study, along with many critics, point out that the Orbs resemble Tic Tacs, and some suggest the novelty (along with the nicotine) are a method to attract (and addict) "a new generation of smokers to...

Here's Why Nokia's Slipping: Boring New X2 Music Phone Costs Just $100

Behind the scenes of Nokia's shift from global cellphone dominance to entertainment giant lies a dark little secret: The company's losing its grip on the tech. Case in point is the new X2 music phone, part of its Comes With Music experiment. It's cheap cell phone spam, plain and simple.

The X2 is a sort of down-graded version of the X3 and the X6. It's a candybar format device, with a 2.2-inch screen at QVGA resolution and it's relatively petite at just 13mm thick and 81g in weight. Inside...

Rattle and Palm: HP Saves the Day, but How Did Bono Fare? [Update]

Palm's safely in HP's hands now, but for several years it's been financially boosted by U2 frontman Bono's company Elevation Partners. With their involvement wrapped up, the rocker's financial experiment fared okay, but just okay [Ed.note: much like the quality of the last few U2 albums]. [Kit note: Blasphemy!]. Bottom line: Bono's other band seems to have taken home a meager profit. We'll explain.

First some background. Elevation Partners were Palm's most influential investors in recent...

Darlene Liebman, Cofounder of Howcast Studios

The Media

Darlene Liebman

Cofounder and Vice President of Production Howcast Studios

Ever wondered how to...well, anything? Welcome to Howcast, offering instructional videos on everything from tying a sailor's knot to decorating a cake. FastCompany.com spoke with Howcast cofounder Darlene Liebman. --Anya Kamenetz

Fast Company: What is Howcast?
Darlene Liebman: We're a new media company that creates shortform instructional videos and distributes them online, over...

Augmented Reality Floor Simulates Walking on Snow, Pebbles, and Grass

One less reason to keep spending so much time in nature.

What happens when display screen technology gets so cheap you can lay it down like carpeting? Researchers at Canada's McGill University have an idea: floor tiles which use precisely calibrated vibrations to simulate snow, grass, sand, and myriad other surfaces--and can even be programmed to become virtual buttons and sliders.

As Tech Review reports, the "haptic" floor tiles, which were created by Yon Visell, a PhD student at McGill's...

Steve Jobs: Adobe's Flash Is Old PC History, Open Web Is the Future

In a rare response to the chatter about Apple's tech feud with Adobe, Apple's Steve Jobs has declared that that the Web should really embrace open standards, even while the iPhone remains closed.

Jobs just had Apple publish his musings on Apple's "hotnews" section. And it's amazing. No, seriously, it's amazing, not only for the frankness of the text, its overt challenge to Adobe's reliability, but also for Steve's stance on open versus closed tech standards. Though the letter's titled...