David Lidsky's Blog, page 4829

Need a Plumber? Redbeacon Adds Facebook Support to Its Service Provider Finder

Redbeacon, a site that matches users up with service providers (like plumbers, painters, personal trainers, and housekeepers), announced a few new options, most notably Facebook, that'll encourage a more social use of the site--and hopefully gain some users in the process.

Redbeacon, which won the TechCrunch50 award last year, is less a reviews site than a straight utility. You type in your location and service needed, and Redbeacon finds a local provider that'll best address the job. It...

Photographer Andreas Gurksy's Ocean Series Was Shot From Space

Photographer Andreas Gursky is known for capturing massive, impossibly-large subjects, but for his latest project, not even the widest-angled lens on the planet would do. In a new show that opened last week at the Gagosian Gallery in Beverly Hills, Gurksy worked for the first time with satellite imagery as his raw materials for the series named Ocean.

According to the exhibition text: "In their
darkly nuanced surfaces, he has worked to reconcile the division
between the machine eye and the...

EA Sports Active 2.0 Will Measure Your Heartbeat, Share Your Data, and Work on Your iPhone

Given the roaring success of Wii-exclusive EA Sports Active, the hardcore workout video that masquerades as a video game, a sequel was pretty much inevitable. Thankfully, this one's more Dark Knight than Electric Boogaloo.

The new, improved EA Sports Active will include a heartbeat monitor that straps around your arms and one of your
thighs. But instead of just showing you how hard you're working--as if you need another numerical reminder while you're dripping in sweat--it senses your...

Crib Sheet: Padmasree Warrior, CTO of Cisco Systems

Cisco's big announcement recently about how its new product was going to change the Internet for the better got the tech community very excited--not to mention the financial world, as the company's share price rose to a 52-week high. And then, yesterday, they launched the thing--a datacenter-level router that should give mobile Internet a bit more "poke." But for some time, Fast Company has known that, for Cisco's shares to go through the proverbial roof, would be somehow to clone its CTO...

How to Write a Mission Statement That Doesn't Suck [video]

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I want to show you why most mission statements are so terrible.

Let's say you founded a pizza parlor. And your first idea for a mission
statement is something like this: "Our mission is to serve the tastiest
damn pizza in Wake County." That's pretty good. If I worked for you, I
could get excited about that. Now here's how it will go off the rails.

[twistage 0fd64afa78711:]

So you'll call your colleagues around the conference room table to unveil the mission, and all of the sudden, these...

Clavilux 2000 Turns Any Keyboard Performance Into an Infographic

Using a keyboard and data visualization software, the device translates the notes into a real-time graph.

The Clavilux 2000, a gizmo invented by Jonas Heuer, turns any piece of music played ona keyboard into a dynamic piece of information art. It's a pretty simple set-up: The midi-signals from the synthesizer are run through vvvv, an free tool for creating live visualizations. The outputs are then visualized with a projector:

What you'll notice in that video is that every note played...

Infographic of the Day: Arms Sales Around the World

Business is booming!

We're all dimly aware that America's defense contractors sell weapons around the world. But you'd probably be surprised at just how huge a business it is: The U.S. accounts for nearly 70% of weapons exports around the world, and the market comes to over $55 billion.

All that information is laid out in a useful new infographic created for GOOD by Column Five Media. Here, for example, are the items that are the hottest sellers on the international market:

But what might...

Is Milfhunter.com Appropriate Laptop Fare on Flights? Survey Says...

Asked by TripAdvisor in its second annual air travel survey what
they'd do if their next-door neighbor were accessing inappropriate
content on the in-flight Wi-Fi (not, one assumes, the movie Airplane!),
22% of respondents said they would ask the person to close the offending material; 6% would complain to the airline; but 27% would alert a flight attendant.

The follow-up questions--namely, just what would they ask the trolley dolly
to do, especially if he or she were a hottie--were...

South Korea Unveils "ReCharging Road" for Eco-Friendly Buses

We've covered sustainable urban developments in Seoul before. On Tuesday researchers launched an environmentally friendly public transport system using a "recharging
road"-- with a vehicle sucking power magnetically from buried electric
strips.

The Online Electric Vehicle (OLEV), towing three buses, went into
service at an amusement park in southern Seoul. If the prototype proves
successful, there are plans to try it out on a bus route in the capital.

The Korea Advanced Institute of...

Battlestar Galactica Coming Soon to Fight With Star Wars and Star Trek MMOs

Bigpoint and Unity Technologies announced on Tuesday that Battlestar Galactica Online will be released this Fall. The MMO (massively multiplayer online game) will debut on Syfy Channel's site first, as a 30-day exclusive, and will use browser-based 3-D software Unity. "We've always felt that Battlestar was the perfect IP for gaming. It's got all the elements that you would want: The various classes of characters, and weaponry, and ships, and dramatic storyline, and big worlds to play in,...