Category: Rich media

Categories
Design Education Globalization Google Network OpenSource Rich media Technology

SlideRocket Beta

I have been beta testing SlideRocket, a new online presentation tool. It has a very Keynote like approach to creating presentations, or should I say is also at the exact opposite end of the PowerPoint scale of slideware. Thanks be to God for Edward Tufte.

SlideRocket Beta

The beta period looks to be stable for the short term, but SlideRocket will give Google’s online slideware tool a bit of a hard look, but I just do not believe it will be enough to move the masses to SlideRocket.

SlideRocket is a Adobe AIR application supporting Flickr photos and the ability to directly import Google Spreadsheets. The beta tag sticks because I was not able to get accurate results on my Flickr search on three attempts. It also borrow’s from Adobe the deep grey design UI of the program.

Continue reading “SlideRocket Beta”
Categories
Design Education Globalization Milwaukee Network Rich media Technology Virtual Reality

Milwaukee has Google street views!

Milwaukee has just been added by Google to their cool interactive Street View component of Google Maps? What a cool technology for the city and organizations to exploit in Google’s popular mapping service.

milwaukee street view via google

So feel free to email anyone and send a link permitting visitors to interactively tour Milwaukee via Google’s panoramic street view component. No mention in local media (newspapers, TV or radio) about Milwaukee joining this cool web tool.

With linking and embedding supporting this will provide a great resource for Web2.0 tools as well….like building the interactive frame right into your blog:

View Larger Map

Milwaukee joins great cities including San Francisco, LA, San Diego, Las Vegas, Denver, Dallas, Minneapolis, Chicago, Miami, New York City, Boston and Orlando with support for Google’s street view technology.

It may surprise some around town that many established cities (including Seattle) are not yet supporting street view.

Wish the resolution of their camera was better….but its a cool start.

Tags: Google Maps, street view, interactive, VR, panoramic photography,
Web2.0, cool, trends

Categories
Design Education Globalization Network OpenSource Reading Rich media Technology

Latest read: Everything is Miscellaneous

David Weinberger’s book Everything Is Miscellaneous: The Power of the New Digital Disorder is really amazing. It follows on the footsteps of Tom Friedman’s The World Is Flat and Chris Anderson’s The Long Tail.

Everything is MiscellaneousThis book presents an interesting look at the digital data we have access to via the internet and how the distribution of data will forever change business, education and society.

What is the biggest change outlined by David Weinberger? The world’s data will be tagged and freely shared, all on the internet.

From the Dewey Decimal System to Flickr and everything in between … is now miscellaneous.

Categories
Education Globalization Network Rich media Smartphone Technology

NBC: Reconsider iTunes

NBC logoSo NBC has been forced to refund advertisers an average of $500,000 each due to low ratings. One hopes they will workout an agreement with iTunes to again sell their TV shows.  NPR news article here.
At some point someone at NBC Universal will realize all those millions of dollars really add up to something….What were they thinking?

Tags: NBC, iTunes, low ratings, trends

Categories
Education Globalization Rich media Smartphone

Why DRM is failing

walmart amazonDigital Rights Management or DRM, has been a controversial snippet of software embedded into music files for a long time. Regardless of how you feel about Microsoft’s PlaysForSure DRM wrapper or Apple’s FairPlay for iTunes it appears the coming death of DRM is from two powerhouses in online sales: Amazon and Wal-Mart.

Funny that Microsoft’s own DRM software will not run on their Zune product. Wal-Mart ditched DRM music in August and a month later Amazon’s site launched DRM free. With larger numbers of online shoppers, the control over digital rights now sit in the hands of the big resellers and not the music industry or even technology companies.

PS – The disappointment with Wal-Mart is their decision to NOT support Mac or Linux systems for downloading music.  Not a good sign for a lot of users.

Tags: Amazon, Walmart, music store, music download, Fairplay, PlaysForSure, The Long Tail, trends