Month: October 2010

Comics with problems

Meet GABBY THE ANTI-PEDOPHILE PUPPET! She knows when you are sleeping and she knows when you’re awake. Here’s a great pamphlet on avoiding molestation and abduction in local bathrooms, gas stations and from ice cream vendors. It’s Gabby the Puppet in THE RIDDLE OF THE FRIENDLY STRANGER. A 1960s giveaway from Marathon Oil Company.

Networked Start-ups

Here’s a great example of how the Maker Revolution in combination with global economic networks can become an engine of economic growth for resilient communities. The example is a new “start-up” that is “selling” a product called the Glif. Essentially, it’s a small piece of plastic that allows you to mount your iPhone 4 on a tripod. It solves a niche problem quite nicely. To build it. The team did their research and product development on their own (a labor of love). They also printed a 3D plastic prototype. To raise money for low cost per unit (and likely higher quality at this juncture) injection molding ($10k fixed cost set-up), they turned to Kickstarter for funding. It has been an unqualified success, selling nearly 4k units for about $100k in revenue.

Ames room

As a result of the optical illusion, a person standing in 1 corner appears to the observer to be a giant, while a person standing in the other corner appears to be a dwarf. The illusion is convincing enough that a person walking back and forth from the left corner to the right corner appears to grow or shrink.

Magic Mirror

A mirror tricked out with 1024 multi-touch points acts as the heart of the dressing booth. The pieces of clothing you’ve selected show up the massive display and are then superimposed onto your reflection. You can even “flick” clothes from a separate iPad app directly to the giant mirror. How well Macy’s “Magic Fitting Room” will work remains to be seen, but we wouldn’t be surprised if Macy’s suddenly sees more returns this holiday season than usual.

selling more crap is one way for AR to break through.

Hello Weighted Sort

a very nice improvement to make web analytics useful. that is, if you use a competent analytics package.

We have a very long tail of data in web analytics. 10s of 1000s of rows of keywords in the Search Report (even for this small blog!). 100s and 100s of referring urls and campaigns and page names and so on and so forth. Yet because we are humans we tend to look at just the top 10 or 20 rows to try and find insights. The problem? The top 10 of anything rarely changes (except in rare circumstances like a sale or on a pure content – think news – site). Hence I have persistently evangelized the need for true Analysis Ninjas to move beyond the top 10 rows of data to find insights.