July 8th, 2011
Forward Thinking Vol. 34
Our weekly update, where we share what’s inspiring us:
A new platform called Percolate, currently in its “Double Secret Alpha” stage, is setting out to help users find new content by bringing them the stuff they would find most interesting. By using “a lot of math and technical wizardry,” Percolate works to connect and filter content from different sources, like Twitter and RSS feeds, giving users an easy and intelligent way to explore and share information while cutting down the time spent trying to find it.
We’ve seen plenty of services that filter down your Twitter feed in the past, but a new service called Shuush is taking a different approach to managing your tweets. Rather than removing certain users, the prototype service levels the playing field by augmenting the visual size of each tweet on the page. This creates an interesting way of balancing your social feed, first by assigning each follower with a “frequency level,” and then scaling the size of their tweets to compensate for the otherwise quiet (or loud) voice they might have.
Unless you’re right down the street from your favorite bakery, it’s hard to know exactly when fresh-baked cookies have come out of the oven. Enter BakerTweet – created to fill this need by giving bakers a wall-mounted button that sends out a tweet the moment they pull something from the oven. MoMA is utilizing the concept in its own Cafe 2 bakery, using this technology as a way to help us optimize the timing of our bakery visits.
Sometimes we stumble on locations that seem vaguely familiar, but not from our own experiences – they’re the famous backdrops to our favorite movies. A new concept app called Augmented Reality Cinema brings these moments together by integrating film scenes with mobile augmented reality. We already use our mobile devices to watch movies on-the-go, but this takes it one step further by actually merging movie scenes with your physical location. While still only a concept, it serves as a great example of how media could be affected in the future by utilizing AR in the mobile space.
The word failure is often interchangeable with the word mistake. But when it comes to developing new concepts and solving problems, failure is often a necessary step in the creative process. An article by Fast Company explores different forms of failure and how encouraging mistakes can help create autonomy and fuel innovation. Mistakes are not only becoming common in creating iterative products, but they have almost become a necessity – advising direction and steering designers toward exploring new possibilities.
