New York, Chicago (and Ottawa)

I just had an amazing week travelling to NY, then Ottawa, then Chicago.  Loved the snow, and the buzz of NYC.  I would go back in a heartbeat.

Times Square

◄ Back

Next ►

Picture 1 of 16

VendHQ Pitch Video for Cloud Connect Launch Pad

VendHQ has been picked as one of 8 semifinalist for the Cloud Connect Launch Pad, and we plan on getting it to the finals.  VendHQ is one of my projects I am chipping away at.  I write the code, design the screens, develop the strategy, put together the demo videos and make the coffee.

Check out the video and VOTE for VendHQ using this link http://launchpad.cloudconnectevent.com/vote-now/ and help a kiwi company get to the finals.

Yes I do the voice overs too

Is augmented reality really a reality – Barcamp Auckland notes

Yesterday I did a brief presentation on augmented reality (AR) at Barcamp Auckland. Having no internet connection, and no mini DVI connector for a VGA projector, I kinda had to roll with it and talked more and showed less visuals apart from a few vids. Here are some notes from my original presentation and some links to videos for more info.

As you can appreciate this is a big topic, but I just wanted to touch on the basics for the 30 minute talk. I am no expert in AR but I think there is a huge opportunity for businesses or individuals to enter this space today and be at the top of the curve.

Augmented reality is part way along the spectrum towards virtual reality. VR is where you experience a fully digital or synthesised environment, whereas AR is where you take a real environment and overlay digital data and imagery to enhance the scene. The most typical example of this is the heads up display in a fighter jet. Airspeed, altitude, pitch, and bad guys are all highlighted in the line of view of the pilot.

There are three most common types of AR that I will cover:

• Projection AR
• Windowed AR
• Retinal display

Projection AR

This is where you utilise a camera and projector to interact with your environment. The camera to observe, and the projector to display overlay information.

This type or AR is currently in use in vehicles to project driving information and directions onto the windscreen so it appears in the line of view of the driver.

See this video of the BMW HUD (mind the music).

Here is a fantastic presentation by the MIT team about their wearable AR projector

This style of AR is good for interactions with environments where you have canvases that are close to you. This would not work obviously when wanting to interact with a mountain, a building across the road and so on.

Retinal Projection

This is where using some eye-wear, with built in camera and micro projection device, projects additional information augmenting the scene directly onto the retina. Think of this as your own personal HUD, that can give you directions as you walk, alert you to new messages, identifying objects and providing detailed information about them.

The best example of this is as seen in the movie Terminator.

Windowed AR – What you can do today

This style of AR is where you use a intermediary device as your window onto a real scene. Think of it as a looking glass. This could be a mobile phone, or portable video device. The device views the scene as you would, and renders it on a screen. It can then overlay digital information on top.

This is the most exciting form of AR for me at the moment as this is relatively easy to achieve using the latest styles of mobile phones, like the iPhone 3GS, Android G1 and G2. Here is what you need to achieve basic AR information overlays on a mobile phone.

Video

You will need a decent video camera within in the device to view and a screen to render the scene.

GPS

The phone needs to know WHERE it is. Consumer GPS can get fairly accurate within a 10 meter area.

Compass

A digital compass to determine which way the phone is pointing.

Accelerometer

What angle is the phone looking at. Is it looking down, up, slightly on an angle?

Combining these things together you get a pretty accurate position as to what the device is looking at. The accuracy has quite some variance, so this works quite well when dealing with large outdoor scenes where the objects are large, for example a tourism application where you might be walking through downtown Auckland or Rome and looking at landmarks, or for real estate where you are covering a suburb and providing property information from the roadside.

Image recognition

A powerful extension to AR is the inclusion of image and shape recognition. By adding this to position, direction and angle, you enable the device to recognise “things” in the scene. These could be features of the landscape, peoples faces, buildings, or objects in a room. This increases the accuracy of AR considerably, but adds complexity by needing to develop algorithms to process realtime video and identify objects. Currently mobile devices are a little underpowered to allow for this but there are some exciting developments underway, and on the next generation devices this will be even more of a reality.

The most common example of image recog today are where a printed patteren or fiduciary marker is used to let the device identify a canvas in the scene. The device then overlays onto or replaces the marker with some digital information. There are examples of this where a 3D object is superimposed onto the scene and the perspective of the object matches the angle and direction viewed by the devices.

This example is a virtual pet for the iPhone

This is a concept game by NVidia using their new GPU chip-set for mobile devices.

Killer Apps

Tourism – A virtual guide, that can identify when you are near a point of interest and provide visual and or audio information about it. A point and identify tool, to get information of landmarks.

Real Estate – Roadside guide to property that guides you from house to house, and provides detailed information from the curb.

Engineering – An app to allow field engineers to easily find buried cables, pipes, or even just a power meter.

What else?? The exciting thing is there are hundreds or applications yet to be discovered.

More Links

FaLLen SREngine demo http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LhujKGuhiK0

Wiki article on Virtual retinal display http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtual_retinal_display

BMW Augmented reality for engineering http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P9KPJlA5yds

A good wiki article on AR http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Augmented_reality

If you want to start developing here is a handy development toolkit – http://www.hitl.washington.edu/artoolkit/

Rhys Darby, only 2 degrees of separation you know

Today’s interconnected world has torn down the barriers and now you can be 2 degrees of separation from the Queen (supposedly) and through social networks this certainly true, follow @rhysiedarby for example. Rhys even plugged my charity bike ride (but then we were mates so that’s like 1 degree of separation).

So we have a new mobile network launching, and who would you rather watch on the ads, Richard Hammond, or our very own Rhys? I know who is funnier.

Now, all 2degrees needs to do now is secure the domain name 2degrees.co.nz and their launch would go much more swimmingly. I do enjoy a drop of pinot now and then so no rush there guys

How I cycled across the straits

I keep getting asked, how hard was it cycling across Cook Strait on my south to north cycle of NZ. Well to all you smart arses, THIS is how I did it so shut up. Well actually I didn’t have one of these puppies but, damn, I wish I had one. They look like fun.

Sneak peak on the Telecom XT network… from the fringes

As you may or may not know I have currently put most of my digital work live on hold and am cycling up the country on a bicycle, tweeting, blogging and posting video as I go all over on http://www.nzuphill.co.nz.

Well, the other day I was given a new SIM card for the new Telecom XT network, which I quickly poked into my iPhone. And so I have come out of temporary hiatus on 8degrees.co.nz to let you know what I found. After a quick change to the APN setting on my iPhone I was away, calling and surfing on the new XT network, and THIS is what I found:

1. Coverage
2. 3G speeds
3. and all from the fringes of civilisation

I must confess I felt like a kid in a candy shop, as I rode my bike from small town to small town with a permanent 3G signal and pretty decent speeds. The speeds I have been getting are obviously not fast compared to a fixed line DSL, so don’t be expecting any crazy crazy speeds just yet, but considering I can do 3G things at good 3G speeds from places like Leigh and Mangawhai, well this is a new experience for me. And if I can get 3G from further up the line as I go, I must say, with only a little hesitation, I would be very very tempted to switch from my 15 year relationship with Vodafone (BellSouth pre Vodafone) and move to Telecom New Zealand if it allows me to make full use of the iPhone that Vodafone sold me, while sitting in my local Kerikeri cafe, where to date even a basic data connection on Vodafone is a rare thing depending on where you stand on the main street and if the sky is overcast.

So Vodafone will bump things up on their own network soon. Well they sure as hell have to, as within minutes I quickly moved (albeit temporally for the moment) onto what so far seems to be a faster broader network and I kept my phone. If I can have number portability to boot, then what’s to stop me? (apart from slightly more expensive data plans). I felt a little hurt that Vodafone let another network provide better toys first. What about all the 10′s of thousands of dollars I have sent their way over the years? Couldn’t some of it gone towards a better network before Telecom got their act together?

What confuses me is why didn’t Vodafone upgrade their network pre XT launch? I have heard from quite a few previously loyal Vodafone customers already saying they are very very tempted to move networks if all Telecom say is true. Well so far I am finding it to be very true, a dramatic improvement on the connections I have been getting on the Vodafone network. Sure it is not all about data speeds and coverage, there is all the other services that you should probably compare to be 100% apples with apples, but to be honest, my needs are pretty simple. I want fast data wherever I go. I don’t care much for voice mail, or the online interface I use to access my bill. I pay every month for fast data and good great coverage, because without those things I cant access my bill online and I can’t check my voice mail from anywhere I might be around our beautiful country.

So it is still early days yet. As I continue my mad mad cycle up the country I will be comparing coverage and data speeds as I go from my bike, from the tops of hills and down in the valleys. At the beach and in the middle of the towns that until now seem to have been forsaken by GSM networks. And if I decide I’m not going to stop at the lighthouse in Cape Reinga, well at least I have the option as a potential Telecom customer to roam to another foreign GSM network with my phone and continue my ride. Perhaps cycling from one side of Europe to the other… hmmm…

stuff.co.nz re-launch

One of my new years resolutions was to not read the news online through the major news agencies and so far I am enjoying my decision. I am no less informed through other channels than I was before, either that or there is a lot of stuff that I just don’t care about because I don’t know about it. However, I heard that stuff.co.nz had relaunched so I had to check it out. Professional curiosity.

From stuff.co.nz’s own article on stuff about stuff here is how the new site is described;

Stuff, New Zealand’s leading news, sport and entertainment website, has been revamped and upgraded, with a fresh, new look, a range of new features and a major upgrade of the underlying technology to produce a faster, more user-friendly site.

First of all I think stuff.co.nz was well overdue for a makeover and change is good for Stuff, as it was looking a tad tired. However I am not convinced of the new look and usability just yet. It isn’t quite working for me (sometimes literally).

Things I am not so keen on

1. A customisable home-page you will never see.

One of the new innovations is a customisable home-page that you can tailor to give you the news you are interested in only. Hurrah, I love these features on other sites, especially on the customisable Google Home-page. However if you want to customise the Stuff home-page don’t get your hopes up too much. The top part of the home-page is fixed and you have no choice as to what content appears here. Fairfax does. To get to the areas you can customise you have to scroll down not one screen worth, but two screens worth of compulsory content, then you get your customised content. So the benefit of this is…? If I want to read the technology articles, instead of visiting the home-page and then scrolling down two screens, it is far easier for me to click the big convenient “Technology” link in the primary navigation. A user wants to see their customised content first, hell that’s why they bothered “customising” the page to start with.

Tip. As a user if I want to customise the home page, I want the things I am interested in at the top so I can easily find it. If you want to spam the user with compulsory content and ads on the home page, then dont make the home-page customisable. It offers no value.

2. Changing the nav on users.

Throughout the Stuff site, and all the other sister Fairfax sites, there is a nav bar right at the top of each and every page. This nav provides you links to all the sister sites, no matter where you are. On the Stuff home-page, it is there with links to all my favourite sister sites like Trade Me, Travelbug, Find Someone and Old Friends. In the middle of the home page is a big colourful navigation bar that has all the sections of the site linked to. Now, as I click into one of the sections of the Stuff site, the big colourful nav bar I just clicked on vanishes. WTF? Also the top sister site nav bar changes on me. It looks the same, but instead of linking to the sister sites, it now becomes the primary nav for the Stuff site, with links to the other sections like National, International, Business etc. So a user has just clicked into a section, and now the primary nav, the most important navigation device on a site, has effectively GONE. Not only that, another navigation device (for the sister sites) is also gone, and has transmogrified into the primary nav.

On the home page the navigation is big, bold and in a familiar place. Notice the sister site nav right at top.

Click on the Technology section and BAM, the navigation is gone! Oh wait, there it is, up the top right where it wasn't before... and now I can't go to Trade Me to sell my stuff.

Tip. Keep your primary navigation consistent! Exclamation mark for emphasis. As a user I don’t want to have to learn new things on each page. I have seen your home-page, which has established the main conventions of using the site for me. Don’t change these conventions! Please keep the navigation bar on every page in the same (or close enough to) the place it was on the home page.

3. The Search UI is Broken.

After recovering from the nav moving around on me, I really wanted to try out the Google search. I clicked the “Search site button” but alas I got a blank page . No error message, no nothing. I click back in my browser and tried again. After clicking around for a bit I relalised I was using the search wrong. The “Search Site” button is a form submit button, but I could not see the search input field and was clicking “Search Site” without specifying what I was searching on. Have a look below and see if you can spot what I was doing wrong.

Spot the search input field
(hint it is the white box with a white border on a white background.

Tip. Perhaps the search input field should be a little more defined or visible even. (I was using Firefox BTW so am not sure if this field is more visible on IE).

4. Confusing icons and interactions.

I wanted to remove some of the rubbish like “Life & Style” (what the hell is Life & Style). So there is a pencil icon to let me configure each of the panels. Awesome, here comes the customisation fun, I was excited. By clicking on the pencil I get a new row roll down underneath the colourful header. I wanted to remove the panel and what do you know, right underneath the pencil (where my mouse is as I just clicked on the pencil) is an . I click the and the config row vanishes, but the panel is still there with Prince Charles still grinning like a loon. What I should have done was click on the word “remove” which neither looks like a button nor a link and is all the way on the left.

Removing Prince Charles Step 1. Click pencil

Removing Prince Charles Step 2. Don’t click , click the word “remove”.

Plus, “remove” is the only option anyway, so I have to click the pencil, then remove to remove the panel, but remove is the only option. So why the pencil?

Tip. Instead, why not have the remove option instead of the config pencil. Then I can remove panels with only one click, not two. If at some point you need to give more config options for each panel, like being able to specify the type and the number of articles to show (which would be really useful), then reinstate the pencil. But right now it is just adding clicks.

4.1 And while I am talking about the configurable panels…

I can move the coloured panels around on the left, but not the panels on the right. If a panel is moveable, then give it an icon indicating this. At the top of the panels there is a good intro instruction that says:

But some content can not be moved. How do I know what can be moved and what can’t?

Tip. Why not put the icon for “Move content” (the arrows) that is includedin the instruction, in the panel headers of the panels that are movable?

5. Give me a sign-in form.

In order to configure the site pages, I need to register with My Stuff. When I registered with the site I got this brief confirmation message.

Success

You have had your email confirmed, you can now login.

But there is no login link or form. There is a tiny weeny [sign in] link up in the header of the site. But that says sign in, I want to login. This is something that catches me out often, so that’s why I look for it. Pick a terminology and stick with it. One day I will learn too.

Also once I have “Signed in” the “Sign in” link becomes “Logout”.

Tip. If you have just confirmed someone’s account, either sign them in auto-magically, or have a sign-in form right there on the confirmation page so the user doesn’t have to hunt around. Also be consistent with your terminology. It is either sign in or login. Sign in is better, and should also be inversely Sign out.

6. Slow.

The site is really slow to load, perhaps not dial-up over broadband speeds, but it is slow. And here is why:

• The home page is 1129.9K. That is a megabyte and a bit. Wow.
• It has 379K of JavaScript and 500k of images.
• It is made up of a whopping 230 HTTP requests.
• Too many JavaScript files. http://static.stuff.co.nz/js/jquery.js and http://static.stuff.co.nz/js/jquery.jqURL.js is included 9 times each. That is 16 requests that can be got rid of for a start. Another tip would be to combine all the scripts together into one request. The stuff.co.nz homepage has 230 http requests. A browser typically downloads two resources from the same host at a time. That is a lot of resources to load all up and simplifying the load of the JS into one file would provide a huge performance boost.
• There are no expires headers on a lot of the resources, so each page is asking for the same images, JavaScript and styles sheets again, and again and again. An expires header simply tells the browser when an element on a page is due to “expire”. If an image has an expires header of next Thursday, then each time you load the page (until next Thursday) your browser won’t ask for the image each time, instead it will just use the copy it downloaded last time. Expires headers are set relative to the first time your browser loads the resource. So images like photos may never need to expire as the wont change and stuff has set the expiry of these resources into the future to 2037 which is good, however there are a lot of reusable images being loaded from the CSS have an expire date of yesterday.
• Move all the JavaScript to the bottom of the page, please. The loading of scripts blocks parallel downloads. Normally your browser will have simultaneous connections for download page elements, so the browser will download two images at a time or more. However as scripts can affect the rendering of the DOM, if the browser needs to load a script, it blocks all other downloads until the script is loaded and executed. By moving all the JS to the bottom, before the close of the </body>, not only do you know the DOM is almost complete so your JS can interact with the DOM safely, all the other resources will have loaded so the JS won’t block any other requests.

7. Georgia, oh Georgia

I am not keen on Georgia font for the article titles, then having the content Helvetica. Pick either a serif font or a sans-serif font. Mixing them up looks ugly (in my book).

Tip. Go sans-serif, it will tie in with all the other Fairfax sites better. Verdana or Arial is good.

Things I like

The weather in the top left hand corner of the banner. 90% of the time I looked at you Stuff, all I wanted was the weather. Fabulous!

Over all it is a nice change. Aside from all my criticisms above, which can all be easily fixed, the new look is fresh. It is an improvement on the old stuff.co.nz. I think there are some nice ideas coming through in the new site. I understand it has just launched and there will be ongoing changes needed, as long as the site is refined and some of the things that I have mentioned get fixed I think it will make for an awesome news site.

I am not picking on things for the sake of picking on things. When I used to read the news online I loved Stuff, and I visited it several times a day. I would really love the new stuff.co.nz to be better. I give it a C+ in it’s current form, and I am sure Stuff will try harder and will make it better.

Twitter motivations?

Do you use Twitter? What are your motives for using it?

If you don’t know what I am talking about, Twitter is an emerging social networking phenomenon that lets anyone “tweet” in 140 characters or less their thoughts, opinions or just what they are doing, right at that moment. Anyone can follow your tweets, and you can follow others. By tuning into different people, you get a stream of thoughts and comments steadily flowing through to you, and you can participate in “the stream” by replying to people, or just adding your own thoughts undirected to anyone in particular.

If you have ever used a chat room, Twitter is kind-a like a “build-your-own” chat-room, where you choose the members you listen to, but they can’t necessarily hear you or each other. Sound confusing? Sound inane? Well it is a simple idea, which has strange addictive qualities that people all around the world are discovering.

Different people have different reasons for using Twitter. In it’s simplest form it is a tool for participating in conversations with your friends and associates. Some people manage only a small group of people they follow and the conversations are personal and relevant. For others it is a tool to build professional and personal networks. They follow industry conversations. For others it is a path to Internet stardom, and having large interested audiences they can entertain. For some it is a way to tap into the broad social consciousness, to get a feel for what people are thinking and talking about around the world.

Twitter can be many things to different people, but the common thread is that Twitter is a way to have a conversation with others.

Like always when a new idea starts to get traction, and a community builds around it, people inevitably starting to think how to make money through it, how to sell your wares through Twitter, how to “cash in”. If you say this to the early adopter users of Twitter, the initial reaction is “Gawd, keep those bastards out”, the bastards being of course the evil marketers and big bad corporates. Of course no one wants to be spammed through Twitter, along with everywhere else. But more and more companies are discovering that Twitter is a way to have conversations with their customers. Not selling to their customers, but talking with them. After all you can’t stop people from talking about you or your products bad or good, but you can choose to be part of that conversation. Besides, every person, as a user of Twitter, chooses who they want to listen to, so as soon as they get the sales pitch from a company they follow, they have the choice to turn off that conversation. For companies, the best way to engage with existing or new customers is to have genuine conversations that they want to participate in. It sounds pretty simple.

So having said that, is there any threat that Twitter will one day be yet another vehicle to be owned by the marketers? I think right now Twitter is in a bit of an “Age of Innocence”, it is becoming incredibly popular, and it is an interface to conversations you would not normally be a participant of. I can tweet with Telecom New Zealand (@telecomnz) and Vodafone (@vodafonenz), and if I am having a problem with a product or service they are most helpful, due credit to both. They respond with genuine interest but still in a casual Twitter way. To be honest this beats calling their call centres hands down. But then 20 years ago, if you emailed both someone within would have responded the same, with personal interest and enthusiasm because they probably only got one email from a customer each day, and it made a pleasant change. Will it be different when they have to respond to 5 tweets a second? Is the “We have received your tweet and will respond within 1 working day” message inevitable one day?

Today you can follow your favourite celebs, and tweet with them. You can quite often even get personal replies from them too. Is it the fan mail of the new century? Stephen Fry @stephenfry has a whopping 52,000 follows, and he is in the top ten twitterers worldwide (by follower numbers) so you may not get a personal response from him, but he does write his own tweets. But when Twitter reaches critical mass will it be harder to participate in conversations with these people, and will they be less genuine?

It will be fascinating to watch what happenes over the next 24 months, and to watch as different market segments adopt Twitter. Will it be the beginning of the end when after a TV news article, they invite you to “talk back” on their twitter address? Will print advertising invite people to follow products on Twitter? Will it be good or bad? At the end of the day, I feel it will be the Twitter users who will decide.

Today I get my news headlines through twitter, I follow interesting celebs, I get information about new product releases (not sales pitches) from companies I am interested in, I get blog feeds and finally, the random thoughts of many many different people (but mostly technology geeks). All my choice. My Twitter motivation is to connect with like minded people, and have genuine interesting conversations with them. As soon as the conversations stop being genuine and interesting I may turn them off. But right now, Twitter is the wild west/new frontier phase. No rules, no barriers, and find your own way.

So what are your Twitter motivations? If you don’t currently tweet, what would (or wouldn’t) you use Twitter for?

BeIntent – Product Launch

Today a client of mine, Be Intent is launching their on-line business, www.beintent.com. It is a fantastic idea. It is a collection of great computer health exercises, motivational and goal tracking tools to help you achieve what you want from your lifestyle. It sounds a bit touchy-feely and cuddly, but they are already getting interest from a number of NZ’s large corporates and ISPs.

How does it work, well there is plenty of on-line inspiration over at www.beintent.com plus there is a fantastic down-loadable app they call the Dreamscreen, which is your own personal life coach that keeps you motivated throughout the day.

Check it out and share your thoughts? Could this help you and your staff? They do promotional giveaways too, and a membership would make a great xmas gift for your clients.

A good reason to run

Here is a good example of smart advertising. It captures your interest on number of levels. Why is he running? Why is he naked? Where is he going?

Watch it again once you have figured it out. I just love the expression he gives his friends at the destination. Classic.