Meet Whole Earth Catalog, the inspiring publication brought back from 1960s. Steve Jobs once quoted the last issue of this wonderful magazine in his commencement speech for Stanford. Being one of the earliest publication on DIY, spawned many subsequent publications. Now we can harness this awesomeness via web archive.
Mobile Space, a Japanese mobile web service that provides free mobile homepages, is getting a lot of attention from younger users. That have reached 8 billion monthly page views as of March 2008 which is toe-to-toe with Mixi with 8.8 billion page views per month, which is the largest social network service in Japan.
(the image above has nothing to do with mobile space)
Mobile Space started around November of 2003 and average of 9,000 new homepages are created each day with 3 million registered users. What’s interesting is the demographics. More than half of the registered users are Japanese teenage girls.They tend to present their interests and hobbies on their mobile homepages.
This seems to be their official website (character encoding is Shift_JIS) which is pretty much optimized for mobile use only.
[via 2ndfinger (Korean blog)]
Last time, we’ve mentioned about Tim Brown’s Harvard Business Review article on Design Thinking. Last month, Tim has launched a blog on Design Thinking.
Here’s an excerpt from the about page at the blog:
This is a blog about design thinking. I am in the process of writing a book on the subject and this is the place I would like to share ideas and have a discussion. If you want to get an overview on how I see design thinking then check out the article I wrote for Harvard Business Review here.
As you will see as you read the posts, I have lots of questions. If you can help me with any answers or perspectives I would be very grateful. If you let me know who you are I will also do my best to acknowledge anything that makes it into the book.
This blog contains cases and questions for design thinkers (and those who wishes to learn the way of design thinking) to ponder on. Let us hope this blog will provide us with lots of inspirations and hints of implementations.
Many games offer players some chances to design their own game stages. Same thing goes for the famous Nintendo game Super Mario. It seems that game designers around the word are not satisfied with original stages. They are designing their own ones, which I think is more competitive and more exciting than the original ones.
Players really have to THINK their way out very hard to clear the game. There are a lot more videos in YouTube.
Now look at this one. I guess some of you who are not really into mario things a lot might have skipped the link above. But I really encourage you to see this one. Concentrate on the background music and see how the music and sound effects in game harmonize.
NikoNiko Song Played With Super Mario Game
It took its designers 6 months to make this one. Whew!
Although the concept of mobile blogging has been around for a while, I haven’t had the chance to check it out until now.
Using Wordpress app for iPhone, it feels quite usable and reliable. Even though touch interface typing still feels quite unnatural to me, quality app like this would actually get bloggers to start conversations on their phones.
Check it out for free at app store near your iPhone and iPod Touch!
Search method is getting more and more sophisticated. As Web 2.0 era comes, multiple tagging system becomes de facto standard for searching contents. It is a great advancement because it enables people to reach what they want to know through various keywords.
However, it is still inside the boundary: text-based search. Today, I would like to share some attempts to overcome the text-based search.
Musicovery is a web radio service playing music that matches user’s both explicit and implicit needs. You can search music by genre or even by your emotion. Seeing is believing, so go ahead and check it out.
Retrivr is a new way of searching images. As you can see in the picture above, you can scribble on the small canvas to look for similar images. I drew a red circle and got some photos like strawberry, balloon, and a lady bug. Do you think it works?
The year 2007 has been great for Nintendo. Not only did they top the charts on home console gaming, Nintendo DS has proven to be remarkably successful as well. Recent news on Nintendo Wii says that they won’t be cutting the price for the console machine, unlike what the ‘tradition’ for gaming hardware industry used to be.
But today, I want to point out a factor that contributed largely to the success of Nintendo’s recent adventure. Throughout Wii and DS, Nintendo have managed to change the core target customer to a more broader audience, by going for less hardware and less ‘bloated’ software. Most games these days tend to go toward the common pitfall of mislead improvements. More graphics, better sound, more enemies, faster play, longer playing time (which obviously is failing), multi-genre in one, etc.
Instead, Nintendo chose to do things less. Less graphics, less horse power, and simpler game play. They focused more on the core essence of the gaming experience, and less on the make-ups. The result was stunning. Not only did they capture a large market share, they literally renovated the gaming industry and what games should be like. They also managed to fuel other industries like brain development and memory training as side effects. The result simply put, was ‘more.’
“Less is More” adequately captures what minimalism is about. It has been widely adopted among artists and architects, like Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and Buckminster Fuller. It is also among one of the key principles of ‘Getting Real‘ - the ebook by 37signals.
After several decades in any given industry, things usually go toward more complex, toward more of everything-but-the-core. Then once in a while, like the gaming industry, a disruptive force moves its way in, and simplifies, clearing out the mess.
We believe this is what’s happening to the software industry and the web in general. Things need to be, and will be made effective through simplification and building less.
Let me introduce a very creative flash-based website, billyharveymusic.com. It’s filled with a sense of humor. Although this website is nothing new, it should be still worth a visit in case you haven’t.
As you can see in the screenshot above, you listen to the music with Billy Harvey. He moves from room to room while you click on the different rooms. What surprised me was that it felt as if he was singing as if we were in a video chat, although it could’ve been better if the person in the flash was a beautiful lady. 
Contact is also quite interesting. Look and feel of it is quite vintage-style, but still has an intuitive touch to it.
Some what awkward and friendly at the same time, this ambivalent feeling the interface gives is actually not that confusing. The creative and artistic side of the interface might cause the user to feel a bit uncomfortable at first, since its look and feel is quite uncommon and surprising. But no matter how creative you get with your interface, it’s absolutely crucial to keep the essence of interface design - making it learnable and intuitive for the user.
If such ‘creativity’ extends to where it starts to ruin the essence of learnability, efficiency, memorability, and alike, it is no longer a design, but an art.
So when you try to design a some what visually creative interface, always keep in mind to maintain the purpose of interface - to get the user to interact easily.
While searching for a service that developed cultural aspect into the product’s value well, I stumbled upon a service founded on Japanese culture and history. While it doesn’t seem like that big of a service, it still delivers one single value really well.
It’s old-vintage Japanese style photograph generator. Pick a photo, click, and voila! You get this really old-looking photo graph back from the 1800’s Japan.
The interface is in Japanese, but it’s quite easy. Follow the steps below:
1. Select the file to process
2. Press the button labeled “古写真風にする”.
That’s it!
Here’s an example of what this tool is capable of:
The Real Homer:
Virgin Galactic Spaceship 2:
WorkHappy.net posted a great interview with Aaron Patzer, the founder of Mint.com. Mint.com is a personal financial management service. I personally fell for the site because of the design, and then the goal of the site which I was pondering over for at least past couple of years. They’ve managed to pull it off beautifully.
For those of you interested in things like how to market a startup, how to develop a decent product into a successful and buzz-worthy phenomenon, be sure to check out the interview.
and btw, they have a great blog on personal financing tips. If you are a person who cares about what goes in and out of your pocket, check that out as well.
UPDATE: Video interview on Scoble
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