8 awesome digital things YOU should know about!
1. Tools to make your life easier:
Xobni – http://www.xobni.com – got 123417928347129347 emails in Outlook? Impossible to find messages using Outlook’s dreadful search? Xobni is here to save the day – a powerful add-on to Outlook, it indexes everything you send and receive and makes finding stuff lightning fast.
Spotify – http://www.spotify.com/en/ – for anyone who loves music Spotify is an internet music player, stream any song you can imagine… for free… legally. You just have to listen to the odd advert. Otherwise though, it’s awesome!
Delicious – http://www.delicious.com – Delicious is an online bookmark site. Free to use, it allows you to bookmark all of your favourite websites online, meaning you can access them from anywhere. You can also add friends and colleagues to your network, so you can all share your favourite sites with one another. It works using folksonomy – meaning you simply ‘tag’ pages with words you’d associate with them. These are all then searchable meaning finding bookmarks is easy.
Jing – http://www.jingproject.com – a neat little app that allows you to easily screen grab parts of your screen, this includes recording video. Great for presentations etc – means you don’t have to cut things out in Photoshop / paint etc.
Evernote – Clippings software – http://evernote.com – Evernote allows you to save anything to a virtual clippings book – from your address details, to website screenshots etc. It has Optical Character Recognition in it too so if you scan something in, it’ll recognise the text and make it searchable.
2. Top Twitter Tools
You should all be using Twitter by now right? No? Then get yourself registered: http://www.twitter.com – it’s a great way of keeping abreast of the latests news and views in your industry, as well as engaging in conversation with influential industry types.
Once you’re on Twitter, you then need to get tooled up.
• iPhone? There are loads, Tweetie and TweetDeck are supposed to be good.
• BlackBerry: Use: http://www.ubertwitter.com or http://socialscope.com (although this is still in private Beta at the moment)
• Desktop: use http://www.tweetdeck.com
Other cool tools are:
• Twitpic: http://www.twitpic.com – post photos to your Twitter feed
• Twitcam: http://www.twitcam.com – post videos to your Twitter feed
• Hashtags: http://hashtags.org – see all the lastest trending topics on Twitter
• Twitcaps: http://twitcaps.com – aggregates every picture posted to Twitter using Twitpic into one place. See (visually) what people are Tweeting about.
3. Video, video, video, I want to be entertained, now!
Bored of YouTube? Try out:
• Hulu – http://www.hulu.com
• Vimeo – http://www.vimeo.com
4. Lonely, bored, need a bit of excitement in your life?
• http://omegle.com – chat (read: insult) anonymously to random people from all over the world. Quite funny if you don’t take it seriously.
5. I’ll have an ‘R’ please, Bob.
A new trend which I’m sure you’re all aware of is the weird naming of websites. In the Web 2.0 world we now live in, ‘Er’ has been replaced with ‘r’ so Flicker is actually ‘Flickr’. Maybe it’s because all web developer entrepreneur types are lazy slobs who couldn’t be bothered to type out the full spelling of the word, who knows. Anyway, have a look at a few of these…
• flickr – http://www.flickr.com – for uploading and sharing all of your photos
• domainr – http://domai.nr – for hunting out that elusive domain name
• trendrr – http://www.trendrr.com – for monitoring social media trends, buzz and the like
• Tumblr – http://www.tumblr.com – great new Web 2.0 blogging service
• Pixlr – http://pixlr.com – photo editing online, great tool set, easy to use and fast – like Photoshop but online and free!
• Talkr – http://www.talkr.com – turn anything you put online, such as your blog, into a PodCast
6. Q) There are all these people saying stuff online, but how can we, a business, use this to our advantage? A) Crowdsourcing – where brands invite their consumers to review their stuff and make comments / suggestions on it.
• Ideastorm – http://www.ideastorm.com – Dell think of an idea, then put it to their customers to vote on
• Toshiba Life – http://www.toshibalife.com – Toshiba help their customers get more out of their products, posting useful tips and guides then allowing visitors to comment on every article
• Lego Factory – http://factory.lego.com – design your own lego kit, if it’s good enough, Lego then manufacture it: http://factory.lego.com/themes/default.aspx
• Kraft Foods – http://brands.kraftfoods.com/innovatewithkraft/default.aspx – Kraft invite customers to submit recipe and packaging ideas for their products
• Threadless – http://www.threadless.com – design a tshirt, submit it, people buy it
• Wii Ware – http://www.nintendo.com/wii/wiiware – Got an idea for a Wii game? Then make it and launch it online!
7. Augmented reality! What?
A new technology called augmented reality is now becoming really big.
Basically, it allows things on your computer screen to interact with what your web cam sees, using special black and white codes.
Your webcam picks up these codes which correspond with a shape, object or animation. These can then be rendered on to another image, or whatever your webcam is pointing at.
Here are a few examples:
• http://ge.ecomagination.com/smartgrid/#/augmented_reality
• Toyota IQ for your desktop… http://www.toyota.co.uk/cgi-bin/toyota/bv/generic_editorial.jsp?navRoot=toyota_1024_root&nodiv=TRUE&fullwidth=TRUE&forceText=TRUE&edname=iQ_reality&id=iQ_reality&catname=/toyota_1024_root/main_nav/pageTopNav/Zone+iQ&zone=Zone+iQ&menuid=316070&sr=Mall
• http://www.crackunit.com/2008/09/11/examples-of-amazing-augmented-reality – watch these videos
• http://www.ddawards.com/2009/campaign/bmw/z4 – you print out a square with Z4 in it, then control the Z4 driving around your desk to create art – very cool.
• http://www.artag.net – a few more examples
8. The next big thing?
Google Wave. Watch this space!