IDEAS

This reminds me of cars, Detroit Raw Power VS Japans efficient motors.  2 completely different ways to do the same thing.  This one is interesting as I’ve done a lot of European travel and I’m very familiar with the green running man.  I’d like to hear our in-house designer’s views on this topic, so I’ll try to get them to comment on this article for everyone to read.

Read the whole article here

“The classic American emergency exit sign—the bold red letters spelling out E-X-I-T—seems at first glance like an unimpeachable bit of sign design. The contrast between the letters and the background renders it highly legible, the illumination stresses the importance of the message, and the color is evocative of both fire and fire-safety devices (fire extinguishers, fire engines, fire alarms, and the like). If you’re reading this in a coffee shop, cubicle, or other public place, pause and look around you; it probably won’t take long to find that glowing red beacon.

But people in the rest of the world—at least, the kind of people who spend time considering how to mark a means of emergency egress—think our simple red sign is completely nuts. Many other countries use some version of the ISO standard, a symbol developed the late 1970s by a Japanese designer named Yukio Ota and adopted for international use in 1985. This take on the exit sign goes by the informal name “the running man,” and looks like this:”

Found this while posting the last post, 9 Technologies to help bring down the costs of our healthcare systems.  I’ve put a couple the ones I thought were amazing below, but you can read the whole article here.  Some are simple changes to current tech and some are complete revamps, but awesome all around.  Funny thing, I bet you no one will complain that we’re putting a bunch of lab workers or doctors out of jobs with this tech.  But when we try to implement technologies to make local and federal government more efficient and need less workers, everyone goes crazy about job security.

Didn’t mean to go off topic, by NJ is bankrupt but everytime they try to cut people out to save money, it turns into a huge protest and I’m tired to paying some of the highest property taxes in the nation….

Medical Acoustics Lung Flute

“People with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease might be able to scale back on their meds by instead using this $40 reusable instrument (also a PopSci Best of What’s New award winner) that sends vibrations into the lungs to break up mucus. Make sure to check out the video of the Lung Flute in action, starring Senior Associate Editor Bjorn Carey and His Mucus.”

Insulin Made From Flowers

“Americans with diabetes shell out some $132 billion a year for insulin, which usually comes from genetically engineered yeast or bacteria. But Canadian scientists can make it cheaper. They inserted the human insulin gene into the common safflower plant, which churns out the drug for a fraction of the cost. Just 25 square miles of the crop could make insulin for the entire world.”

Popular Science and google have teamed up to put all 137 years of popular science magazine online…. 137 years… damn!  Read the whole story here.  Hopefully magazines like Popular Science will be able to survive in the digital world.

Have to admit, seeing this technology focused commercials gives me the goose bumps.  Saw this today on Hulu, we fortunate enough to find on youtube, tell me what you think?

I’ve been saying for years that job searching costs way too much, and always thought of demolishing the whole industry by putting the craigslist business model into place for the job search industry. Looks like someone beat me to the punch, and its one of the pioneers of the industry itself! Read the whole article here

“Pioneer of online job search starts over again

Bill Warren founded an early online job board in the 1990s, helped kick-start an industry and was president of Monster.com, one of the leading Internet career sites. But these days he’s not very happy with the results.

So he’s taking another crack at it, going after Monster, Career Builder and similar commercial job sites. Warren is starting a nonprofit job listing system that could lower the costs that employers pay to list positions and make the process easier and more fruitful for applicants.

He has the enthusiastic backing of hundreds of large companies, including IBM Corp., American Express, AT&T Inc. and Johnson & Johnson, the kinds of employers that spend hundreds of thousands of dollars a year searching for new talent.”

This portion is a great idea that wasn’t in my original idea, but it’s a very clever idea that will help put these websites over the top:
“Companies that belong to the association pay a $15,000 annual membership fee and will receive prominent placement on the “.jobs” Web sites. Smaller companies can purchase a “.jobs” domain name for about $125 a year and then post jobs for free. They can also work through their state employment agencies, which post jobs online at no charge.

At those prices, the new “.jobs” system could be another online innovation that undercuts what currently exists — much as the invention of job boards themselves undermined newspaper help-wanted ads.”

Seemed pretty relevant after looking outside Remember, bend at knees, not the waist…

Got this email below today about dimdim.com’s newest features which finally include quick desktop sharing and username based URLS to simplify starting a meeting. If you don’t know what dimdim does, it’s a web conferencing tool that is free for up to 20 users and the price goes up from there, but it’s very reasonable and it’s very stable.  For the attendee to a meeting there is no software to install, for the host that wants to share their desktop, there’s a small plug-in to install and it works for both PC and Mac.  I just used this tonight to view a Mac user’s screen and she was able to install without any direction from me.  It was pretty sweet to send her a URL that goes directly to the meeting I’m in that’s based on my username instead of some long guid URL.

If you haven’t used this product, give it a try. If you have meetings with less than 20 heads, I’m sure you’ll find this comparable to webex or live meeting.

Here’s the email from DimDim:

“Thanks to your suggestions, we’ve made Dimdim faster, easier, and a lot more powerful.

The instant you log into Dimdim you’ll notice the change. A big red button invites you to “Meet” Click it once (go ahead, try it) and in seconds you will be in your live Dimdim meeting room.

Now look at your browser’s navigation bar URL. It will be http://my.dimdim.com/username Simply email, IM, Skype or Tweet this Smart URL and your guests will join your room just as fast as you did — all without installing any software!

Speaking of software, if you choose to share your desktop in a meeting we’ll prompt you to install an optional plug-in we call Dimdim myScreen™ You’ll call it magic. Just click the new system tray icon (PC) or menubar icon (Mac) and you will instantly share your screen — even without opening a browser or starting a meeting! Share your Smart URL and your guests will see your screen in seconds.

If no meeting is running or you are not sharing your screen, your Smart URL points your guests to your new profile page where they can register for future public events (any event without a meeting key is public) or wait for your event to begin.”

Just read this off of the AP (Original here):

“Google plans to build experimental, ultra-fast Internet networks in a handful of communities around the country.

The search company said Wednesday that its fiber-optic broadband networks will deliver speeds of 1 gigabit per second to as many as 500,000 Americans. Google Inc. says those systems will be more than 100 times faster than the networks that most Americans have access to today.

In a blog post, the company said the networks will let consumers download a high-definition, full-length feature film in less than five minutes and allow rural health clinics to send 3-D medical images over the Web.

Google says it will seek input from communities that might be interested in getting one of the testbed networks.”

My thoughts:

1. I already have FIOs and I think that my 20 megs down and 5 megs up is fast (check out the image I’ve attached), but more speed won’t hurt right

2.  This is Google getting around the normal ISP’s and their nonsense of wanting to double dip by charging the users who pay ISPs already and content providers like Google who don’t have to pay the ISPs currently

3.  The motto “Google does no evil” is getting weaker everyday something like this gets launched.  Don’t get me wrong, I love that they’re pushing other companies to get their ish together and offer services at better quality for lower prices, but they’re have such a cash engine behind them that they can wipe out whole industries

4.  They’re slowly getting closer to the root of the internet, first they’re running their own DNS servers for users, and now their own portion of the internet, soon they’ll make their own Root Servers and we’ll all be paying a google bill for home services

5.  if you think they track alot of your internet usage now, what about when they are the ISP…. and couple that with what they already know about u…

Overall, I’m still in a wait and see mode with Google and all their ventures as we use a lot of their services and don’t mind giving up some info in exchange for those services.  But I’m watching and waiting for some greed or shadiness to happen because if it’s possible, it will happen….

Thanks to Shawn for this one.  This is a good add on to the my previous post about subversion for Dreamweaver.  Get the client at http://versionsapp.com/

Many people watch for just the commercials, and most like me love the game and can’t wait until next season! At the party I attended, it was like Mystery Science Theater 3000 with everyone spitting out the opinion quickly and often I would say we had more thumbs down then up, and very few that I can remember today. Godaddy (the use of females tearing off dress shirts), Doritos (funny ones, especially the Doritos ninja), Hyundai (people carrying the car), Etrade (Talking babies still work), Jay Leno, Letterman and Oprah (have no clue what it was for, but was awesome to see).

But by far the best commercial was definitely the Google one, very clever, very simple, and pulls on your heart strings. I only remember seeing it once, and it was so memorable. If you can think of a better commercial let me know in the comments, but I think they ended up with the best bang for the buck commercial by far: