Amazing Prezi demonstration

January 21, 2010 on 1:26 pm by Thomas | In Art, Tools, videos | 1 Comment

If you haven’t seen Prezi in action, this is an awesome illustration. Watch first the video which gives you an impression about how to work with Prezi (speed is 10x) and then the result, a Prezi which sums up a class by Howard Rheingold on Social Media in Stanford last october, done pretty much simultaneously by Adam Somlai-Fischer, artist and Prezi co-founder.

Click ‘play’, ‘wait’, click ‘more’, ‘fullscreen’, keep clicking.

Continuity Game

December 11, 2009 on 6:57 pm by Thomas | In Art, Tools | Say something!

This is a great game, small, fast, and easy to get into. Not always easy to solve and not supereasy to understand. You are the little man and need to collect the key to open the door and get top the next level. Zoom in with space and jump and run within the given square. Zoom out and reorder the squares to be able to walk from square to square in case they fit together. It’s intriguing and comes with good music. Enjoy th continuitygame.

Continuitygame1

Continuitygame2

Trabayo ist mein nicht mehr ganz so neues Internetbaby, das ich hier schon mal erwähnt habe. Es geht darum, zu sagen was man kann, das andere brauchen könnten: Cocktails mixen, Babys sitten, Websiten fixen, Rasen mähen usw.

Im ersten Schritt haben wir ein sehr einfaches System entwickelt, mit dem Beschreibungen und Headlines innerhalb von Kategorien erstellt werden können. Fehlt eine Kategorie, kann man den “Fehlt was”-Button benutzen. Interessiert man sich für einen der Services kann man mit dem Anbieter Kontakt aufnehmen. Die Trennung von Service und Person ermöglicht eine sehr einfache und dennoch granulare Privatsphäreneinstellung, sodass genau angegeben werden kann, wer man ist, wo die Dienstleistung angeboten wird und wer das sehen darf.

Trabayo - Dienstleistungen, Services privat vermitteln

Wir sind noch am Anfang und können auch nicht so schnell entwickeln wie ein voll finanziertes Startup, denn zur Zeit bezahlen wir alles selbst und arbeiten neben unseren eigentlichen Jobs daran. Unsere Vision ist aber ein System aufzubauen, das es sehr leicht und angenehm macht, den eigenen Service darzustellen, konkrete Services für andere Vorzuschlagen oder Dienstleistungen zu beschreiben, die andere brauchen könnten und die es daher geben sollte.

Dazu gibt es regelmäßige Updates auf unserem Trabayo-Blog, z.B. wer außer mir noch hinter Trabayo steht, wie wir damit irgendwann auch mal Geld verdienen wollen und dass wir nächsten Samstag, am 21.11., eine Party im Dave Lombardo feiern. Ich würde mich freuen, wenn ihr vorbeikommt, RSVP zur Trabayo Party geht hier.

Trabayo auf Facebook
Trabayo auf Twitter

Update: Thx to Lifestyle Blogs - Blog Catalog Blog Directory for adding me to their catalogue. May your visitors be mine!

And here’s another toy for live electronic musicians: The Ableton – Novation launchpad. Trigger loops, bars, effects and all the other stuff you can do and prepare with Ableton live. Looks awesome in the video, can someone please send over a piece for me to try it out?!!

Novation Launchpad – Ableton Live Controller from Michael Hovemann on Vimeo.

The eRockit is a mixture between bike and electric motorcycle. You still use your legs to get it in motion but merely use your power as a trigger for the electric speed. It goes up to 80km/h so it can even be used on the autobahn. Moreover it looks fantastic and sounds like future (in this case the furture is noiseless). Of course, it’s a prototype and if you want to get one your own, it would be a toy worth 25000 EUR. But to be able to accelerate faster than a car on a traffic sign could be worth it.

Inudge: Create soundloops in a widget

September 25, 2009 on 11:38 am by Thomas | In Music, Tools, Widgets | 1 Comment

Here is the result of minutes clicking and trying out to build a nice loop with inudge. It’s a great and very intuitive tool, works like a classic drum machine, great to play around with!

On the right side, you’ll find six different sound libraries, the drums are at the bottom, next is base and some synths on top. Click on the matrix to define a sound in the time line, which represents one bar with 16 clicks. Go ahead!

Online audio editing with Myna

September 16, 2009 on 7:23 pm by Thomas | In Music, Tools | Say something!

Myna ist ein Audio-Mixing und Bearbeitungs-Tool, das komplett im Browser läuft und auf den ersten Blick ziemlich beeindruckend ist. Garageband-mäßig kann man hier aus einer Bank mit Sounds und Loops auswählen und als Spuren anordnen. Die Clips lassen sich dann mit Effekten belegen, ein- und ausblenden und trimmen, d.h. Anfangs- und Endpunkt bestimmen sowie weiter loopen.

Natürlich kann man auch eigene Audiodateien hochladen und im Mix verwenden und sogar direkt Audio per Mikro aufnehmen. Alles funktioniert wirklich intuitiv und nur ein bisschen rumspielen mit den Loopbänken macht schon einen Riesen-Spaß. Das Ergebnis lässt sich als Projekt speichern oder als Mixdown exportieren, auf den Myna-Server oder lokal. Und schließlich per Embed-Code verteilen. Das Demo-Video macht Lust auf ein paar nächtliche Sessions.

[via Mashable]

zeigstimmeEinige Initiativen haben sich ein Beispiel an dem sehr erfolgreichen “Der eine Nichtwähler, der Obama verhindert hat”-Tool genommen und ähnliche Web-Instrumente produziert. Immer geht es dabei um ein Video, das sich mit Name und Bild personalisieren lässt und anschließend an Bekannte als Link verschickt werden kann. Ziel ist es bei allen Tools, Menschen am 27. September zum Wählen zu bewegen.
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Ok, now here we are with augmented reality, it is starting. We have the tools like webcams and Actionscript and in flow the impressive examples.

AR Business Card from James Alliban on Vimeo.

You can try it too! Print this and go here and be amazed!

It’s done by James Aliban, an artist-developer-scientist who likes to experiment and build stuff with all sorts of hardware and flash. Here is how to build a multitouch screen very easily on your own. And he has many more examples.

(via Michael)

Update: Thanks to Konrad here is another augmented reality example by GE

Testing putpat.tv

June 4, 2009 on 4:20 pm by Thomas | In Music, Tools | 1 Comment

I have 5 invitations, just comment below if you would like to test putpat too.

Putpat is another musicvideosite which aims to make it simple and easy to watch music videos like back in the ol’ days on MTV. A simple, flash based interface lets you skip videos, change channels, and love or ban videos. Based on this bans or loves plus on a tool called Veequalizer users can build their own channels which will then deliver videos according to taste and mood.
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Die Versprechen des mysteriösen, sich aber immer konkreter abzeichnenden Semantic Web sind groß. Nichts anderes als dass Maschinen tatsächlich verstehen sollen, was man gerade sucht und die Informationen und möglichen Entscheidungen entsprechend aufarbeiten will das semantische Web liefern. Ein Web der Daten, mehr als Daten im Web.

Artikel von mir im Trabayo-Blog weiterlesen

European election badge

April 28, 2009 on 11:08 am by Thomas | In Politics, Tools, Widgets | Say something!

European parliament offers a nice widget on their European Parliament MySpace site which breaks down essential political questions in a very simple way. Here is the widget I did:

Too bad it does not show the meaning of the symbols but it goes like this: the cat is for taming financial markets, the sun is for solar energy (althought that’s a little short, I believe we need a mix, which includes nuclear energy BUT with a clear stop in the future), the lock is for open borders, the flash for electric energy for cars, the book is for investments in education (instead of agriculture) and the syringe is for genetic agriculture (and I do not mean Monsanto! I believe public science must undertake a much bigger effort than today to find, also genetically driven, solutions to make agriculture more sustainable and productive.

Great movie trailer iPhone app

April 27, 2009 on 12:25 pm by Thomas | In Tools | 1 Comment

A friend pointed me to this great film trailer iPhone application which does exactly what you expect: List all available trailers with some context information about the movie, shows the trailers, makes the downloadable to a local archive, select between European countries and thus languages, search for titles or other tags like production company genre and so on. Very recommendable!

And here’s the trailerapp trailer:

Developed by filmtrailer.com (Preview Networks) with xTreo

I had this idea when I realized how many people twitter about what they are watching on tv right now. Taking a look at my German twitter friends on a sunday night, be sure, almost half of them will comment on the ongoing “Tatort”. But in contrast to stuff from the web, tv shows cannot be linked to directly. Of course, there are pages from tv channels, YouTube videos or blogentries, but there is clearly no distinct system to link to tv shows.

This is a gap to be filled, maybe it is THE gap to be filled for the two systems to grow together. We need URLs for tv shows.

How can this be done? Here is just an idea, feel free to discuss it, take it, rework it and implement it.
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Café Solvey

January 22, 2009 on 7:37 pm by Thomas | In Berlin Scene, Design, Tools, Webfindings | 3 Comments

For the most time I have been in my current flat, the little store in the ground floor was filled with a computer store. The guys where nice, even had some hints for me from time to time but obviously they did not suceed with their business and closed last year. Some months later people started to build a café there. This was of great delight to us since we have many bars in our neighborhood but no nice cafés to sit and read newspapers.

In september, Café Solvey opened finally and we instantly became friends with Solvey and her family who run the place. It’s warm and cosy, with very old porcelain, self-made cake, soft armchairs, a kids corner with toys and a fake, yet very well done chemin. And when Solvey asked me to help her out with a website I could not say no. Jimdo was the system of choice to build it fast and easy and when I see now that Solvey herself (who is not a big fan of these “computer things”) edits the events on her page and adds products, I know it was the right decision – Jimdo obviously easy to use. And I earned myself a couple of coffees, breakfasts and cakes!

Take a look at Solvey’s website, more importantly, visit the café if you are around and leave a comment in the guestbook!

Yesterday, I attended the ceremony of Deutsche Welle to award the Best of Blogs (theBOBS) which, according to the jury, are the best blogs in different national categories, as well as in video and audio in 2009.

Peter aka thewavingcat blogged live with a very fascinating tool called Coveritlive. It has a very smooth editor surface to write, comment and adjust stuff and codes which can be embedded in other websites where your twitterlike short news are flowing in and can be commented. He worked really hard in typing down the many informations from the stage, approving comments AND answering questions from a worldwide crowd. Respect! Also, Stefanie Suren and Andreas Schepers did a good job in guiding the audience through the evening with a plimpse of Hollywood feel: “And the winner is..!”
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What you can do with Arduino

November 26, 2008 on 5:24 pm by Thomas | In Art, Design, Tools | 4 Comments

ArduinoArduino is an open-source electronics prototyping platform based on flexible, easy-to-use hardware and software. It’s intended for artists, designers, hobbyists, and anyone interested in creating interactive objects or environments.”

Hm, so what does that mean? Basically what you can with the little Arduino board is easily bring lots of input in and turn it into certain outputs. Sounds easy and maybe trivial but really is not. Because Arduino can process many different signals and trigger many different outputs. Kiss a door and it opens. Step close to a mirror and a video starts playing with the mirror talking to you. Turn TV picture into LED-signals. Connect it to the Wii and In general one might say it’s very nerdy and looks a little unready still. But it’s definetly the start into a development of selfbuilt robots and machines.

Below are some video examples. I particularly like the TV to LED part because it’s kind of what a friend and I did for a party once. We put 16 toilet paper rolls covered with translucent paper in fornt a tv and thus reduced the pictures to a 16×16 pixel screen. We taped it to video and had a nice party light installation. The posted below is slightly more elegant but, really, less charming.
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Greenhouse.sproutbuilder.com is an absolute blast. It’s a flash based widget builder which works entirely in your browser window and has a lot of editing features. Build sites with text, video, pictures, slideshows, maps, charts or insert RSS. Define size, fonts, colors, background, effects. Here are the most recent updates from the PANORAMA3000 blog in a widget, it took me 20 minutes to make it nice.

Wordle – Beautiful word clouds

September 11, 2008 on 8:59 am by Thomas | In Politics, Tools | Say something!

obama_mccain_acceptancespeec_wordle“Wordle is a toy for generating “word clouds” from text that you provide. The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text. You can tweak your clouds with different fonts, layouts, and color schemes. The images you create with Wordle are yours to use however you like..”

I discovered Wordle in a Twitter-tweet by Steve Rubel where he compared Obama’s and McCain’s acceptance speeches with the help of this text analysis tool. It’s very open to interpretation indeed but somehow pretty and illustrative.

I compared two speeches of Müntefering and Merkel, the one Müntefering held at the Parteitag in Hamburg and one Merkel held to celebrate the Soziale Marktwirtschaft. They were surprisingly similar. A very interesting fact is that both use the word “müssen” a lot. Maybe German politicians should think about putting their messages into sentences with more “können”.

You can see Müntefering’s speech on the left side (obviously, Merkel wouldn’t say “Genossen”) and Merkel’s on the right side.

Iphone wordpress app test

September 2, 2008 on 9:01 pm by Thomas | In How to, Tools | Say something!

Just a test of the iPhone wordpress app – still iphone word recommendation is really a pain but that’s not the (the=thw- wtf?!) fault of the app..

Took a picture but I guess it means work to adjust it nicely to the design. We’ll see..

Next task: Disable this autocorrect thing.

IFA-Links

September 2, 2008 on 5:38 pm by Thomas | In Art, Design, Tools | Say something!

Sony hall at IFA, by HolgerESony hall on IFA by HolgerEI went to IFA last week and apart from the vacuum cleaning robot (cute!), the 3DTV screens by LG and Samsung (no link found) and the vast Sony hall, I especially liked the science part of the trade fair. I talked to two scientists from DFKI Saarbrücken and tried the Wii fit board they hacked to surf Google Earth. Fun! In general, I think it’s a big chance for IFA to strengthen this part to be ever more successful in the future. Here, Matthieu and Simon demonstrate their invention:

This weekend in Berlin will see art, music, politics and overall a mashup of all: Friday night will see Substance, the biggest Dubstep party on the European continent so far, at Berghain, there is the big art festival Videoakt on friday and saturday where Stylewalker’s going to spin, and on sunday people living in Friedrichshain-Kreuzberg have the chance to cast their votes for or against the urban development project Mediaspree.
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There’s less than a month to wait for Melt! festival taking off again. I’m looking forward to working there again, you can read about my experiences at this beautiful and excessive festival in several articles on stylewalker.net!

I don’t know which artists I am going to take care of this time, I’ll post it as soon as I know. But everything about the line up, maps, tickets, pics and videos you can find in the Melt! (blog me) SITE below. Repost it at your blog (just click “blog me”), Myspace or Facebook and take the chance to win tickets!

The Melt! (blog me) SITE is a product by PANORAMA3000 for Melt!

Fassadendrucker

May 26, 2008 on 8:12 pm by Thomas | In Art, Tools | Say something!

Just checked on a comment and found this: A facade printer. Crazy. Facade printer.
[via Big City of Dreams]

What’s missing on the iphone

May 19, 2008 on 7:00 pm by Thomas | In Tools | 1 Comment

So, it’s not all gold that’s iPhone and with all the hysteria about this product, many flaws should not be forgotten.- So here is my ultimate list of what’s missing or not good or what actually sucks on the iPhone, even after hacking or unbreaking or simunlocking it with Ziphone. If I should be mistaken or just too stupid to find it, please correct me in the comments.

Downloading files – apparently there is an application for it but so far I can’t make it work.
Why is there no obvious file management?
There’s no flash in Safari browser
The camera can’t record video and until now there’s no application which does it good enough (e.g. with sound)
The camera is not very good for fotos either.
You can’t send calender items
You can’t subscribe to podcasts
You cannot pick a song from your library as ringtone!!
No radio, no dvbt
3,5 mm line-in for headphones only works with the slim apple one. Normal hi-fi line in will be too thick too fit into the slot.
No copy-paste!!
No counting of letters while writing sms, no draft saving for sms, cannot edit sent sms and resend them
No gps, no umts (3g)
Autocompletion of words is far away from T9 level
Where’s the DJ application (pitch and mix..)?!

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