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It’s exciting to see Paul, Jack, =Drummond et al. at Parity releasing a useful customer app under their Azigo brand. They’ve taken the serious foundational work of Higgins and built on top of it a helpful I-Card application.
Their new I-Card offering is called “RemindMe“, and it’s designed to interact with sites you visit that include available membership benefits. By downloading the RemindMe I-Card (assuming you already have the Azigo Card Selector and associated Firefox plugin), you’ll start seeing overlays on various sites (like during Google searches) notifying you of available member offers.
For example, if you’re a member of AAA, you might not realize that the hotels you’re researching for your next trip will give you a discount. Azigo’s RemindMe I-Card will pop a notification into the search result page. Beyond benefiting members, the organization gains visibility as the overlay will appear for anyone with RemindMe, encouraging people to join to access the offer.
Based on a recent post by Phil Windley, it looks like they’re using the Kynetx Network Service to power the overlays. It makes sense to leverage their APIs and focus on the card management experience.
It’ll be interesting to see whether the I-Card model will take off, though. It’s going to be tough convincing people to buy into the experience enough to download a card selector application and then install various I-Cards. If they can hitch their wagon to a useful application, they should be able to go along for the ride, but they’ll need a compelling value proposition to overcome the download.
Those of us old enough to remember a time when you could only play video games at an arcade will appreciate this. Mark built a cabinet that’s nearly identical to the ones we used to feed with quarters at the Manitou Springs Penny Arcade. The primary difference, of course, is that rather than playing only one game, his runs a MAME emulator under Linux so you can jam to all of your old favorites.
Ahhh… for the hours spent with the posse amidst the din of the outdoor arcade on a breezy summer night. Nicely done, BlackRazor.
 If you find yourself walking along Newark Avenue and First Street in Jersey City, NJ, look around. In one of the barren fenced corners you’ll see an interesting installation of guerrilla art. They are glass spheres made by wiring the necks of discarded bottles together in series, each about 2 to 3 feet in diameter.
OK, that’s intriguing enough… but I got some of the back story when talking to Peter Wasinger, the artist responsible. He apparently got the idea for the installation as he walks past the space to and from work each day. Using bottles from a local bar, he then wired the spheres together in his studio and installed them at night (well, actually 4am).
During the installation, he said that passersby made some interesting comments. A group of men walked by and said, “You go Pappi! This is SO New York”. In response, Wasinger replied, “It is now Jersey City too.” They then said “Keep it going, Pappi. You rock!”
You can check out more photos of the installation in my Flickr stream. He’s already working on other installations, and trying to figure out how to light them up. While that’s in progress, you can check out some of his other artwork available on his Cafe Press site.
Keep it going, Pappi.
UPDATE: 2/15/2008 – I just heard from Peter Wasinger (the artist) that the installation was removed by the Jersey City Parking Authority. Bummer setback.
In his Data Mining blog, Mathew Hurst posted a simple and elegant Gedanken exercise of traffic drivers to specific content from various sites. Based on the readership and interests of their audiences, he points out some clear ideas related to the differences between “popularity” and “authority”.
What I’m describing … is the difference between some notion of popularity (which may be called influence) and some other notion of authority (or expertise) and how these issues are related to both the blogger (blog) and the readers of that blog or feed. Measuring readership on topics is key to really modeling this stuff in social media which is why FeedBurner is such an asset to Google. It also captures why metrics for bloggers should capture notions of topic (something which BuzzLogic understands).
Clear and concise. Now the trick is to capitalize on this concept.
I can’t remember how I found out about the Radio Lab show produced by WNYC, but since I’m in Boston I was pleased I could snag the podcasts from the second season (the first season being tied up in rights issues preventing their distribution as MP3s).
What really caught my ear was the “Musical Language” episode. There was a great segment on audio illusions in which they interviewed Diana Deutsch, a professor of the Psychology of Music. Specifically, they were talking to her about an audio clip she’d accidentally created of her speaking which, when heard as a loop, sounded like music. It has to be heard to be believed: WAV | MP3.
NOTE: The track begins with Deutsch speaking the full sentence, followed by a few loops of the “singing words.” Listen to the entire track, then play it again to hear the sentence again.
I was intrigued enough to pick up her two CDs (Musical Illusions and Paradoxes and Phantom Words, and Other Curiosities) to hear more. I’ve only sampled a few of the tracks so far, but they’re incredibly interesting. Especially with my interest in Beispiele paranormaler Tonbandstimmen I was keen on the “Phantom Words” tracks. What they seem to show is the incredible power of our brains to try and sift through apparent randomness in an effort to impose order (in this case turning beeps into words).
… I hear voices.
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December 31st, 2008 | 
Glass Bottle Bubbles Guerrilla Art
OK, that’s intriguing enough… but I got some of the back story when talking to Peter Wasinger, the artist responsible. He apparently got the idea for the installation as he walks past the space to and from work each day. Using bottles from a local bar, he then wired the spheres together in his studio and installed them at night (well, actually 4am).
During the installation, he said that passersby made some interesting comments. A group of men walked by and said, “You go Pappi! This is SO New York”. In response, Wasinger replied, “It is now Jersey City too.” They then said “Keep it going, Pappi. You rock!”
You can check out more photos of the installation in my Flickr stream. He’s already working on other installations, and trying to figure out how to light them up. While that’s in progress, you can check out some of his other artwork available on his Cafe Press site.
Keep it going, Pappi.
UPDATE: 2/15/2008 – I just heard from Peter Wasinger (the artist) that the installation was removed by the Jersey City Parking Authority. Bummer setback.