designswarm thoughts

Ok so after a first introduction I’m retracting and making a second announcement: Dave and I concluded that Blogger sucks and put together Tastythinking on Wordpress instead. So basically it’s a blog about food, health, weird food related services, dieting and everything unique we can collect around those broad topics… if you have some ideas send them along to alex at tastythinking dot come ; )

via Dana Gordon

So Jaiku (love the name) just came out, a very interesting endeavor that exploits online and mobile presence and people’s ever growing need to stay connected on every level. The only things is that so far, i only feel like being subversive and untruthful… maybe it’s just a tuesday afternoon thing…

A lovely project by Bethan Laura Wood: a tea cup that the more you use, the more the dotted pattern appears on it’s surface.

Definitely a positive history project.

As if my thesis needed more conceptual evidence of the fickle relationships we have with high tech devices, here’s the the seven stages of owning an iPod or rather being between iPods.

via Valleywag.

One of the many problems that you face when you travel is the language barrier of course. I speak and understand 3 (french, english and italian), but now I’m back in Amsterdam, I’m being bombarded by Dutch again (or Holish as Tod puts it). That’’s only fair in a way and just pushes me to actually learn it this time around.

What I hate though is that when i google anything now, I get Dutch advertisement in Dutch! I have obviously never googled in Dutch, and so wouldn’t it be something that Google would be clever at figuring out? Location does not mean that I am a native… so if you want to, give me .nl ads that are in English, that would be far more relevant, coz right now, there’s a whole marketing potential I’m simply ignoring and getting annoyed at…

Zune (coming out in stores on the 14th of November) just came out with some really interesting features that replicate a number of my thesis ideas around music sharing between devices. You can locate other wifi-enabled devices in your surroundings and send them songs or pictures. (something iPod doesn’t have yet i believe).

Obviously this has some silli DRM restrictions such as “3 plays in 3 days” so that if you send someone a song you have 3 days to play that song 3 times and then it just remains as meta-data in a “community” section, but in general I can genuinely say that this is a very interesting interface and product. There’s something nice about the personalized background and the large emphasis on content, album covers and the near disappearance of the navigation.

Well done Microsoft!

Canary Wharf dusk skyline

Originally uploaded by mbiddulph.

Some creatures hibernate till spring, refusing to face the cold of winter and preferring to stuff their face and sleep through it. I envy them. I guess I’ll be going through something similar because for the next 6 months i’ll actually stop traveling…

I took my last flight of 2006 today, making this my 15th relocation, my 16th flight this year, and after all this, impossible as it might seem, i’m on a break. So from now on till late spring, I’ll be exploring the dutch cultural landscape in much more depth and will hopefully also learn the language, on top of working hard for Blast Radius of course : )

Sigh, maybe i’m pushing it a little, but Dave and I started a new blog. So if you’re interested in food, weird food packaging, restaurant concepts, obesity, healthy food services, then go check it out!