Here's a convenient little app from LinkedIn - it watches Twitter and catches tweets referencing keywords associated with your profile (companies, schools, etc.)

Company Buzz is an application that allows you to see what people are saying about companies and topics you care about. Company Buzz uses information from your profile such as companies and schools to find relevant discussions on twitter. Company buzz also shows you how frequently your company or topic has been mentioned and the top words associated with your company and the topic. You may add new topics and customize existing topics with new search terms to get just the results you are interested in.

(Marginally) more info here.

AppVee has video reviews of two new apps for Google's Android phone platform - bar code scanners that use your phone's camera for image capture. (see YouTube links at bottom).
From MIT's Ad Lab article:

These applications seem to be among the few with one or two natural business models built into them from the start. Placing contextual recommendations next to price look-up results is one; powering branded wishlists and registries is another.

MIT Ad Lab article about the apps

Previous MIT Ad Lab article about Instant price Checking at retail

YouTube videos:

URL: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t2zMPbVFIYE

URL: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IZkxkvWq9zE

Big Blue brings us a thoughtful article on how to profile AJAX interfaces, with a view to increasing speed, of course.

Toolkit focuses on Firebug and YSlow.

Article

AJAX Resource Center

Drupal, our favorite CMS (it powers this blog) has a new hi-profile case study - the Sony/BMG MyPlay site.

From the case study:

Myplay.com is a redesign and re-branding of Sony's Musicbox site which showcases SonyBMG's artists, providing free access to their videos, music and photos. Users can create lists of their favorite artists as well as review their music and embed widgets of their favorite artist's content into other sites.

This case study's particularly good, in that it details how various site features were accomplished in Drupal. Well worth a quick read.

Case study on Drupal.org

New Sony site

Worthwhile article from the Times on the tension between online computing and the desktop model.

Clearly the graphics industry will lag behind a little in moving everything online, mostly for bandwidth reasons - but that move is afoot as well.

Quote:

The growing confrontation between Google and Microsoft promises to be an epic business battle. It is likely to shape the prosperity and progress of both companies, and also inform how consumers and corporations work, shop, communicate and go about their digital lives. Google sees all of this happening on remote servers in faraway data centers, accessible over the Web by an array of wired and wireless devices — a setup known as cloud computing. Microsoft sees a Web future as well, but one whose center of gravity remains firmly tethered to its desktop PC software. Therein lies the conflict.

Link

New Adobe CEO talks to USAToday

Narayen takes over from Bruce Chizen.

From the article:

Adobe, best known for Photoshop photo software and Acrobat and PDF digital document tools, is shifting many of its wares from boxed software to online services.

USAToday interview (quite brief)

Thanks to Rob Webber for this one!


Stanford University hosts this site, which makes vector art from pixel art:

This site converts bitmap images to vector art - it's an online auto-tracer.

Just upload your image and we will vectorize it for you.

They're claiming a higher rate of shape accuracy and color identification than Adobe's and Corel's tools.
Granted that you can misuse any tool you care to compare with a few quick settings, I'd want to actually test this - but frankly I thought this software category was dead and buried, and I'm glad to see the Smart Guys giving each other some competition.
Boing Boing post

Stanford link

Adobe's Bruce Chizen confirms - Adobe's planning to move to web-based applications over the next decade. Maybe this'll make the InDesign server more robust?

My fondest wish is that, in moving their core applications server-side, they make them more interoperable too.
They're already shown some awesome online editing capabilities - Photoshop Express and Premiere Express for example.
Adobe's advantage in this space is that they already have a complete suite of powerful tools, and they've started the work of integration in a very savvy way.

Production 2.0, anyone?

Link