Tag Archives: Microsoft

5 Things I Loved Last Week… Obama Inauguration Edition

21 Jan

Obama’s coronation er… inauguration had the entire world (and by extension the Interwebs) buzzing and some great links came out of it.

Clouds Comparing Bush’s Inaugural Speech Versus Obama’s

I thought David Wescott did a clever thing punching the two transcripts into Wordle. Have a look below and tell me which one is Obama’s and which one is Bush’s (I desaturated the images. The colours made it too obvious). There a few commonalities, but a couple of the prominent words are dead giveaways.

Collage of Newspaper Front Pages from the Next Day (via @jasonfried)

As Jason said, “Anyone know who this guy’s PR firm is?”
 

CNN’s Photosynth of the Inauguration (via @kevinrose)

Television really didn’t do it justice. They should have done some 360 degree pans. Interestingly enough, when you zoom in from some angles it captures moments when Obama isn’t on the podium. How is that even possible? I assume that 95% of the photos taken would have been while Obama was on stage.
 

Obama Skywalker

This is one incredibly detailed action figure with some awesome accesories (sold separately no doubt). Check out the link for the full photo shoot.

 

My President is Black – Jay-Z Remix (via @vasta)

I don’t care if the Young Jeezy/Nas version was first. Jay is the man.

5 THINGS I LOVED LAST WEEK… NOVEMBER 30 – DECEMBER 6

13 Dec

Coming in later than usual this week, but it has been a crazy week for me, but I am hoping to write a few real posts over the holidays so stay tuned. 

1. BMW Product Navigator

As somebody who has previously worked on automotive kiosk experiences, I would really like to try this out first hand. Also, it is nice to see Microsoft’s Surface technology popping up more regularly.

 

2. How to be a 21st Century Capitalist

Umair Haque has a nice (albeit slightly abstract) post on the redefining capital and capitalism (something Adbusters and a whole bunch of other folks have been harping on for years). It is nice to see those ideas making it into more mainstream strategy discourse.

3. Woordle

Woordle creates word clouds based on text you provide. Below is what they automatically generated based on the RSS feed of this blog. I would love to see a word cloud of a week’s worth of the words that come out of my mouth. Now imagine that tracked over a year with robust analytics. I could pinpoint exactly when certain words became played out in my mind, compare my social vocabulary to my work vocabulary (I bet there would be a lot more cuss words than I would want to see in both) and do a whole bunch of other awesome stuff. There is definitely a nice business application or at the very least a cool art project here. Somebody please do this.

4. TechCrunch’s Interview With Lord Zuckerberg

It’s always nice to hear a bit about the vision for everybody’s favourite time hole.

5. Let Me Google That For You

Now when somebody asks you a question they could probably just Google themselves, you can really step up your jerk game by using this service to send them custom Google instructions to answer their question.