Aptera: Electric Gadget Car of the Near Future

I want one of the space-age electric cars. Supported by such groups as Idealab, Google.org and EssenJay Investments the Aptera has moved from R&D and is beginning pre-production. You'll actually be able to own one of these suckers soon. It is being built in California and meets all road/highway driving requirements. It will cost between $25k and $45k depending. And it looks cool. And you can plug your iPhone into it.

Of course, Tesla Motors is rumored to be coming out with their new all-electric sedan soon, too. I guess I'll just need to get one of each.

MIX09 Conference: We Are Leaving the Desktop

We just got back from Las Vegas where we attended the Microsoft MIX conference, an event focusing on the intersection of technology and design. In place of actually writing insightful comment, we'll just post a bunch of our observations. John Lim was my cohort on this journey and we explored it all and lived to tell about it.

This is the new web. We are leaving the desktop behind. We are saying goodbye to the broadcast paradigm. We are getting free steak from Steve Ballmer. The cloud awaits.

• Silverlight 3 Beta released to much hoopla at MIX09. Many naysayers are warming up to Silverlight and we got to see tons of neat multimedia demos. Netflix demonstrated their video player which, now that it's been converted to Silverlight, works on both Mac and PC platforms.
• Convert Flash files to Silverlight with SWF2XAML
• There were multiple demonstrations of how Silverlight is time-based (like After Effects) and not frame-based like Flash.
• Silverlight 3.0 allows for something called the Out-of-Browser experience (OOB) which allows you to detach a Silverlight application from a browser instance so the app can rest on your desktop.
• See this cool video: "Seattle radio station KEXP discusses their use of Silverlight to engender listener loyalty and support. The KEXP application allows you to interact with live media, as well as store media for playing on the bus or plane when disconnected." DJ Riz was in Vegas mixing beats each morning as conference attendees filed into the keynote speeches.


• Conference attendees were lucky enough to see the new film by Gary Hustwit called Objectified. (See the trailer below.) "Objectified is a feature-length documentary about our complex relationship with manufactured objects and, by extension, the people who design them."

• Microsoft's Expression Suite had some announcements at the show. Expression Blend 3 Preview is available with some cool new features. Also check out the Expression Web SuperPreview for IE available now. It allows developers to test websites on multiple browser versions while on same box, with no virtual machines needed. Sketch Flow is a great new rapid prototyping tool for Blend 3. A really cool way to turn a mind map into a storyboard into a prototype. The work flow promise of Expression seems to hold true according to Blitz, an agency that presented. They talked about a best practice of making a “Shadow HTML version” of your site so that all plug-in content (flash and silverlight) can be crawled.


• In direct competition with open source tool sets, Microsoft has started the BizSpark program where they give away tons of software for free to qualifying start-up companies for the first three years of their new company.


• "BlogEngine.NET is an open source .NET blogging project that was born out of desire for a better blog platform. A blog platform with less complexity, easy customization, and one that takes advantage of the latest .NET features."


• Microsoft Internet Explorer 8 officially released at MIX and I've downloaded it for my PC (but of course not my Mac cuz they don't make a Mac version). It's definitely worth the download. They kicked off the talk with a pretty funny movie starring some famous comedians talking about the Internet. (see below)
• The Add-Ons gallery at Microsoft allows you to extend the functionality of IE8. One add on that was released at MIX09 was the OneRiot Video Search.
• Some features received applause like the fact that when one tab is displaying a crashed website, the whole browser doesn’t crash.
• IE8 Accelerators are an easy way to right-click info on a page and act on that info via a new pop-up floater.
• Instant Search is a visual search that lets you compare, side-by-side, results from Google, Live.com, Wikipedia and other sources without leaving the current browser window.
• Web Slices allow IE8 users to keep track of a “slice” of the web that you visit frequently.
• IE8 seems to adhere to W3C standards much more than previous versions.

• Stack Overflow is a programming Q & A site that's free. They gave an overview presentation about how they used Microsoft tools when creating their site.


• The ZAAZ presentation was well done. It was called Measuring Social Media Marketing (Measuring Meaning, Creating Value: From data to action in social media). See the video and slides. Jason Burby is the Chief Analytics & Optimization Officer for ZAAZ and Ryan Turner leads ZAAZ social media efforts. They talked about quality vs. quantity in analytics. Human-centric, not tool-centric. Participatory. People are not going to the web to meet people. Really they are looking for value. Social objects and portability are super important. Entrepreneurs should ask what service they can offer that will take advantage of what is already online today. The year of the API. Remix, reuse.


• Bill Buxton spoke about experience design, creating products that people connect with and have positive experiences with. He joined Microsoft three years ago and has brought much street cred to the UX design team there. I liked when he was discussing prototyping and storyboards. He stressed that representing the transitions is as important as representing the states...what happens between the elements. He explained that successful experience designers must understand working on all platforms. His book Sketching User Experiences is great and conference attendees got free copies. See his keynote video below.

• I saw Lemmy from Motorhead in the Venetian casino. My shoulder rubbed against his leather jacket. He looked healthy and purposeful. Ace of Spades! Lemmy the movie coming soon.


• SharePoint was omnipresent.
• Visual Studio 2010 will allow you to open and edit SharePoint sites from within VS.
• Tony Jones presented "How Razorfish Lights Up Brand with Microsoft SharePoint" where he showed their creations for clients such as Kroger and Dell Financial. See the video.


• Microsoft Live Labs: Scientists, engineers and entrepreneurs doing research and experimentation and displaying the results online including Photosynth, Web Sandbox, Seadragon, Thumbtack and more.


• "Microsoft PlayReady is a new content access technology that enables business models for a wide range of digital entertainment content.”


• Bondi Digital Publishing is a company bringing print media online in a smart way and utilizing Deep Zoom to allow exploration. They've created Cover to Cover, 40 years of Rolling Stone Magazine plus a free online gallery of 50 issues of Playboy Magazine at PlayboyArchive.com. Also presenting was Vertigo who worked with Bondi on the Playboy site. Vertigo also built the MIX09 site, the Hard Rock Cafe Memorabilia site and the CBS Obama Inauguration site. Vertigo has the BigPicture tool for making DeepZoom experiences. See the fun 3D cloud example. Get the code for BigPicture.


• There was a Rock Band video game competition during the conference. Everyone wants to be a rock star, but no one wants to learn the chords.


• The Windows Web App Gallery: Tons of free apps to install on your server including IIS versions of popular open source tools. The Microsoft Web Platform is "more than just a powerful set of tools, servers and technologies, the Microsoft Web Platform offers a complete ecosystem for building and hosting web sites, services, and applications."



• Azure is Microsoft's platform for the cloud. The cloud consists of SAAS, PAAS and IAAS (software, platform and infrastructure as a service). The Cloud Pyramid, as described by GoGrid, represents apps on the top of the pyramid (like Gmail), platform in the middle (Azure is a platform) and infrastructure on the bottom (server farms in the sky like Amazon Web Services or GoGrid).


• Forrester says that every dollar spent on UX research will return $100 over the life of the product.


• Links about MIX09
• Official MIX Site
• Flickr Photos of Mix09
• MIX09 Twitter feed
• Microsoft tweaks Windows Mobile 6.5 UI for the haters
• Microsoft Rocks the Web at MIX09

Pomegranate Phone Is Too Good to Be True

This new phone is amazing. It has GPS, an MP3 player, a video camera and a voice translator. Oh yea, and it can also make coffee and be used as a harmonica.

Check out the cool Pomegranate Phone website which is actually a $300,000 ad campaign for the province of Nova Scotia. Yup, you heard that right. It's Canadian travel propaganda. And I love it.

It appears to be attracting a great deal of interest with it's high-quality video and slickly produced graphics. I wonder if this type of branded entertainment functions well as marketing. My gut says that it does work. Even though I wasn't looking for Nova Scotia, it pulled me in. I've thought about Nova Scotia several times today because of this site...which is several times more than I thought about it yesterday. And now I'm blabbing to my blog about it.

Not everyone agrees that this attempt at deliberate viral marketing is effective. Some even call it the Pombomb.