Thought Garage

What an amazing concept and implementation. Probably the BEST application on iPad. The Flipboard application on the iPad can create a stunning and truly delightful magazine from any Twitter feed (or Facebook for that matter).   It looks at a tweet, access the URL and compose the original article in a beautiful magazine format. It also picks up images from the article and arranges them in various magazine formats.   If the tweet is not referring to an URL, then it nicely composes the tweet like a quote in a magazine. A little intro to the  Flipboard for iPad. Introduction to Flipboard for iPad Take a look at a couple of awesome screenshots of the Magazine created from Twitter feed of @inspions.

This is pretty cool online show application built  on Silverlight technologies. Silverlight streaming video, excellent typography, really cool art work,  slick animations and tons of relevant content synchronized with the video. http://everybodysbusiness.msn.com/   Content all spread out nicely.

Looks like Apple is beefing up for some announcements tomorrow, on iTunes. Will iTunes have an SDK too?

With the financial and business muscle Tata’s have, they could have build just any other car for the new age, but they have decided to build a Nano, a car for everybody.  Just watched this video R.A. Mashelkar: Breakthrough designs for ultra-low-cost products - R.A. Mashelkar (2009) on Active Player , where the speaker was sharing a bit of the story and idea behind building Nano.  Engineer RA Mashelkar shares three stories of ultra-low-cost design from India that use bottom-up rethinking, and some clever engineering, to bring expensive products (cars, prosthetics) into the realm of the possible for everyone. Source : R.A. Mashelkar: Breakthrough designs for ultra-low-cost products - R.A. Mashelkar (2009) from TEDTalks ( Feed ) via Active Player

The next best bill board could be just your car. If you haven’t seen enough Advertisement in any given day, well, you will pretty soon. Ads are coming to a car near you. Its called ‘Cash Ur Drive’. You can make your car a moving bill board. Read more here . Via Springwise

Groupon 's Unsubscribe screen asks you to ‘Punish’ a team member that recommended Email Subscriptions whenever you unsubscribe to those Email notifications. Nice, personal, playful and bring you back to interacting with their site, even after you decided to go away. Loved it.

“ I promise not to exclude from consideration any idea based on its source, but to consider ideas across schools and heritages in order to find the ones that best suit the current situation.” -- The Oath of Non-Allegiance, Alistair Cockburn Sold. And Signed.

As per Nielsen report, Kindle owners are more wealthier, older and educated compared to younger and majorly male  iPad owners. Source : Nielsen

Just noticed that with Windows Live Essentials 2011 upgrade, Windows Live Writer also gets Ribbon style interface that became so famous and productive with MS Office applications. If you have been using WLW for a while but haven’t used any MS Office applications that feature ribbon style interface, you are in for a big surprise and little bit of confusion.  If you are looking for all your Picture effects, they are split into two different sections: borders and effects. Click on Image to make these Picture tools/Format section visible.

If you haven't noticed this "Do The Math" widget already, Amazon appears to be offering a Textbook Buyback store where you can sell your books back to Amazon. Amazon is including the price at which a particular book can be bought back and showing the effective price you may have to pay if you just want to read it once and return to the store. Quite a saver for many books that we normally read just once and ready to return.

Thinking Machine explores the invisible, elusive nature of thought. Play chess against a transparent intelligence, its evolving thought process visible on the board before you. The artwork is an artificial intelligence program, ready to play chess with the viewer. If the viewer confronts the program, the computer's thought process is sketched on screen as it plays. A map is created from the traces of literally thousands of possible futures as the program tries to decide its best move. Those traces become a key to the invisible lines of force in the game as well as a window into the spirit of a thinking machine. -- Thinking Machine [caption id="" align="aligncenter" width="480" caption="Thinking Machine, thinking ..."] [/caption]

Just watched Dan Cobley: What physics taught me about marketing - Dan Cobley (2010) on Active Player . Physics and marketing don't seem to have much in common, but Dan Cobley is passionate about both. He brings these unlikely bedfellows together using Newton's second law, Heisenberg's uncertainty principle, the scientific method and the second law of thermodynamics to explain the fundamental theories of branding. Source : Dan Cobley: What physics taught me about marketing - Dan Cobley (2010) from TEDTalks ( Feed ) via Active Player

Just watched Velocity 2010: Aladdin Nassar, "Worldwide Inventory of Last-mile Bandwidths & Network Latencies" on Active Player . Source : Velocity 2010: Aladdin Nassar, "Worldwide Inventory of Last-mile Bandwidths & Network Latencies" from O'Reilly Velocity Conference ( Feed ) via Active Player It is totally surprising to see that Hotmail is actually better/faster in Safari browser on the Mac than any browser/OS. ( Source : PPT )

While posting through TweetButton , Twitter translates your URL to a short URL, say in this example, http://active-player.inspions.com to http://t.co/0toCfbl .  This is all but normal. But a nice improvement Twitter did was instead of just posting the short URL in the tweet, it posts a readable URL while still linking to the short URL. It totally cool improvement and makes tweets more readable. Compare it with this following tweet of this very post, but using Google’s short URL.

Look at this funny error displayed by Youtube when some thing went wrong on the servers. Is Google referring to its developers as monkeys? or am I missing some joke? “Sorry, something went wrong. A team of highly trained monkeys has been dispatched to deal with this situation. If you see them, show them this information :”

  Kiran Bir Sethi shows how her groundbreaking Riverside School in India teaches kids life's most valuable lesson: "I can." Watch her students take local issues into their own hands, lead other young people, even educate their parents. Such a simple and inspiring motto : “One Idea. One Week. One Billion lives to change.”

The official Indian Currency, “Rupee” (INR) got its official currency Symbol now. You can use it now on web pages all over. Look how the symbol looks on a typical webpage  Picture Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_rupee_sign

Listen to this wonderful conversation between Scott Hanselman, Martin Fowler and David Heinemeier Hansson happened back in 2007 before we ever heard of ASP.NET MVC. Transcript here . Scott sits down with Martin Fowler of Thoughtworks and David Heinemeier Hansson of 37 signals and talks about beauty, making developers happen, the death (or life) of HTML, the future of Microsoft, and asks if we should care about Rich Internet Applications. DHH is the creator of the Ruby on Rails framework, and Martin Fowler is the Chief Scientist at ThoughtWorks, well-known systems architect and Extreme Programming expert. --- Hansel Minutes   So delighted to see such a bold and open discussion between passionate developers with completely different backgrounds and ideas. Some how, this podcast explains a lots of things that were introduced in ASP.NET after 2007. Not suggesting that this has anything to do with that, but probably things must have been already moving in that direction, ...

Listen to this wonderful presentation by Kent Beck on Developer Testing . Kent Beck is widely recognized as the father of eXtreme Programming and JUnit. Kent's other contributions to software development include patterns for software, and the rediscovery of test-first programming. He is the author/co-author of Extreme Programming Explained: Embrace Change 2nd Edition, Contributing to Eclipse, Test-Driven Development: By Example, Planning Extreme Programming, The Smalltalk Best Practice Patterns, and the JUnit Pocket Guide. He received his B.S. and M.S. in Computer Science from the University of Oregon. Source : Kent Beck on Developer Testing .

Google's logo for the 4th of July with a Goldberg's machine (its also Rude Goldberg's birthday).