Thought Garage

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 )

Just watched Seth Priebatsch: The game layer on top of the world - Seth Priebatsch (2010) on Active Player . By now, we're used to letting Facebook and Twitter capture our social lives on the web -- building a "social layer" on top of the real world. At TEDxBoston, Seth Priebatsch looks at the next layer in progress: the "game layer," a pervasive net of behavior-steering game dynamics that will reshape education and commerce. Source : Seth Priebatsch: The game layer on top of the world - Seth Priebatsch (2010) from TEDTalks ( Feed ) via Active Player

Just watched David McCandless: The beauty of data visualization - David McCandless (2010) on Active Player . David McCandless turns complex data sets (like worldwide military spending, media buzz, Facebook status updates) into beautiful, simple diagrams that tease out unseen patterns and connections. Good design, he suggests, is the best way to navigate information glut -- and it may just change the way we see the world. Source : David McCandless: The beauty of data visualization - David McCandless (2010) from TEDTalks ( Feed ) via Active Player

Chris Anderson and Wired offer yet another riveting conclusion (sounds like a prediction for some of us) that the Web as we know is dead as we are getting more and more connected on the internet with apps and devices. You’ve spent the day on the Internet — but not on the Web. And you are not alone. -- The Web Is Dead. Long Live Internet, Wired I agree 100%, as it is just a fact for how I consume content on the internet. Almost (99%) everything I do on the internet is done through a custom application (mostly on iPhone and iPad) rather on the web. Active Learning Suite In fact the applications I have been building as part of Active Learning suite exemplify the same conclusion about web.  Active Player lets you enjoy and learn from your favorite videos and podcasts without ever visiting a single web page. If a website doesn’t offer an RSS Feed, you can create your own RSS Feed of any content available on the internet with Active Feeds and help the rest of the world...

Listening now: Nicholas Carr - What the Internet is doing to our Brains on Active Player . Dr. Moira Gunn sits down with author, Nicholas Carr, to discuss the weird, new, artificial world in which we now live, through the pages of his new book, The Shallows: What is the Internet Doing to Our Brains. Source : Nicholas Carr - What the Internet is doing to our Brains from IT Conversations via Active Player

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.

Just watched Lifecycle of a Wireframe by Nick Finck on Active Player . Wonderful session. Dive deep into the process used to create wireframes, a key deliverable for user experience designers. Hear about the principles that guide this process, how to create great wireframes (all the way down to the nitty-gritty page or screen level), and how to identify and deliver solutions that meet your clients' business goals and solve their problems. Walk away with a better understanding of what delivering awesome wireframes entails - from methodology, to process, to delivery - and how to do it yourself. If you're an information architect, interaction designer, visual designer, or regular old user experience-curious creature: this one's for you. Source : Lifecycle of a Wireframe from MIX 2010 ( Feed ) via Active Player While we can just start with a white paper and pencil to get started with wire-frames, We could also create great wireframes right in MS Power Point itself...

Just watched Daniel Kahneman: The riddle of experience vs. memory - Daniel Kahneman (2010) on Active Player . Using examples from vacations to colonoscopies, Nobel laureate and founder of behavioral economics Daniel Kahneman reveals how our "experiencing selves" and our "remembering selves" perceive happiness differently. This new insight has profound implications for economics, public policy -- and our own self-awareness. Source : Daniel Kahneman: The riddle of experience vs. memory - Daniel Kahneman (2010) from TEDTalks ( Feed ) via Active Player

There is a heated discussion going on at LinkedIn in .NET People's group about what is the most preferred .NET Programming Language : VB or C#.  I don't want to add fuel to the fire, but just wanted to point out search patterns for C# and VB.NET on Google. As usual, interpretation is left to you.

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 :”

While discussing about the trend charts of .NET Versions over lunch yesterday, the discussion led to ASP.NET MVC and how does it fare against Ruby On Rails (ROR). Ofcourse, we are just talking about Search Patterns here.  So here is the search Patterns chart between RoR and ASP.NET MVC. It is quite a surprising chart though. Try interpreting the chart and let us know your thoughts.