Numiko, an award winning Leeds based digital creative agency

Numiko are very excited to be working with Medex-Media to develop an interface for their multi-touch screens which will feature at an international trade fair in the coming months.

Three screens have just arrived in the office and we can’t wait to try them out and get to work designing some slick features which will enable users to really engage with the content.

Plus we’re even more excited to know that the screens are the only ones in the UK (apart from in T-Mobile shops) at the moment. Watch this space for more info…

Numiko has been selected from over 100 companies to take part in the new commissioning initiative @North. The initiative ties in with BBC Children’s move to Salford in 2011 and is all about bringing people, technology and creativity together to develop fresh new online content for children.

Impressed by our experience and track record of working with broadcasters, we will now be involved in intensive workshops where we will be developing our ideas alongside creative and technical mentors from the BBC. The best ideas then enter into the final commissioning selection process, where four final projects will be commissioned from the £500,000 fund for CBBC and Cbeebies.

Something I’ve been playing around with over the last few weeks is Faviki, a semantic tagging tool.

Tagging is a familiar and widespread phenomenon online, used by things like the social bookmarking tool Del.icio.us and photo-sharing site Flickr as a way of labelling, categorising and organising content.  Tagging is very web 2.0 – it’s generally users who do the tagging, rather than The Man, using pretty much whatever words they want to describe whatever it is they’re tagging.  The result of this is a known as a folksonomy; an informal system of categorisation.  They’re great for capturing descriptive information: what something’s about, if it’s funny, or interesting, or whatever.

What tags are not so good at is organising information in a useful way…  Because of the uncontrolled vocabulary, any old net user can tag something as ‘digital media’, or ‘wickedy wick’ or ‘splunge’.  There’s no checking of meaning, no authority to control what goes on; the strengths of tagging are also its weaknesses.

Read more after the jump…

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I’ve read quite a bit about Facebook Connect lately – the service that lets sites allow Facebook users the convenience of authentication via their existing Facebook account details:

This implementation by “news mashup” Buzz Newsroom caught my interest as it manages to combine 2 of the things I love most about the web: the ability to build applications by linking different components and content sources together, and collaboration – or the (so-called!) “wisdom of the crowds”. Here’s how techcrunch describes it:

“You sign in with Facebook Connect, and then can not only vote up or down any story, but write your own entry.

Buzz Newsroom is a big Wordpress blog. You start off as a contributor, which means you can author posts but not publish them. Buzz Newsroom editors review the entries and publish them. Once you become a trusted contributor, your status may be upgraded to “author,” which means you can publish directly.”

Once you are connected to Facebook (from another site) you have instant access to all of your friends, and although it’s hard to see this openness by Facebook as an entirely selfless gesture  it certainly does seem to have some advantages for us too. Not least the convenience of being able to login to a site without having to create and manage another user account. (N.B. Facebook aren’t the only ones to recognise this and it would be wrong not to mention the Open ID project at this point, with which Facebook recently got involved). It could also help to reinforce brands – a user’s activity on a site can be published back to the Facebook news feed for all their friends to see. And of course, a visiting Facebook user potentially brings many new visitors with them – or as the Facebook site explains:

“With Facebook Connect, users can take their friends with them wherever they go on the Web. Developers will be able to add rich social context to their websites” –  et voila, instant social network!

Sources:

http://developers.Facebook.com/connect.php

http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/01/19/buzz-newsroom-combines-wordpress-and-Facebook-connect-for-tracking-news/

http://mashable.com/2009/01/12/Facebook-connect-implementations/

The BBC’s Tomorrow’s World may have promised us 3D TV quite some time before now… (As a kid in the 80’s I remember tuning in with much excitement to use my 3D glasses which came with the Radio Times!) but… it might just be with us in the next few years.

With HD now becoming ubiquitous, engineers are looking for the next big thing. And it could just be stereo 3D television.

In a remarkably short space of time – just about two years – this has gone from a one-off demonstration in the USA through practical trials from the BBC to test broadcasts by Sky, so there is a lot of momentum behind it.

More movies will certainly be made in 3D for cinema release (Recent examples include My Bloody Valentine and Disney’s forthcoming Bolt) , but it could also be a viable home system, with consumer manufacturers already preparing for 3D sets, some of which do not even need special glasses.

Extract from:
http://www.broadcastnow.co.uk
Reported by Jan Eveleens, general manager, Image Capture Systems at Grass Valley

Install this app (http://rjdj.me/what) on your iPhone, pop in your headphones and you could soon find your life enhanced by your own unique soundtrack.

Back in Oct 2008 Gareth blogged on ‘Mind reading music’ – well here’s something in a similar vain which is available for the iPhone – the RjDj app plays music which reacts to both your movement (using the phones accelerometer) and by also taking audio feeds using the iPhone’s mic – surrounding you with your very own realtime soundtrack.  I think this a really nice example of how the iPhone is inspiring creative individuals to explore how the iPhone interface can be used to allow people to explore their own creativity.

Check out this introduction video for a good demonstration of the apps versatility:

And this for an example of how some cool results can be achieved using the iPhone’s accelerometer:

Using similar technologies to that which numiko uses when measuring engagement with content and usability of websites using eye tracking technologies – NEC have developed intelligent digital signage with all the tools necessary to know everything about the consumers that enter its perimeter.

‘Eye Flavor’ uses a camera to gather demographic information about visitors, but also to gauge how engaged the shopper is with the advertisement. It can tell whether viewers simply glanced at the display, gave it a passing look, stopped, or ignored it entirely. From this information advertisers can know exactly which ads grab their targets in a real way, and the locations which host the displays can more specifically target advertisers with strong demographic proof.

NEC Press Release – http://www.nec.co.jp/press/ja/0812/1601.html

I’m dying to find out what my Diagonal Thinking score is. I’m definitely going to do this tonight, I’ve promised myself and everything. This is a test developed by the IPA to measure your ability to think laterally and logically, the combination of which characterises successful people in the advertising industry.

I’ll post my score up here when I’ve done the test- presuming it’s better than my Brain Age on the DS

Also of interest is Imagini, which aims to build a profile of the user without putting them through a long winded series of drop down/check box type preference process. It poses simple questions, and the user simply selects an image from a matrix, that best fit’s their answer to the question.

It’s been used on mydeco.com to create a ‘visual DNA’ which is then used to suggest items of home furnishings etc. that would suit your visual style preferences. It’s also forming the centre of a social network called Youniverse, which matches people together based on how they think, how the love and what type of movies they like… absolutely superb!

It does presume to an extent however that you get on better with people who are the most similar to you, which I’m sure you’d agree is not always the case. Just because you are ambitious, good looking and successful doesn’t mean you’re going to get on

But, that small, social psychological point aside, there’s some very interesting things happening in this area of personalisation based on how people think. Comparing this, Richard’s earlier post about technology that automatically tries to determine your cognitive style by how you interact with the content of a website, provide two clear vectors for where this kind of thing is heading.

And for us, it’s very interesting because if we are seeking maximum engagement with consumers, it has to be on their terms, ideally on a one to one basis. Imagine [NAME], being able to personalise communions and touch points not only on the crude CRM-esque methods available today, but increasingly on past interactions, moods, cognitive styles and visual preferences.

No really, Musinaut are the developers behind the MXP4 player “available on all platforms” and the Brainwaves headgea which “allows users to control their MXP4 musical selections on the basis of their thoughts and frame of mind.”

What the this for more.

Last night, four Numiko girls went to Leeds’ first ‘Girl Geek Dinner‘. After a bit of networking and lots of finger food, we settled down for the talks, the first of which was from Girl Geek founder Sarah Blow – via  a video post. In the post, Sarah challenged all Geeks to think about how we can change the technology industry to encourage more Girl and Guy Geeks into the industry; taking into account the disputes between what people consider IT and ICT to be, and what it actually is.

To inject a level of science into the debate, Sarah Blow went to a primary school in London to ask the kids what they thought IT was. The answers in summary were that they thought it was basic word processing and perhaps a little programming. There was no comprehension of such things as Facebook, Myspace, their computer games etc, having anything to do with IT.

A brief discussion at Numiko threw up that when people think IT, they usually think number crunching, and, mostly due to they way they were taught maths at school, they write IT off as a potential career as they’ve been put off by previous experience and lack of awareness as to what IT actually is.

It was clear that syllabuses (syllabi?) in schools should be adjusted to take account of the changing online digital and interactive worlds and the career opportunities presented as a result – summed up by Clare who said she would never have connected the job she does now (web developer) to anything that was taught at school, including IT.

The second speaker – who was there in person which was a bonus – was Lydia Machell who ‘was inspired by early ringtone formulas’. Needless to say we were a little hesitant, but it turned out that early ringtones had in fact inspired her to develop something which transcribes standard print notation into Braille for blind musicians. I can’t seem to find anything on Google (after a very quick search) worth linking to, but if you want to conduct your own search try ‘Prima Vista Music’.

The last and final speaker was Lorna Mitchell who encouraged us to ask questions, and be proud, not scared by being representative of the minority.

All in all, a great evening with inspiring and informative speakers!