Tracking Twitter posts.
Archive for April, 2008
TwittEarth
Tuesday, April 29th, 2008Japanese Creative Barcodes
Tuesday, April 29th, 2008A fresh look at the design of barcodes by Japanese firm D-Barcode. Creating subtle branding opportunities and injecting fun into a practical device.
Ecover – extending the brand identity through the barcode
“The Fair Tracing project: Indian coffee and the digital divide”
Monday, April 21st, 2008
On 26 March, Ashima Chopra, one of two funded research students on the Fair Tracing Project, presented ”The Fair Tracing project: Indian coffee and the digital divide” at the annual conference of the British Association for South Asian Studies (BASAS) held in Leicester from 26-28 March 2008. Note that BASAS is “is the largest UK academic association for the study of India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Nepal, Bhutan, Maldives and the South Asian Diaspora”.
“Fair Tracing and the digital divide: tracking Indian coffee across the Internet”
Monday, April 21st, 2008
On 28 February 2008, Ashima Chopra, one of the two funded research students on the fair Tracing project, gave a presentation entitled “Fair Tracing and the digital divide: tracking Indian coffee across the Internet” at the Critical Internet Studies semiar series held at Liverpool John Moores University (LJMU).
Series organiser Dr. Adi Kuntsman called the presentation “fascinating”, and encouraged Chopra to appear as a guest lecturer on the globalisation course offered at LJMU. Kuntsman also invited her to attend the Internet Studies Festival to be held at LJMU in July.
WhyBuy.It – easy as 1,2,3
Thursday, April 10th, 2008Designer Chris Adams is busy producing some great graphics for the WhyBuy.It consumer interface. Here’s how he explains the system to users:
WhyBuy.It?
Thursday, April 10th, 2008
Just what can you achieve with a weekend of Social Innovation? After 24 hours of simultaneous hacking, designing and user requirement gathering, our Barcode Wikipedia team came up with a basic prototype system: WIBI.it. This is a simple user interface to a wiki-like system that lets anyone look up a product by its barcode and add information. The system also grabs related tagged photos from Flickr and automatically links to Amazon, price comparison sites, and related blog and review articles.
Tom and Fred managed to integrate some open source code to recognise photos of barcodes taken using Nokia phone cameras, allowing users to look up information directly using their mobile. One of the killer apps we envisioned for this type of system would be in-store price comparisons. If you are looking around shops for say DVDs or a flat-screen TV, wouldn’t it be useful to see what online prices were available at the same time — and click to order? This has the potential to turn most of the world’s shops into exhibition spaces, with the real commerce happening on the Internet.
Thanks to David Wilcox you can watch our team’s presentation at the conclusion of the weekend:
President of Chile in London
Monday, April 7th, 2008
Chile’s President Michelle Batchelet gave a talk at the London School of Economics on Friday. Maria and I, and what seemed to be the entire Chilean diaspora in London, went to hear her. She said:
“I believe that [in Chile] for so long we have struggled to be free, in many ways we forgot to be fair. We forgot that fair democracy requires equality of opportunity that comes from access to education, healthcare, social security or housing…Democracy must deliver goods, especially to those who have made great sacrifices in recent years but who have received very little reward, as shown by the levels of poverty which still prevail in Latin America.”
Social Innovation camp
Saturday, April 5th, 2008
I’m spending this weekend with fellow enthusiasts at the Social Innovation camp in east London. This group of around 60 developers, designers and campaigners have met up to work on technologies that build social capital. One of the six ideas being developed is Barcode Wikipedia, described by the Guardian as follows:
The basic idea is to build a system that lets people quickly identify information about products they find in the shops; particularly things like ethical information, news items about it or reviews. Ideally this would work through a mobile phone – you could snap a photo of your product’s barcode or tap in the numbers and get back information that helps you decide whether it’s good to buy.
I’m trying to feed in everything we have learned so far on Fair Tracing, which focuses more on information from producers, distributors and retailers. Barcode Wikipedia should generate some extremely useful ideas on incorporating user-generated content from consumers into product information systems.
