Look who showed up in last Saturday’s new Fairly OddParents!
(via compc)
Alex Lai
The coolest Taiwanese guy you'll ever meet
The story of the smiley face from the man who invented it
In 1995, sales of pagers were booming among Japan’s teenagers, and NTT Docomo’s decision to add the heart symbol to its Pocket Bell devices let high school kids across the country inject a new level of sentiment (and cuteness) into the millions of messages they were keying into telephones every day. Docomo was thriving, with a bona fide must-have gadget on its hands and market share in the neighborhood of 40 percent. But when new versions of the Pocket Bell abandoned the heart symbol in favor of more business-friendly features like kanji and Latin alphabet support, the teenagers that made up Docomo’s core customer base had no problem leaving for upstart competitor Tokyo Telemessage. By the time Docomo realized it had misjudged the demand for business-focused pagers, it was badly in need of a new killer app. What it came up with was emoji.
I used Google Glass: the future, with monthly updates
The frosted-glass doors on the 11th floor of Google’s NYC headquarters part and a woman steps forward to greet me. This is an otherwise normal specimen of humanity. Normal height, slender build; her eyes are bright, inquisitive. She leans in to shake my hand and at that moment I become acutely aware of the device she’s wearing in the place you would expect eyeglasses: a thin strip of aluminum and plastic with a strange, prismatic lens just below her brow. Google Glass.
What was a total oddity a year ago, and little more than an experiment just 18 months ago is now starting to look like a real product. One that could be in the hands (or on the heads, rather) of consumers by the end of this year. A completely new kind of computing device; wearable, designed to reduce distraction, created to allow you to capture and communicate in a way that is supposed to feel completely natural to the wearer. It’s the anti-smartphone, explicitly fashioned to blow apart our notions of how we interact with technology.
But as I release from that handshake and study the bizarre device resting on my greeter’s brow, my mind begins to fixate on a single question: who would want to wear this thing in public?
Google Glass, so insane
New Google Glass UI video shows off search, camera, and voice translation features
Google today posted a video preview of its forthcoming Google Glass wearable headset, providing a fresh, and more realistic look at the device’s user interface. It’s got a brand new look at the UI (much more similar to Google Now than what we saw the last time around), and there’s a lot of Siri-esque discussion with people talking directly to “Glass.”
Based on the demo, Google Glass will allow users to receive and execute onscreen directions, send voice-controlled messages, and search the web through speech. The UI also includes voice-controlled photos, and suggests that the device will offer onscreen translation support — a rather notable development that Google hadn’t mentioned in previous announcements.
Polygon with a preview of Destiny: Bungie’s Brave New Worlds
Players will grow and customize their characters with new armor, clothing, weapons, vehicles and spacecraft, items that players will acquire and equip, objects that flesh out the lore of Destiny’s 10-year narrative arc. The game’s personalized gear will persist throughout single-player, cooperative and competitive modes.
