Pinger is a new mobile service that just became public this week. Basically, it’s an alternative to SMS that has some similarities to Twitter. You call a local number and record a spoken message. Then you can speak names of people you want to send the message to - up to 2000 people. They will then receive an SMS that you have left them a voice recording and can call a local number to receive it. The best thing about Pinger is that you can send messages internationally while only paying local fees (right now they only have about 20 countries - not including China, but plan on expanding).
In a podcast interview with Mashable, Pinger founder Greg Wook talked about some potential uses of Pinger that came out of the beta testing. He said that it could be used as a sort of public broadcasting system and can also be used to do large scale marketing. A company can send out a message to tens of thousands of people and Pinger not only will send the message, but will be able to find out how many people have listened to the message and who they are.
He also said they are now looking into developing various widgets to use with Pinger. I’m looking forward to seeing what comes out of it.
I’m not sure if this is something that could become popular in China, considering that SMS is so much cheaper than making a local call. But surely it will be helpful for international business and possibly fun for creative web.
Take a look at their site for some simple videos on how it works.
[via: Mashable]
jiaJia has just completed the Play with My Girl project he’s been working on these past months with Mao. Check out the video.
Very simply explained, it uses a light sensor to read reflected light from a mirror. The light sensor sends a signal to a microcontroller (MCU) which then sends a signal to the computer. Software that jiaJia developed, then manipulates the video of the girl on the screen to move her hands to block the light in her eyes.
A new blogging software called Chyrp has just been released.
It’s designed to be simpler and more lightweight than Wordpress. It is also built on MySQL and PHP and additionally uses some AJAX. According to their blog it has about 1/4 the loading time that Wordpress has. It sounds like it still has a lot of bugs but I think it’s a step in the right direction toward blogging software - simple. Oh, and I like the bird.
Take a look at their demo. (login: demo/demo)
I thought I’d introduce you all to a little bit of my home and probably the most memorable place in Detroit, The Heidelberg Project.
The project was started in 1986 by Tyree Guyton. As a young child, Tyree witnessed the 1967 riots in Detroit, which left much of the city in ruins and even now many areas of the city still remain abandoned ghettos. Guyton, his family and some neighborhood children began to clean up the neighborhood of Heidelberg street. Guyton used the collected refuse from the cleanup to change the abandoned houses on the street into a giant art installation. Over time the project has grown bigger and bigger with various other contributors. Although the project won numerous awards, the City of Detroit still demolished parts of the project on two occasions in 1991 and 1999.
There are some interesting photos on flickr, Heidelberg Project flickr photo set and also take a look at The Heidelberg Project homepage.
There are few laser related posts that I’ve seen in the blog world the past few days. The first one to catch my eye is from the Graffiti Research Lab - laser graffiti. I don’t think graffiti artists will be running to grab a laser instead of a pen, but it’s a good concept.
The group has done a number of projects using art to promote free speech. Here is a link to a video and pictures from their recent trip to Hong Kong. In the video they say, “Advertisers here (Hong Kong) speak so loudly.” They hope to develop more technology that enables people to communicate on the same scale that advertisers do.
The most interesting thing about the project is that all of their software is open source and they provide instructions on how to build the same setup that they use. The setup consists of a projector hooked to laptop that uses their custom open source software. A camera tracks the laser and send info back to the laptop and then through the projector.
Make has a good video tutorial and pdf of how to create the Graffiti Research Lab set up. There is also another tutorial on creating a laser projector at Instructables.
Links:
Graffiti Research Lab
Make Laser Graffiti Tutorial
Instructables Laser Image Projector
At first I’d thought I would start this first post by talking about what the purpose of this blog is or what it might be, or maybe what it won’t be? But instead, like all good Americans, I’m going to talk about myself.
I’m a… programmer… um… turned … internet researcher?… well, I don’t have a job title yet, which aptly describes the general state I’m living in these days. I moved to Beijing just over half a year ago with my husband and have been lucky enough to fall into some good places and live life without much direction. Originally we planned to stay in Beijing for only a month and I took a freelance position with Yah. The month has been extended and now I’ve started a full-time position.
Yah… Yah Interactive Lab is a creative studio mostly dealing with interactive web projects, both commercial and not. My role in the studio at this point is to bring some ideas to them while bringing some of their ideas to the rest of the world… hence the blog.
… the blog! At this point, its direction is a little bit fuzzy and will gain some clarity as it continues. The first purpose is for me to share some ideas with Yah - this is the fuzzy part as the categories may be broad. The second purpose is to provide a little internet window into Yah through my eyes.
So, there we go. The first post. woo!
