Digg will launch again this week after the six-week “Rethink Digg” project by Betaworks who also builds News.me. This will be v1 even though Digg has been around since 2004.
What we will see is a Digg that is a different experience than it has been in the past, but will be an experience that capture the essence of what we need in reading and sharing news today.
This Digg doesn’t look like or even feel like Reddit. Focus has been drawn away from headlines and more about arranging content that is being read, shared, or viewed the most at that time or what’s popular.
How Betaworks is rethinking Digg it reminds me of what Circa is possibly going after: re-imagining the news.
It’s also worth noting what they found in their survey results prior to starting the “Rethink Digg” project. View the result here.
Dreams can come true if you put in the desire. July 10, 2012 marks the day a partnership was made with 8BIT. I’ve been staying in touch with these guys for awhile now and because I want Resimplify to be a solid publication for the world of design and for all you lovers of design I reached out to them.
Check out a little video explaining Resimplify.
Having a team of like-minded and passionate people is hard to come by.
8BIT is a band of digital rapscallions. We build Standard & we’re passionate about publishing.
Their main product is a WordPress theme they call Standard. That’s what Resimplify is being built on.
Right now sketches are being drawn up. Be sure to stay updated all up until launch day right here!
Back to building Resimplify…
Students at Duke have been testing a localization app called UnLoc in the Northgate shopping mall in Durham as well as in the computer science and engineering buildings on Duke’s campus, UnLoc achieves 1.6 meter accuracy on average.
The Duke team’s key idea for accurate indoor localization is analogous to how people use landmarks in outdoor environments. Say that Alice is in Bob’s neighborhood and calls him for directions. She tells Bob she is standing in front of a fountain that he is familiar with and then Bob is able to guide her from there.
“The best part of the application is that it is recursive, which means that it starts with zero knowledge but ‘learns’ over time,” said He Wang, the lead Ph.D. student on the project. “Therefore, it becomes more and more accurate the more it is used in a given building.”
UnLoc does not require any pre-deployment effort, often called “wardriving.” Wardriving is a process where every location needs to be visited and calibrated to create a database of per-location fingerprints. This is often expensive especially because it needs to be done periodically.
UnLoc is also less battery-hungry than GPS, which can drain a phone’s battery in a matter of hours. The use of energy-efficient inertial sensors, available in almost all smartphones, allows a user to track location continuously through the day.
Just in time for the Olympics. Uber comes to London.
Paul Sawers of The Next Web talks with Uber CEO and Co-Founder Travis Kalanick about launching in London today.
Whilst Uber has been gaining traction for the past two years in most of the US’s main cities, as well as in Canada and France, Travis was quick to point out that London has been on its radar from the beginning. “In many ways, London is the most sophisticated and competitive transportation market on the planet”, he says.
Where Facebook events seem like an annoyance, Google delivers an enjoyable experience with ‘Party Mode’.
From the small, but noticeable design touches to the capability of everything being gathered like a real event Google releases how an event feature should quite possibly behave.
More to come on what Google is doing with Google+.
After more than 20 years of research and development, the Navy’s dreams of laser weapons are about to come true. But like the dog who chases the car and doesn’t know what to do when he catches it, the Navy’s thoroughly unprepared for its coming arsenal of focused-light weapons. A new congressional study warns that the Navy runs the risk of outfitting its surface ships with laser guns that their on-board power systems can’t handle.
What seems like a problem pointing to nothing but bad news is actually good news.
Now, the attention is on designing the future of the U.S’s Navy ship fleet with laser technology. This technology is expensive, but cheaper than reconstructing existing ships to handle the laser beaming power.
For Google’s money making strategy being advertising they know how to create their own ads and sell what they’re building. This ad, shown above, is remarkable. It displays how the experience works with an added remix composition.
Google Chrome is quickly becoming the standard browser. With 310 million active users there is no question that Google is doing something right.
In late 2008, Google Chrome was released and faced heavy competition from the then leader Firefox, Internet Explorer, and Safari. But, what Chrome lacked was the cross platform usage which includes using the browser on the ever popular iPhone and iPad devices. That’s all changed.
Today, Google announced that you can now have your Chrome browser be on those devices. Many tech reviews and people on Twitter have mentioned their move from Safari to Chrome.
Why Chrome? It’s fast, it’s secure, and it was the first to introduce the all-in-one address bar to make searching easy. It also was the first to eliminate the title bar with focus put on the tab functionality.
On top of all of this they were able to have many developers create extensions and apps to only enhance the Chrome experience. The focus is clearly put on user pleasure. The growth came from a strong push in the advertising both on YouTube, Google’s homepage, and actual television of which Microsoft is seeing as an avenue to promote Internet Explorer 9 (they love dubstep).
Sure many see it Google Chrome as just a browser. But, really this is Google’s operating system that is being built on top of existing OSs. Mind blown? We are.
