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Posts Tagged ‘cool’

Beyond the Business Card: Three Alternative Tools

How to bump strangers, who killed the Rolodex, and what to do about it.

This week, we’re at SXSW, supposedly a mecca of interactivity and tech innovation. And yet we keep bumping into one massive business etiquette dinosaur: The exchange of physical, paper business cards.

So we’ve curated three handy digital tools to help unload the fossils and bring your networking up to speed with the digital age. The Rolodex is dead (we don’t even know anyone who owns one, let alone uses it), long live LinkedIn.

BUMP

Bump may just be our favorite app ever. Free and available for iPhone and Android, it lets you exchange contact information with another person simply by bumping the two phones together. While it requires that the other person have the app as well, we’ve seen Bump adoption rates skyrocket in the past few months — it’s that good — so it’s bound to spare you a massive amount of number-crunching as you attempt to digitize those crumpled up business cards floating around your laptop bag.

Simple and incredibly fun to use, Bump combines seamless functionality with a kind of delightful playfulness — it’s hard not to smile when you see two grey-haired CEO’s bump fists and chuckle like fifth-graders.

Tip: If you keep your phone in your pant pocket, avoid walking up to people, saying “Let’s bump!” and pointing to said area of your pants. The capacity for martinis tossed in your face is limitless.

ROBO.TO

Let’s face it, most of us have more online profiles than we know what to do with — Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, LinkedIn, Google Buzz, Foursquare… they’re just the tip of the random registrations iceberg. And while a handful of them are actually useful for connecting with people, they’re becoming increasingly hard to manage, let alone share.

Enter Robo.to, a nifty centralized home for all your digital dwellings. This tiny, update-from-anywhere video-enabled calling card contains all your favorite sites and services, giving you a simple robo.to/username URL to share with people.

STICKYBITS

We’ve always liked the idea of connecting real-life objects to the virtual world. Enter Stickybits, an ingenious tag-based platform for attaching digital information to physical objects. It’s simple — you get a bunch of barcode stickers, attach something to them online, and start handing them out. A free iPhone and Android app reads the barcodes and relays the embedded information.

Though meant for a much wider array of purposes — from “sticking” a wish on a gift to slapping on your laptop as a bring-it-home system in case you lose it — they’re perfect for sharing your contact info or even your resume.

Grab a pack of 20 barcodes for just $9.95 and start slapping.

Psst, we’ve launched a fancy weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays, offers the week’s articles, and features five more tasty bites of web-wide interestingness. Here’s an example. Like? Sign up.

Tags: business, cool, culture, innovation, social web, technology
Posted in culture, open-source, social web, software, technology | 45 Comments »

Before OK Go: The History of Rube Goldberg Machines

Endless tipping points, or what today’s music hipsters can learn from 80’s Swiss filmmakers.

You may have seen the new OK Go video, This Too Shall Pass, making the viral rounds this week.

And while we do love us some OK Go, we have to raise an eyebrow at all the collective gushing about how innovative the video’s approach is. Over the years we’ve seen our share of this domino-effect, object-based-chain-reaction creative execution — like this 2006 Honda commercial, or this 2007 Guinness spot from director Nicolai Fuglsig, or even Timo Arnall’s much-acclaimed Nearness project last year.

This object chain reaction is known as a Rube Goldberg machine. But where its use in visual storytelling really originated is a little-known Swiss film from 1987 by director duo Peter Fischli and David Weis, titled Der Lauf der Dinge (The Way Things Go). In it, an incredible chain reaction of common household objects — tea pots, tires, ladders, trash bags, shoes, soap — unfolds over 29 minutes and 45 seconds across 100 feet of meticulously arranged ramps, swings and surfaces.

The Way Things Go is available on DVD, which we highly recommend for experiencing this trend ancestor in its full glory and understanding its influence on a number of contemporary art trends, from urban prankstership to stop-frame animation.

And while we love seeing this historically-fueled cross-pollination of creative disciplines — film inspiring everything from physical interaction design to advertising to music videos — we also think it’s important to understand the roots and origins of things we laud as innovative today. Or else we end up with suspicious similarities.

Thanks, @claudius!

Psst, we’ve launched a fancy weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays, offers the week’s articles, and features five more tasty bites of web-wide interestingness. Here’s an example. Like? Sign up.

Tags: cool, culture, film, history, video
Posted in culture, film | 24 Comments »