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Month: February 2007

Innovation Forum: Launch event: Who wants tomorrow’s papers?

Written by Ian Jindal on . Posted in Publishing.

I’m looking forward to Tuesday evening when we have Khoi Vinh, Design Director for NYTimes.com speaking at the inaugural “Innovation Forum” event at Bush House.

The event’s being organised by Nico Macdonald, with whom I’m collaborating on a Future Media Summit project (there’s some information on that at the bottom of the Innovation Forum page).

Khoi’s being joined by Victor Keegan of the Guardian, Paul Adams of Flow Interactive, Mike “Dorf” Altendorf of Conchango and Tom Savigar of The Future Laboratory.

Booking is via the event booking site, powered by the most lovely EventWax. I’ve been keen to try this out in anger for a while and I’m not disappointed.

Finally, do make sure to check out (and contribute to) the Future Media group on Ma.gnolia if you’d like to keep across the developing debate.

SpinVox’s “Spin-my-Blog”

Written by Ian Jindal on . Posted in Technology.

I’d rather ignored Spinvox since I wasn’t sure that the voice-to-text technology was ready to receive voicemails (that, let’s face it, often have peculiar acronyms, words and accents). However, a number of friends are using Spinvox and swear by it. Admittedly, they’re either head hunters (large volume of calls, screening etc) or tech types (who would rather not speak to anyone at the best of times) but to be fair the conversions they’ve received have been pretty good.

Allegedly, the conversion is by dint of humanoids, listening and transcribing to the VM recording, but their website makes no mention of the mechanism. The human touch could explain the accuracy – as one friend mentioned, the transcript accurately reflected a mumbling, drunk Welshman in a cab… Harsh.

Anyhoo, their latest product extension is voice to blog. Nice idea to file short pieces quickly, although I’m not sure I’d trust spellchecking, linking and suchlike to a voice interface. I can imagine ‘posting’ a blog entry only to discover an embarrassing typo a little while after Google indexes the blog…

That said, the joy of being able to huddle in a corner and pretend that you’re reading your scoop “down the wire” to the expectant news desk (like a hack in a 1950s movie) is just too great – I’m going to have to try this!

Aside from this implementation though it’s good to see asynchronous voice interfaces being developed, especially while so much attention is lavished on the visual and the ‘battle of the gooeys’.

37 Signals’ “Getting Real” book available online. Free.

Written by Ian Jindal on . Posted in Publishing.

Getting Real

I’ve a lot of time for the folk at 37 Signals and I like their combination of web2.0-tech-ness, clear design and say-it-loud clear views.

Good therefore of them to put up their latest book online (surely, adding to their googlejuice didn’t feature in their planning). Great to skim online, but you can always get the artefact for $29 if you wish. Best of all, that artefact comes from Lulu, a print-on-demand specialist, so 37S are clearly taking their lean application-building principles all the way through the supply chain.

Vecosys -Isotoma and ‘mapmyadventure’

Written by Ian Jindal on . Posted in T'interwebs.

Props to Doug and Andy at Isotoma for their mention on Vecosys today. Mike Butcher saith:

And today’s favourite mashup is from York, UK-based, Isotoma, which has launched a new site for STA Travel today called Mapmyadventure.com. Quite the slickest javascript implementation I’ve seen in a long time.

Praise indeed 🙂

Now we’ll have to form a queue to get the tech wizards at Isotoma to do any work for us 😉