The Barcode Revolution

Pacarc, the guys who brought the Mitsubishi Jet Towel to the U.S. are now bringing over another piece of Japan: The design barcode. The design barcode, in the words of Pacarc’s James Allard, “seemed so obvious – utilize the last one-inch square of (nearly) blank real estate on product packing for branding or company image … Read more

Translate This

I’m a sucker for this kind of thing: Translator Boomerang (thanks, Satya), which translates from English into a foreign language and then back again, just for laughs, really (I suppose one could say something pompous about how this reflects the difficulty of translation etc.): Google Translator Boomerang is a silly little program that uses the Google … Read more

Female? In a Chatroom? Get Out While You Can

We probably didn’t need an academic study to tell us this, but the figures are still quite surprising: The University of Maryland’s A. James Clark School of Engineering has, in a study released today, found that chat room participants with female usernames received 25 times more threatening and/or sexually explicit private messages than those with … Read more

The Red-faced Blue Frog

What’s intriguing about this Blue Security/Blue Frog episode, where angry spammers attack the anti-spam company with a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack, which in turn directs traffic (unwittingly or wittingly, it’s not clear yet) and temporarily brings down blog hoster TypePad, is this: The guy behind Blue Security, Eran Reshef, is founder of Skybox, … Read more

How to be a Press Expert

Interesting post (a bit late reading of it; apologies) On Being a Press Expert and dealing with the media by danah doyd [sic], a PhD student in SIMS at Berkeley and a social media researcher at Yahoo! Research Berkeley. She makes some good points, and she’s clearly exhausted after three years of becoming sought after (eight … Read more