The always connected lifestyles that we lead invariably creates a constant bombardment of our senses through media consumption that never has to stop. The sleek mobile device, the humble car radio, the trusty MAC workstation, the smart home entertainment system and even the modest Kindle have insidiously taken over every waking aspect of my life.

We have inherited the knowledge of an entire race and they serve it to go.

I remember a time when dialing up a connection to the web was a privilege of the few. When social sharing and the exchange of information took place over a drink and a chat with friends at the local coffee-shop. The power of the web as it is today is an exhilarating taste of liberty in comparison. I rejoiced when broadband made the mass market. When the first iPhone hit the stores, i saw entire generations transformed into information experts and video connoisseurs. The iconic hunched over posture of the mobile touch device user, reverently cradling and swiping away at the latest piece of hardware in his hand, became a staple sight anywhere i went.

And with it came the noise.

I slowly came to realize my senses where so occupied that i had barely any room in there left for myself. My imagination fled before the flashing colors and booming soundtracks. Voices unheard from a thousand notifications flooded my head. I would wake up to persistent challenges from my friends across the spectrum of digital puzzles. And don’t even remind me of meeting reminders that serve only to remind of work left undone.

I lost my inner voice.

As a person that relies on creative insight, imagination and story telling as my core skills, i was dangerously close to being blinded. I disconnected myself. A self imposed media curfew of a couple of hours each day. I had to regain the luxury to tease and draw out an interesting thought or to further explore a salient point. How can i tell a story when i can’t hear or see it in my own head? How can i create originally when all i do is look at what other people have done. My mind’s eye needs all the training it can get for generating creative visions.

Silence shouts loudest in a noisy crowd.

Don’t get me wrong. I am not anti technology. I love my tech and the media that comes with it. It’s what i do. But every once in a while, i go offline. So i can dream up some new ideas and savor some old ones. And if you do not wish to sound or talk and even look like everyone else, i strongly urge you to reconsider the importance of silence too.

Case in point – Kony 2012. Cleverly, it pushes all the right buttons. Child soldiers. Rape. Murder. All those terrible things that we know are happening but never wanted to be confronted with. Clearly, it provoked the right responses. As a case study in social media, it’s very much a success. Numbers don’t lie. The actual content though, well, seems to play a fast and loose game with the truth. This much seems to be the case after a quick Google search. Question is, how many would do so? After all, it came from a trusted enough source. Friends, family, they’ve all seen this video. Been outraged by it. Then they pass on that indignation. Next thing you know, there’s an online mob baying for blood, buying the merchandise and donating to the organisation. Don’t get me wrong, the awareness generated may likely bring about more good than evil. But the answer presented is unlikely to be the one needed. As to what that is exactly, will require much more information than any quick, slick video can provide. The moral of the story (and it’s an old one) – be informed and don’t always believe everything you see online, even if someone you know and trust does. At least take some time to find out more about it before you hashtag or share it. Then maybe you can be bulletproof yourself.

Even as consumers do more ranting in the digital space, some companies still haven’t taken advantage of these instant touch points in the fire-fighting process – when there are real financial benefits for doing so. With bad news spreading so fast these days, it doesn’t hurt to pacify your troubled customer quickly – the right way.

If a company worth $58 million values every tweet it gets, even the negative ones, perhaps we should too. Microsoft Xbox, with a Guinness World Record for Most Responsive Brand on Twitter, listens to every tweet, recognising that a nasty comment could be a tip-off for service outage. Instead of shying away, the support crew picks it up and alerts the tech team immediately – cutting downtime, potential losses as well as customer frustration. All while turning an angry consumer into a happy brand advocate.

Ignore and you shall not score.

A not-so-pretty encounter with a favourite skincare brand reinforces my point. Shabby service at its counter prompted me to complain on their SG Facebook wall and boy, was I shocked. This brand is known for its attentiveness and I’ve always been impressed until then. My comment was ignored, and other “customers’ posts” commending their good service were greeted with great gratitude. Thanks to this incident, my loyalty now belongs elsewhere.

Being attentive really helps – when you speak in one voice.

I recently tried to book a flight on an airline website but had trouble when paying online. As the helpdesk wasn’t available, I tweeted in the hope that its customer care department would hear me. It did, but what I didn’t expect was a phone call all the way from the Netherlands!

Meanwhile, the SG office also called after replying to my Facebook post, saying that help is on its way. As ridiculous as it might sound, I was overwhelmed by the attention and had to coordinate their efforts to help.

So, while keeping customers informed about your latest offerings keeps them engaged, prompt and well-coordinated responses in times of trouble contribute towards CRM just as much – perhaps even more. Which is why jobs like online community managers are now on the rise, but that’s a story for another time.

(sqrt(cos(x))*cos(300*x)+sqrt(abs(x))-0.7)*(4-x*x)^0.01,sqrt(6-x^2),-sqrt(6-x^2)

Try it out. Paste it in the Goggle search bar.

Happy Valentine’s Day!!

- Content acceleration: This simply speeds up the text, css, images beside 2D HTML canvas.

- Compositing acceleration: Combining chunks of content together for display, it is more likely used by HTML5 videos with css effects applied to it.

Currently IE9, Chrome 7.0 and Firefox 4.0(current stable version is 10.0) onwards have hardware acceleration feature enabled.

Style editor is a new feature targeted for developer, which will allow developers to easily change the css code on a web page and view the changes simultaneously.

Firefox 11.0 beta introduced new feature called 3D web page Inspector, which is a 3D web page visualizer. This will require WebGL “web-based graphics library” to be able to use it. Check out the live example of this:

 Some of the new cool stuff from Firefox 11.0 beta:

• HTML5: The outerHTML property is now supported on HTML elements.
• HTML5: View source syntax highlighting now uses the HTML5 parser
• NEW: The CSS text-size-adjust property is now supported.
• FIXED: Redesigned media controls for HTML5 video.
• DEVELOPER: XMLHttpRequest now supports HTML parsing.
• DEVELOPER: Files can now be stored in IndexedDB (see bug 661877).

Some time ago, it was a HOT news in the press/web about the Google chrome OS and from that we can say that browser is the future of the PCs. Google chrome OS is based on chrome web browser, where you can do all sort of stuff within a browser.

HTML5 Canvas3D (WebGL)

WebGL is a cross-platform, royalty-free web standard for a low-level 3D graphics API based on OpenGL ES 2.0, exposed through the HTML5 Canvas element as Document Object Model interfaces. Developers familiar with OpenGL ES 2.0 will recognize WebGL as a Shader-based API using GLSL, with constructs that are semantically similar to those of the underlying OpenGL ES 2.0 API. It stays very close to the OpenGL ES 2.0 specification, with some concessions made for what developers expect out of memory-managed languages such as JavaScript.

HTML5 Canvas3D or WebGL is an open standard so any browser vendor can implement it, Chrome and Firefox already support it, and Safari has implemented it in their nightly builds. It’s a solid technology, but the spanner in the work is IE which currently has no public plans to support it.

Learn more: http://www.khronos.org/webgl/

Flash Stage3D (Molehill)

Flash Stage3D or previously codenamed “Molehill”,  is a new method/model of 2D and 3D rendering developed by Adobe and supported with a new Stage3D API—a set of low-level GPU-accelerated APIs enabling advanced 2D and 3D capabilities across multiple screens and devices (desktop, mobile and TV) through the Adobe Flash Platform runtimes. These APIs provide advanced 2D and 3D developers with the flexibility to leverage GPU hardware acceleration for significant performance gains.

To create hardware-accelerated content based on Stage3D, you have a couple of choices. For developers interested in programming against the low-level AGAL language, AGAL is a very low level language. It’s used to write your Vertex Shaders and Fragment Shaders. It’s the heart of Molehill. For developers wishing to leverage their Actionscript skills can use 3D framework such as Alternativa3D or Away3D.

Learn more: http://www.adobe.com/devnet/flashplayer/stage3d.html

Unity3D

Unity is an integrated authoring tool for creating 3D video games or other interactive content such as architectural visualizations or real-time 3D animations. Unity’s development environment runs on Microsoft Windows and Mac OS X, and the games it produces can be run on Windows, Mac, Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, Wii, iPad, iPhone, as well as the Android platform. It can also produce browser games that use the Unity web player plug-in, supported on Mac and Windows but not Linux. The web player is also used for deployment as Mac widgets.

Unity consists of both an editor for developing/designing content and a game engine for executing the final product. Unity is similar to Director, Blender game engine, Virtools, Torque Game Builder, and Gamestudio, which also use an integrated graphical environment as the primary method of development.

Learn more: http://unity3d.com/

Future

No doubt soon or later all PlayStation and XBOX games will be playable just using your browser. Not too sure how they can protect the source though, but well if Piracy Controls happen then maybe all games will be Open Source, just my two cents.

Go to Ostanovca page for more details.

With these in mind, we decided to communicate how this was an app unlike any other – one which promised an almost magical experience.  One evocative of an iconic story – only instead of rubbing a lamp, a swipe on your phone is all you need to bring forth a host of wonderful moments. This concept was implemented in an integrated campaign, complete with tactical messaging at various touchpoints. Here we addressed the TA’s specific needs by demonstrating how the various functions could help “fulfill” their wishes.

    - Drive and generate wide fan base
    - Create engagement between fans and the brand
    - Meet objectives of other Amex business units

The American Express Singapore Facebook Page launched on Singapore National Day 2011.  Keeping with the theme, TUS developed an online photo and voting contest which ran for 6 weeks. During the campaign, we garnered 9,000 fans out of which 1,000 fans were garnered within the first week.

To keep AMEX fans engaged, and continue to grow the fan page, TUS has developed to additional campaigns:  Amex Check-In Deals and Amex Spend Stimulation.  Amex Check-In Deals utilized Facebook Places and allowed members who checked into participating retail locations to receive special discounts.

The Amex Spend Stimulation campaign was a 10-week campaign designed to encourage Amex Cardmembers to spend moreduring the festive season .  The main draw of the promotion was a chance to win a brand new Volkswagen Car but TUS also designed a musical holiday card for fans to share with friends.
As of January 2012, the AMEX Singapore Facebook page has over 18,000 fans.

In the scene when Ethan Hawke and his sidekick are trying to fool the guard in the Kremlin Data Vault with their “Reality Distortion Field” device powered with an iPad. What this does is they hide behind a screen which displays a virtual version of the hallway to the guard. A robotic arm tracks the guard’s head and eye position to display the correct perspective so that he does not think it is an image on screen. Imagine this, when you are watch a movie, your visual perception is not 3d because the perspective do not change as you move your head or eyes which you are used to in the real world, even with stereographic movies powered by 3D glasses. In the MI4 movie, the camera tracks the face so that the system knows where the person’s point of vision is in relation to it. This allows the system to generate a virtual space to that is constantly inline with the person’s point of vision. Look at this example for a better idea.

So is a reality distortion field possible? Actually the technology has been around for quite a while and is based on something techies call “Computer Vision”. Computer Vision is about allowing machines see and understand objects via images (See Wiki: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_vision). To track the face the system uses algorithms to detect facial features. One simple method is the “Haar like features classifier”. Blocks of the image captured by the camera is processed and compared to a library of sample views of features. This way the system will know that a human is face is present in the capture footage which will in turn return the POV of the subject. But as with all cameras the quality of the tracking will depend on the image captured. Low light captures will result in high noise which will interfer with detection. An alternative to this is to use a range camera like the one in Xbox kinect which does not rely soley on visible light.

There are plenty of applications for human recognition. Helping systems know that a person is present can allows it to adapt or output relevant information. After the widespread usage of multitouch screens, this is sure to be the next step to make technology more human aware.