Trying to decide on a nice restaurant for a date in Koramangala and can’t decide where to go or what to do ? AskLaila, from Four Interactive comes to your rescue. Asklaila aims to answer common questions of Who? What? Where? When? Why? How? within your city.
Currently they have local information services for Bangalore and Mumbai (which was launched a couple of weeks ago). I had a chat with their team and they were telling me that you can soon expect to see asklaila in all metros and other major cities in India in next few months.
I think this product has some great potiential (especially going by the vision of their passionate team !) in the Indian consumer market and the next couple of years will determine how consumers actually percieve the real value from local products.
No explanations. No FAQ. Just a figure of Jesus which keeps on emitting random Twitter posts in cartoon-like balloons. Pointless? Probably. Cool? Definitely.
Yahoo released their new version of the popular Y! messenger with an exclusive version built for Vista on WPF. This is currently only for preview. The UX is brilliant, and this app brings more of a human touch to conversations with smooth transitions and the likes.
The app however does not run on XP even if you have .NET 3.0 and the other jazz. But this looks and feels so much like a native Vista app, including the richness and the transparencies. This new version also provides a good deal of customization, with the usual laundry list of features. These two features were extremely useful
The Vista gadget which comes along with this IM is very useful and enables you to drag and drop your favorite contacts on to your sidebar so that you can ping them from there itself.
Being able to switch between different people that I’m chatting with in a single window.
But the bigger question is, ‘What do you think provides more value’ - a quick and dirty IM chat client like Gtalk (also built into your gmail) or an app like this which provides a great UX.
Isn’t this game incredibly cool, check the video below. Looks like you really need to know your physics well to play this one This one is from Kloonigames and runs on the tablet PC. A PC version of crayon physics is coming soon.
The user experience on this is incredible, watch how the game reacts as the user draws different figures and tries to achieve their objective. With the Wii and PS3 giving PC games a run for their money, I think innovative concepts like this one are a really good answer.
This makes me wonder about the process of gathering requirements for this game. I’m thinking, there are so many scenarios that need to be captured and then taking a call on which ones the game needs to support and deciding others to be left out. Phew ! It’s actually my dream to do requirements, scenarios and functional specifications for a gaming product. Wouldn’t that be cool
Nice concept ! The new Twitter poster from Spanish company Come and Click Networks provides a mashup of Twitter users sized relatively to the influence of each Twitter user, based on the number of followers and the number of Tweets the populars make.
These posters are now available for the United States, Japan, Brazil, United Kingdom, Spain, Germany, Australia, Italy, Mexico, Canada, France and Taiwan, in addition to a global poster on the front page. Now this is a nice concept and goes to shwo how mashups can surface up a lot of important information.
However I wonder what would be the real usefulness of something like. It’s eye candy! yes, no doubt about that, but could this lead to a digg style user rating mechanism in Twitter ?
How do you think this can be leveraged and can you build a business opportunity through this mashup ?
Orkut, the second largest online social network has a new look. Apparently they are rolling out the new redesign to select groups of users and their blog states that they will continue to do this over coming weeks.
One of their goals have to been to maintain the “true blue simplicity” but at first glance I find the white backgrounds and the rounded corners to be very distracting.
Xobni, a new email-management service offered by the San Francisco-based startup company Xobni Analytics aims to empower the email user and help them “take back their inbox”. Xobni provides data on things like how much time you spend on email, how long it takes you to respond and what times during the day have the most important emails coming in. They are funded by Khosla Ventures, First Round Capital, YCombinator, and a group of angel investors.
Xobni claims that it will help you manage time spent on your email account much more efficiently.The new “Email me instead” allows you to send Facebook messages directly to people’s inboxes, saving the extra step of having to go into Facebook in order to read them. Users can sign up to receive news and updates on the Beta release. Until then, users can visit the site’s blog to correspond with the Xobni team.
They have a button for your blog and claim that users using this on their blog will get priority access for their release. Check this out.
Tafiti is a mashup that uses the resources of Windows Live Search driven by a Silverlight user interface. The result is a search engine with a totally new experience.
Tafiti (which is the Swahili word for “do research”) uses a desktop metaphor to search across media types and even filter your data result set multiple times. So here’s my take on Tahiti
The good
1. Provides a stack view of my search results – Ability to drag multiple search results on to the right pane and to label a stack of results.
2. You can email items of a stack to people, which is pretty useful.
3. Ability to blog about a stack you have created on your Live Space account.
4. Ability to pivot the search results by RSS feeds, books, news items, images. I found this to be very useful . It does not stop here, you can in fact view contextual information on a book. (This feature however doesn’t seem to be working currently)
5. Here is one cool feature, though it took me some time to figure out how to get to this – On your web search results, there is a tree icon and clicking on which provides a real tree view visualization of your search results. You can choose to view how many results you wish to see and hovering over a result provides a brief description of the same. Very cool, but doubt if people will find value.
The bad
1. A somewhat jerky experience throughout, not as smooth as WPF desktop applications.
2. There are some issues with resolution, does not run perfectly on lower resolutions.
3. No pagination for search results – there’s only a more link which is not great usability.
4. There’s a text box for filtering the search results – where you can actually type and I figured that it does a text comparison with the search results and pivots them. Not a common standard for filters - users might be expecting a drop down etc.
5. Try right clicking on the site and you will notice only one option called ‘Silverlight configuration’ clicking on which provides a note about silverlight. I am really hoping that this is customizable ?
6. It opens up all the search results in a new IE window, which is not great usability.
Overall, it’s worth a shot, though I am sure that Microsoft realizes that no one is going to use this as a search engine, it’s more of an effort to showcase the power of silverlight and maybe the future of rich internet applications.
Trying to decide on a nice restaurant for a date in Koramangala and can’t decide where to go or what to do ? AskLaila, from Four Interactive comes to your rescue. Asklaila aims to answer common questions of Who? What? Where? When? Why? How? within your city.
currently only for preview. The UX is brilliant, and this app brings more of a human touch to conversations with smooth transitions and the likes.
