Wednesday, November 24, 2004
Posted by Roberto
1:30 PM
0 comments
DESIGN THAT SPEAKS TO CONSUMERS
Today, Lenovo of China and BenQ make products that approach the quality of long-standing industry giants such as Sony, Panasonic, or Philips Electronics.
What does it take then to become a world leading brand? A Design Culture.
Samsung is definitely a good example. This year, Samsung won five awards in the Industrial Design Excellence Awards (IDEA), making it the first Asian company to win more awards than any European or American rival. Samsung has grown from a me-too producer of electronics and appliances into one of the world's leading brands. Samsung's designers these days no longer have to find a way to put their boxes around the devices that engineers create. Instead, they often give concepts to engineers, who must then build the machine inside the box dreamed up by the designers.
"We want to be the Mercedes of home electronics," says Yun Jong Yong, Samsung's chief executive.
It is clear that Design goes well beyond the look and feel. To create stand-out products companies have to improve the way people use and control gadgets. For instance, sound is an integral part in the design of the user interface of a phone. A specific suite of bells and buzzes improves usability and promotes brand awareness.
Wednesday, November 17, 2004
Posted by Roberto
11:34 AM
0 comments
FIREFOX
THE IE ALTERNATIVE
Firefox 1.0, a lightweight new browser based on years of redevelopment since Netscape's open-sourcing of Communicator in 1998, has been released!
"I suggest dumping Microsoft's Internet Explorer"
Walt Mossberg, Wall Street Journal
Firefox is solid and secure, earning hearty recommendations from CERT (the Computer Emergency Response Team - heavyweights in the world of computer security). It is based around Gecko, the next-generation webpage rendering engine built from the ground up for efficiency and standards-compliance by the Mozilla developers. Firefox can be downloaded at mozilla.org. While you're there, you might want to take a look at Thunderbird, an excellent Mail/Groupware client similar to Microsoft's Outlook, also based on Mozilla.
Firefox's developers are hoping to reach 10% of the browser market.
Mozilla
Monday, November 15, 2004
Posted by Roberto
2:00 PM
0 comments
MSN SEARCH
BETA VERSION RELEASED
MSN has been working on a search tool for at least two years. If you are a webmaster you might have noticed that "MSNBot" has been spidering your sites as MSN Search gathered information and compiled its own database.
The beta search engine is currently live and with its clean design and relevant results can definately challenge Google's dominance of the search market. Keep in mind that results displayed by the beta engine are different from results displayed on their main MSN site which continues to show results from the Yahoo/Overture database.
MSN Search Beta
Monday, November 08, 2004
Posted by tom
9:07 AM
0 comments
LETTING TECHNOLOGY IN
In 1989 I was in India working with the Tibetan Exile Government. I was tasked with teaching several of the young monks how to use newly arrived PCs for word processing and accounting. Within days my students became proficient users, not thanks to my brilliant teaching, but rather in spite of it.
While I concentrated on explaining the complex mechanisms that transformed keystrokes into images on the screen, they smiled politely and accepted what we call details as mystery. This acceptance of technology as magic is what technologists have been dreaming of for years, and it touches our deepest fire making instincts.
Fifteen years on and we are still fighting with the details of technology. Users still insist on knowing and understanding, on owning, the most elaborate details and features of technology, even those that are superfluous to their needs.
But there is hope. As the Economist recently points out in a special on simplifying IT, there are now technologies and gadgets that embed themselves into our lives seamlessly, and a generation of more casual, and less fearful users is accepting the mystery of technology without banging their heads against the details.
While simplification is helpful, anyone who has tried to hide technology will know that you can build a box around it but complexity doesn't go away. Westerners will feel better about technology that they don't see, only if they can trust that it is beneficial to them. The black box remains a menace to most of us.
A Luddite friend, who has difficulty using the electronic teller machine, is perfectly happy to connect his pacemaker via telephone to his doctor's computer. He accepts that the pacemaker is part of him, and is keeping him well. It is this acceptance or trust that will allow technology into our lives in a meaningful and less stressful way.
The next big leap will not be a simplification or dumbing down of technology, but rather an acceptance of the magic, a letting it get under our skin.
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