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Lotus Eco EliseJuly 15 2008

On July 22nd at the British Motor Show, Lotus will unveil their new environmentally friendly sporty roadster, the Eco Elise, which features a number of “greener” improvements. Instead of just decreasing CO2 emissions, Lotus tried a holistic approach to ecology by using sustainable materials (like hemp and eco wool), a cleaner manufacturing process, renewable energy generation and reducing the car’s weight. Overall, the weight saving program for the Eco Elise has resulted in a total saving of around 70.5 lbs over the feather light Elise S, which consequently reduces the fuel required to drive the car.

Are those weed plants in the background?

Although we enthusiastically  welcome the idea of using Hemp in cars ( or any other product for that matter ) may we point out that the concept of using  Hemp in a car is not that new.. (remember Henry Ford?)

10 Ways to Get More Out of FriendfeedFebruary 26 2008

Friendfeed.com just opened its doors for everyone... you don't need an invite anymore to use this site, which can act as your feed reader, social network, and twitter-style mini blog all in one. Here are some tips & tricks for Friendfeed:

1. You can subscribe to any RSS feed at all, whether or not it's connected to a person. For instance, you could subscribe to social news site Reddit. Just go to Friend Settings -> Imaginary, click the create button, and give the friend a name (like "Reddit"). In the options dialog that opens, click Blog and enter the feed URL in question (like "http://reddit.com/.rss").
2. Similar to above, you can also subscribe to a Google News alert on any subject. Just visit Google News, set-up your preferred search, order by date and restrict the date to, say, a week, and copy the RSS feed. Paste the feed URL when adding an imaginary friend as described above. (Note the last time I tried, it was unfortunately necessary for your feed to contain at least one item for Friendfeed to accept it.)
3. Search Friendfeed content. Well, right now there is no official search feature at Friendfeed, only a search for friends... however, Friendfeed recently said this will be coming

5 Essential Tools for Digg AnalystsFebruary 24 2008

Most users prefer to take Digg at face value and just enjoy the daily stream of news and cool links it provides. Others, like me, want to find out the inner workings of this seemingly arbitrary but in fact quite complex system.

Back in the early days, the only way to find out how Digg works was to observe. Luckily, today Digg “analysts” have a large number of tools at their disposal; not flashy games or fun visuals, but actual tools that use Digg’s API to extract meaningful information, extrapolate statistical data out of it and present all of it in a useful way. Without further ado, here are 5 tools that everyone who wants to find out the nuts and bolts of Digg should have bookmarked. (more…)

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GrandCentral Announces Blogger IntegrationFebruary 22 2008

GrandCentral, Google’s free unified phone management platform, has announced their first major integration point with the other tools of the Google portfolio today: Blogger.  In case you aren’t one of the lucky few to have been in on the private beta for GrandCentral, essentially  it acts as a call forwarding system for all you lines, giving you just one number to put on your business cards that will ring all your lines at once.

Today, they released a new version of the WebCall button for use on Blogger powered blogs so that your readers can easily leave voicemail or call you directly from your site without seeing your phone number.

With GrandCentral, and with the WebCall button, you’ll be able to screen and record incoming calls, or send them to your GrandCentral voicemail box.

The WebCall button has been available for some time now from within the GrandCentral system, but has always worked with varying degrees of reliability.  Now that the service is finally publicly announced on the Blugger Buzz blog, one would imagine that it has reached more of a level of post-alpha.

The Presentation ParadoxFebruary 15 2008

There’s a problem with presentations by web agencies done for clients, and it leads to the problem of overly complicated interfaces on the web. We can define the Presentation Paradox as this:

<<The effectiveness of a presentation is inversely proportional to the effectiveness of the tool presented.>>

Now this is more of a general observation so it doesn’t apply to all cases. Not all websites are tools, for starters – a tool as in: a hammer, a search engine, a shopping form, and so on –, though a lot more are tool-like than we may think. Also, sometimes clients or the team are so clued-in to what is presented that they can sense true effectiveness. But we need to keep in mind that clients are often not that technically adept, or they might have done the implementation themselves.

To explain the paradox, let’s use an example. The goal of the given hypothetical site is to sell more products, and the client envisioned a “related products” tool for visitors. We’ll peek into two alternate realities below. The left is a solution from an agency which envisions to print a simple link to a related product on the product page. The right-hand solution from another agency is to have a full-featured and visual Related Products Explorer application. On button press, the Related Products Explorer opens a plug-in based app in a new window and uses colorful nodes mapped onto an auto-rotating 3D sphere; it also contains priority sliders for