B1BLOG

I was at a WPP Dig­i­tal Day last month and one of the pre­sen­ters was King Yiu Chu from Layar. He took us through some great exam­ples of Aug­mented Real­ity and how it can be applied to our mar­ket­ing efforts.

One case study was the Unin­vited DIY Exhi­bi­tion at MoMA New York, where vis­i­tors to the art gallery were able to see a num­ber of addi­tional “unof­fi­cial” exhibits through their iPhone and Android hand­sets. A nice way of blur­ring the lines between phys­i­cal and vir­tual environments.

Read the full post »

As a writer by trade I have a habit of try­ing every word-processor I can get my hands on. For day to day work, I still use Word – although a heav­ily cus­tomised stripped back ver­sion. But I have this per­pet­ual feel­ing that there’s a bet­ter option out there. Of course, today, there are more options than ever before (even for a Mac user).

So to date I’ve tried a vari­ety of desk­top options:

Read the full post »

• Word – good but bloated
• OpenOf­fice and its Mac vari­ant NeoOf­fice – pretty much as good as Word if not quite as pretty (and still pretty bloated)

Happy new year, I hope Santa brought you every­thing you wished for (obvi­ously if you opted for peace on Earth you may have been some­what disappointed).

It’s cus­tom­ary at this time of year to make pre­dic­tions for the 12 months ahead. Of course, this is largely an exer­cise in ensur­ing you look pretty stu­pid at the end of the year. (It’s almost as if, sim­ply by pre­dict­ing the future, you can guar­an­tee that it won’t come to pass.) So with that in mind, and not want­ing to pass up the oppor­tu­nity of look­ing stu­pid, here are mine:

Read the full post »

There has been a raft of inter­est­ing arti­cles and posts lately look­ing at alter­na­tives to tra­di­tional desktop-based soft­ware. Some, like the peo­ple at Vit­a­min, are look­ing to reduce the cost by mov­ing to a pri­mar­ily open source solu­tion. Oth­ers, like Sam at TechCrunch UK, are explor­ing the web OS approach, tak­ing advan­tage of the plethora of new web-based apps that are spring­ing up (and gen­er­ally being bought by Google). And yet oth­ers are cau­tion­ing that there is a need for both desk­top and web-based soft­ware.

Read the full post »

Since the intro­duc­tion of Intel-powered Macs, there have been a num­ber of devel­op­ments promis­ing the abil­ity to run Win­dows on a Mac. Typ­i­cally this has either been through a dual-boot approach such as Apple’s own Boot Camp or the run within OS X vir­tual machine approach of Par­al­lels Desk­top.

Now soft­ware com­pany Codeweavers, how­ever, is promis­ing the abil­ity to run Win­dows appli­ca­tions within OS X but with­out requir­ing a copy of the Win­dows OS. The prod­uct is CrossOver Mac and looks very interesting.

From the web­site:

Read the full post »

There is a say­ing in NLP that goes some­thing like “If you only have one choice you are a robot, if you have two you are in a dilemma, it’s only when you have three or more that you have real choice.”

So it is with oper­at­ing sys­tems. For most peo­ple, there is a choice of one, the Win­dows that was pre-installed on their PC when they bought it. For a small minor­ity, there’s also the Apple OSX option. And then, of course there’s Linux. But Linux is scary for most peo­ple. Despite the friendly pen­guin, it is still the domain of the the alpha-geek.

Read the full post »

Ok, install at your own risk but Firefox’s march toward’s a full 2.0 release has taken another step for­ward. The beta 2 release is avail­able here.

As with any pre-release soft­ware, you’ll have to take the rough with the smooth in terms of sta­bil­ity. How­ever, I’ve been using Fire­fox 2.0 on the Mac since it was in alpha and it’s been remark­ably sta­ble and well behaved. One thing to watch out for, the new ver­sion is unlikely to play nice with all your themes and extensions.

Now if only they could make it as good as Opera…

Microsoft announced on Fri­day that it’s launch­ing ver­sions of Win­dows and Office in the Incan lan­guage in Bolivia. This promises to help close the dig­i­tal divide between the 2.5 mil­lion Quen­chan speak­ers (about a third of the pop­u­la­tion) and the bet­ter sup­ported Span­ish speak­ers in the country.

If we are to see tech­nol­ogy as a force for good (which per­son­ally I do) then open­ing up access is fun­da­men­tal to suc­cess. This is an area where open source has promised so much (and deliv­ered rea­son­ably well all things con­sid­ered). Because users have access to the code, they can tweak it for spe­cial­ist use and port it into new lan­guages (if they have the skills them­selves of course).

Read the full post »