Another evolution of customization is demonstrated in Apple’s Celebrity Playlists. Something about having the music chosen by an artist you respect or enjoy makes it more attractive to purchase than the music on its own.
Celebrity iCal files, anyone? Could they be the killer app for a rich database of events? I picture a John Hennessy-chosen […]

So one of the several ideas from the marketing team involved filming an E@S commercial at a newspaper publishing house, basically something with huge machines and paper whizzing by all over the place… with the punchline “Next time, don’t bother with all the flyers.” LiveJournal had this idea done professionally, with good results: MPEG, […]

Kyle’s hero Ben Fry has come up with another interesting and useful visualization: type in digits of a zip code and the map narrows its focus to the area covered by your partial entry.
By doing this, I found out that 99403 (clarkston, wa) is the biggest US zip code; and that 01001 (agawam, ma) is […]

Stumbled upon the Fry’s clone here in Taiwan (or probably more realistically, the Fry’s inspiration). I feel right at home. Just like Fry’s only 1) more jam packed with stuff that’s made here anyway so 2) the prices are better and 3) you can negotiate (which is especially fun when you don’t know […]

Interesting NYTimes overview of the upcoming format battle for the next consumer video standard. Particularly interesting to understand the players (how silicon valley companies now are players) and all of the IP rights invovled.

Hey dudes and dudettes!
I just did another edit of this quick tutorial for Final Cut Pro 4. For those of you who have played around with Final Cut before, please check this out and e-mail me comments!! (spokes@stanford.edu) I would love to have some feedback before I call it “finished.” I […]

While working on a video project at work, I found some limitations to Apple’s Quicktime technology. As explained in the last paragraph on their page:
When the movie plays over the web, QuickTime loads the chapter list immediately via HTTP. It attempts to get the stream from the server only when the movie is played or […]

Hey Team –
I hope everyone is enjoying their Winter Break. However, if you are stuck in an airport en route to somewhere exotic or are tired of viewing your Family Guy DVDs, and you just happen to be perusing the ISIS Blog, you might find this Washington Post article about Apple’s iPod as enjoyable […]

For me, there are two ways to listen to music: to concentrate closely on an artist, a song, or an album and listen carefully to each note and word; or to play a variety of songs in the background while I do something else, barely noticing the words.
Apple has launched a new service called “iTunes […]

Similar to Kyle’s experiments with dynamic video from RSS, I found a site that cartoons the weather based on a weather.com XML feed.