My iPhone typing speed improved dramatically yesterday!

"The iPhone is not about the press, it’s about the release", says my mate, and Mobile guru, Oli Weidlich.

Do you feel a little stressed when you type an SMS or write a note with your iPhone? It’s because you are trying to ‘press’ the buttons.

The little birdy in my head used to say "I hope I press the right key" and get frustrated when I had to delete and retype a letter or word. Or use that funny magnifying glass thingy that often renders off the screen.

Oli enlightened me that what you can do is slide your finger around the keyboard until the right letter pops up, without risk of selecting the wrong one, and then release it. My life has changed!

if this tip was plainly described in the store where I bought it, I could have immediately reach the amazing typing speeds compared to other phone, as claimed in this research about typing speed on different devices.

Last year I wrote about how daily technology hassles like this add up to stress people out in this presentation at World Usability Day Sydney 07.  Let’s get lots of these tips together to help make our daily lives S M O O T H E R.

This a cool new widget for those of you with lots of slideshows. Showcase your work or even better put all the shows from a conferece in one spot! Simply tag them all the same and it becomes easy to group them together. Here’s my randomness of shows:

| Get your Presentation Pack

I don’t know that it really enhances the magazine reading experience right now? The advertisers will certainly be relieved of millions of dollars!

See how the ad changes?

It will be interesting to see how the e-paper develops in the consumer space and what is done to recycle it!

Read more about it on Wikipedia

You can still access them

I’ve talked about controlling your computer with your eyes and mind a couple of times already on this blog.

Well, Craig Rispin just helped blow my mind!  He handed me a scribbled URL on a scrap of paper at the office the other day and said, "I think you will like this…"

Tonight I eagerly entered the URL into my browser and discovered a recent video created by Cali of GeekBrief.tv describing new input devices for computers.  In particular a new technology from Emotiv, an Australian Company headquartered in San Fran, that reads brain waves to let you interact with a computer game with your thoughts, emotions and facial expressions. WTF?!

I have been doing some work with PSTNet who have actually put their reaction timing software into fMRIs and EEGs that can be used with eye trackers for research into brain function. However, making this gear small enough to put on your head, with a wireless connection to a usb dongle receiver in a laptop, is way cool! I didn’t think this kind of technlogy would be here so quick! And created on my Aussie doorstep with a COMET grant! 

There’s another video of it on CNET here and a 2SER radio podcast on their site here.

They claim that the new technology is a total form of communication that can allow us to comunicate with other people by using much more than our conscious thoughts and associated actions. Imagine what would happen if you coupled it with text based chat?  Goodbye emoticons

The hardware device is being released in the US, and available online, this year bundled with a game.  The headset will also be sold with a software that allows backwards compatibility with existing games you already own!  Oh, and there is a web platform coming too!

Even more exciting is that this technology could be used by people with disabilities such as quadraplegia in a similar way to how MyTobii currently works to allow Cerebral Palsy patients (for example) to control computers with their eyes. You can check that our on a previous post here too!

Exciting times!

Technology gets to me sometimes, especially my mobile phone!

I rarely access the mobile Internet, download mobile content or send picture messages. But this is soon to change!

I recently came across the You Can on a Mobile website developed by a team set up by The Australian Interactive Media Industry Association (AIMIA). It is a collaborative effort from the media and telecommunications industry in Australia.  It really helps me understand the useful content I can access on my mobile phone.

Check it out!

I’m doing a lunch presentation on next Tuesday at Bureaux, where I have my office.

I will be showing how I use online tools to improve communication, knowledge management and marketing.  Hopefully I can seamlessly link the tools together on different sites during my preso!!

Here it is on Slideshare!

As an outcome of all of this you basically get free marketing on search engines!

Scribd is another way of publishing your stuff on the web to get noticed!

I’ll add more ideas here on Tuesday night!

Have you heard this kinda of rhetoric?

1. ‘Sorry I’m not doing Facebook yet, I am focussing on LinkedIn‘
2. ‘Oh, Facebook is so bad, relationships become so superficial’
3. ‘I don’t have time for Facebook’

From my perspective:
#1 people, ‘You are missing out’
#2 people, ‘Your relationships are probably superficial anyway’
#3 People, ‘It’s worth it’

I was talking with a psychologist friend the other day about how great Facebook is, and she really ‘got it’. I recounted my experiences of about 6 months ago.

Catching up with a friend I haven’t seen for a while at a party:
F: ‘ How ya goin?’
J: ‘Good how are you’
F: ‘Fine thanks’
J: ‘I’m about to have a baby’
F: ‘I know, it’s on your Facebook’
J: ‘Doh!’

Then today, I met a friend I haven’t seen for a while:
F: ‘Hey, How was your presentation last night, did you get good feedback?
J: Great thanks! (I think to myself - ‘ah, he read it on my Facebook’). The group was really interested and loved the eye tracker. How was your lunch yesterday?
F: Awesome, at such and such and we ate…’

What happens now is that a lot of the small talk is done away with and is relegated to the realm of Facebook or other social networks. Technology is helping us to have richer and more focused catch ups with friends and colleagues who we know well.  Not to mention keeping up to date with what they are doing whilst we are busy with work and family.

Then on the other hand, it means that we can be lazy! We don’t have to catch up with our friends to find out what they are doing! Plus small talk is fun!

I’m an advocate of the former, what do you think?

I am working on a client project with a really tight time frame. We have to spend more time together innovating but I there is none! Plus people are in 3 different offices in two states! What to do?

I immediately launched a free and private Tangler forum so the collaboration can happen online. Over Friday and the weekend we’ve had 6 people contributing and some great ideas are surfacing.

It has helped us to quickly:

• Get thoughts out of our heads
• Comment of existing documents
• Consider our innovative ideas as we write them down
• Think about and discuss solutions without being face-to-face
• Prepare for our next face to face meeting on Monday so it is short and to the point.

Here’s to Web 2.0!