Whoa! It seems that Networked Loyalty made it to 5th place, which makes the concept a prize winner! The overall winner will be announced by Starbucks like at 3pm today, so please tune in to see if you’ll soon be using networked coffee mugs instead of paper: http://www.livestream.com/thebetacup
Please help us win the competition! There are 11 days remaining to vote at: http://www.jovoto.com/contests/drink-sustainably/ideas/5364
There are 14 days left to vote in the BetaCup contest. I entered with several members of the Purpose team. Our proposal asks users to take existing coffee and travel mugs and apply a RFID sticker that can be scanned at coffee shops in tenth-cup-free loyalty program. The user is free to get coffee wherever they want, but each scan is counted only at the location at which it is scanned, so one mug can be used in infinite loyalty programs.
Please take some time and vote for our submission! http://www.jovoto.com/contests/drink-sustainably/ideas/5364
Logo by Mina Cheong
A screenshot taken just after we reached 10,000 riders
The latest site from Purpose (where I work) is the amazing I Ride For Livestrong Game. The game was created to draw new supporters to the Livestrong Foundation. The game is simple; users can either join the ride or cheer for a rider. Riders advance in the race by acquiring cheers. We reached our goal of 10,000 riders in well under the goal of 48 hours. As of this post, we have 17,000 riders and nearly 90,000 cheers! Well done everyone!
The New York Times covered the launch on Media Decoder. PSFK also wrote about it.
As I’ve been exploring various applications for the sound clocks, I wondered what it would look like if the Live Shock Clock were installed at international airports. If many airports participated in installing them, the audio input could be networked and, along with seeing global time, we could also see how bustling it might be at participating airports. It is a simple way to bring more detail to time. I modified these beautiful images I found on Flickr in order to demonstrate how the clocks would look. If anyone knows of a place where I can submit a proposal to get them into a public space, please let me know.
sound / time, a series of clocks that explores the relationship between music and sound, is complete. Several clocks do this by superimposing music theory over time, but my favorite clock, shown below left, takes live voice input to “shock” the hands of the clock. I’d love to see it installed in a busy lobby or some other bustling public space. Try them out:
The Circle of Fifths clock tells time with sound using the music theory of the Circle of Fifths. The clock will help train your ears to hear pitch and will make sense to those who can already do so. The 12 tones of the diatonic scale correspond with the 24 hours of the day. Every half hour, music sounds and the waveform of the music is displayed on a screen. The clock is structured so that one complete and complete piece of music is played every day. It is inspired in part by the Winchester chimes I used to hear at my grandparents’ house. Winchester chimes resolve musical tension over the course of the hour, while the Circle of 5ths clock resolves tension over the course of a day. The music for the clock was played on my 1954 Martin 00-18G.
The Circle of Fifths, which works in a clockwise fashion and is sometimes known as the Cycle of Fifths, explains the relationships between the 12 tones of the chromatic scale. It shows patterns that composers use to write music. The Circle of Fifths is so powerful that anyone without any understanding of music except for the chart below and the relationships it describes could write a beautiful piece of music. Simply explained, any note on the circle is the major fifth of the previous note in the cycle. However there are many other ways to explain the circle. Every casual musician should know it.
The clock works by playing the chord associated with a given note in the circle every hour. C major, generally considered the root of music, is a happy chord and represents 12:00 noon. The rest of the p.m. hours are represented by the rest of the notes that complete the major circle (G = 2, D = 3, and so forth). The A minor chord is more somber and represents midnight. The a.m. hours grow more intense with minor chords leading up to noon/C major.
The half-hours are marked by a I/V cadence, which gives a sense of the day progressing as one long musical piece. The V which finishes most cadences is the chord that will be played at the top of the next hour. 11:30 a.m. is the only half-hour that is not represented by a I/V cadence. This time begins the transition to 12:00 noon and C major, so we need a ii/I cadence here from D minor to C major. Since ii/I is not a very strong resolution, the piece is actually infinite – as infinite as time itself!
This clock can be installed on any computer running Java and connected to a screen. The current time in milliseconds is shown on the bottom right of the clock. This clock is in the proof of concept stage and is currently in development. Hopefully now people will start saying, “Drinks at B major!”, or maybe “B is for beers!”
the clock
the circle of fifths
The New York City Ticket Finder SMS service is back up and running. This was a homework assignment that Andrea and I did about a year ago. While it was on the ITP server it was a password protected site, so it wasn’t open to the public. I’ve moved it to Dreamhost, fixed a few bugs, and built a mobile site for iPhone and Android. The mobile site is brand new and I encourage you to try that.
The basic idea of the service is that if you want to go to any event in New York, enter the event info and your phone number, and the service checks Craigslist and notifies you as soon as tickets are posted. In fact, it should notify you before the posted is even available on craigslist.org, but Dreamhost plan only allows me to run the cronjob every 10 minutes or more, so you may or may not receive the listing before the rest of the world. If I can get some donations I’ll get hosting with a better cronjob plan. It works like a charm and has helped me get into many events at the last minute including Andrew Bird at Carnegie Hall. There will be some layout changes coming soon, but the system is stable for me. If it’s not stable for you please contact me. It’s open for registration right now, and we’ll cut the list off at about 50 or so for now, so if you want to get in, do it now.
Below are a few screenshots of the iPhone site. The homepage is designed so that all information is accessible right there, without having to load several pages to view About, Instructions, and Contact content. I’m a fairly heavy mobile device user, and what annoys me the most about the mobile web is loading a homepage and having to navigate around the site, often with a dodgy connection, by loading several subsequent pages to find the info that I want. This way I use JavaScript to hide divisions until the user decides to view them.
To implement this, I made two arrays; one to contain the navigation divs, and a second to contain the content divs. Then I wrote a function which takes two parameters (nav button div id, content div id) to manage visibility and highlight the selected button:
// the content divs
var content = new Array('_about', '_instructions', '_contact');
// the navigation divs
var nav = new Array('about', 'instructions', 'contact');
function show_hide_text(_button_content_id, _content_id) {
var content_id = document.getElementById(_content_id);
var button_content_id = document.getElementById(_button_content_id);
for (var i = 0; i < content.length; i++) {
var content_index = document.getElementById(content[i]);
var nav_index = document.getElementByIid(nav[i]);
if ( (content_id == content_index) && (content_id.style.display == 'block') ) {
content_id.style.display = 'none';
button_content_id.style.borderBottom = 'none';
} else if ( (content_id == content_index) && (content_id.style.display == 'none') ) {
content_id.style.display = 'block';
button_content_id.style.borderBottom = '2px dotted';
} else {
content_index.style.display = 'none';
nav_index.style.borderBottom = 'none';
}
}
}
I’ve been messing around with a logo after being inspired by the color palette of the American Spirit Light box. I used those three colors and highlighted the B and E in my last name, because if I try extra hard I can be whatever I want to be! The font is Blackoak Standard.
