In the New York Times

It’s been a couple of weeks already, so this is old news in the age of Twitter. But the fact that Simon and Andrea were featured in a New York Times story more than justifies the delayed post.

Robots like Simon are probably decades away from leaving the research lab and heading to people’s homes, but I have no doubt in my mind that it will happen. These kinds of stories give people a taste of what’s to come.

Very cool.

World Cup Visualizations

The World Cup is under way in South Africa. For a soccer fan, being able to watch 3 games played by the best teams in the world every day is a dream come true.

To me, what has been particularly interesting this time around is how the media has been pulling all the stops to show, communicate and broadcast the games – there’s TV, mobile, newspapers, radio, live commentary on blogs, Twitter and lots more.

It’s been really cool to see that visualizations have been used so widely, sometimes to illustrate an on-going game, sometimes to put results in perspective.

This one is from the New York Times, for a live game, Greece vs. Nigeria:

This visualization represents Brazil’s performance in World Cups:

There’s a lot more, for example here, here, and here, just to mention a few.

BBC Redesign

As it’s become painfully obvious by now, I’ve all but abandoned this blog. The truth is, things got busy, the baby started crawling and I am still figuring out what type of format I would like to adopt moving forward to communicate thoughts, ideas and interesting things I find online that are worth sharing. So for now I will leave at that.

But before I disappear again, I would like to share a link from the BBC discussing their digital language overhaul.

Definitely worth 5 minutes of your time if you do or think about this kind of stuff for a living.

Information vs. Confusion

A simple graph that explains so much. (via Flowing Data)

Hello, Autom

My friends Cory and Erica recently unveiled Autom, the weight-loss robot, at an entrepreneur event in Barcelona. It looks great:

You should check their web site for more information. The robot is based on Cory’s MIT research and Erica plays a key role in design.

MySpace School Of Design

Facebook usually gets points for having a fairly straightforward and clean user interface. This morning, however, I clicked on the “Notifications” icon of my profile and was taken to this atrocious web page.

I don’t know what’s worse, the Google-like marbles at the top or the “Idiot Test – Your ranking: idiot”. Oh, and let’s not forget the “Vampires” ad.

Nice one Facebook. I could barely find the actual settings controls I came to this page for. This is MySpace all over again.

Health Visualizer

Explore the major health issues in the U.S. with a visualization by GE. It works quite well, except that I don’t find the “compare this with that” interface very intuitive.

The $4 Business Card

How to design a business card that stands out in the crowd.

(via Fabio Seixas txt)

Disney Institute

Have you ever heard of the Disney Institute? Me neither. But I just ran into an ad for it and its logo caught my eye. It’s a great logo and captures the Disney spirit quite well:

Now you might be wondering what the Disney Institute does! Here’s their answer:

Disney Institute is a recognized leader in experiential training, leadership development, benchmarking and cultural change for business professionals across the globe.

You can read more on their site, but they seem to offer classes around Disney’s management approach and its values. Interesting.

Obama The Brand

From the 37Signals security page – “the world’s most respected brands trust our web-based products to run their businesses”.

Interesting. Just goes to show how effective and pervasive the Obama movement is. The brand has staying power. And the logo looks good right next to Adidas, Trek and Kellogg’s.