Have $20 000 to spare, reserve your place to be one of the first to travel into space with Virgin Galactic.

Back, maybe 4/5 years ago when almost everyone was still connected to the internet via 56k modems, Broadband was the buzzword flying around as the saviour of the web and online content. Viewing videos on the web was limited to stuttering 320 x 240 mini movies, (I might be exaggerating here) it was just painfully slow. Today with more people taking up broadband fast internet connections, website have become richer in content, video viewing on website are the norm and some of these sites leading the way with video content are very addictive. These are the 6 I have bookmarked, I’m sure there are others out there. This guy is probably my favourite video on YouTube. Reuters did a news story on him, tracking him down to Korea.

YouTube, The leader of the pack right now, I’ve found some amazing and rare stuff on here. Close behind is Google Video, Guba, has a pay and watch online model but theres plenty of free stuff too, most are full length videos ranging from comedy to documentaries. Revver, doesn’t seem as extensive, this one is based on users getting paid for uploaded videos. Metacafe, again no as extensive, most of whats on here can be found on YouTube. Whoomp, not very user friendly and all videos open up in Windows Media Player on a Mac. This site also has image galleries. Kontraband, more adult and non work safe videos on Kontraband, lots of viral videos. And something extra, Microsoft will try to compete with YouTube with Soapbox

It started with Beautiful Losers and now with Spank the Monkey, showing at the BALTIC, non traditional art is getting a lot of exposure and recognition in the mainstream galleries. Someone in Sydney should do a show at the AGNSW or the MCA!

This exhibition will be the first serious international examination of urban and suburban art bridging the gap between the street and the traditional art space. With strong links to graphic design, graffiti, manga comics, skate boarding and surfing.

All the big names are there including, Banksy, FAILE, Shepard Fairey, Groovisions, Invader, Kozyndan, Barry Mcgee, Ryan Mcginness, Takashi Murakami, David Shrigley and Ed Templeton.

Greenpeace parodies Apple. Nothing against Greenpeace for this campaign, and to their credit they have answered some of the questions that came to mind, “There are other companies with an even worse record than Apple but these follow rather than lead industry trends” like Dell and HP.

I don’t know about anyone else, but I’ve never thrown out anything I’ve bought from Apple. I’ve seen lots of old computers and screens dumped on the side of the road while driving but none of it is an Apple product. I have an old G3 desktop and monitor that I bought in 1998, its still working faithfully running OS9.
C’mon Greenpeace, I want to see more wider photos of these computer dumps, not just tiny cropped ones mocked up on the computer screens. 90% of what we see in those images could be non Apple waste and the ones with the kids holding the iMac keyboards look staged.

Maybe this will debunk a few things about this campaign.

Wallop, another Social Networking space, this time by Microsoft I think, trying to get on the Cyworld bandwagon with lots of eye candy.

Its always nice seeing people drawing and create

Cockeyed building

I wonder if this would work as a base for a campaign, have a fat teen and a skinny teen on a see-saw and its not moving at all, the skinny teen up in the air with a sad face looking at the fat kid, with the tag line “are your kids enjoying their childhood?”. It can revolve around these two kids doing things together, where the healthy one is having more fun or whatever. Other situations can be, running away from a mad dog, climbing trees… Things that shows being healthy is a good thing, making parents aware that their over weight child might not be as happy as they should and in turn make them be responsible for what their kids eat.

I have two sisters who are in high school and they eat so much junk food, they are always on the computer and never go outside to play, its a good thing they don’t get fat easily, or else they would be obese.

Its looking like a big problem in health over the coming years since the government is putting so much money into it.

Weird viral animations for the Zune. The Zen Vison W looks cool, but I’ll wait for the full screen video iPod thanks.

Scary paint

These are my ideas for the My Dream App competition, not really sure wether some of them have been designed or developed in one form or another, but they are the kind of apps I want to use myself right now. They got 2716 entries, most of them would’ve been 3 by the same person, still thats a lot of ideas, I’m sure out of that something cool will come out, if not they have 2700+ ideas to develope into other things.

Collector

A visual catalogue application that acts as a digital central repository for all your memorabilia and collectibles such as comics, stamps, baseball/basketball cards, objects, books, records etc… basically anything that is collected. This can be used to catalogue anything else that users collect and want to keep in one place digitally.

Using Core Image and Core Animation to make the interface as image based as possible to visually represent the items in the collection. Basic user interface metaphors can be a box for comics, album for stamps, display folder for cards or 3D glass case for objects.

Items can either be scanned in, sourced from Amazon, Google Image, taken with a webcam or camera or any other ways.

LifeGrapher

A data visualiser application that can graph in 2D or 3D form any entered datasource. For example, I have written record of daily lunch expenditures and what I’ve eaten for a year, I want to graph that in a form that shows me say, week by week amounts that I have spent or eaten. Or a more useful graph would be for daily exercise routine.

Basically, anything that can be imputed as number data can be graphed.

This can be a fun application with nice graphics and animation using Core Image and Core Animation to visually represent the graphs.

Interface metaphors can show a fun background or scientific grid background for the base of the graphs in a window. The graph images themselves can take on the form of the category of the date, like sandwhiches for food.

Deskollage

I like customising my desktops and I like to stick stuff (art, posters, stickers, drawing etc…) on walls where I work.

This idea works on the same premise as Capture, and the new Dashboard creation Widget for Safari, where you have a master desktop image file that gets updated. You use this Application/Widget when you’re in photoshop or browsing online and you come across an image you like, use this A/W to select the portion you like and it will get collaged/stuck to you desktop on the fly. Captured images get posted with torn edge templates or custome edges so its not boring square. You can open up the master desktop file to arrange your image and save versions of it or create a new one.

This can work as a post-it note thing too. Capturing reminders.