Design

The Putting People First blog by Experientia has pointed me toward the excellent essay "The Long Wow" by Adaptive Path's Brandon Schauer. Schauer outlines a vision of creating lasting customer loyalty and brand value that runs counter to the fixation on quick wins and instant gratification, which many companies, under the pressure of shorter product life cycles and CMO tenures, seem to pursue these days. He defines "The Long Wow" as "a means to achieving long-term customer loyalty through systematically impressing your customers again and again."

This goes far beyond adding new features … Read more

Right on the heels of the big tryptophan doping event of the year, three of my favorite programs have gone through some minor tweaks and changes. Firefox, Pidgin, and The Gimp have all received a bit of tweaking. Let's take a look at the changes.

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Porsche announced plans for an unveiling at the 2007 Bologna auto show next week that evokes nostalgia for 1960s racing.

The Boxter RS 60 Spyder (left) will be offered in limited edition. It's meant to be an homage to the Porsche Type 718 RS 60 Spyder (right) that won 12 Hours of Sebring in Florida in 1960. The car will offer the same type of GT Silver metallic paintjob , Carerra red interior and stainless steel door trims as the original. Other features that distinguish this car from the 2007 Boxter S will be 19-inch wheels positioned higher within the … Read more

Mercedes-Benz is relaunching all of its Web sites to include more rich media content and tools, the company announced Monday.

The change will effect over 50 brand sites and 1,000 dealership sites around the world. The brand sites will include higher-resolution photos, videos and a 3D vehicle configuration tool, as well as Mercedes-Benz television commercials and links to Mercedes-Benz TV.

While several car companies already offer media rich Web sites, the change is significant for the German automaker as it could signal that Mercedes is getting serious about courting a younger demographic of drivers.

The company cites increased broadband … Read more

Amazon has announced its entry into the eBook reader category with Kindle.

It's not in many people's hands yet or mine (CNET's reviewers have some first impressions), so these will have to be preliminary remarks. But I can say that I find it a schizophrenic device and hard to understand what it is trying to accomplish in its current form. It's easy enough to see where it's going, but ambition seems to have got ahead of what Amazon could actually deliver in the near term, and the ambition was not updated for reality. As a … Read more

Writing up a list of items for which I'm thankful is such a cliche at this time of year...that I can't pass up the opportunity to add my own contribution to the Thanksgiving fray. I have very little need for 3D turkey screensavers, but luckily, there are a few more valuable applications listed on CNET Download.com upon which I can bestow appropriate tribute.

In honor of Thanksgiving week, I've decided to serve up a heaping helpful of my nine "most useful" Windows utilities on the Download.com site. Now, notice that I didn'… Read more

Can you call a concept a cultural phenomenon if different people conceive of it at the same time? Within the past few months, three publications have come to similar conclusions. The digital media agency Avenue A | Razorfish released a study called "Fast Forward: Designing for Constant Change." It consists of thirteen essays as well as research exploring how consumers' digital media habits are changing, and how this affects the design of user experiences and brands. The key take-away is: Today's online users are forced to adjust to constant change in increasingly volatile rich media environments, and they … Read more

Those of us who are artistically challenged need all the help we can get when it comes to design software. A new tool called Vector Magic--the result of Stanford University Artificial Intelligence Laboratory research project by James Diebel and Jacob Norda--seems to be a valuable addition to the arsenal of free apps available for creating and editing images online.

Basically, Vector Magic takes rasterized images (composed of pixels) and converts them to vector (or scalable) images. The result is an image that can be easily resized with no blur or pixelation--an ideal format for logos or other images that need to appear both large and small. Vector Magic supports the uploading of JPEG, GIF, PNG, BMP, and TIFF formats, and can export its final products as EPS, SVG, or PNG files. A warning on the Vector Magic blog today warns users to be patient because of a recent upswing in the load on its servers, but I had no problem at all converting JPEG images of various sizes into vector images in no time at all.… Read more

And here we thought the 727 jet limo was insane. The vehicle pictured here might seem like an ordinary fire engine at first look--until it's turned around. From that angle, it's a work of insanity.

Not only is it modded with a turbine engine, but it's one from a Russian MiG fighter jet--making it "the largest turbine motor in a land vehicle anywhere in the world," according to LifeOnTop. The size alone would seem to lend credence to that claim, at 27 feet long and 5.5 feet in diameter.

If they add one of … Read more