Everyone always hears of the success stories born from the internet. The Googles and Facebooks of the world. I am always just as interested in the stories behind the companies that didn’t make it. I think that there is something to be learned from every experience of creating products online. I thought this was a fascinating article that talked about why some online products are no longer, and some of the reasons for their demise.

http://37signals.com/svn/posts/2682-the-creators-of-no-longer-with-us-products-explain-what-went-wrong

This site, like maplight.org aims to show the link between dollars and politics. This one does it a little better…

http://wherethemoneygoes.org/viz.html

Point Inside – www.pointinside.com

This is a cool application that provides interactive maps for Airports, Malls, Convention Centers, ect. If you ever need to see where the restrooms are or the Entrances / Exits, this is the app for you.

I always love to see awesome augmented reality apps come out. Check out Layar (http://www.layar.com/)

It turns the visual world around you into actionable information.

“High Capacity Color Barcode (HCCB) is the name coined by Microsoft for its proprietary technology of encoding data in a 2D “barcode” using clusters of colored triangles instead of the square pixels traditionally associated with 2D barcodes.^[1] Data density is increased by using a palette of 4 or 8 colors for the triangles, although HCCB also permits the use of black and white when necessary. It has been licensed by the ISAN International Agency for use in its International Standard Audiovisual Number standard,^[2] and serves as the basis for the Microsoft Tag mobile tagging application .” – Wikipedia

Microsoft is actually doing something quite interesting and quite disturptive

http://tag.microsoft.com/consumer/index.aspx

Light Blue Optics is an awesome company I recently came across.

They do really cool things with a projection technology called Holographic Laser Projection – or HLP™. They have utilized this technology to project information into the driving experience.

http://lightblueoptics.com/products/light-speed/

This technology, combined with infrared technology, has also made its way into interactive projective interfaces. I think this is great because it opens up new ways and places where interfaces can be utilized

This type of portable interface technology is really quite cool, who knows how disruptive this technology will become. I am excited to see where this goes.