cool nerd king

What kind of nerd are you?

Novel Texting…

Books.  They are my crack. In this high-tech, fast-paced, 24/7 world of ours, there is something delicious in the decidedly low-tech act of sitting down with a good book and just…unplugging.

Which is why, I suppose, the near-constant push for e-books baffles me. Browsing a newspaper’s website or reading magazine articles online is all fine and good, but who in their right mind would want to read a several-hundred-page novel on their computer?

Of course, even though the usage model makes no sense whatsoever, UK-based ICUE Software wants to go one better, and bring e-books to cell phones.  Yes, really.

New software that flashes words on cell-phone screens has traditional publishing houses chasing young readers with renewed interest.

Launched in England less than a year ago, ICUE software lets users read novels on their cell phone without the irritation of constantly scrolling through blocks of text displayed on the small screen. Instead, the text is flashed on the screen one word (or short phrase) at a time.

While I think the underlying technology is pretty cool, and would probably be an awesome way to pass along stock quotes, newspaper articles and the like, I just don’t see it working with books.

I. Mean. Who. Wants. To. Read. A. Book. One. Word. At. A. Time?

I sure don’t.

a little something to spice up your powerpoints…

Many Eyes is a free online data visualization tool from IBM’s Visual Communication Lab. Upload your own data sets and spice up your PowerPoint decks with the many graph formats, from histograms to tag clouds and tree maps. Very, very cool and useful. The site is featured in Business Week’s “Thinking Outside the Design Box“.

According to Business Week:

“Many Eyes can transform any data set into graphics such as world maps or bubble charts. The project’s ambitious goal is to encourage public discussion and debate at its Web site. Anyone can upload data or create custom visualizations, while IBM itself is currently using a secure, internal version of the program for its own research. So far, topics include statistics on the global labor force and climate change.”

Kudos to Advertising Lab