3LiveShop
www.tre.se/privat/ovrigasidor/3liveshop
Phone operator 3 has mixed the high street
with the convenience of online shopping. Well, in Sweden at least, where the
3LiveShop trial was carried out.
You ask a real person questions about the
product you want to buy via video chat, and not only can they answer in real
time, they can also add details to the chat screen such as images of the
product, or details of talk plans or your online shopping basket. It’s powered
by bespoke Flash multi-touch technology – you can see part of their desktop so
they can drag and drop images and info onto the screen.
Proust
www.proust.com
Proust provides you with a fun and easy way
to really get to know your family and friends, with the idea that this will
trigger meaningful discussions. The founders hope you’ll find the answer to
‘Describe a childhood experience that shaped your perspective’ more interesting
than ‘What did you have for breakfast’.
Proust is not so much a diary of events as
a way of creating an biography of those closest to you. It gets its name from
the Proust Questionaire – an ice-breaking party game.
Grooveshark
www.grooveshark.com
Grooveshark’s music service is web-based
and easy to navigate, and you can be listening to music you like within
seconds of opening the site. You don’t even need to log in – you can just
search for a song and play it. the search even autocompletes with popular
artists and songs.
If you do log in, you can save playlists of
other people’s songs or upload your own. You can follow other users and comment
on their playlists.
There may be questions about Grooveshark
‘s legality, but it is insists it’s doing
nothing wrong, and is paying artists for the use of their songs.
OnLive
www.onlive.com
With OnLive, cloud gaming is a reality. The
service requires no disc, hard drive space or high-end components, letting you
play on devices like laptops and tablets. The grunt comes from OnLive’s
servers, which it upgrades every month with the latest graphics cards and extra
RAM. Basically, you play remotely via the internet. Press a button and the
command is sent to the OnLive servers, which interpret the command and send
pictures to your screen showing the result.
Open Yale Courses
http://oyc.yale.edu
you can now study Yale courses from the
comfort of your own home. The Open Yale Courses website provides free and open
access to a selection of introductory courses taught by lectures and scholars
from the university.
The courses cover subjects from
evolutionary biology to Spanish and Portuguese, with all the relevant materials
available to anyone who wants them. The courses are available to download in
video, audio, and text formats. You can even download them from iTunes.
Instapaper
www.instapaper.com
Increasingly we find ourselves dismissing
text longer than two paragraphs because it takes up too much time. Instapaper
thinks it has the answer. This service lets you save web articles with the
click of a ‘read later’ button and assembles them into a newspaper-like sheet
for you to read when you have time. You can also email links to it, or use it
with Google Reader.
It’s rare that we get the chance to
appreciate great writing, but with Instapaper’s ability to save up to 20
articles in an easy-to-navigate grid format, you can catch up on all the
fantastic articles you’ve been missing out on.
8 tracks
www.8tracks.com
Do you remember the days of making a mixtape
(or even CD) for your friends with a special note or image in it? Well, 8tracks
has taken that premise online. Positioning itself as a hand-crafted radio
station, 8tracks lets you upload – or search for – the music you like to create
compilations at least 30 minutes long (which to translates to about eight
tracks’ worth). You can then add a description and pictures to your compilation
and share it with other 8tracks users, who can rate and comment on your mix.
