Shoppers will soon be able to stand outside the designer Norma Kamali’s boutique in Manhattan, point a phone at merchandise in the window and buy it — even late at night when the store is closed.

The New York Times has the details.

It remains to be seen how readily shoppers will embrace such aggressive merchandising, which will generally require them to download free applications onto their phones and consent to being tracked electronically while in a store. But many stores are betting they will go along. After all, people already wander city streets guided by maps on their mobile phones. Why shouldn’t the same technology lead them to the toilet paper in Aisle 3?

Here’s Calais’ new media venture

We want to make all the world’s content more accessible, interoperable and valuable. Some call it Web 2.0, Web 3.0, the Semantic Web or the Giant Global Graph – we call our piece of it Calais.

Calais is a rapidly growing toolkit of capabilities that allow you to readily incorporate state-of-the-art semantic functionality within your blog, content management system, website or application.

But what does it all mean? Partly, it’s the fundamentals in motion: math, variability, and different forms of filtering.

Instance Names
Frame Labels
OnEnterFlash on AS3 basics

But this is really cool.

Thanks to gTa for this.

Here are links to tutorials for the software you might be using:

Windows Movie Maker (comes free on all Windows machines).

Another free download you might want to try is Photo Story 3 for Windows.

On the Macbooks, there is iMovie 08.

Lastly here is a site with links to all kinds of information about digital storytelling.

After that, we discussed the importance of creating a map of the world in which your stories will occur using something called pen and paper. Then we took our first look at the Inform 7 authoring environment where you will be working to produce your first work of interactive fiction.

We just covered a few basic coding techniques to create “rooms”, the connections between these rooms, simple objects to place within these rooms, and then how to “run” your code to test it.

Next Monday (10/6) I will take us through the code to build a short game to get everyone started.

In the meantime, think about what kind of work you want to create, download and install Inform 7 on your computer, and visit our interactive fiction page (where there are links to games and free interpreters to play these games)

Some short games I recommend to check out are linked in a previous post.

Another example of Microsoft’s inability to understand younger users, comes in what I can only call their software design philosophy, which I can summarize as “Throw in More Features”. Yet, that seems antithetical to those products which are selling most successfully in the market place, especially to young people. Microsoft Office is the clearest example of this. The myriad number of options buried in Word 2008’s ribbons, will rarely be used by most users. And in Excel 2008, some users might need pivot tables, but vast majority of those that use spreadsheets will never ever need to use them, nor will they ever write a macro, or script in Visual Basic. What is clear from the success of Google Docs and Zoho, especially amongst college age students, is that people want tools that are simultaneously powerful and simple to use. And that is why not only are web based office replacements, which focus on ease of use,facilitating collaborative exchange, and being able to publish in digital environments, but also iWork and Star office, are gaining traction.

(links in original)