Transana is software for professional researchers who want to analyze digital video or audio data. Transana lets you analyze and manage your data in very sophisticated ways. Transcribe it, identify analytically interesting clips, assign keywords to clips, arrange and rearrange clips, create complex collections of interrelated clips, explore relationships between applied keywords, and share your analysis with colleagues. The result is a new way to focus on your data, and a new way to manage large collections of video and audio files and clips.

A mac version is in development.

Tags: Exploratory Data Analysis, natural language processing, statistics, text data mining

PythonCard is a GUI construction kit for building cross-platform desktop applications on Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux, using the Python language. The PythonCard motto is “Simple things should be simple and complex things should be possible.”

PythonCard is for you if you want to develop graphical applications quickly and easily with a minimum of effort and coding. Apple’s HyperCard was one of their inspirations; simple, yet powerful. PythonCard uses wxPython.

Tags: interaction design, graphical user interface, Python

Google News Map is a python google hack that parse Google News, and draws a map with the latest headlines of the coordinates of the countries.

Tags: google, hack, information visualization, map algorithms, maps

World66 is an open content travel guide, where people from all over the planet can write about the places they love, the hotels they stayed in, the restaurants that have eaten. Every part of the travel guide can be edited directly, just click the [edit] button and go ahead. You can change the info you find, do a write up, add a complete city or just a bar or a restaurant.

Tags: collaboration tools, maps, tagging

CmapTools program empowers users to construct, navigate, share and criticize knowledge models represented as concept maps. It allows users to, among many other features, construct their Cmaps in their personal computer, share them on servers (CmapServers) anywhere on the Internet, link their Cmaps to other Cmaps on servers, automatically create web pages of their concept maps on servers, edit their maps synchronously (at the same time) with other users on the Internet, and search the web for information relevant to a concept map.

The CmapTools client is free for use by anybody, whether its use is commercial or non-commercial. In particular, schools and universities are encouraged to download it and install it in as many computers as desired, and students and teachers may make copies of it and install it at home. (Commercial companies that install their own CmapServer do need to get a separate license for a CmapTools client that will talk to the commercial version of the CmapServer).

Tags: flowcharts, information visualization, learning technology, mac, maps, collaboration tools

Monkey business furthers this work with animatronic agents, as seen earlier with the Cellular Squirrel. We plan to create a peer-to-peer network of animatronic monkeys that act as audio-enabled agents, keeping members of a distributed group of people informed about each other’s current state and level of availability. We can also use the animatronic monkeys as media to which we can send “behavior messages” from cell phones; the monkeys, upon receiving these messages, will move and make sounds in such a way to indicate certain emotions or behaviors.

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Tags: information visualization, interaction design, new technology, wierd

Oliver pointed me to his review of collaborative writing tools. Unfortunately I do not read German so well to appreciate his comments. Here I repropose the links in case someone is interested.

• Writely
• Thinkfree
• Wikispaces
• Writeboard
• Backpack
• Planzo
• Hidetext
• Bloglines

Today I met Jani Korhonen and Heikki Tolonen from the MediaTeam in the university of Oulu. We had a nice meeting and they showed me their ubiquitous ‘capture the flag’ game. The design concept is based on a series of rules that the user has to evaluate to decide to which point in space to move before actually moving. This reduces the speed of the interaction, overcoming also some problems related to the refresh speed and the positioning accuracy.

Heikki promised to send me some screenshoots in the next days.

Capture the Flag game is played in teams. The idea is to capture and defend virtual flag zones. Game is played with a mobile handheld device, in which player’s position and the flag zones are shown on the screen. Cooperation within a team is emphasized: players are forced to play as a team. Capturing flags is much faster, when it´s done as a team, but also flags situated nearby have effects. Players must also pay attention to the flags positions in their strategy and their affect to the game itself.

The game was tested on 12 – 16 May 2005 at the University of Oulu with some about thirty students.

Tags: ubiquitous game, urban exploration

Habbo Hotel is a virtual hotel where you can hang out and make new friends. It’s designed for 13 to 18 year olds in the US. There are also lots of other location all around the world.

When you register you ‘become’ a Habbo and then you can walk, dance, eat, drink and chat in the cafes, restaurants, swimming pools and games rooms. The real fun begins when you decorate and furnish your own room. Then you can host your own party.

Creating a room is free, while you have to pay to furnishing the room.

Tags: virtual online communities

Teemu pointed me to their map annotation tool, which I find extremely well designed and simple to use. The annotation is done ‘a-la-flickr’, selecting a squared part of the image and attaching a text to that. Check this out!

ImaNote – (Image and Map Annotation Notebook) is a web-based multi-user tool that allows you, and your friends, to display a high-resolution image or a collection of images online and add annotations and links in to them. You simply mark an area on an image (e.g. a map) and write an annotation related to the point. You can also add a link to the annotation.

You can use RSS (Really Simple Syndication) to keep track of the annotations added to the image or make links on your own blog/web site/email that are pointing to the annotations on the image. The links leads right to the points in the image. ImaNote is Open Source and Free Software released under the GNU General Public Licence (GPL).

Tags: information visualization, Location Based Services, map algorithms, maps, psychogeography, urban exploration