When I set out to write “Seven Projects to Stretch Your Digital Wings” two weeks ago, I really meant to put all seven projects into one column. But I’m famous around Xconomy for my inability to say anything briefly. If 800 words are good, then 1,600 words are even better—that’s my motto.

The point being that I only got through three projects in that first column—on art, writing, and photography—before I ran out of time and space. Last week, I finished two more, on audio self-publishing and computer animation. In today’s third and last installment, I want to suggest two final projects that will give you a chance to express yourself in digital media that may be a little less familiar: maps and 3-D virtual worlds.

6. Put Yourself on the Map with Platial

Mapmaking hasn’t traditionally been seen as a craft open to amateurs, or even one where self-expression is encouraged. A map, after all, is a public resource, and is supposed to be objective and accurate, right? Well, maybe in theory. In practice, the digital revolution is transforming the meaning of maps just as drastically as it’s changing the way we think about music and news and other forms of communication.

Platial is a website where average users can try a new form of storytelling that combines maps, photos, and writing. Once you’ve signed up for an account, you can create your own themed maps for other Platial visitors to browse. Each map consists of a set of locations that you designate on an underlying Google map; for each location, you can add a title, a written description, photos, and Web links.

One way to use Platial would be as a kind of personal photo-travelogue, uploading pictures from your trips across the country or around the world. But a lot of people seem to employ Platial to document personal interests or obsessions. For example, a user named “Barnaclebarnes” has created a map of famous film locations, like the house in suburban Tujunga, CA, where Steven Spielberg filmed E.T. And I’m working on my own Platial map showing locations around San Francisco used in one specific film, Hitchcock’s Vertigo.

You can designate a map on Platial as closed—meaning it’s for your own personal doodling—or open, meaning anyone can contribute to it. One cool open map is “Where I Was When I Heard Obama Won,” where you can join the more than 15,000 people who have marked the spots where they learned of President Obama’s historic election. For people on the go, the folks at Platial have also built an iPhone app called Nearby that figures out where you are and shows you nearby Platial locations created by other users. The app also lets you create and document new locations directly from your phone.

To me, the intriguing thing about Platial is the way it melds the personal and the public—allowing users to anchor their inner visions and insights by attaching them to maps representing our shared landscape. And Platial is just one example of a worldwide explosion of Web-mediated geographical expression and exploration. The phenomenon goes by fancy names like “neogeography” and “locative media,” but it boils down to …Next Page »

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From architecture to kids’ videos to online animated ads, Ksenia Oustiougova’s path to founder of Seattle online ad company Lilipip has been unusual. To start, the company was funded not by investors, but on credit cards. The good news: after shutting down the kids’ video version of Lilipip and retooling to its current incarnation, Oustiougova is now paying down the debt.

Oustiougova said Lilipip’s change of focus in the summer of 2008—from children’s videos to online marketing ads—had a straightforward motivation. “We ran out of money. It was as simple as that,” she said. “Either reinvent or close down. And I’m not a quitter by nature.”

Now, together with more than 150 independent creative contractors around the world and a director of business development, Oustiougova makes one-minute animated videos for small businesses. Her team currently works on about four projects at once, she said, but they hope to get up to their capacity of 20 at a time eventually. Oustiougova and the director of business development are not yet salaried, taking a cut of the proceeds from each project, but Lilipip is bringing on four project managers as Lilipip’s first employees in the next six to 12 months. Now starting to pay off her credit card debt, Oustiougova has no plans to look for outside investment.

Asked why fundraising isn’t part of the plan, Oustiougova gave several reasons, among them: “The entire process takes months, and it takes away focus from sales; second, suddenly you have someone looking over your shoulder telling you what to do—we are breaking a lot of conventional rules, and I want to build a company where people don’t feel like they work, but feel like they play.” She added, “I am not interested in growing huge. I want to build an excellent business, and we won’t be necessarily big. But investors want a certain return at a certain time that might force us to do things faster…Some things just take time to get very good, like good wine—you can’t speed it up.”

Lilipip’s animations are mostly used online, Oustiougova said, on businesses’ websites, Facebook, YouTube, or other social marketing sites. She has also seen them played on TVs at trade shows, or used in presentations to clients or shareholders. Lilipip will encode the videos into any format its clients need for free. Many small businesses like having their ads available on their cell phones to share on the go, she said.

“This is really a tool to tell their story in a uniform way through all the new social media channels,” Oustiougova said.

Oustiougova’s first entrepreneurial steps came when, after leaving a career as an architect, she began making PowerPoint presentations for her son to teach him to read in English and Russian (her native language). Her friends soon started requesting custom videos for their kids, and …Next Page »

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I love September. There’s a back-to-school crispness in the air that always gets me jazzed to learn something new, even though I’ve been out of school for 15 years. Maybe you feel it too. And with a long holiday weekend coming up, perhaps you’ve got a few hours free to experiment with a new tool or craft—something that will help you express a bit of your own creativity. The question is, where to begin?

Well, if you’re like me and you’ve got a weakness for gadgets, software, and Web tools, you may find something of interest in the following list of easy digital projects. This is just a smattering of the options popping up every day for people who want to use new media to explore the world around them and express and share their own ideas. Even if you don’t think of yourself as a creative type, I urge you to give these new tools a try. Everyone has something unique, valuable, and personal to say about their life experiences, and in many ways, the new digital technologies make it easier than ever to say it.

In this week’s column, I cover three projects in the areas of visual art and Web publishing; I’ll outline four more ideas involving different media next week. [Update 9/18/09: Actually, this turned into a three-part column. Be sure to check out part two and part three.] Some of these items involve technologies I haven’t written about before, and others are things I’ve introduced in past columns. Most of them require a bit of basic equipment, such as an Internet-connected computer, a digital camera, or smartphone—but the Web-based tools that I list are all free.

Pick one and have fun! I encourage you to post your results online and share a link in the comment section here. And if you have your own favorite tools for digital self-expression, let us know about them.

1. Make a Digital Painting with Brushes

There are plenty of powerful programs for creating computer art, like Adobe Photoshop Elements and Corel Painter. Creative professionals often put these programs to work using high-end gadgets like Wacom’s Intuos pen tablets and Cintiq pen displays. But using inexpensive software from the iTunes App Store, anybody with an iPhone or iPod Touch can try their hand, literally, at painting digitally.

My favorite iPhone painting app is Brushes, a $4.99 program created by independent developer Steve Sprang. It sprang to fame this summer when The New Yorker published a Brushes painting by New York artist Jorge Colombo on its cover. The program is extremely easy to use—you just point and draw with your finger—but its features, like a color picker, a transparency adjuster, zooming, layers, and undo buttons, make it surprisingly flexible.

I’m amazed by some of the art Brushes users have created: they’ve used the software to evoke styles ranging from hard-edged, Mondrian-style modernism to a misty softness that reminds me of Japanese scroll paintings. (You can see more than 7,000 Brushes paintings uploaded by more than 1,400 Flickr members here.) But the program is also great for plain old doodling.

And there’s an extremely cool feature that allows you to share not just your finished Brushes paintings, but animations documenting your work, brushstroke by brushstroke. You just log into the app’s built in Web server from your Mac’s browser, copy the special “.brushes” file, then open it using the free Brushes program for the Macintosh. Here’s a video showing how I made my first Brushes painting—it’s amateurish, obviously, but I had fun with it.

2. Start Lifestreaming with Friendfeed or Posterous

Blogging is so 2006. All the cool kids, like Steve Rubel of Edelman Digital, have moved on to lifestreaming. Definitions of lifestreaming vary, but I’d say it comes down to having a central online clearinghouse for everything you …Next Page »

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I came across a nice Isaac Asimov quote this week: “No sensible decision can be made any longer without taking into account not only the world as it is, but the world as it will be.”

The copyright dispute that went public this week between the UK’s National Portrait Gallery and the Wikimedia Commons is lodged firmly in the world as it is. Under UK law, it seems pretty clear that the 3,000-plus high-resolution images that a Wikimedia administrator copied from the museum’s website and uploaded to the Commons are copyrighted by the museum and are not, as the Wikimedia Foundation argues, in the public domain.

But the case is making waves in the blogosphere because it’s also about the world as it will be. Digital technology is making it possible to share near-perfect copies of priceless paintings and other cultural artifacts with anyone, anywhere, instantly. And because the cost of this sharing is now practically zero, many people now believe the information itself should also be free.

And perhaps it should. But unless we figure out a reasonable way to support the institutions that spend lots of money to make these images—namely, museums—very little of this material may actually be available for sharing in the future.

Free-culture activists are applauding Wikimedia for refusing to delete the disputed images, but this isn’t a simple Robin Hood story. If the Wikimedia Foundation prevails and gets to keep the images, it could lead to an overall reduction in sharing. Don’t get me wrong—I’m a public domain maniac. I’d love to see as much of the world’s heritage digitized and freely shared as institutions can manage. But what I fear is that the episode will prompt the National Portrait Gallery and other museums to either slow digitization efforts or place greater restrictions on access to their digital collections in the future—or both.

Let me back up and explain the Wikimedia case. The Wikimedia Commons is a public file repository maintained by Wikimedia Foundation, the same non-profit organization that runs Wikipedia. (Most of the images you see alongside Wikipedia articles are stored in the Wikimedia Commons.) In March, a volunteer Wikimedia administrator named Derrick Coetzee copied 3,300 high-resolution images from the National Portrait Gallery’s online database, some of them as as large as 2400 x 3200 pixels, or about 8 megapixels. He then uploaded all of the images to the Wikimedia Commons, where, for the moment, you can view them at your leisure—just be ready for lots of lace and powdered wigs.

Coetzee, a U.S. citizen, hasn’t spoken out about the case, so it isn’t clear whether he was merely trying to make it easier for others to see the portraits, or whether he was also hoping to goad the National Portrait Gallery into a confrontation. But that was certainly the effect. In April, the gallery’s solicitors asked the Wikimedia Foundation to remove the images. It refused, for reasons I’ll get into momentarily. On July 10, the solicitors, Farrer & Co. of London, turned to Coetzee himself, sending him a letter (which he promptly posted on the Wikimedia Commons) threatening to seek injunctions and damages unless Coatzee agrees to remove the images, delete all of his copies, and generally keep off the Gallery’s digital lawn.

The letter gave Coetzee until July 20 to comply. As of this writing, the images are still online, so it’s safe to assume Coetzee and the Wikimedia Foundation are digging in their heels. He posted an update saying he’s being represented in the case by Fred von Lohmann, an intellectual property attorney for the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF).

The main question in the dispute is not about the portraits themselves, most of which were painted more than 100 years ago and are indisputably in the public domain. Rather, it’s about who owns the digital images. Are they copyrighted by the National Portrait Gallery, which went to the expense of hiring professional photographers to document the original paintings, and should therefore (the solicitors argue) have the right to control their distribution and collect licensing fees from anyone who reproduces them? Or are they in the public domain and therefore …Next Page »

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I’ve been writing World Wide Wade for almost a year now; this is the 44th installment. A year is a long time in the technology world—long enough for many of the gadgets, services, and websites I’ve covered in the past to evolve cool new features. So I thought I’d revisit a few of my previous columns and fill you in about what’s changed.

1. Beyond megapixels. In my April 4 and June 6 columns, I wrote about the Gigapan community site, where you can upload super-high-resolution photos stitched together from lots of regular digital shots. In January of this year, a new company called GigaPan Systems introduced a $379 robot camera mount that puts gigapixel imaging within the reach of hobbyists. It takes care of the tedious part of gigapixel imaging by guiding your camera through hundreds or thousands of individually-angled shots, with just enough overlap to give the stitching software something to work with.

2. News aggregators on steroids. Last April 11, I wrote about my favorite news-tracking tools on the Web, including Netvibes and Alltop. Netvibes hasn’t changed much in the last year, but Alltop, a cool aggregator that uses pop-up windows to squeeze a lot of news onto a single page, has exploded beyond all bounds. It had about 55 categories of RSS feeds when I last wrote about it; now there must be well over 500, on everything from Atheism to Zoology. And for tech-news enthusiasts, there’s a site called TechFuga that recently got a nice overhaul that makes it more competitive with the uber-popular but somewhat tired TechMeme. The new features at TechFuga include Twitter searching, reflecting the fact that more and more people are getting their news from each other via the red-hot microblogging service. (Speaking of Twitter, you can follow me there at “wroush“.)

3. Earth as you’ve never seen it. On April 18, I wrote about Google Earth 4.3, which featured improved navigation and a larger crop of 3-D buildings. The latest version of the world’s most popular geo-browser, Google Earth 5.0, came out in the middle of last month. The coolest improvements: a fantastic view of the ocean floor, the ability to delve back in time and see aerial imagery from the 1980s and earlier, and imagery for Mars as well as Earth and the Moon.

4. An art museum in your living room. If you’ve got an HDTV already, there’s no reason to buy one of those expensive digital photo frames. My April 25 column talked about GalleryPlayer, a company that provided software and imagery for turning your TV into a digital art exhibit. Unfortunately, GalleryPlayer went out of business in July (though founder Scott Lipsky, an ex-Amazon exec, hinted that it had merely been sold and might re-emerge). Luckily, there are still plenty of ways to find and display high-resolution images on your big screen. DeviantArt is a great place to browse and download free HD-resolution images created by professional artists and photographers. And if you hook up your computer to your TV, you can use software like Slickr or FlickrFan to display those images—or your own—in the form of animated slide shows.

5. An elephant never forgets. My July 18 column was about Evernote, a fantastic cross-platform system for storing and tracking all the info-flotsam in your life: Web pages, photos, receipts, you name it. I still add material to my Evernote account every day, and the company just keeps making the software better and better. There’s now a version for Android phones (on top of the existing Web, Windows, Mac, Windows Mobile, and iPhone versions). In December, Evernote (whose logo is an elephant) added a file synchronization feature, so you can use it to keep copies of important Word files, PDFs, PowerPoints, and other electronic documents, and more recently, it rolled out a vastly improved version of its Web Clipper, which is the tool I use most often. A feature I plan to try soon is the recently-announced Shoeboxed, a service that will scan that pile of business cards and receipts on your desk and put them right into Evernote. And if you used Google Notebooks—which Google gave up on in January—you can easily import all of your notes to Evernote and pick up where you left off.

6. Cutting the cord. In my July 25 column, I threatened to give up my cable TV subscription and switch to watching my favorite shows online, via video aggregators like Hulu. Well, it took me a while to gather up the courage, but last week I finally made good on the threat, and dropped my $80 digital cable package at Comcast in favor of a $10 lineup of about 23 local channels (which I kept just in case I ever feel the need to watch live news). While I was at it, I canceled …Next Page »

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Over the last week, I’ve had several people tell me that the most interesting thing about Google Chrome isn’t the browser itself, but the way Google chose to present it to the world: via a comic book. Indeed, for at least a day or two, Scott McCloud’s Google Chrome comic—which was accidentally leaked to journalists over the Labor Day weekend, before Google’s official release of the software—was the only information available about the project. Which meant that thousands of Internet users, for perhaps the first time in their adult lives, found themselves reading an extended comic—a genre familiar to millions of adult manga readers in Japan but still mainly relegated to the kids’ sections of U.S. bookstores.

I wondered aloud in a column last week whether all that exposure might help put the comic genre back on the map as a vehicle for serious fiction and non-fiction work. On Monday, I got a chance to put that question to Scott McCloud himself. The author of a bestselling trilogy of comic books about the comic genre’s history, future, and practice—Understanding Comics (1993), Reinventing Comics (2000), and Making Comics (2006)—McCloud is both the profession’s leading theoretician and one of its most versatile practitioners. He’s also a true geek, and has had his eye on the Web for more than a decade, writing and drawing about its potential as the medium for a new generation of comics that would be liberated from the printed page by emerging interface paradigms such as hyperlinking, zooming, and scrolling.

At its most basic, after all, a comic is just a sequence of pictures that tells a story. And computers and the Web offer many new ways to create and arrange these sequences and to move from panel to panel—they supply what McCloud called, in Reinventing Comics, an “infinite canvas.” Which helps explain how Google was able to interest McCloud in the Chrome project. McCloud says, as you’ll read below, that one of the aesthetic ideas driving the Chrome developers (though this idea didn’t make it into his 38-page comic about the browser) was to “sweep the path clean”—essentially, to get out of the way of content developers and Web users by reducing the software’s onscreen footprint, as well as its functional bells and whistles, to the bare minimum. That’s music to the ears of an artist like McCloud.

Here’s the full text of our interview.

Xconomy: Tell me how the comic came about. How did Google get you on board, and how did you do the research and gather the visual materials you needed?

Scott McCloud: I was first approached by Eric Antonow at Google. He had actually had me out to speak at the Googleplex in August of 2007, during the tour for Making Comics, my last book. He knew that Chrome was coming up—they had been working on it for a year and a half —and he had a sense that comics might be a good way to help explain the project.

But beyond that, it really only took shape when I came up to the campus and we started brainstorming about it. This was Eric, and another Googler, Anna-Christina Douglas, and we were joined by a third, Mark Sabec. In brainstorming we considered a lot of possible forms. Everything was up in the air. We didn’t know if it would be print or online. We didn’t know what sort of length. We weren’t sure what the focus would be. But gradually we came to agreement on what would be an effective strategy.

And then the research was primarily these video interviews that we did with about 20 engineers. These were substantial interviews, running on average about 30 to 40 minutes, some longer. And they had markers and a whiteboard and would occasionally use it, but that was about it for visuals. It was mostly just these explanations, which we then culled through and tried to find a common narrative. I took this sort of raw transcript and pared it down. But [it was] still pretty rough around the edges. And I tried to pound it into a coherent, connected story and then make it visual.

X: You must have had to wait around for the developers to finish certain things about the look and feel of Chrome before you could represent it in the comic.

SM: There were only one or two visual elements that we were hanging on—one or two icons that changed. But for the most part, its shape was concrete enough that I was able to work concurrently in that last couple of months. For example, they knew the shape of the tabs. I wasn’t drawing screen-shot-level detail. My cartoon version of Chrome was …Next Page »

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While the tech-blog world is exhausting itself testing and writing about Google Chrome, the new open-source Web browser released by the search giant on Tuesday, I’m still just having fun paging back and forth through the 38-page Scott McCloud Web comic that Google commissioned to explain the whole project. A lot of Silicon Valley companies, when they’re launching big new products, will rent a hotel ballroom, erect a glitzy set, and invite a bunch of journalists and pundits to a scripted dog-and-pony show. Chrome’s launch may mark the first time in history that a company simply hired a comic book artist instead.

Google couldn’t have found a likelier candidate than McCloud, who is the author of Understanding Comics (1993), Reinventing Comics (2000), and Making Comics (2006), and has written (or should I say drawn?) extensively about how the Web is expanding the boundaries of comics as a genre. It’s a perfect pairing to see McCloud—who has done comics on topics as technical as the constraints imposed on digital-comics authors by HTML tables—writing about something as fundamental to the Web as the browser itself.

If you haven’t heard the story behind Chrome already, it’s Google’s attempt to update the very notion of the Web browser—which was, after all, invented 15 years ago—to reflect the realities of the Web 2.0 era. These days, if you’re on the Web, chances are you’re interacting with an application rather than simply consuming content. “People are watching and loading videos, chatting with each other, playing Web-based games…all these things that didn’t exist when browsers were first created,” Google software engineer Pam Greene points out in McCloud’s comic. (She’s one of the many Googlers whose words McCloud drew upon for the comic. His drawings of her remind me a lot of the Jodie/Julie character in McCloud’s terrific experimental Web comic, The Right Number.) Chrome is designed to make such applications run faster and more reliably, and to protect users and their computers in the process—in part, by separating the activity occurring on each open browser tab into its own process, as if it were a separate program. (As McCloud explains, current browsers like Internet Explorer and Mozilla Firefox attend to the scripts running in each tab one at a time, moving between them serially—which is why the more tabs you have open, the slower your browser gets.)

I won’t go into the real details—plenty of other bloggers and journalists have done that this week. What’s amazing about McCloud’s Web comic is that he’s able to distill some fairly high-level points about things like multi-process architecture, memory fragmentation, rendering engines, virtual machines, hidden class transitions in Javascript, and incremental garbage collection into a few panels in a comic, and make it all feel fun and non-threatening. Take it from a longtime technology writer: explaining a new technology’s significance while getting the details right and keeping it all accessible to your Aunt Mae is a difficult feat. But a lot of us tech journalists could take lessons from McCloud, who doesn’t bring in a concept unless he can clarify through a clever combination of graphics, iconography, and text.

So, a lot of what I’m saying here boils down to one craftsman admiring another. Envying, even: the comic medium gives McCloud access to a lot of visual devices and idioms that are denied to us lowly copywriters. One of McCloud’s frequent tricks is to make the Google engineers part of the very diagrams he uses to explain Chrome’s new features. Every time you open a blank tab, for example, Chrome populates it with small, clickable tiles representing your most-visited Web pages (the program figures that you were probably on your way to one of those pages anyway). To explain what’s happening on this page, McCloud puts a couple of Googlers inside the tiles, not unlike those washed-up actors who used to appear on Hollywood Squares. In other places, the Google guides are climbing around on flow-chart boxes or perched on the borders of the comic’s panels.

Given how long McCloud has been working on various forms of Web comics and how popular his books have been, it’s odd that his example hasn’t caught on more widely. It’s true that traditional comic publishers like Marvel are finally using Flash and other Web-based technologies to put their classic superhero comics online. And in the non-Web world, comics and graphic novels are still in the midst of a renaissance that’s been underway for more than a decade now, even crossing over into film (e.g., 2003’s American Splendor, based on the comic books of Harvey Pekar). But I don’t have the sense that many comic artists are creating the kinds of new Web-based experiences McCloud was hoping they would back in 2000-20001, when he published “I Can’t Stop Thinking,” a series of Web comics that continued the themes in Reinventing Comics—especially, his speculations about the future of digital comics.

In one great strip from “I Can’t Stop Thinking,” for example, McCloud examined how the endlessly scrolling nature of a Web page—he called it the “infinite canvas”—might allow comic artists to play with reader’s expectations about the sequential nature of comics, perhaps by connecting panels via unconventional types of lines, links, paths, or trails. The Right Number used a unique zooming interface to get from one panel to the next—and this idea has found an unlikely reincarnation in the form of Seadragon, an experimental Microsoft program that uses zooming to ease the navigation of massive amounts of graphical information. But while software engineers and information architects may be busy experimenting in these directions, I’m not aware of a lot of artists who are.

Perhaps Web comics aren’t flowering (outside of McCloud’s opus) because drawing well is simply harder than writing well. Or perhaps it’s because we still equate comics with Superman and Batman. But a blogger at the Dublin, Ireland, Web design company iQ Content noted this week that the usual association between comics and low-brow superhero stories is a Western thing. “In some cultures, notably Japan, comics (or Manga) are not only an accepted form of entertainment for people of all ages, they are used as product instruction manuals and even on government tax forms,” iQ Content senior analyst John Wood wrote. That sounds pretty smart to me. There are some cases where you just have to RTFM, as they say—and I think we’d all be happier if the M stood for Manga.

Not everyone is enchanted by the McCloud comic. It has already inspired a savage (but amusing) parody over at the website of Conde Nast’s Portfolio magazine, which argues that the comic simply panders to Google’s geeky constituents, and that some software concepts are so arcane that they don’t lend themselves well to illustrations. And there have been a few complaints that at 38 pages, McCloud’s comic is too long. But I’m with Wood, who writes, “Personally, I’d rather wade through a 30+ page comic than 15 pages of technical detail, randomly salted with marketing bumpf.”

In short, the comic leaves a stronger, clearer impression than any writeup could have. Now we get to see whether Chrome is really as shiny as it seems in McCloud’s drawings.

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Last spring, Wade wrote about Seattle-based GalleryPlayer’s software, which allows users to display high-resolution photos and artwork on HDTVs. Now GalleryPlayer has apparently “ceased operations” as of July 30, as reported by the Seattle P-I, citing a message on the company’s website. GalleryPlayer was founded in 2003 by former Amazon exec Scott Lipsky.

But Lipsky’s website now says the company “was sold in August, 2008. Buyer data confidential—transaction pending.” So watch this space…

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In February 2006, Swedish physician, statistician, and global health expert Hans Rosling brought down the house at TED (the Technology, Entertainment, and Design conference in Monterey, CA) with a presentation on health and economic trends in developing nations. But it wasn’t the content of the presentation so much as the software he was using that grabbed the audience: called Trendalyzer, the program converted Rosling’s data into colorful animated graphs. By representing countries as dots of varying size that moved against the x and y axes over time, Trendalyzer brought vivid life to changes such as the last century’s general improvements in income and life expectancy—and highlighted how health and wealth in once-lagging regions such as Asia have surged ahead, while they have improved much more slowly in areas such as sub-Saharan Africa.

To many in the audience (and to me, when I watched the online video of Rosling’s TED talk), the Trendalyzer presentation was a revelation, seemingly heralding a new era in which clever design choices coupled with serious graphics-processing power would cause all sorts of interesting trends in complex data to leap out at computer users. Indeed, the next year, Google announced that it had acquired the Trendalyzer software from Rosling’s non-profit Gapminder Foundation, saying that it hoped to improve and expand Trendalyzer and make it “freely available to any and all users capable of thinking outside the X and Y axes.” Unfortunately, like many other early-stage technologies that get anointed by the massive buzz amplifier that is TED, Trendalyzer has since receded from view. Google hasn’t done much with the software, beyond making a Trendalyzer-like gadget called “MotionChart” available as part of Google Spreadsheets.

Meanwhile, there’s a company in Newton, MA, that has spent the better part of this decade quietly applying many of the same design principles behind Trendalyzer to business problems—and selling its software, to boot. It’s called Visual I|O, and I spent some time recently learning about the company’s remarkably beautiful Web-based business analytics software, called DecisionIris, from company co-founder, president, and CEO Angela Shen-Hsieh.

Now, that’s probably the first time I’ve ever used “beautiful” and “business analytics software” in the same sentence. While Visual I|O markets DecisionIris as a business intelligence tool, and making sense of complex business data is certainly one of its strengths, it would be grossly unfair to lump the program in with the kinds of graphical tools offered by traditional business intelligence companies like SAP and Cognos, which are closer to the primitive chart wizards in Microsoft Excel than to anything a professional information designer might conceive. If you’re an aficionado of the work of Yale information designer Edward Tufte—author of The Visual Display of Quantitative Information and Visual Explanations and the man the New York Times has described as “the da Vinci of data”—then you will immediately feel at home with the way DecisionIris represents logical relationships and changes over time, and with the innate sense of color and proportion built into the software.

I’m gushing, I know, but bear with me. The program’s beauty is undoubtedly traceable to the fact that Shen-Hsieh and her fellow co-founder Mark Schindler are both Harvard-trained architects, not software engineers. The pair created Visual I|O as a spinoff of Chicago-based consulting firm Schindler + Associates (where Mark was a partner) in 2002; they wanted to take the visualization software the firm had created to help clients such as pharmaceutical companies get a high-level view of their data and turn it into a commercial product.

Shen-Hsieh (pronounced “shen-shay”) and Schindler felt sure that there was a larger market for software that would help business managers visualize data more flexibly—switching between space-based and time-based representations, for example—depending on the kinds of insights being sought. After all, why go the trouble of collecting terabytes of data about a company’s performance and assembling it into huge, expensive databases and data warehouses if you can’t play with it at will? “If you look at the history of information technology, so much of it is focused on storing and accessing data,” Shen-Hsieh says. “We focus in the last 18 inches–from the screen to the brain. We’re about the cognitive piece.”

Since a picture equals one kiloword, I’ll refer you at this point to the picture at right. It’s a screen shot from a demo Shen-Hsieh walked me through, based on real data about residential properties for sale in the Boston suburbs of Brookline, Newton, Waltham, and Watertown. It illustrates how DecisionIris can help users draw meaning from a mess of data by bringing out multiple dimensions of the data simultaneously; an example about real estate seems easier for most people to relate to than heavy business analytics. (Click on the picture for a larger version.)

Each dot in the chart represents a house. The size of the dot represents the house’s asking price, and its color shows which town it’s in—Brookline is purple, Newton is blue, Waltham is green, and Watertown is yellow. The horizontal axis indicates the year the house was built, and the vertical axis indicates its square footage. (Notice how that’s already four dimensions of data, packed into a type of graph usually used for no more than two dimensions.)

What observations can be drawn from the chart? Well, right away, it’s obvious that houses for sale in Newton are older, bigger, and more expensive than houses in the other cities. That makes sense, given that Newton (where Visual I|O happens to be located) was one of Boston’s first major suburbs, and is still home to …Next Page »

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Imagekind, a Seattle-based online marketplace for user-generated art, announced that it has agreed to be acquired by CafePress, best known for its customized T-shirts. The deal is worth $15-20 million, according to VentureBeat, the Seattle P-I, and others.

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When I took my dog out for a walk yesterday morning, the sidewalk was strewn with old EKG readouts, as if we had just missed a macabre ticker-tape parade. I picked up one of the sheets—probably flotsam from the hospital across the street—and gazed at the thin blue trace, tremulously crossing a field of pink squares.

The stiff, glossy paper was imprinted “Marquette Pressure-Scribe Recording 1976.” It was obviously old. In fact, a doctor’s scrawl indicated that the patient—a woman whose name I won’t print here, since I probably committed a huge HIPAA violation just by picking up the readout—had come in for the test in March 1987. I’m no doctor, but I could see from the trace’s violent, roller-coaster swings that she had not been well.

Finding this medical artifact made me think of how the line of an EKG, with its check-mark rising and falling, has become a kind of cultural icon for life itself. When the line pulses regularly, the patient is okay. When it goes wild—and especially when it goes flat—we all know what it means.

Or we think we do. But behind the blue thread on the old readout, there’s a complex skein of scientific causes and effects: the way rippling photons carried the colors of the trace from the paper to my retinas; the way the trace itself was etched by the seismograph-like arm of the old EKG machine; and the way the EKG arm was guided by amplified electrical signals, signals that ultimately originated in the convulsing muscle cells of one woman’s heart on a spring day 21 years ago.

Science explains our visual world, and visual representations help to explain science. That’s the central theme of On the Surface of Things: Images of the Extraordinary in Science, a wonderful book that I discovered this week and that is the real subject of today’s column. The authors, science photographer Felice Frankel and Harvard chemist George Whitesides (who is also an Xconomist), have filled the book mainly with close-up images of the surfaces of inorganic materials such as oil drops and silicon transistors, rather than biological cells or tissues. Yet I feel certain they’d look at the discarded EKG as its own kind of surface, one telling a vivid story about our physical world and the beings who move through it.

On the Surface of Things first appeared in 1997, and Harvard University Press issued a revised, 10th-anniversary paperback edition last month. I picked it up at Barnes & Noble Wednesday night, immediately after attending a talk by Frankel and Whitesides at the new Apple Store in Boston (which is, by the way, a true marvel of glass, brushed steel, and architecture-as-advertising). I’ve only begun to examine the 58 detailed images Frankel created for the book, each of which is paired with an elegant caption by Whitesides. But I’m already under the spell of the ravishingly detailed imagery, and I intend to clear a permanent space for the volume on my coffee table.

Frankel, who is a senior research fellow at Harvard’s Initiative in Innovative Computing and a former research scientist at MIT, said Wednesday night that she doesn’t use any special tricks for her photography—just a Nikon F3 with a 55mm or 105mm macro lens, shooting on Velvia and Ektachrome film that she later scans and cleans up digitally (using her Mac—hence the appearance at Apple). The genius of Frankel’s images is really in the way she conceives and constructs her subjects. And this is, of course, the essence of science photography, a field just as demanding and content-driven as science writing.

A Swedish foundation recently recognized Frankel for her leadership in this field with the 2007 Lennart Nilsson Award for Medical, Technical, and Scientific Photography—basically, the Pulitzer of explanatory photography. As she put it Wednesday, “I’m not just making pretty pictures. I understand the science.” And she arranges the pictures to illuminate that science.

Her photo of ferrofluid, chosen as the cover image for the paperback edition, is a perfect example. (See the book cover thumbnail, above left, or click here for a larger version.) Frankel arranged seven small magnets beneath a glass plate, then placed a drop of ferrofluid—powdered magnetite suspended in oil—atop the plate. The fluid took on a disturbingly beautiful formation that calls to mind …Next Page »

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On balance, I’m a fan of all things Web. But every successful new medium disrupts or transforms the media that came before—just as the movies killed vaudeville, TV killed episodic radio, MP3s are upending the music industry, and Netflix is killing the neighborhood video store—and it’s important to recognize the value that can be lost in this process. Today I’d like to deliver a short elegy for the educational multimedia CD-ROM, which has been replaced, but not surpassed, by the Internet.

For a brief time in the late 1990s—roughly between the release of Microsoft Windows 95 in 1995 and the widespread availability of DSL-speed Internet access starting around 2000—the typical home computer had a powerful graphical interface capable of displaying at least 256 colors, but was effectively a digital island. At 28 or 56 kbps modem speeds, access to what little photographic, audio, or video content there was on the Web was painfully slow. The only practical vehicle for getting multimedia content onto PC screens and making it interactive in real time was the optical CD-ROM drive, a standard feature of most home computers by 1996 or so.

With nowhere else to turn, artists, writers, and producers excited about the possibilities of interactivity churned out a huge volume of CD-ROM-based games, educational software, reference materials, and “edutainment” titles. It’s this last category that particularly fascinates me. Using, for the most part, a single authoring and playback platform called Macromedia Director (now Adobe Director), publishers created learning-oriented CD-ROMs on everything from volcanoes to Impressionism to World War II history. The theory behind most of these titles was that adding sounds, visuals, animation, and narration to the dry facts of history, art, science, or engineering—and giving users tools for navigating their own way through this material—would lend such subjects an immediacy and vibrancy that older media, such as textbooks, encyclopedias, and TV documentaries, simply couldn’t match.

And for the most part, the theory was correct. I’ve got a large collection of old CD-ROM titles that I still pop into my Windows laptop from time to time—the way an audiophile who won’t part with his vinyl albums might break out the old LP player. As I re-watch these titles, it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that multimedia authoring, as an art form, reached a kind of pinnacle around 1996-97. That was the era, for example, of Dorling Kindersley’s live-action, interactive version of David Macaulay’s classic The Way Things Work, and of James Cameron’s Titanic Explorer from Fox Interactive, a stunning 3-disc collection of blueprints, news footage, and first-person accounts of the sinking of the Titanic, structured around sequences from Cameron’s blockbuster movie.

But the absolute masters of the CD-ROM genre were a team of producers brought together by Corbis, the digital image archive founded by Bill Gates in 1989. As I explained in a previous column, the original idea behind Corbis was to license the digital versions of the world’s best art and photography for display in consumers’ homes. That part of the vision didn’t come to fruition until recently; in the 1990s, meanwhile, the company went through a number of incarnations as it searched for a realistic business model, eventually emerging as an online stock-photo archive focused purely on image licensing (there’s a pretty good history here).

From 1994 to 1996, one of Corbis’s strategies was to publish cutting-edge multimedia titles that showcased its archive’s rich content. And the series of six CD-ROMs it created—especially A Passion for Art (1995), an interactive tour of the Barnes Foundation museum outside Philadelphia, and Leonardo da Vinci (1996), which was built around a digitized version of Leonardo’s Codex Leicester, purchased by Bill Gates in 1994 for $30.8 million—astonished most critics, including yours truly in a review published in Technology Review 10 years ago this spring. The da Vinci disc contains the most accessible and bewitching introduction to Leonardo’s thinking and methods I’ve ever seen. And the Barnes CD-ROM is such an uncannily faithful recreation of the actual museum—with its unparalleled collection of Impressionist masterpieces by Cezanne, Renoir, Matisse, Van Gogh, and others—that when I had the opportunity to visit the foundation several years ago, I felt as if I already knew my way around the entire building, and was able to walk straight to the galleries that held my favorite paintings.

Unfortunately, the Corbis titles never sold well enough (or, if my guess is correct, were never marketed aggressively enough) to cover the vast expense of producing them—for A Passion for Art alone, Corbis had to …Next Page »

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You no longer need to be a multi-billionaire to have large-scale digital art in your home.

When Bill Gates built his 40,000-square-foot mansion on Lake Washington in the early 1990s, one of the most talked-about features was a 22-foot-wide, rear-projection video wall in the reception hall, showing digitized versions of fine art, historic photographs, and the like. Gates founded Corbis, now one of the world’s largest digital stock photo agencies, on the theory that many other people would also enjoy watching a rotating selection of paintings and photographs on large-screen displays in their homes.

At the time, that wasn’t exactly affordable for the hoi polloi. But thanks to good old Moore’s Law—which applies to the transistors in LCD and plasma screens as much as it does to those inside CPUs—the hardware required to turn your own home into a digital art museum is finally within reach. All you need is a high-definition flat-screen TV (incredibly, 42-inch versions with full 1,080-pixel vertical resolution are now available for under $1,000); a Windows or Macintosh computer; and a cable to hook the computer’s external monitor port to your TV’s video input jacks. (I recently got a VGA-to-DVI cable for $22 at CablesToGo.com.)

Once you’ve connected your PC to your TV—which may take some fiddling, as you’ll need to go into your computer’s control panel and pick the proper external-monitor display settings—there are two pathways to watching great high-definition images. If you don’t mind shelling out a few extra bucks for some fantastic professionally produced imagery, I highly recommend a visit to GalleryPlayer. This small Seattle company was founded in 2003 and originally provided digital images from Corbis for large displays in commercial spaces such as hotels and offices; to use it, you needed to buy a $3,000 image server and pay $195 per month for a rotating selection of images. But in a measure of how quickly the digital-imaging market has changed, GalleryPlayer’s software is now free (Windows only, sadly) and images, which can be purchased and downloaded over the Internet, cost about $1 apiece—less if you buy them in packs.

GalleryPlayer has a huge library of images to choose from, ranging from National Geographic nature photography to fine art from some of the world’s best museums, including Boston’s own Museum of Fine Arts. Each image is accompanied by a museum-style caption that appears on screen briefly, telling you about the image’s provenance. If you do try GalleryPlayer, I recommend splurging early—there’s a 50 percent discount on your first purchase.

If you’re a digital photographer, there are two perfectly good alternatives to GalleryPlayer that will cost you absolutely nothing: Slickr (for Windows) and FlickrFan (for the Mac). Technically, these free programs are screen savers—but if you hook your computer up to your HDTV and set your computer’s power options so that the screen never shuts down, you’ve got an instant digital art exhibit. What’s neat about these programs is that they’ll display either photos stored in specific folders on your computer or pictures you’ve uploaded to your Flickr photo-sharing account. Both programs also animate your photos in “Ken Burns” style, meaning they slide gracefully across the screen—a nice break from GalleryPlayer’s static images. If you’ve got a lot of old photos that you never bother to look at on your PC, Slickr and FlickrFan offer a great way to resurrect them.

For Boston residents, or anyone else who gets their cable TV service from Comcast, there’s an extra piece of good news. If you already have an HDTV and a Comcast high-definition set-top box, you can watch high-definition digital slide shows from GalleryPlayer without the need for a PC or special gallery software.

GalleryPlayer shows are a free part of the On Demand service from Comcast. But they’re buried several levels deep in the On Demand menu, so many customers don’t even know about them. To find them, click the On Demand button on your Comcast remote, then choose “HD On Demand,” then “TV Entertainment,” then “GalleryPlayer.” You’ll see a selection of about ten half-hour shows, each comprised of about 30 stunning, high-resolution photos or paintings set to pleasant jazz, classical, and New Age background tunes. The images change every month, and cover themes such as African wildlife, underwater photography, space imagery, Van Gogh paintings, and autumn in New England.

Boot up GalleryPlayer, Slickr, or FlickrFan at your next cocktail party and your guests will think you’re the Bill Gates of your block.

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Mosaic has been a popular form of public art since Roman times, but the techniques behind it haven’t advanced much over the millennia. Assembling the glass, stone, or marble pieces of a mosaic, called tesserae, is still a manual process that takes even experienced craftspeople two to three hours per square foot. (If the artist is cutting her own tesserae, add another three to four hours to that.) At such painstaking rates, it’s a form of decoration few but the rich can afford.

But there’s an angel-funded startup in Boston that hopes to gradually change that, using a combination of custom graphics software, robotics, and classic assembly-line techniques. Ted Acworth, CEO of Artaic, says his company’s system will churn out mosaics at a rate of one square foot every six minutes, at a cost of around $150 per square foot—which is well below the $250 or more per square foot you’d have to shell out for a traditional mosaic.

That cost could drop over time as the robots get faster at placing tesserae. And because the process is software-driven, Artaic can make a mosaic from almost any image, such as a photograph, a painting, or even a historical work like the famous, 1,700-year-old Bikini Girls at Sicily’s Villa Romana del Casale (the subject one client has hired Artaic to reproduce in his bathroom).

“If you e-mail us a JPEG of your dog, we can make a mosaic out of it,” says Acworth. I’m crazy about my dog, so if I had the spare change I might actually consider it. But Artaic’s very first commission will depict a slightly more traditional subject: a sailboat. Based on a watercolor painting, the three-story-high, 500-square-foot mosaic will become the lobby centerpiece of a New York office building that was once a factory for fiberglass yachts. Acworth says production and installation could begin as early as July, depending on whether Artaic’s first robot is assembled and working by then.

Acworth says he first became interested in mosaic while traveling in Europe, and that he has been a student of the medium for a decade. It was when he considered installing mosaics in the bathrooms, kitchen, and patio of the new home he was building a few years ago that he was surprised to find out how complicated and expensive it could be. With a mechanical engineering PhD from Stanford and an MBA from MIT’s Sloan School, he started thinking about creating a company to apply automation to the process.

Artaic wasn’t his first company launch. While at MIT, Acworth was part of a team that developed a 3-D imaging technology that won seed funding from the then-new Deshpande Center for Technological Innovation and was a runner-up in MIT’s 2003 $50K Entrepreneurship Competition. The startup that he helped to create around the system—Brontes Technologies—won $10 million in venture funding from Bain Capital Group, Charles River Ventures, and IDG Ventures (now Flybridge Capital Partners) in 2004, and went on to be acquired by 3M two years later for $95 million.

With part of his proceeds from the sale, Acworth became one of his own angel investors at Artaic. The technology it’s developing has two main components: computer-aided design software that helps artists translate images into specifications for the placement of tesserae, and a high-speed robotic arm that takes over the manual labor of picking and placing tiles. The robot is designed to grab tiles as small as 3/8 of an inch across from up to 200 buffers, each one loaded with tiles of a different color, and lay them at the right spots at the rate of about two tiles per second. The one-square-foot tiles created by the robot are assembled on-site into a finished mosaic.

“Pick and place” robot arms are fairly common in industries such as food handling and packaging. But it’s a …Next Page »

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You don’t have to go to the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston to appreciate its amazing array of paintings, prints, sculptures, and artifacts: thanks to an aggressive digital-capture effort, the MFA has the largest image database of any art museum in the world, all freely browsable on the Web. And now, you can even carry a mini-masterpiece with you on your cell phone. This week MFA became the first U.S. art museum to allow users to download iconic paintings from its collection, such as Monet’s “Water Lilies,” for use as wallpaper on their mobile-phone screens.

Single-image downloads, available at the new mobile website http://mobile.mfa.org, cost $1.99, the museum announced Wednesday. For $4.99, dedicated art aficionados can subscribe to a rotating selection of six new wallpapers each month. But the MFA isn’t really in it for the money. The wallpapers are part of a strategy to broaden the public’s access to museum’s collection and help people develop a more personal relationship to the art there, says Kim French, the MFA’s deputy director of communications.

“Our interest is in making art a part of people’s everyday lives, not just something they experience once a year when they walk into a museum,” French says. “And not just with their phones, but with the website. Once we built our database and put it on the Web, we began to look for ways to help personalize the experience.”

The “MFA Mobile” campaign is a collaboration with Boston advertising agency Hill Holliday, whose interactive marketing division also helped the museum launch “microsites” focusing on its recent smash-hit Edward Hopper exhibit and its upcoming Napoleon exhibit.

“MFA has been very forward thinking in seeing the mobile channel as a viable channel for promoting art,” says Thi Linh Wernau, a managing supervisor for Hill Holliday’s digital division. In addition to the wallpapers, the company helped MFA set up a mobile “short code,” MYMFA (69632), where cell-phone users can request art, sign up for alerts about events at the museum and, in the future, obtain tickets to special events. Text “fog” to 69632, for example, and the museum will send back a copy of “The Fog Warning,” the museum’s most famous Winslow Homer painting.

If the cell-phone screen is a bit small for your taste, there are plenty of other ways to experience the MFA’s digital reproductions. For example, the museum has licensed some of its paintings to GalleryPlayer, a Seattle company that publishes fine-art content for high-definition displays; one offering is a DVD collection of 20 Claude Monet paintings owned by MFA, including “Water Lilies.” GalleryPlayer also produced a DVD based on the Hopper exhibit (I can recommend it personally; it’s available through the MFA’s online gift shop).

“We are continuing to explore all the things we can do with the digital assets we have available,” says French, who also points to the museum’s podcasts and e-cards and the customized tour suggestions available at the MyMFA section of the museum website.

At the same time, the museum is improving facilities for actual visitors. Excavation is underway for the new Norman Foster-designed American Wing, and the museum has started work on revamped entrances on both the Huntington Avenue and Fenway sides of the complex. The projects, scheduled for completion in 2010, will increase the museum’s exhibition space by 28 percent.

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