Once again a great talk at the TED conference by John Maeda, Associate Director of Research at MIT’s Media Lab, spreading his philosophy of elegant simplicity.

“The MIT Media Lab’s John Maeda lives at the intersection of technology and art — a place that can get very complicated. Here, he talks about paring down to basics, and how he creates clean, elegant art, websites and web tools. In his book Laws of Simplicity, he offers 10 rules and 3 keys for simple living and working — but in this talk, he boils it down to one simply delightful way to be.”

I especially like this statement from his talk when he defines what simplicity really means:

“Simplicity is about living life with more enjoyment and less pain”

This could be also applied to designing customer experiences since most people think of customer experiences as about “big-bang-fancy-firework” interactions when it is actually about “more enjoyment and less pain” for your customers.

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…that’s the name of a project that describes itself as a web-based news feed delivering must-know information if you are trying to sell to, connect with, or understand young people. threebillion is built from links to content on other websites.

They have produced a video on behalf of MTV Asia with the title: Thirty-six youth facts in one-hundred fifty seconds.

(found via PSFK)

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Microsoft announced today the start of Surface Computing. What is it? Basically it is a huge multi-touch display which opens up a range of possibilities for human computer interaction. A review of this technology by Popular Mechanics is shown below.

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Here are the results of a study done by Panorama together with Nielsen Media Research that concludes that “while all makes of mobiles have a wide spread of customer types some groups are more attracted to certain brands than others.”

What your mobile phone says about you:

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Twitter is the latest hype in the world of Web 2.0 and even though some people are highly sceptical about it (even the MIT advertising lab) this service is highly interesting - because it brings blogging to your mobile phone and creates at the same time the chance for an extension of the mobile phone business model.

Twitter is a “A global community of friends and strangers answering one simple question: What are you doing? Answer on your phone, IM, or right here on the web!”. Sounds complicated - but it’s actually pretty straightforward.

Here is how it works:

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