I’ve mentioned the headup publisher widget before. This nifty add-in identifies entities (places, people, companies, books, etc) mentioned in a site it’s installed on, marks them up with a dotted underline, and when you mouse over them a small pop-up comes up with information, news, photos and videos about that place/person/whatever.

That was then. Now Semantinet, the start-up in Herzliya where I work one day each week, has packaged the capability as a Wordpress plugin, which means that a blogger can add the capability to any Wordpress blog in a mere minute or two. If you have a Wordpress blog, you can download the plugin here.

What’s more, the product had evolved, and it now includes a tab called “friends” in addition to the ones for photos, videos, and the rest. This tab – once you connect it to your Facebook account – shows you how the entity being viewed is connected to the people you know, like which of your friends live in the place or work at the company.

Pretty powerful capability – and easier than ever to include. Which is what I just did – mouse over the marked up words anywhere on this blog and see it in action!

More from Amir’s visit to Japan:

This staircase gives access to the trains at a Tokyo underground station. Given rush hour crowd density, its designers did well to split it in two, to separate the up and down streams of commuters.

But note how the two sides are of different width. Someone characterized the traffic and found that at peak times more people will be going up than down. Other staircases might have the reverse arrangement, each optimized to its location and usage. These designers took a scarce resource, in this case stairwell width, and allocated it in a totally optimized manner; a very Japanese (and very intelligent) design approach.

Amir is back from Japan, and sent in some interesting photos attesting to that country’s outstanding and different ways of solving life’s daily problems.

For starters, here is yellow path marked out on a Tokyo sidewalk, whose surface is textured with the little rubber bumps that are so annoying at some airport terminals. Turns out these strips are quite common in major cities in Japan.

This is not a way to mark the road to the Wizard of Oz; it has a very practical and worthwhile function: it allows blind or low-vision individuals to find their way safely. The bumps have different patterns where the trail changes direction – they are linear on the straight and round at intersections, allowing the users to sense through their feet where they should pay attention.

In addition, the strips continue in public buildings like railway stations, where they mark the way to the ticket office and other key locations. There are also plaques with Braille directions in strategic locations along the paths. The photo below is from the train station at Kurashiki.

That is one simple, ingenious and commendable practice that other nations ought to emulate!

A piece of thoughtful design on the Renault Clio:

When you activate the windshield washer, the fluid is squirted onto the glass and the wipers are activated for four consecutive cycles. This is pretty much standard these days. But in the Clio, they then rest for three seconds, and give the windshield another single wipe.

The added wipe gets rid of the annoying trickle of fluid that often forms at the top center of the windshield after the first wash/wipe action. It’s not hard for the driver to reactivate the wipers, but the Renault designers took care of it for us. Good thinking!

Our supermarket provides a large billboard for public use, where people post the usual mix of personal ads of all kinds. So many of them, in fact, that any one ad is likely to get drowned or covered by other ads before the day is out.

So here’s one person that solved this problem in an original way, providing their ad with a unique chance to register on people’s eyeballs.

I was walking up the ramp at the left in the photo above, which leads to the supermarket’s main doors, and I saw at my feet the ad in the photo, taped right to the metal ramp. It advertises a flat for rent – and no shopper coming that way can fail to notice it. Wayda go!

As someone who spent a large chunk of  lifetime working on improving knowledge worker effectiveness, especially around computer mediated communication and  collaboration, I can barely contain my excitement.  I’ve just sat through the lengthy video of yesterday’s unveiling of Google Wave in the I/O developer conference. Not only have the good folks at Google integrated the most central processes of Computer Supported Collaborative Work – Email, IM, Shared document editing, Discussion boards, and more – into a single tool; but they’ve upgraded their underlying paradigms – which had changed very little in decades – into a dynamic, vibrant usage model that takes advantage of the latest Web 2.0 concepts (and then some).

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The video is quite long, as was the demo, but well worth your time to watch. I won’t repeat the details; if you don’t have patience for the video, there are screenshots here and some info here. They include concepts we’ve been waiting to improve on for years (like properly dealing with, and visualizing,  discussion threads) and others I haven’t seen yet (like an intelligent, meaning-sensitive spell checker).

What will be very interesting to behold when this product comes out later this year is how different segments of the user base adapt to the new paradigm. The Social Networking set should be ecstatic, but what will large enterprises do? The new features of Wave could revolutionize their collaboration  effectiveness, so they stand to gain the most, but many large organizations are not known for their agility where new technology (or changes in ingrained cultural paradigms) are involved. Those who do adopt and unleash this power will have a serious competitive advantage, IMHO.

Kudos to the Google team that developed this down under!

I was waiting for a Cappuccino at a coffee shop and asked the girl making it to also give me a glass of water. An incongruous conversation ensued:

Girl: To drink or to smoke?

Me: Huh?

Girl: To drink or to smoke?

Me (the sensible part of my brain trying to stop the engineer’s part from concocting images of transforming the glass of water into an improvised Hookah): How would I smoke a glass of water?

Girl: Oh, sorry. You don’t smoke, right?

Right. So then the girl obligingly demonstrated, picking up a disposable plastic cup and mimicking a smoker holding it in one hand and flicking ashes into it from an imaginary cigarette in the other.

And so I discovered that following the draconian ban on smoking in public places, and thus the removal of ashtrays from the cafes, smokers figured that a plastic cup with a protective puddle of water in it can serve as an excellent mobile ashtray to use either indoors or (if they get chased out) on the go.

There is no stopping the human spirit!

The progress of engineering over the years has brought us many triumphs of human ingenuity, but it has left quite a bit of roadkill behind. One species driven to the brink of extinction is the Tinkerer.

The attitude to Tinkering has always been ambivalent. Look at the dictionary definitions:

tinkerer [noun]

1. a traveling mender of metal household utensils.
2. A clumsy repairer or worker; a meddler.
3. a person who enjoys fixing and experimenting with machines and their parts.
4. a person skilled in various minor kinds of mechanical work; jack-of-all-trades.
5. Scot., Irish English.
a. a gypsy.
b. any itinerant worker.
c. a wanderer.
d. a beggar.

What a mix! On the one hand, a person skilled in fixing things; on the other, a beggar, a clumsy worker…

The truth is, this was an extremely useful person in centuries past. This was the ingenious man who made the rounds of the county, a wanderer indeed, and who knew how to fix everything that had broken down since he last came. All the newfangled contraptions that were useful to the villagers but beyond their ability to fix: sewing machines, radios, bicycles, gramophones, tractors… And this tinkerer had manifold skills – a real jack of all trades – but even more so, he could improvise, making replacement parts from whatever was at hand, working around the missing or broken pieces. Take my favorite definition of engineering – The art of making what you want from things you can get – replace “making” with “fixing”, and you have the Tinkerer’s calling. Above all, this is “a person who enjoys fixing and experimenting…” – someone who loves his work, hence deserving our respect.

And now he’s a threatened species, for two reasons having to do with how we design our technology today: first, because we design it to be discarded at the first failure, so no need to fix it; and second, because with the advent of microprocessors, most items cannot be fixed by improvisation. If your car acts up, you need to get it to an authorized garage where they hook it up to a computer that tells them what to do; no way can you take a screwdriver and a shoestring and fix it… and in any case we specialize so much that no one person can fix the electronics in a sewing machine, a DVD player and a car.

Too bad – those tinkerers had a technological flair to their way of life and their vocation that will be missed – or not, once we forget they ever existed.

One of the small pleasures of life is sharing a fine Cappuccino on a weekend morning at home. The only difficulty is, you need a way to produce one, and we don’t have a professional machine at home like they have in a proper coffee shop. We do have the means to make strong espresso – one half of the Cappuccino story – but what of the milk? We had a battery-operated propeller thingy that was supposed to beat milk into a froth, but it left much to be desired.

Enter Tupperware. This innovative manufacturer of kitchen plasticware came up with a gizmo for making foamed milk – the “Magic milk cappuccino maker” – that shines in its ingenious simplicity. It consists of a small plastic jug with a lid that allows through a round metal mesh – a strainer – on a rod. Here’s how this works:

First you fill the bottom third of the jug with milk, put on the lid and microwave for 2 minutes to get the milk hot.

Next you put in the strainer, close the lid, and pump the rod up and down rapidly a few times. The mesh moves through the milk and foams it up in no time – very effectively.

Meanwhile you produce the espresso in your Brikka, put it in the cups and shovel in foam and hot milk from the Tupperware jug. The entire process takes under 5 minutes, most of it waiting for the machinetta to boil. And here we are:

Lovely, lovely Cappuccinos… none of the artwork a barista may make in the foam, but just as pleasant to consume.

We all know the raised reflector buttons on the lane divider lines of a freeway. They have white or yellow retroreflectors embedded in their edges, so that at night they shine right back at you in the light of your car’s headlamps. Safety and beauty in the same simple device.

But what many may not realize is that they have another design feature, also safety related, and far more ingenious. At least in some freeways – California’s, for sure – the buttons’ other edge – the one facing away from oncoming traffic – has red reflectors in it. Why put reflectors on the side you never shine a light on, the side you can’t even see?

Precisely because of the one circumstance when one would be seeing it: when they drive on the freeway in the wrong direction, having entered via the off ramp instead of the on ramp by some colossal mistake – think DUI, for instance. Now you have a drunken driver going in the wrong direction at night; traffic is sparse, but any moment disaster may strike unless this fool notices his mistake. And now those reflectors return the investment – for this driver will see long lines of red lights shining ahead to infinity; so unusual as to immediately alert him that something is wrong.

And if, like me, you never did that, you can still see the effect if you drive facing straight into the sun when it is low in the sky; you can then see the red reflectors, shining back the in the sunlight, in your rear view mirror!