WDITOT

I recently completed a 3-month Experience Design internship at CPB, which constituted my last semester of BDW. I had the great pleasure of helping out on a project initiated by my supervisor, Noel Franus, VP/Experience Director at CPB, called “Personal Ink (P.INK)”. It’s a Pinterest site that enables breast cancer survivors to explore artistic alternatives to the standard, post-mastectomy, nipple tattoos. Pinterest is a great solution for this pro-bono initiative — it’s visual, it’s flexible, and it serves not only as a forum for sharing content, but also as a vehicle for connecting survivors and artists.

The idea for P.INK came to Noel after a personal experience, which he describes on his blog:

When my sister-in-law Molly was diagnosed with breast cancer, she quickly learned that her mastectomy would leave her with scars and no nipples. In fact, they’d have to be tattooed on. Which begs the question: if you’re going to stylize new nipples, why not rethink what they should look like, now that it’s a blank slate.

That’s what Molly asked the family in an email. Hey, why not a monogram? Headlights? Something else? Let’s start from scratch…who’s got ideas?

I figured she wasn’t the only one with this problem. That just about anyone who’s been through a mastectomy would appreciate a chance to take control — for the first time in a long, grueling process — of what breast cancer looks like on them. On their own terms.

I also figured there had to be a community or resource for this sort of thing. After all, millions of women in the US alone undergo mastectomies each year. All of them have to deal with scar coverage and/or nipple replacement.

But there wasn’t. So an idea was born.

A great idea. To which I say, “WDITOT!?!”

This one really speaks for itself. And I’m really pissed I didn’t come up with it.

That’s the simple if statement behind Triggers, an iPhone app that lets you use the range of available inputs, outputs and rules to create mini programs on your phone, such as sending you an email when your toast is ready (watch the video below).

The inputs include: microphone, camera and proximity sensor.

Some of the rules: equal to and less than.

And some of the outputs: speaker, vibration and email.

So as you can see, the possibilities are endless. And Triggers wants to collect them all. You can check out the latest 10 triggers shared via the app here. Bridging digital and physical using your iPhone — WDITOT!?

The past few months have passed with the blink of an eye, as my second semester at BDW has given new meaning to the term “workload”. After a brief and unintended breakup with WDITOT, I am back. I have genuinely missed lamenting over ideas I could/would/should have thought of, which I was bombarded by this past week at SXSWi 2012.

One of the many standouts was an iPhone app that launched called Picle from London-based digital shop Made by Many. It allows you to snap images and record audio at the same time and then compile them into a shareable story. “It’s like Instagram with sound, or Soundcloud with pictures,” according to its makers. “Picle preserves moments that matter to you by capturing an audio clip with a photograph. These moments — or Picles — can then be laced together to make stories and shared with the web.”

The idea for Picle came to Alex Harding, a Made by Many Interaction Designer, on an experimental day trip to the seaside town of Broadstairs, England. He documented his experience in the video below. If this doesn’t make you want to download the app, I’m not sure what would. It’s very well done.

The team at Made by Many has been definitive in their description of the release as MVP-only. They’re following the Eric Ries / 37 Signals model, which has become entrepreneur-gospel: put it out there early, test and get feedback, make better. In other words, see if anybody gives a sh*t before you waste time building it out. They went to SXSW with 15 users and came back with 30,000. Not too shabby of a research group to move forward with. We’ll all be watching — and evaluating — as they round out the app with more features.

As Forbes put it, “Adding sound to stills is one of those aggregative improvements that makes you face-palm yourself and wonder why it took somebody so long to do it…” In other words, WDITOT???!

I find this poster to be very engaging.

Is it a commentary on the times we live in with everyone finding his or her own special way of inducing numbness. Mine happens to be watching episodes of mindless reality garbage on TV. But I digress.

Or is it representative of the latest trend in healthcare — customization — which many see as a positive development?

Either way, I wish I would have thought of it before the talented artist Adam Simpson did.

Who knew this blog of mine would have so many entries about condoms. First, Sir Richard’s. Then Pronto. And now this one about Olla, a Brazilian condom company.

Olla’s ad agency, AGE Isobar, created their “Unexpected Babies” campaign, which is quickly gaining buzz in the ad community (and beyond) due to its clever manipulation of Facebook, which is hard to pull off.

Here’s the gist: To drive home the importance of protected sex, they created faux Facebook profiles for future baby boys by taking an existing profile’s user name and tacking on “Jr.” to the end of it. The unsuspecting male Facebook user then received a friend request from his “virtual son”, along with the message “Avoid surprises like this one” and a link to Olla’s website.

WDITOT!?!

This Facebook app is horrendously designed but the concept is annoyingly good. It searches Facebook profiles, updates, comments and likes to come up with gift ideas for your friends.

Shopycat is the brainchild of Walmart and it’s been testing the app for months, gaining about 6,000 users to date, and will start launching it more widely among Walmart’s 10.6 million Facebook fans and via the retailer’s YouTube channel. The goal is to get users to buy gifts at Walmart.com, but Shopycat also shows availability at a user’s nearest Walmart store and in some cases even directs them to the websites of rival retailers such as Bed Bath & Beyond or Hot Topic for items Walmart doesn’t carry.

WDITOT!??!

As someone who lived in NYC for eight years — a mere two years shy of earning my official “New Yorker” status, which takes 10 — I can attest to the fact that there is just too damn much to do there. The infinite options can get overwhelming and actually have an adverse effect, resulting in you doing nothing but sitting in your tiny apartment watching TV. 

With that in mind, this new site, Gidsy (currently in beta) would have come in quite handy. “Gidsy is a marketplace for authentic experiences. Besides booking fun stuff to do, anyone can host activities. Think unique walking tours guided by locals, nature hikes with wild cavemen and exclusive pop-up restaurants hosted by top chefs,” the site reads.

Here are just a few of the current listings that I would definitely partake in if I still lived there: Guide to building your home cocktail bar, NYC Chinatown Dumpling Tour, and Photographing New York City.

WDITOT years ago??!

This never actually dawned on me, but now that I think about it, why has the focus of digital maps been solely on the outdoors? We’ve all gotten terribly turned around in a unfamiliar airport. Maybe even missed a flight because of it. Well, leave it to Google to save the day with this official announcement: “Google Maps Goes Indoors.” According to the official Google Blog, “With the release of Google Maps 6.0 for Android, [the indoor] directory is brought to the palm of your hands, helping you determine where you are, what floor you’re on and where to go.”

This is a nifty feature that only fuels the Google vs. Apple rivalry. As an iPhone user, I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t a wee bit envious of this new Android oneupmanship. And a lot envious of Google for coming up with the idea. WDITOT??!

I may be late to the game here, as I’m just discovering this service which launched in June of 2010, but I’m envious nonetheless. AppSumo is self-described as “Daily Deals for Web Geeks”. In other words, it offers deals on premium software and web services. AppSumo partners with people who make the coolest apps out there to offer you exclusive price deals on sweet products.

An example of an AppSumo deal: the $50 “Entrepreneur Bundle” that included premium access to social CRM BatchBlue, email marketing manager MailChimp, business card maker MOO, finance tool FreshBooks, and Formstack, which offers wizards for building out web-based data forms.

Taking a trend like Groupon and applying it to a targeted segment like this! WDITOT??