http://www.wolframalpha.com 2009-05-14T14:13:40+00:00 When a free web service called WolframAlpha launches in the coming days, the general public will get to try a "computational knowledge engine" that has had technology insiders buzzing because of its oracle-like ability to spit out answers and make calculations. Which has a bigger gross domestic product, Spain or Canada? What was New York City's population in 1900? When did the sun rise in Los Angeles on Nov. 15, 1973? How far is the moon right now? If I eat an apple and an orange, how much protein would I get? WolframAlpha will tell you - without making you comb through links as a search engine would. It also will graphically illustrate answers when merited. So if you query "GDP Spain Canada" you'd see a chart indicating that Spain's economy was smaller than Canada's most of the time since 1970 and recently pulled ahead. That's pretty clever. 210 0 0 0 0 0 2010-03-06T09:23:12+00:00 467 277 http://www.wolframalpha.com idée 2008-12-03T10:13:27+00:00 A fun way to search for reference images by their colour content. It selects from over 10 million images on Flickr according to the colours you select from a handy little palette. Then of course you can link directly to any picture you see. It doesn't give you any rights to use the images you find, but if nothing else it's delightful, therapeutic toy. 187 0 1 1 2 0 2010-03-11T22:29:36+00:00 21 588 http://labs.ideeinc.com/multicolr/ White Space Gallery Lukas Marti 2008-01-29T18:29:09+00:00 A fellow designer Lukas Marti recently developed this website for a gallery in Zurich. What is worth highlighting is how the artists are showcased on the site. Instead of preselecting the artists work as most galleries/exhibitions/portfolios tend to do, the work is gathered from Google. All content is generated from what is readily available on the web. This of course puts a lot of questions forward, Are you less successful if your entries in Google are low? What happens if your name is common? etc.. Personally I think it is a very interesting move for both gallery and designer, knowing that it would cause an overdose of discussion with the artists. 126 0 Lukas Marti Benno Fäh 2 2 3 0 2010-03-11T15:59:09+00:00 57 894 http://www.whitespace.ch/ 2007-11-01T03:28:44+00:00 Social bookmarking, but for images. A useful source of inspiration for anyone working in the visual arts. Members can post images straight to the site via clever little bookmarklets. Sort of like a Google image search, whereby you browse to a page because of the images within it. Perhaps i'm over-complicating it. Go and have a look. You never know what you might ffffind. 115 0 2 1 1 0 2010-03-11T13:07:42+00:00 13 754 http://ffffound.com/ Massachusetts Institute of Technology Artificial Intelligence Laboratory Human-Computer Interface 2007-07-09T02:59:22+00:00 A very useful online tool for finding the font you're after. Its a simple idea and its executed very well. You are asked a series of questions about the typeface you have: what are the serifs like? What shape is the dot above the lowercase i? And it eventually narrows down to a set of potential answers. Interestingly it can also be used in 'reverse' to suggest typefaces. If you have an idea of the characteristics of a typeface you'd like to use (whether you know it exists or not) you can use this to give you a list of options. 71 0 0 1 2 0 2010-03-11T22:28:11+00:00 13 681 http://www.identifont.com/ frederic vavrille 2007-07-06T06:44:56+00:00 A fun little bit of flash which helps you to discover new music. Simply enter the name of an artist you like and it'll give you a 'map' of similar artists. I don't know how rigourous the underlying data is and the design is a bit bargain basement. But its got something which makes it really rather fun to use. It is certainly a much richer version of the 'Other customer's bought...' that a lot of online shops offer. It links directly through to Amazon, although the basic interface undermines the process and I doubt i'd click straight through and buy. 70 0 0 3 0 0 2010-03-10T18:45:20+00:00 13 656 http://liveplasma.com/