Situated Research's Blog

Many companies approach us and ask, “I want to maintain and update my own website. What CMS system do you suggest?” When reviewing content management systems (CMS) with clients, we go over the pros and cons of the most popular systems, and evaluate their background and website capabilities to ensure that the correct CMS system is selected for your company. Sometimes a CMS system is not the solution for a company, and an affordable monthly maintenance program is more appropriate.

Following, we discuss the pros and cons of three major CMS systems: Drupal, Joomla, and WordPress. Read more »

In the spring of 2011, Latitude Research launched a study to understand the recent explosion in gaming, driven in part by the popularity of mobile phones and tablets. Specifically, the study sought to uncover how the profile of the stereotypical gamer has changed, various motivations for gaming, and the evolving role of games in moving traditionally online experiences into the “offline” world—suggesting new opportunities for game and technology developers, educators, and social innovators. Read more »

IBM’s Supercomputer Has Implications for Healthcare, Information Tech and More

Wouldn’t it be nice to have your very own supercomputer in your pocket?

If your laptop crashed while you were working on a major presentation, you could ask your portable expert to help diagnose the problem. If you wanted to bone up on Middle Eastern history, you could ask it to comb every document available and then wrap it all up in a simple summary (annotated, of course). Read more »

A newly unveiled Apple patent (USPTO #20100279768) reveals Apple’s plans for multiplayer, location-aware interactive iPhone games.

In a nutshell the patent describes how iPhones could be used for real-world cooperative gameplay, using the iPhone’s sensors, camera, GPS module and WiFi/wireless internet connection. Read more »

Image: From Introducing the iThink by Paul Mic on his The Monkey Buddha blog

The history of smartphones looks something like this: At the end of 2008 the very first Android handset was available on T-Mobile in the US. The iPhone has existed for 3 years. The very first Blackberry featuring push email came out in 2002.

From WAP and push email to iPhone in 5 years. From one iPhone to 60 different Android handsets in under 3 years. At that rate it’s challenging to create a credible mobile roadmap that extends as far as 6 months- and the rate of change is increasing. Read more »

This video is a refresh of the original video with new and updated social media & mobile statistics that are hard to ignore. Based on the book Socialnomics by Erik Qualman.

The use of social media as a marketing tool has become prominent in the modern business world because it is an extremely effective way to promote products and services to a targeted audience. While standard websites serve as a one-way monologue, social media opens up dynamic dialogue with customers: creating interaction and personal connection. Read more »

Virtual saleswoman and other technology changing how we work, play, shop

Our avatars are coming. Those mobile and 3-D and interactive technologies being created around us are about to beam us into a new world, filled with workday holograms, avatars and stuff we called magic only a few years ago. Read more »

Games are a wonderful medium. Like music, literature, film and theatre, games do a great deal to help make life worth living. In Dorian Gray, Oscar Wilde said, “All art is quite useless.” He said this to illustrate that yes, art has little to no practical value. That does not mean that art is of no benefit to anyone of course! For me, the same argument can be applied to games, as their entertainment value is enough to justify their existence.

Critics of games however are full of concerns about violence, addiction and distractions from what the establishment regards as “more meaningful” pursuits. These being reading, watching films or punching someone in the face in a bar. Read more »

Can’t find your Nintendo DS? Try one of the new Adidas sneakers instead.

Adidas has created a virtual 3-D world that can be accessed using an upcoming line of five men’s sneakers in an idea that ties into one of the technology trends of the year: augmented reality.

“The foundation of augmented reality lies in adding a layer to the real world,” says Chris Barbour, head of digital marketing for Adidas Originals. “That’s what we have done. We have taken a real world item and added a fantastic virtual world on top of that.”

All users have to do is go to the Adidas site and hold up their sneaker, which has a code embedded in its tongue, in front of their computer webcam. A virtual world then pops out in front of them and they can navigate it using their sneaker as a controller. Read more »

A group of students in China produced the image montage software, and had the following to say about it:

We present a system that composes a realistic picture from a simple freehand sketch annotated with text labels. The composed picture is generated by seamlessly stitching several photographs in agreement with the sketch and text labels; these are found by searching the Internet. Read more »

Steve Ballmer discusses some of Microsoft’s new technologies and the future of computing: cloud computing and revolutionary user-interfaces to support content on multiple devices. Read more »