To learn more about our presentation as ThePremiumPress; where we introduced the topic of re-defining the social-layer by Geo-Tagging with BuddyPress.

Firstly, let’s point out that the organizing committee - lead by Simon Lim did an outstanding job in the organization and running of the actual event. We hope that as much effort goes into the marketing and promotion of the event next year, where we’ve already started counting down the days!

Furthermore, as Terminal Junkie pointed-out:

This is the very first Wordcamp event to be held in Malaysia and I must commend the effectiveness of the organisers from start to finish. The whole event was on time and on schedule, something you don’t always see in a Malaysian’s event as they are infamous for their tardiness.

We believe the venue was an excellent choice, and the service provided by the hotel was exceptional. Good food and drinks, plenty of snacks and an excellent buffet spread for lunch with cakes and drinks in the afternoon too. Each table had fresh water and sweets stocked each time we re-entered the room, and the internet provided by PI was sufficient to power the 150+ attendees.

Here’s a photo posted by Vironia on Yfrog during Jimmy’s presentation:

If you’re into Twitter, Joshua Ong made the best compilation of the key tweets - very cool stuff:

@Bennimaru Great demo / examples presented by @thepremiumpress on geo-tagging with #BuddyPress. #wcmy

@icednyior Buddypress creates a whole new type of wordpress. Bring ur site out of the box & it’s free #wcmy

@kreativethemes BuddyPress as Event Management and Geolocation tools looks promissing #wcmy

@icednyior Buddypress features easily extensible plugins – make a Flickr like site, add events feature, ratings, geolocation #wcmy

@Bennimaru Extensions for #BuddyPress: doc sharing, photo albums, tweet/face streams, ratings, geolocation, events & more #wcmy

@vernieman Check out http://irrationalgames.com built on BuddyPress + WP. #wcmy | Nice, very nice.

@icednyior U can build ur own foursquare by redefining the social layer in buddypress #wcmy

@vernieman Nice. BuddyPress is a re-definable Social Layer. Build your own Foursquare, FTW! #wcmy

@Bennimaru BuddyPress will be great for focus groups, community sites. Catering for individuals wif similar interests #wcmy

@tjunkie @jimmynguyc from ThePremiumPress up now on geo-tagging with BuddyPress… Let’s Buddy up #wcmy

Talking of very cool stuff and Twitter, when we were asked to provide some marketing material for the WordCamp goodie-bags, we knew we needed something a little more memorable than flyers that would get thrown in the bin by the end of the day. At the time, a few of us here at the office were crazy (still are) about Foursquare, and figured, hell, why not get the Foursquare features we always wanted into gMaps ready for launch, and then go out and build four different square badges, and then we’d be handing out Four square badges! Trouble was, for the life of us, we hunted high and low and could not find anyone in Malaysia capable of creating nice looking square badges, so ended-up with round ones:

Our badges had a small URL hidden on them, which once visited presented people with an image and the task of finding two hidden letters from within the image. Collecting all 4 badges, putting together the 8 digit promotional code and auto-tweeting each discovery allowed us to run the competition live at the event from our mobile devices, where Jimmy was able to announce the winners by the time he presented. It was rather exciting when it got down to the last place and 5 or 6 people were all racing to get the last clue. Speaking of which, as soon as ThePremiumPress is ready to launch, they will post another article with the winners and more details on promotions available to those attending.

Icednyior posted a nice pic of the swag bag contents on TwitPic:

In our opinion, the best presentation BY FAR was from Aizatto regarding Beginning WordPress Plugin Development, which was well presented and good, clean professional code to learn from.

In addition, we also managed to find this video from WeGoPro on YouTube:

You can make more friends in two months by becoming interested in other people than you can in two years by trying to get other people interested in you…

For it seems we have gone full-circle and that this very concept is more relevant today than ever before, which was the inspiration for this article and the importance of Social-Media for Brands & Businesses, which to some business owners is a difficult concept to grasp.

In all our searching and researching, we have found one lady (Marta Kagen) who has done an exceptional job of getting straight to the point and summarizing the importance of these new tools and platforms in a presentation she has titled What the F**K is Social Media:

One of the most important factors from this slideshow is that over 93% of social-users expect brands to have a social-media presence.

Facebook has become the obvious leading social-platform, especially with statistics such as:

As of August the 14th, 2009; there are more than 250 Million active users…
…and over 8 Million users become fans of pages each day…

If brands can learn anything from these facts and figures, the most certain fact of all is that the marketing and advertising strategies of brands and businesses not using social-media to its fullest must change their ways if they want to compete with other brands already using such tools, and as such; we have another interesting slideshow that deals directly with this very issue from Paul Isakson:

The key differences between social-media communications and other forms of mass-communication include the facts that social-media can provide spontaneous feedback directly from the consumers and gives them the control to spread the word - not only that, but it can be targeted to niche user-groups and specific demographics.

Perhaps the most powerful insight into social-media can be seen by this simple flow that demonstrates the inter-connected and true underlying power of social-media and how an interesting article, photo or video can be perpetually spread through the viral-marketing mechanisms of social-media:

For those still not getting-it, the only option left is CommonCraft’s plain-English:

01. Social-Media in Plain English:

02. Social-Networking in Plain English:

LEARNING CODEIGNITER FROM SCRATCH
Nettuts Plus featured Jeffrey Way’s article about the focus on the CodeIgniter PHP framework which seems promising for all web developers.

With raw PHP, building a simple image upload utility,performing some validation, saving the file to uploads folder, and automatically create a respective thumbnail, can be somewhat time-consuming. However, with CodeIgniter, it’s simply a matter of referencing the correct library, and passing in some configuration options!

Learning the CodeIgniter - Day 1

Learning the CodeIgniter - Day 2

Learning the CodeIgniter - Day 3

Learning the CodeIgniter - Day 4

CREATING DIFFERENT TOP NAVIGATION
Designing websites that have good navigation designs are always a challenge. And designers often face the question of horizontal or vertical navigation. Connor Zwick explains in Nettuts Plus that sometimes a drop-down system is usually the answer and it’s always a good idea to think out of "normality" to create navigation that stands out.

CREATING A SIMPLE WEB-BASED CHAT APPLICATION
We have all heard about tutorials for web applications, but what about chat applications? Nettuts Plus featured a tutorial by Gabriel Neva teaching us in great detail as to how it is done.

In this tutorial we will be creating a simple web-based chat application with PHP and jQuery. This sort of utility would be perfect for a live support system for your website.

CREATING LITTLE PLANETS USING PHOTOSHOP
Abduzeedo.com featured an article that teaches users how to create a "little planet" effect from flat horizontal pictures by using Photoshop.

40+ HIGH QUALITY ADOBE FIREWORKS TUTORIALS, RESOURCES AND PNG FILES, NOT TO MENTION 30 SELECTED FLASH AND ESSENTIAL ACTIONSCRIPT 3.0 TUTORIALS
Sites like Noupe.com offer some cool tutorials and other essentials that will certainly make your day, such as: Fireworks latest tutorials, and Actionscript stuff.

Tutorials on how to use software is one thing, but how about the programming stage? Noupe.com featured 30 hand-picked essential tutorials for Flash and ActionScript 3.0.

30 OF THE BEST PHOTOSHOP WEB LAYOUT DESIGN TUTORIALS
As designers and programmers, we need all the help we can get in designing and programming the best website possible. Dzine Blog made a featured article concerning some of the best Photoshop design tutorials for Web Design.

How to create PDF Files with PHP
Theme Forest.net featured an article showing us how to create PDF files using PHP and a free PHP library called FPDF.

PDF is the de-facto electronic document standard because of its security and integrity. Making a PDF isn’t limited to high-end desktop software though; they can be created quite easily on the fly from your web application. Add in a sprinkle of free code, and you got one great recipe for PDF-ala-mode!

Creating a Polaroid Photo Viewer with CSS3 and jQuery
What if you could do more than just create Polaroid pictures on your site, such as having fun modifying them online? Marcofolio.net came up with a detailed tutorial on how to make this possible.

By combining the CSS3 Box Shadow and Rotate properties, this effect is relatively easy to create. When dragging a Polaroid around, you’ll see the shadow. When it’s placed down, it’s rotated to the left or the right (random).

This example is making use of CSS3 and jQuery, just to show the effect when combining two powerful techniques. The CSS3 is injected by jQuery, keeping the CSS file clean.

Creating a Cute and Furry Vector Monster in Illustrator
Trying to create something cute and fuzzy vector monster but don’t really know how, then Blog Spoon Graphics‘ article about creating such a thing using Illustrator.

Follow these steps in Adobe Illustrator to create your very own super cute fuzzy monster character. We’ll be working with the basic shapes to start, then use a variety of gradients to add depth. We can then finish it off with some detailed fur effects to really lift the design from the screen.

Building a better Tooltip with jQuery’s Awesomeness
With this tutorial, tooltips that appear whenever you hover your cursor over it won’t seem so boring anymore, as Net Tuts Plus demonstrates in this cool jQuery tutorial by Jon Cazier.

One of the great tools we have in our web development goodie-bag are tooltips. A tooltip is a box that appears when you hover your cursor over an element like a hyperlink. It provides supplementary information about that element. For example, a link with little or no text (an icon) may become confusing. Provide an extra sentence or two within a tooltip to explain to your users what will happen if they click on it.

Smart Columns with CSS and jQuery
Soh Tanaka.com featured a simple article concerning how to rectify certain problems on site columns with the help of CSS and jQuery.

One solution that would be able to benefit the situation of excess white space and being restricted to having a fixed number of columns per row is to take the good of both scenarios and mash it into one.

TURN-BY-TURN DIRECTIONS WITH THE GOOGLE MAPS API
Nettuts Plus featured an article by Noah Hendrix portraying a cool detailed tutorial in creating a small widget allowing users to retrieve turn-by-turn directions to a specific location in Google Maps.

I challenge you as developers to continue to find interesting ways to integrate maps in to your applications. Anytime a model is location aware, you should question if your project has a use for visual representation on a map.

RETRIEVING YOUR GMAIL EMAILS USING PHP AND IMAP
In David Walsh’s blog, he features a useful tutorial on how to retrieve emails from Gmail in the shortest possible time without the hassle of connection interruption. In this case, he uses the MooTools FX Accordion plugin to display each email through a cool demo.

MAGENTO TUTORIALS
Inchoo.net highlighted an article of a tutorial about the implementation of multiple ways for Magento’s various features in detail provided by Branko Ajzele.

Basically, what you need to do is to create the directory inside your template directory and place the bestseller.phtml file in it. In my example, I’m using the custom-created directory /inchoo

Using Facelift Image Replacement (FLIR)
Ivan Weiler posted a small tutorial in Inchoo.net to show users how to operate the Facelift Image Replacement script using Magento features.

Facelift Image Replacement (or FLIR, pronounced fleer) is an image replacement script that dynamically generates image representations of text on your web page in fonts that otherwise might not be visible to your visitors.

Twitter has come a long way and is expanding like it was an unstoppable force in the virtual world. In its awesome evolution, we’ve compiled some of the coolest articles featuring its various usage on the net.

TWITTER CHANGES THE WORLD OF POKER WITH A "TWEET"
Read Write Web.com featured an article about a poker game by an elderly man who probably used Twitter to his advantage at a $10k stake game in Vegas recently.

As a growing number of poker players are beginning to send out short messages to the world via Twitter, existing poker media is being disrupted and the news sites are scrambling to out-compete with each other in responding to the players’ direct and immediate communication with their fans. Players are reading each others’ Tweets, too, and that has consequences.

 

BRINGING TWITTER TO YOUR SITE WITH TWEETBOARD
TechCrunch.com featured an article that depicted one of Twitter’s global usage as a main conversation spot on the Web, and now it can be applied to any site with Tweetboard forum, as seen to the left…

Once a site adds the Tweetboard code to their site, a site-wide tab appears which allows visitors to have forum discussions by simply logging into Twitter (via OAuth). All the conversations are threaded, and comments appear on Twitter as well, potentially drawing in a larger audience into the specific conversation.

COLLECTION OF RECENT UPDATES ON MASHABLE AND TWEETS FROM YOUR COMMODORE 64
Here we have a small collection of Twitter articles featured in Mashable.com

Space Twitter
Imagine being able to text message from space! That’s exactly what transpired for the first time in this part of history captured by Mashable, when astronaut Mike Massimino became the first human to Twitter from outer-space!

The tweet in question comes courtesy of NASA’s Mike Massimino, a.k.a Astro_Mike , whose status update reads, “From orbit: Launch was awesome!! I am feeling great, working hard, & enjoying the magnificent views, the adventure of a lifetime has begun!

Mashable also complied some inspiring Twitter backgrounds, as sampled below:

Doug Cone (@nullvariable) : Doug, a web designer and consultant, brilliantly integrates his face with his brand and contact information in this spacey theme.

CoolTweets (@cooltweets) : CoolTweets, which collects, well, the coolest tweets on the web, gets an A for its simple and clean layout. Perfect for many brands.

Justine Ezeraik (@ijustine) : The popular new media star has a balanced theme reflecting her brand.

7 Helpful Twitter Background Resources

MyTweetSpace: MyTweetSpace is one of the simplest ways to create a Twitter background with minimal effort.

TwitterBacks: This website provides a set of templates perfect for creating your ideal Twitter background.

TweetStyle: TweetStyle offers free background templates, custom Twitter backgrounds, and a few useful blog posts on the subject of the backdrop.

Free Twitter Designer: This handy little app provides an easy-to-use image editor to help you create a professional-looking theme.

TwitBacks: This is another tool for creating backgrounds.

TwitterGallery: TwitterGallery is a directory of themes based on color and category.

Peekr : If you stumble across a great Twitter background and want to take a quick look at it in its pure form, the Peekr bookmarklet is the way to go.

 

5 Ways to Post Twitter to Facebook
Mashable.com featured an interesting article concerning guidelines as to how to apply our Twitters into Facebook as status updates.

From auto-updating your Facebook status, to more calculated updates, we think these five ways to share Twitter updates with Facebook will satisfy those of us with a predilection for maintaining dual social presences.

1. Auto-Update with a Facebook Application
If you’re looking to automatically post your Twitter updates straight to Facebook, the Twitter application (by Twitter) is your best bet.

2. Use a Twitter Client
Two such applications are TweetDeck, a desktop client (rivaling Seesmic Desktop), and PeopleBrowsr, a multi-purpose web-based application.

3. Via Facebook Connect
Facebook Connect offers site developers and website owners an immediate way to let new users log in to their sites using their Facebook accounts.

4. Just Speak It
Vlingo’s mobile application for Nokia, BlackBerry , and iPhone does speech recognition for a variety of functions, but we love it for status updates.

5. Ping Your Page or Profile
You can use Ping.fm and HootSuite together to disseminate your tweets everywhere. Plus, there’s also a convenient way for admins to link their Facebook Pages with Ping.fm to seamlessly post updates.

Ashton Kutcher Hits 2 Million Followers on Twitter
Mashable.com made a featured article regarding the next milestone of Ashton Kutcher’s Twitter follower base, where he has now reached a huge sum of over 2 million people!

Ashton’s rise to the top of the Twitter food chain has certainly been helped along by the competition with cnnbrk and his appearance to talk all things Twitter on Oprah . His closest competition for Twitter’s #1 comes from @TheEllenShow account, which is still about 300,000 followers behind.

Making Millions via Twitter
Mashable.com came across one of the benefits of Twitter in the business sector as computer giant Dell can testify as being one of the biggest companies using social media. It used its Twitter account @DellOutlet to tweet out major discounts and sales increased in no time!

It has gained quite a following (620,000+ followers) and sold a lot of computers – at the end of last year, they surpassed $1 million in revenue , after about a year and a half’s worth of tweeting. Well throw those numbers out the window, because Twitter’s phenomenal growth and Dell’s social savvy have pushed sales from Dell Outlet to over $2 million , in 1/3 the time needed to pass the first milestone. And @DellOutlet is still on the rapid rise.

Twittering From Your Commodore 64
News.Cnet.com featured an article by Matt Hickey concerning the new usange of Twitter through Commodore 64, and applying its function through an application called Breadbox 64.

Not only does Breadbox 64 allow you to tweet, it also lets you access your friend feed, as well as individual friends’ timelines. And, of course, Van den Brande also has details on the hardware in a post on his site, like the MMC plug-in ethernet adapter, as well as various screenshots. It looks pretty awesome.

TWEETCRAFT - THE WORLD OF WARCRAFT TWITTER CLIENT
Tech Crunch.com featured an article about Twitter’s influence on The World of Warcraft fans. It revolves around an in-game Twitter client for the popular online game that allows the user to send and receive Tweets within a game, especially useful when waiting for raids to start.

TWITTER WHORE - THE ESSENTIAL TWITTERING AND FOLLOW ME
This video is but one of the many videos by @lisa_nova featured in deburca.com that demonstrates what Twitter can be to some people and the driving force of increasing followers - no matter how ridiculous or annoying it may be, attention is everything to some people.

TWITTER USERS CAN NOW "BUY" FOLLOWERS
Telegraph.co.uk wrote an article about the new feature of Twitter where users are now able to literally "buy" new followers through a new company called uSocial.

The company finds potential followers by searching through Twitter to discover areas of common interest to match people more closely. uSocial then send these potential followers a message, alerting them that there is someone on Twitter they might want to follow. The potential follower then decides whether or not to follow that person.

HIGH QUALITY TWITTER ICON AND TWITTER TOOLS FOR DESIGNERS AND DEVELOPERS
Hongkiat.com featured some pretty cool high quality Twitter icons that are so adorable and catchy!

Tools And Tutorials For Designers And Developers
What would Twitter be without properly knowing how it works and using its right tools to make full use of it? Smashing Magazine featured an article for designers and developers to refer to various sites, tools and tutorials to help them "Twitter". Here are some of the many tutorials featured in the article:

1. Twitter Development Links
Twitter Technology Blog
Twitter API Wiki home page
Twitter API Announcements - Google Groups
Twitter Development Talk - Google Groups
Follow Twitter Development via Twitter

2. Introduction to the Twitter API
Twitter API for Dummies
Using the Twitter API
Get Started With the Twitter API
Getting Started with the Twitter API

3. Building Your Website Around Twitter
Build Your Own Social Home!
How to Create an RSS-Enabled Micro-Blog with Twitter
How to Make a Unique Website for Your Twitter Updates
How to Build a Maintainable Website Using CushyCMS and Twitter
Send Message from a PHP Page Using the Twitter API
How to Run Multiple Twitter Feeds on the Same Page
Add Twitter to Your Blog (step by step)
Scripting Twitter with cURL
PHP + Twitter + Google Calendar + SMS
TwitterZoid PHP Script

For those not already following us on Twitter, please do so, or drop a tweet using our Tweetboard…

LANGUAGE RSS ICONS, BUTTON DOWNLOADS, FICTION ICONS, FREE FONTS & MORE FREE STUFF!
Andrea from CSSGlance designed five cool Language-based RSS icons that are meant to identify content in different languages that was once only a thought.

Komodomedia.com featured these finely Refined Social Network Icons:

Mochivation.com featured some downloadable buttons with various themes and designs:

With the option of being able to download free resources online, there are countless elements and theme-based icons to download. Noupe.com featured some cool and free high quality icon sets that are based on famous feature films, Japanese anime and other interesting concepts.

When most would look for free icons and picture resources, those who are into Typography and copy-writing would want to have some free typeface or fonts to facilitate them. Fontex.org features the very best hand-picked free fonts:

While icons and fonts are on the menu for free stuff, templates for websites give a big helping hand for the designer too, as Smashing Magazine featured in an article about free PSD and (X)HTML Templates.

Speaking about templates, ThemeForest.net featured an article that presented a Free template File for the Month of July 2009 called Nice & Clean exclusively from YA Design.

Starting today, each marketplace in the Envato network will be offering one free template for the entire month. This site template is the complete package: five page theme, portfolio slider, AJAX contact form, etc. From now until July 31, it’s 100% free!

Smashing Magazine featured an article concerning Icon sets specially for Web Designers to use:

Naldz Graphics featured some free high quality doodle Photoshop Brush sets:

ONLINE BACKGROUND GENERATORS, DYNAMIC FONT REPLACEMENTS, AND MORE
Numerous elements are put together to make a website look beautiful and classy. And there are many online applications to help designers get the very best for their website designs.

A website’s background may seem to many as an after-thought in design, but it is equally important to help bring out the information of the website. Single Function.com featured an article consisting of a few interesting Online Background Generators.

MODIFYING IMAGES INTO PATTERNS
Studio Ludens created a free pattern creator that literally turns images into unique patterns:

Regarding online assistance, DezinerFolio.com featured some pretty handy text replacement solutions.

Whilst on the topic, let us recommend Font Jazz the simplest of them all…

Smashing Applications wrote an article concerning an interesting open source invoicing application:

And what better way to manage your code anywhere through an online PHP control application?

Referring to correct resources is essential in web design. Therefore Ext Core is the right choice for your Cross-Browser Javascript Library.

Ext Core is a cross-browser JavaScript library for building dynamic web pages. It includes the following features high performance, lightweight, clear, maintainable code, an intuitive, easy to use API with an MIT Open Source license

BUILDING ONLINE GAMES USING SIMPLE METHODS
For the online game junkie, creating a new game is cool. And what better way to do so than with a variety of free game creation applications as featured in CNet News.

CREATING AN ONLINE PROFILE AVATAR WITH MANGA CONCEPT
Ever wanted to know how you would you look as a Manga character or simply need a cool avatar to represent you online through the various social networks that you use?

EXCHANGING REAL-TIME DATA ONLINE WITH A.P.E. (WITHOUT RELOADING PAGES)
Exchanging data in real-time online with thousands of users is easier to do with Ajax Push Engine.

As a complete packaged solution, it is designed to push real-time data in a lightweight, highly scalable and modular way, only using Javascript for the client side. With the use of those Web Standards, APE is fully cross-browser and uses all the latest browser features and provides backward compatibility for older ones.

And that’s why today is such an exciting day, because today marks the launch of KalturaCE…

Kaltura Community Edition (KalturaCE) is a free, self-hosted, community supported version of Kaltura’s Open Source Online Video Platform.

Following installation any site can gain comprehensive video and rich media functionalities including video management, searching, uploading, importing, editing, annotating, remixing and sharing. It is intended to solve all your video-related needs, and allow you to easily create your own rich-media applications – all behind your own firewall and on your own servers.

Guess what we are playing with today…?

During day 2 of Google I/O, they dropped a bombshell called Google WAVE, which will without a doubt revolutionize online communication through an OpenSource browser-based collaborative protocol that will surely replace emails within the next three to five years…

Built by the same engineering team who are responsible for the Google Maps API, and who, for the past couple of years have been secretly developing this new service out of Sydney Australia, the more and more that they explained about this platform and protocol, the more and more one’s jaw finds itself dropping towards the floor.

As Mashable were quick to point-out…

The concept behind Google Wave is to “unify” communication on the web. It’s a hybrid of email, web chat, IM, and project management software. It features the ability to replay conversations because it records the entire sequence of communication, character by character. Because of this, discussions are also live in Google Wave: you will see your friends type character-by-character.

The features don’t stop there, either. Google Wave also supports the ability to drag attachments from your desktop into Google Wave. It loads that file and sends it immediately to anyone in the conversation. It’s also embeddable, so you can embed Google Wave conversations on any blog.

CNET were amongst the first to officially break the news and have since posted the following video, live from the Google I/O conference where they first announced this news to the world:

(be warned that this video is 90 minutes, but well worth it)

The API feature set of WAVE is phenomenal, and some of the demos being showcased by Google include live translations between 40 different languages as you type, where integrated form functionality and Google Maps are just some of the native possibilities encouraged by the platform. What’s most important here is the underlying protocol (not just the product or platform, but the underlying technology itself) is also OpenSource, which is a clear attempt to put an end to the static irrelevance of POP3 email messaging protocols.

Waves can be created and hosted by anyone, not just Google!

This must surely have Microsoft VERY worried - for in many ways, it threatens Microsoft Exchange, which may ultimately become the first truly powerful platform that Microsoft releases as an OpenSource project, but then again, perhaps that’s taking dreams a little too far…

Without exaggeration or flamboyance, this is quite possibly the most interesting and exciting technological (internet-based) breakthrough since the internet itself…

It also helps to explain why there were never any rumours that Google might buy Twitter or why they were not participating with live-communication - because it’s quite clear they have just reinvented what LIVE communication is really all about…

THE MILLION TWEETS OF ASHTON KUTCHER
And what about Oprah’s first tweet …? Or the whole Ashton Kutcher Vs Larry King in the quest for one million twitter followers, who then goes and get one million Facebook fans whilst he is at it…? Am certain that the fact that one of the new online animated shows from his media company is primarily available from within Facebook certainly helped.

The most impressive aspect of this milestone is that Ashton has grown from around 400,000 fans to over 1 million fans in under 3 days! It’s an impressive feat and it shows the viral nature of Facebook public profiles.

We feel it is Facebook that is responsible for this final stage of saturation, which has in many ways even made it possible for Twitter to grow the way it has, something that is somewhat limited here in Asia but nonetheless a force well worth keeping in sight…

With growth at a staggering rate of over 480,000 users a day and demographic shifts of the over 35 year olds doubling a day , it is no surprise that rumours of Microsoft buying Facebook for US$50 Billion have re-surfaced and some have taken notice.

Yahoo!’s stock price shot up  on the news of his comments, but I think the press and the markets are missing the big picture: Microsoft’s is using the “potential Yahoo! deal” as a red herring with investors . Ballmer is using Yahoo! to convince the market that Microsoft needs to buy Facebook to compete with Google, and to set a price floor of 50 billion for the acquisition.

It’s not all rosy at the top though, the recent re-design they forced upon users almost caused riots in France , and their sudden change in their Terms of Service caused quite a up-roar with those that care, forcing Zuckerberg to quickly re-strategize.

The fact that Facebook may eventually sell our personal data is another matter entirely, and the fact that the platform is being used for blackmail and countless other spamming and scamming techniques , it seems only natural that Facebook would fight back with private groups for families .

The Consumerist has noticed a seemingly slight but very important (and disturbing) change in Facebook’s terms of service , regarding user-generated content. In short, all of the content you’ve ever uploaded on Facebook Facebook reviews can be used, modified or even sublicensed by Facebook in every possible way…

With plans for adding the ability to integrate Facebook chat directly into Facebook Applications , and the news that some Facebook developers are earning over US$ 700,000 a month , it’s impossible to miss applications as fun and engaging as the ones that BuddyMedia (a company specifically developing Facebook Applications) are creating. Take the new InTru3D application for Intel :

In talking about 3D worlds for Facebook, how could we not mention Sacred Seasons & Small Worlds?

Turn based multi-player games have been a huge hit on Facebook but there are few that have a real-time multiplayer environment. Sacred Seasons can’t see any reason why there shouldn’t be more multiplayer games, especially massively multiplayer games. So the team behind this virtual game environment has ‘created a Facebook application that combines the Sacred Seasons world with the Facebook community.

Given SmallWorlds’ focus on social media integration, it’s not surprising to see SmallWorlds with a Facebook app. It’s designed to push engagement and media-sharing opportunities, which is a core concept for the SmallWorlds virtual environment to begin with.

The SmallWorlds Facebook app mostly consists of an embedded version of your SmallWorlds creation on your Facebook Profile. From there, you can interact within the SmallWorlds virtual realm without leaving Facebook.

With that said, please come VISIT US ON FACEBOOK and find our if and how we utilised the following:

• 30+ Business Apps for Facebook
• Strategies for Developing Fan Pages
• Optimising Fan Pages
• Facebook Application Development Strategies
• The Facebook Flash ActionScript API

THE BUMPTOP EXPERIENCE IN THE VIRTUAL WORLD
It’s been a long time coming, but it’s finally here! The awesome reinvention of the Desktop in 3D with cool Social Site Integration - The BumpTop has arrived.

Fact is; the desktop has not seen any major innovation in a while. It’s still the same lines of icons on a 2D area. Neither the Mac OS nor Windows goes as far as BumpTop does to completely reinvent and re-imagine the user experience when it comes to the desktop.

Two years ago, a bright engineer, Anand Agarawala, gave a presentation at the TED conference about a new technology he and a team were working on that showed how they believed the desktop should work. Just like how people use a real desk, they believed that the user should be able to interact with desktop items in 3D, pin up photographs, pile related items into stacks, and more.

RISE OF THE VIRTUAL WORLD
Revenues, trends and investments have been poured in by the millions towards the availability of virtual goods and advertising concepts. Companies like Habbo raked in a whopping $74 Million from such methods by using the interactive features to lure teenagers, which makes up more than half of its profit.

Popular mostly outside of the U.S., Habbo Hotel is a mostly free online virtual world which earned $30 million in revenue in 2006. The site is targeted towards a younger demographic ranging from 13 to 18 year olds (90% of users fall in this range). It is free to register and walk around the hotel, yet users can pay extra for more functionality, club membership and furnishings for their hotel room.

Millions have been spent on investments in 63 Virtual Worlds by related companies in 2008, resulting in an astounding $594 Million! Virtual World Management has now officially become the leading trade media company for the virtual world. The Executive Director for Virtual Worlds Managements quoted:

“Nineteen youth-oriented properties received over $70.47 million over the course of the year. The bulk of that was in Q1 and Q3. As more and more youth worlds came to market over the course of the year, spectators worried that the space was overcrowded. Others have seen it as a sector for opportunity, and it appears as if venture capitalists are still at least somewhat interested.”

While that certainly makes a good investment profit sector, discussions on using this brave new media for enterprises have been ongoing. Second Life Grid featured a detailed article on usage of this media.

Today, hundreds of global organizations, including Fortune 500 companies such as IBM and Northrop Grumman, use the Second Life Grid platform to bring distributed teams together in a shared virtual workspace to collaborate, meet, learn, and prototype new offerings.

Speaking about Second Life, Profy featured an article about a $10 Thousand improvement expenditure for Real Life applications.

Today the team is announcing Linden Prize, a contest with the $10,000 in prize money to be paid to a member or a team of Second Life residents for the most innovative in-world project that will improve real lives outside of the virtual world.

With this interesting approach, business meetings in the corporate world are also venturing into virtual conferences to avoid the hassles of real meetings.

As featured in articles for Cnet News, and Read Write Web, Avatars and the Enterprise Virtual Worlds are proving to be more effective than Web Conferencing.

IMPACT AND EVOLUTION OF THE VIRTUAL WORLD
On the subject of the impact and influence that Virtual Worlds have on society, Mattel’s Barbie Girls, which used this media as its marketing source,amassed 11.2 million sign-ups, most of which are of the fairer sex. According to an article in Giga AOM, it’s now about to launch a subscription option for memberships. This incredible strategy can certainly rake in billions within no time! As such, other deals involving Virtual Worlds from the likes of IBM are fast becoming common knowledge. Here we feature some articles from Read Write Web regarding the global impact of Virtual Worlds and Second Life.

There’s been a lot of speculation - and hype - about using virtual worlds for enterprise learning and collaboration. In January, a Forrester report into the use of virtual worlds in the workplace was analyzed, which claimed that “within five years, the 3-D Internet will be as important for work as the Web is today”. However at that point there seemed to be much work to do before virtual world software became user friendly to the enterprise crowd - “you’ve practically got to be a gamer to use most of these tools”, Forrester noted in January.

This year was a rocky one for virtual worlds. They continued to move out of the spotlight as media darlings and found, instead, more taciturn media and struggling communities. Second Life dealt with stagnant numbers and Google decided to pull the plug on Lively .

Now, the shot in the arm for Second Life seems to be as simple as a redesign that emphasizes the benefits of the community to would-be users and encourages them to register to try the service for themselves. Plus, they’ve thrown some Cooliris -like panning interactivity in there for good measure.

 

THE VIRTUAL EVOLUTION COMES TO FACEBOOK
Many social websites will definitely be influenced to use at least a small part of the virtual world media to enhance online response. In an article in All Facebook, we discovered that the web-based virtual world platform of Smallworlds is releasing a Facebook application that is designed to push engagement and media sharing opportunities.

Once you’ve added your SmallWorlds virtual environment on Facebook, you can go on to crate avatars, decorate rooms, play games, watch videos, listen to music and embark on the popular SmallWorlds missions, offering a pretty robust virtual experience that’s akin to the standalone site. There’s also a more social option of making your Facebook profile accessible to others within SmallWorlds, linking the SmallWorlds site with individuals’ Facebook pages in a deeper manner.

 

MOVIE VIRTUAL MAGIC COMING TO LIFE IN REALITY
Hollywood movies have paved the way for creative ideas when it comes to advanced technology. And the virtual world has been used as a concept for countless movies. "Minority Report" was a futuristic sci-fi movie, that involved a revolutionary spatial user interface, that has now been made possible, as seen in this video from Fubiz.

Dubbed g-speak, the mind bending OS combines gestural information, recombinant networking, and real-world pixels, to deliver what the creators call the first major step in a computer interface since 1984. The G-Speak system basically “consists of an off-the-shelf DLP projector and special gloves embedded with reflective beads".

IDEAS FOR THE VIRTUAL WORLD
As society itself begins to shift towards a more interactive future, ideas and preferences are needed more to be fully accustomed to the usage of Virtual World media. Here we have two examples of what this Open Virtual World could be spawned from - Beyond the online boundaries of a Metaverse will be the legends of a counter-culture long forgotten….

The key deliverables of the OpenSource Metaverse Project are a server engine and a client component.

The server engine can be installed, configured and administered by anyone to create their own metaverse, somewhat analogous to an Apache web server for web content. Instead of web pages, a metaverse server will serve up the data and contents of a 3-D virtual world that can be customized by the administrator.

Beyond 2 establishes a foundation for four types of virtual world simulation: Physical, Logical, Cognitive, and Narrative. Beyond specifies an API for the Physical simulation model and provide bases classes and abstractions for the Logical, Cognitive, and Narrative simulations.

 

VARIETIES OF VIRTUAL WORLDS AND OPEN SOURCES
Here we feature some cool open source virtual worlds where custum-made applications can be created by using those sources as a base. Among these are RealExtend, Open Croquet, Qwaq, Project Wonderland and Project Darkstar.

We’ll be on the lookout for even more news and features regarding the Virtual Worlds of the future…

ARCTIC PAPER 2009 AGENDA CREATION
Helene Ryenbakken teamed up with four other creative people and created the 2009 Agenda for Actic Paper - a paper production company with the idea of showcasing some paper qualities while promoting Arctic Paper and Studio3.

The theme of the agenda is computer and internet on paper. You have these expressions from the paper world that the internet and computer have borrowed, and now we borrowed them back – in an internet wrapping.

INGENIUS LANDSCAPE CONCEPTS OF LEVI VON VELUW
Levi van Veluw is a renowned designer with an awesome imagination of realism in his work. Here we take a look at one of his achievements in one blog article of Abduzeedo - "Landscapes"

Levi van Veluw´s photo series are self-portraits, drawn and photographed by himself: a one-man-process. His works constitute elemental transfers; modifying the face as object; combining it with other stylistic elements to create a third visual object of great visual impact.

Using the human body as a design concept is always fun and imaginative. In a blog article from Design You Trust, we discovered an interesting design made for Socks Anatomy depicting the human muscle structure and giving off a unique illusion of realism.

Within the subject of creativity, you should check-out Siggi Eggertsson’s work:

AMAZING PACKAGING DESIGN COLLECTIONS
Packaging is a living example of graphic design in physical reality. Numerous blogs such as Dzine Blog and The Dieline blog have compiled whole galleries of them for all to see. It’s wonderful to see what a little bit of imagination and creativity can accomplish within the world of packaging.

Dzine Blog’s compilation of 45 Really Nice Packaging Designs:

The Dieline compilation created articles featuring some of the world’s most creative packaging from Jeff Krichmar and The Soda Studio

Other cool packaging creators such as Turner Duckworth and The Brand Union were also featured.

BOTTLE PACKAGING DESIGNS AT ITS BEST
When it comes to packaging, alcoholic beverages are often the cream of the crop. As featured in the articles of Abduzeedo, Designer Daily and Touchey, these packaging creations are by some of the world’s greatest designers and are truly unique if not attractive examples of world-class design..

NAME CARDS OF EXCELLENCE
A name card can carry great importance as it projects the introduction to a company. Here are numerous collections of some of the world’s greatest name card designs featured in blogs such as Altered Advice and Abduzeedo.

Among the most unique in these is the AEN business name card. This is probably the best example for the effectiveness of being simple and stylish at the same time!

This is as minimalistic as one can get without crossing the line of insanity.

CONCEPTS THAT ARE LITERALLY OUT OF THE BOX
Art can be defined in various ways. Digital art is one way to tweak any masterpiece into a unique blend of photo manipulation and creativity as featured in one of the articles of Hong Kiat’s design blog.

Out of bounds (OOB) photos are post processed photos where the contents are taken outside the boundaries, presented in creative 3-dimensional perspective. OOB photos can be achieve with some basic photo editing skills. Getting an interesting OOB photo depend largely on the photo angle and individual creativity.

As the digital age evolves, digital concepts in 3D using JavaScript are also being taken to the next level. Kawanet and Nihilogic are but a two blogs that feature articles concerning this new step into Java modifications and online interactivity.

With the introduction of online JavaScript modification, interactive experiments such as CubeScape have been created, where users can build, destroy and view their block-building progress along with the option of being able to save their progress online.