Gatsby introduces you to nearby people with interests you share, whenever you check in on foursquare. I built Gatsby with Will Tsui. My good friend Haan Lee drew the illustration of Gatsby.

Check it out at meetgatsby.com

Gatsby won Twilio’s SMS app contest!

Mashable: Connecting Foursquare Friends Who Like Cats and Circuses

CNet: Meet Gatsby, matchmaker for Foursquare users

PSFK: MeetGatsby Matches Strangers Through Foursquare

The Rundown: Link Foursquare to real life with Gatsby

ReadWriteWeb: Connect With Like-Minded Foursquare Users Around You

Many people are too busy for organized guided tours, and others don’t want to buy and lug around a thick travel guide just for a short business or family trip. And yet, most people still want to discover and learn about the cities they visit and inhabit. Scenic Route helps these individuals get more out of travel, on their own schedule.

Scenic Route is a mobile website that builds customized routes for urban walks. Given your destination and a time allowance, Scenic Route builds a meandering walking route to that destination, filling the available time with stops along the way. Each stop reveals a hidden surprise about the city: a short message left by a user or verified guide. At the end of your walk, you’ve explored new streets and uncovered a unique set of local knowledge through a fun, spontaneous activity that fits into the available moments of your day.

Visit my partner Catherine’s website at paradeofkites.

Visit Scenic Route at scenicroute.info!

SF Chronicle: Streets give up secrets on Scenic Route app

Pretweeting

There’s a whole ecosystem of different words. The English top 100 words (“the”, “and”, “or”, etc.) are the blue chip stocks of the twittersphere. Some words, like “dinner”, “#followfriday”, and “sleep”, have very predictable cycles. But you’ll need to follow current events to really know when the best picks, topical words like “ipod” or “lakers”, will hit it big.

This game hit it big on twitter and had several international articles written about it.

@louroboros: i love this so much. #pretweeting
@bdougher I want to buy shares of ‘pretweeting’, it’s gonna be huge! #pretweeting

IndieGamesBlog Browser Game Pick: Pretweeting

Mashable: Pretweeting gets a prediction market

Technology Reviews: Pretweeting- Virtual Twitter Stock Market

OnlyGizmos: Pretweeting is the new trend

WATBlog: Enough of tweeting and retweeting: it’s time for pretweeting!

TechCrunch: Can You Predict Twitter Trends? Use Your Skills For Virtual Cash With Pretweeting

Whytech.fr: Spéculez sur la fréquence des mots avec Pretweeting pour Twitter

MyFox Tech Tips: Predicting Twitter

“Le Livre Secret des Buttes Chaumont” is an interactive short story situated within Paris’s Parc des Buttes Chaumont. Every plot point in the fictional adventure, set in Rome and Tivoli, corresponds to an actual location within the park. The way you choose to navigate the story will guide you on a unique path through the park’s phantasmagorical landscapes.

The colors on the map roughly correspond to the locales in the story.
Gold: Rome Train Station / Ave. de la Cascade, Southeastern Park
Brown: Rome / Eastern Park
Blue: Tivoli / Northeastern Park
Green: Tivoli Forest / Lac des Buttes Chaumont
Red: Temple of the Tiburtine Sybil / Butte Chaumont

To start, click on book #1 (golden).
View Le Livre Secret des Buttes Chaumont in a larger map

Book icon designed by Navdeep Raj (http://dezinerfolio.com)
Translated by Annaig Combe and Daniel Levin Becker

Turf is a fun, easy-to-play strategy game set on a map of anyplace you choose – a web-based game that brings neighbors together in the real world.

The first game of Turf was created by Gabe Smedresman at Yale University in January 2007, and lasted 40 days. Called Old Campus Tree Risk at the time, it was a strategy game and would-be art piece, where the board was the freshman quad, each residential building formed a team, every student could be a player, and trees flew with banners reflected the state of the game.

The Yale Daily News: “Students hazard all in campus Risk game”

Old Campus Tree Risk was a tremendous success: 62% of undergraduates played – 3300 people, many of them playing an online multiplayer game for the very first time. Gabe released the code behind the game open-source, and Harvard ran a thrilling game a few weeks later: alliance, betrayal, hacking, bribery, and several Youtube videos ensued.

The Harvard Crimson: “Houses Compete in Bid For ‘Risk’ Supremacy”

Wall Street Journal: “Facebook Ignites Entrepreneurial Spirit at Harvard”

The game was mentioned by Bill Clinton (!) at his 2007 Harvard Class Day address.

Turf followed up its successful first season with games at Reed College, Olin, Stanford, and Harvard.

Harvard Independent: “Winner Take All”

Stanford Daily: “StanfordTurf invades campus”

Geofroy Tory was one in a series of scholars, architects and artists, who, in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, invented the capital letter as we know it today. The serif capital letter was based on Roman inscriptions from the first century AD, which Renaissance antiquarians believed to be aesthetically superior to the scripts they were using at the time, a combination of medieval blackletter and a curving script from the ninth century called the Carolingian. But, as we can already see from Tory’s bizarre conception of the letter Y, the Renaissance reconstruction of this antique form was no straightforward imitation. By the time the form had solidified in the 1520s, calligraphy, architecture, literary criticism, biblical exegesis, mnemonic aids, Platonic philosophy, and Pythagorean number symbolism all played an essential role in its birth.

Many Renaissance scholars were tight-lipped about the sources of their thoughts, preferring to preserve the aura of mystery and awe surrounding the antique. But Tory, a Frenchman outside of the direct academic circles of Italy, in his enthusiasm to explain the perfection of these letters, reveals much about the thoughts behind the construction. And while what historian Stanley Morison called Tory’s “cabalistic abracadabra” may have quickly faded to obscurity, Tory’s work lives on through his student, Claude Garamond, whose typefaces are built into and used by every computer manufactured on the planet.

Published in Printing History, January 2008.

Download full paper: “Alphabetic Architects: Geofroy Tory and the Renaissance Reconstruction
of the Roman Capital Alphabet”