Masters of Media

Drebbel: The Sinking Machine

Since the beginning of its age, the Internet has been a site where users could (more or less freely) express their opinions. Social media platforms were created exactly for this purpose and their rapid development has had a global...

By Markéta Horázná on 10/17/14 1

Training Wheels

As one of the cultural capitals of Europe, thousands of international students (2,000 at the University of Amsterdam alone), new residents and tourists convene in Amsterdam every year. Unfortunately, not everyone who comes to Amsterdam has the typical Dutch...

By Auke Akkerman on 10/17/14 Comments Off

Panoptibook

Panoptibook is a new media research project. is not a real social platform: it is a website that just looks like a social network. The intention is to approach what a ‘social’ network would look like if a...

By Thom on 10/16/14 Comments Off

Get Water! Have fun and make a difference

What if someone told you that by playing a fun digital game you could raise awareness to a current global issue, promote learning and education, or perhaps even help solving relevant problems at a local, national and/or international level?...

By Giovanna Salazar Ojeda on 09/18/14 Comments Off

The posthuman cyborg: Technological telepathy

Researches have recently published an article where they have done an experiment with some kind of technological telepathy. A man in India wearing a BCI (Brain-Computer Interface), has successfully transmitted different kind of words through thoughts to a man’s...

By Chaïm Wijnberg on 09/18/14 Comments Off

Functions of representation in a work of art & MMORPGs

Interactive Digital Art ‘‘Do Not Touch” is an interactive crowd sourced music video for Light Light’s song ‘Kilo’. The video was created by Amsterdam based art collective Moniker. Before the experience starts users are being notified that their cursor...

By Giel Veenstra on 09/18/14 Comments Off

Your taxi 2.0 has arrived?

Amsterdam. Capitol of the Netherlands, known for cultural highlights as the Rijksmuseum, the Anne Frank House, the canals, fleamarket on Waterloosquare and an infinite number of bikes. The last twenty years the number of bikes has grown so much...

By Kyrsha Verweij on 09/18/14 Comments Off

A New Kind of Pop-up Book

Early pop-up books are made out of pure paper. Each time the kid opens a page, an architectural piece of art jumps out of the book. In 2014, it looks much different. Bridging Book established a new mixed-media book for children and presents...

By Janina Sommerlad on 09/18/14 2

Manually Manipulated Modulation

In the year 2013, six hundred seventy-two million people used a mobile phone in Europe. And this number is on the rise. In the Netherlands alone, twenty million mobile phones were used by the end of 2013. Mobile phones...

By Oskar Strajn on 09/18/14 Comments Off

Alba: Improving or Controlling your Life?

During TechCrunch Disrupt in San Francisco the start-up Stack Lighting announced a new way to light your house: Alba. Alba is described as the world’s first responsive LED lightbulb, that is equipped with sensors that will know when you...

By Suzanne Tromp on 09/18/14 Comments Off

Apple’s and U2’s unsolicited music release: gift or spam?

On the 9th of September Apple published a press release titled ‘Apple & U2 Release “Songs of Innocence” Exclusively for iTunes Store Customers’. In this press release Apple announced that together with the famous rock band U2 they will release U2’s new album...

By Richelle Werners on 09/18/14 Comments Off

MUBI: Watch movies of cult, classic and indie movies

It happened to me more than once that I got myself into the situation when I had no idea what to watch on Netflix. Even if it is amazing that we can reach everything there, sometimes it is easier...

By Blanka Szamos on 09/18/14 Comments Off

Tribler: Who’s downloading?

Researchers of the Technical University in Delft (Netherlands) have released Tribler 6.3. Under the leadership of Johan Pouwelse a researching team works now for about 9 years on Tribler, an opensource p2p-client which makes use of the bittorentprotocol. In...

By Roy Schutte on 09/18/14 Comments Off

“SOMEBODY”. Because “Texting is tacky. Calling is awkward. Email is old.”

By encouraging real-life interactions between strangers, Somebody is one of the most interesting apps launched lately. While messaging becomes an ordinary activity incorporated in most people’s lives nowadays, the artist Miranda July, in a partnership with the fashion brand...

By Gabriel Reis on 09/18/14 Comments Off

Could Snapchat’s new feature challenge Facebook’s dominance in terms of trust and privacy?

What’s the next Facebook or is there one? Ask many, including John D. Sutter (2012), who suggests that this question is not only wishful thinking, but an increasingly likely reality. Jamie Turner argues that although Facebook is still “king...

By Agnieszka Walewinder on 09/18/14 Comments Off

How was school today?

“Jeremy hasn’t finished his Math assignment – and it’s not for the lack of trying. Math has been especially difficult this year. The concepts of Speed, Distance and Time seem incomprehensible to him. All his other friends seem to understand the concept...

By Sameena on 09/18/14 Comments Off

Does gameful solar power pay off?

Imagine you could produce your own electricity, charge the batteries of your electronic devices and even get rewarded. The German startup Changers tries to make that true. They designed a solar power charger for USB devices and a software...

By Danny Lämmerhirt on 09/18/14 Comments Off

Should we keep our emojis in check? Emojli doesn’t think so

On August 29th, London-based app developers Matt Gray and Tom Scott released an application that could possibly redefine the way we communicate through our digital devices forever: Emojli, a social network, where users can only communicate by using emoticons, or...

By Miles Zornig on 09/18/14 Comments Off

Twitter’s “buy” button creates one-click shopping

Twitter, a microblogging platform with 271 million monthly active users began beta testing a “buy” button, allowing users to purchase exclusive merchandise from within the Twitter app. According to Twitter’s blog post, released September 8, 2014: “Today we are...

By Sage Stargrove on 09/18/14 Comments Off

From Anytime, Anywhere towards All the Time, Everywhere

Some of us might have noticed social changes through the intensive use of smartphones. The anytime and anywhere connection seems to make us overly ambitious when it comes to satisfying our social needs. Phone in the pocket, out the...

By Dominique Verschragen on 09/18/14 Comments Off

Forget glasses… the future is smart contacts!

Eyeware devices have been around for some time with gadgets like Google Glass or BT-200; what they do is to enhance reality by projecting images into our field of vision and this can be films, videogames or the screen...

By Ana Mireles on 09/17/14 Comments Off

Minder, the app that wants to change content control

Disrupt SF 2014 Disrupt SF 2014, an event where new technology startups showed their products to the public and to prominent investors, took place last week in San Francisco. Launched by the web magazine TechCrunch in 2011, it has just reached its...

By Roberto Pizzato on 09/17/14 Comments Off

Introducing Nearables: Real-world context for your apps

“Create new, contextually rich mobile experiences.” That is what Estimote promises with their products. They’ve recently introduced their new Estimote Stickers, which should “represent the future of what sensor technology and contextual computing will be.” They call these stickers...

By Michael ten Pas on 09/17/14 Comments Off

Will SCiO be the Google of Physical Objects?

How many calories are in the cake you are eating? Does that medicine contain caffeine? Is your shirt really 100% cotton? SCiO, A small new sensor, molecularly scans objects and instantly displays their nutritional or chemical make-up on your smartphone. Will SCiO change...

By Gali Ronen on 09/17/14 Comments Off