Christoph’s posterous

Ribbon Hero is a game for Word, PowerPoint, and Excel 2007 and 2010, designed to help you boost your Office skills and knowledge. Play games (aka "challenges"), score points, and compete with your friends while improving your productivity with Office.  As a concept test, this add-in is not supported, but is an opportunity for you to try out an idea we are working on and let us know what you think.  For additional challenges and the opportunity to earn more points, download Office 2010 Beta.

Since I am surrounded by Mac geeks, this has slipped my radar completely. Ribbon Hero seems to be a fun and engaging way of learning to use MS Office applications. Now I am pondering if this is something that could work in the corporate world, too.

(Found via Dirk Songür: http://dirk.songuer.de )

no comment!

Hilarious!

I despise about 99% of all Facebook applications, but this could totally change the tide. Civilizations was one of the finest games ever developed and is now coming to FB. I so want to become a beta tester!! Not quite sure what I need to do to get access though.

Here an excerpt from the announcement: "“I wanted to let you know we’ll soon be looking for beta testers to help us develop a unique new way to play Civilization. Ever since we finished Civilization® Revolution™ last year, I’ve been looking at ways of expanding the Civ gameplay experience to include solo, competitive and cooperative play to take advantage of the uniqueness of social networks. We’re calling this project Civilization® Network™ and the full game will be available next year on Facebook.”

The One&Other art project in Trafalgar Sq, London, ended yesterday. The video is an amazing summary of a very challenging but inspiring project. It reflects in an unprecedented way what people really care about at the end of the first decade of the 21st century. Very glad Headshift had a stake in it!

Ok, embedding doesn't seem to work: Here the link.

Last week we asked a simple question: How will you use Google Wave? Over 600 responses later, we're sending Wave nominations to the people who had the best use cases. Here are a few.

Lifehacker's readers have come up with a great list of meaningful use cases for using Google Wave. Some of them are of theoretical nature and need yet to be proven, others are rock solid already. It's important to note, that unless people find value (i.e. GWave addresses users' needs) GWave will nothing be than an over-hyped technology.

Uh, this is way too cool. Gone are the times of endless hours of 'photoshopping' trying to come up with a mediocre result using layers, masking and what not.

Simply sketch an outline of your 'perfect' image, label it and let the program do the magic. Very sweet!

From SmartBlog:

"Here are a few great ideas from Heather Oldani, senior director of communications and Steve Wilson, senior director of global web communications for McDonald’s, on how McDonald’s is using social media at all levels of the organization:

* It’s not a department that owns social media, it’s the consumer. Rather than having one team “own” social media, lots of departments collaborate on it at McDonald’s, including creative, customer satisfaction, legal, and brand content.

* Fostering existing communities is key. Heather explained how one of the hardest things for McDonald’s to learn was that the adage, “If you build it, they will come” isn’t necessarily true.

* Some of the biggest opportunities in social media are internal. McDonald’s Mindshare community helps owner-operators share ideas with one another. One of Steve’s favorite examples was how an owner in Italy used it to share a simple way to remove fingerprint stains from doors and windows with other McDonald’s owners around the world."