king talk

The World Cup is under way and our download counter is getting back to normal. It‘s been two weeks of fame since we launched our free World Cup Schedule, a quite unusual project for us, because it‘s completely non-interactive and non-digital. Good old graphic design. Anyway…

Things were going really fast and we received tremendous support from sites like fontblog.de, loadblog.de, 11freunde.de, news.suite101.de,dersven.de, jetzt.sueddeutsche.de, funload.de, page-online.de and allesaussersport.com just to name some. Other downloadsites like www.chip.de and softonic.de decided to spread it from their own servers.

We received a lot of mails throughout the last days which gave us a great positive response. On the other hand some pointed out little mistakes which could be fixed immediately. One guy, Jimmy Hublet, was extra nice and translated the whole website and schedule into a french version. Thank you Jimmy!  After all we can announce a current total of 79.457 downloads (June 21th 2010). The team of envis precisely is thankful for your support! See you 2014 with a new schedule…

Concentrating at work feels hard if you have the possibility to play around with the new iPad. ; ) Appearance is deveiving, we got something cooking…

Some 800 young people from the EU united at Madrid for this special event, bein held during the Spanish Presidency of the EU. People took part in forums, workshops and presentations relating to science, digital creativity and innovation. We had a nice time there at the Campus Future presenting Earthwalk and Quasar interactive.

They received a lot of positive feedback from the participants. Today is the last day and we‘re deassambling the installations. We will publish some photo and video material the next days. Thank you and we see us again at another Campus Party, maybe.

On Tuesday, the 13th, we will pack our bags and fly to Campus Party, the worlds biggest lan-party and electronic entertainment event. At Campus Futuro, an area for new technology and innovation, we will present two installations.

First, this will be the world premier of a new installation of ours called Quasar Interactive. It is based upon the visual synthesizer Quasar and adds – you guessed it – interactivity! Together with Gold Productions a.k.a. Meduino we created three interactive spheres which are used as input devices for realtime sound and graphic manipulation. The picture is showing the Quasar board which is based on the Arduino platform containing an accelerometer and ports for LEDs. Further information will be published the next days…

The other installation is our well-known Earthwalk, which was realised together with Jens Franke. For this year it was little bit optimized, replacing a hacked keyboard by Pokey55T, a USB keyboard simulator board.

I think I am not exaggerating when I say that I am quite immersed in digital lifestyle. I send and receive tons of email, I use Twitter and Facebook a lot and almost all the news I get are somehow channeled through an RSS reader, Digg or some other kind of syndication. I’m being told all the time that in todays networld, you have to be everywhere at the same time, everything has to be instant and everyone needs to maintain a variety of communication channels at any given time.

Well, I did all that for quite some time and to be completely frank: it sucks. The biggest problem for me seams to be, that I am surrounded by applications that all somehow want something from me. The RSS reader tells me how many really interesting articles I am still supposed to read, Growl and Skype are doing a terrific job at reminding me about who went on- or offline just a second ago and thanks to push email I get notified about new messages in real time because every email could be really important, right!?

I found my enemy. His face: a red badge with a number on my application’s icons. His name: notifications. Over time I started feeling so overwhelmed by them that I couldn’t bear it anymore. So over the past month, I gradually started to take out those little bastards one by one.

Here’s a little list of the naggers I got rid of and why. This might not work for everyone, but it doesn’t hurt to give it a try, right?

Good advice right after the break.

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