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Time to get your last finalist fix before the weekend. Here’s Friday’s big three.
Bubble Fish, by Peter Pebler: In Douglas Adams’ sci-fi classic, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, there is a fish called the Babel fish that, when placed in the ear, instantly and seamlessly translates all foreign languages to your own. Bubble Fish is the equivilant for our internet age. Select a word or phrase, and bam, Bubble Fish brings up definitions, Wikipedia entries, Google search results, Flickr images and more instantly in a bubble, providing a painless and easy summary of what the internet has to say about whatever you’re curious about. And, to note, Peter is a Windows developer by occupation which gave me a chuckle. You can read the full idea here and check out Peter’s first blog post here.
My personal thoughts: I’m sure I’m not alone when I say that I bring up Google and Wikipedia among others on a regular basis whenever I encounter some word or phrase or name I’m curious to find out more about. Bubble Fish would do this all automatically and show relevant information on anything with utter ease. And, if this won, it would most definitely be implemented with many different services available as plugins. So, for an example, I can imagine Bubble Fishing a name and it bringing up some photos from Flickr, a Wikipedia entry, contact info, and even related news from Google News. This one I’d use all the time, and was a no-brainer for finalist status.
iStyleIt, by Windy Chen: iStyleIt is to your wardrobe as Delicious Library is to your media collection. iSight your clothes, manage and rate your outfits, mix and match to preview your look, plan your appearance in advance, and more. Did Apple forget how important clothes are to many of our iLives? You can read the full idea here and check out Windy’s first blog post here.
Developer Judge Jason Harris: “When I first read this entry, I was like “whoah, that’s the lamest thing I’ve ever heard.” Then I began thinking about the people I know who dig style, and the way that they operate. Most of these people are women, a market pitifully under-represented by current software offerings. I went back and read the submission again, and thought, “hmm, that could actually work. Delicious Library for clothes.”.
The more I thought about it, the more compelling this entry became. There’s been a lot of business recently that’s geared towards making things fun for markets that are something other than the traditional (hello, Nintendo!), and this idea falls right into that category.
So I came back to this idea, noticed that there were 5 duplicates, and began pushing it on the other judges. I think iStyleIt has possible killer app potential!”
Puppet Constructor, by Joe Batutis: Yes, I know. You think we’re crazy now. But Puppet Constructor is more than, well, a puppet creation app. It’s a low barrier 2D animation app that allows users to create animations with mouse manipulations versus the higher barrier concept of keyframes that you find in more complex (and very expensive) existing applications like Flash. You can read the full idea here, and check out Joe’s first blog post here.
Development Manager John Casasanta: “This one will definitely be a polarizing love-it-or-hate-it app. It even was with us while judging it. Reactions went from “totally f___ing ridiculous” to “just stupid enough to be brilliant”.
What made this reach finalist was the fact that once we all started chatting about it, ideas were quickly flying all over the place: “photo booth integration…put your face on a puppet”, “it could come with a screensaver where your puppets take over the screen”, “one-button YouTube upload…YouTube would be overrun by these weird puppet videos”. This went on for about 15 minutes and then even the original skeptics were on-board for it. So Puppet Constructor’s definitely in.”
I never thought I’d ever write something tying puppets, “Hitchiker’s Guide” and outfit-matching together, but there you go. Finalists announcements will commence again Monday, and we’ll have some fun stuff for the weekend, so keep dreaming MDA folks.
