Here’s what we’re reading online, this week at Involution, on design, tech, and the digital life, in our links round up.

The Internet of Things Will Rise in Boston
With the advent of the mobile revolution, we’re now living connected lives, where our day-to-day activities are closely tied to the digital products and services that we carry with us everywhere on our smart phones. The future vision of smart devices networked via an Internet of Things takes this connectedness one step further, to a place where not only our phones, but our cars, our homes, the appliances within them, and any number of other objects can communicate with each other and us. This connected vision may be closer to reality than we realize.

Boston has long been a hub of both industrial and software design. The Internet of Things, of course, requires that those disciplines work together to produce the amazing new connected devices, generating streams of sensor data that can be controlled, consumed, monitored, and analyzed by software.

In his Innovation Economy blog in the Boston Globe, Scott Kirsner highlights Bolt, a new accelerator / incubator program, with the express mission of fostering businesses built around connected devices, currently looking for space in the Boston and Cambridge area.

One User Experience for All Devices
With the announcement of OS X Mountain Lion last week, Apple has fired the first shot in the universal user experience platform war.

GigaOm has a great article dissecting Apple’s Grand Unified User Experience, the term coined by Jean-Louis Gassée in his analysis of the OS. The essential idea is that no matter what the device — laptop, tablet, or phone — the user experience feels the same, behaves the same, and draws on similar patterns. Mountain Lion, of course, brings UX elements from iOS back to the desktop experience, completing the cycle of OS behavior. With this universal UX, the user can also expect their devices to synchronize, not only data, but workflow. Start a conversation on your iPad in FaceTime and finish it on your Mac laptop. Write a document on the laptop and edit it on the way to work on your iPhone. While some of this is certainly possible now, the new Mountain Lion OS further integrates the separate device experiences to make them seem like they fit together naturally.

It’s easy to see how Apple has upped the ante here for UX. In the coming war then, for a universal user experience, on one side we’ll likely have Google with its Android / Chrome OS, on another Windows / Windows Mobile, and, in the strategically enviable forward position, at least for the moment, of course Apple and OS X / iOS.

Freelance Nation
There’s no question that the combination of work anywhere technology and an unpredictable economy has contributed to an increase in the ranks of Freelance Nation. Time has an interesting piece heralding “The End of the Full Time Salaried Job” that details some of the current trends, while a related article in GigaOm cites a study by MBO Partners predicting 70 million independent workers in the next decade, which would amount to half of all employees. The Atlantic Monthly has called the surge in freelance workers, the “industrial revolution of our time”. The disruption of the time honored employer / employee relationship is here to stay. What happens next, though, is another question entirely. Whether a huge swath of independent workers can not just survive, but thrive over time, without the trappings that come with employment from a single entity — like health and retirement benefits and a steady flow of work — remains to be seen.

Seeding Boston Start Ups
The Boston start up scene got another boost as NextView Ventures inaugural fund recently closed with $21 million in its coffers. NextView Ventures is a seed stage venture capital fund, managed by partners David Beisel, Rob Go, and Lee Hower, that invests solely in internet businesses. A micro VC firm like NextView is right sized for Boston’s early stage companies and fits the needs of a city where start ups are in abundance, but angel funds can be hard to find.

Rethinking Money v. Happiness
A review of Laura Vanderkam’s new book, All the Money in the World: What the Happiest People Know About Getting and Spending, on Fast Company, highlights some of the new realities of work / life balance in a world that blurs the boundaries between the two. Technology has freed us from the cube farm, but it has also tethered us to the always on broadband connection. The economic instability of the past four years has shaken our belief in the steadiness of full-time employment, but has opened us up to the great possibilities of a work / life conceived and designed by ourselves. If you could work on any project, what would it be? As we rethink the assumptions we’ve made about how and why we work, we have a golden opportunity to align our daily grind with what fulfills us. Credit Fast Company for advancing the conversation.

Tagged android, apple, boston, Design, freelance nation, google, start ups, the internet of things, ui, user experience, UX, venture capital, windows

Here’s what we’re reading online, this week at Involution, on design, tech, and the digital life, in our links round up.

If You Make Sure You’re Kinected, the Xbox is on the Wall
Last week, Microsoft’s Kinect turned one year old, and the Redmond giant celebrated the “Kinect Effect” with a video highlighting future applications of the technology from healthcare to music to education.

Released in November 2010, and originally intended for use primarily in gaming and entertainment as part of the Xbox platform competition with Nintendo’s groundbreaking Wii, the Kinect’s advanced gesture, facial, and voice recognition features were soon hacked for a variety of purposes ranging from creating art to assisting the disabled.

Microsoft knows it has a good thing going and has accepted and even embraced the alternate uses of the Kinect. The Microsoft Kinect Effect Web site is chronicling new and inventive ways the technology is being implemented.

Playing Laptop Music
Audio production moved from analog tape systems to the convenience of digital long ago with the advent of ProTools software and other audio editing suites. For creating live music in a spontaneous and active way, however, the bits and bytes have always lagged a little. This isn’t to say that performers haven’t incorporated computer generated sounds and tracks into their live performances … far from it. But the computerized track has always lacked the instant, live, and personal feedback and flexibility that more traditional instruments are capable of.

Stutter Edit, an innovative piece of software designed by pioneering DJ and producer BT and built by Boston-based iZotope, aims to change all that. Stutter Edit takes live sample manipulation to another level, allowing performers to play effects like an instrument and remix in real time.

DJs and electronic musicians have pushed the envelope when it comes to defining musical instruments, the most obvious example being the turntable, which has evolved from a machine for audio playback to an expressive tool used with technique and artistry. Laptops and touch screen devices are the new frontier for digital music. Expect to see more software innovation on the way, if the BT and iZotope collaboration is any indication of what’s possible when musicians and tech get together.

Come Together, Right Now: Design is Integration
The concept of total system design is gaining traction in the business world. The idea that design can be an integrative method, bringing together engineering, business, and users, while a familiar meme to the UX and software communities is still a relatively fresh way to look at problem sets in the larger world of corporate thinking.

Design blog Thought You Should See This, provides a great summation of GE CMO Beth Comstock’s talk at the Design at Scale conference.

In the presentation, Comstock describes the company’s overall process and how design fits in. “At an engineering-focused company like GE, the tech teams and engineers rule. ‘They push the limits of science every day,’ she said. What they need, however, is the ability to pull all the various pieces and insights together and this, she averred, is a role for design.”

Designing the Supply Chain
One of the unheralded but critical business innovations at Apple over the past decade, is the company’s design, creation, and management of a highly optimized supply chain.

A revealing Bloomberg Businessweek article explains how Apple has effectively hamstrung competitors like HP and HTC year after year by locking down everything from air freight delivery to critical parts like touchscreens, months in advance. Gartner has rated Apple’s supply chain as the world’s best for four years in a row.

Apple’s business excellence and design focus apparently doesn’t just extend to its products, but to all of the systems that make up the company. Design thinking may be much maligned as a buzz word lacking substance, but here we can see where the active, creative problem solving for business systems has reaped substantial rewards.

Get Up and Get Fit
The evolution of body and skin top fitness devices took another step this month as mobile products company Jawbone released the Up wristband which works with an iPhone app to track everything from your sleep cycles to your physical activity.

Competing with the Fitbit clip on sensor and the BodyMedia FIT, the Jawbone Up seems to have at least one major advantage, it’s water resistant. So, you can wear it while you’re in the shower. Personally, I’d love to have one of these devices that I could wear while swimming. Maybe that will come in Jawbone Up version 2.

Tagged apple, digital music, innovation, microsoft, software, ui, UX