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Souktel designs and delivers mobile phone software services that link young people with jobs and connect aid agencies with people who need help. They're almost ready to launch a new website and we're proud to be working on streamlining the user interface of that site to make it more accessible and engaging to potential Souktel customers and anyone interested in this innovative organization.

We really believe that Souktel is an excellent example of how SMS can provide very powerful means of communication through its simplicity. You can learn more about what they do in the video attached to this post.

I just came across a very interesting handset manufacturer by the name of Native Union - the firm is Hong Kong based and makes handsets with a combined audio jack, which can interface with USB, for mobile phone use. You can also use their handsets with a laptop and whats specifically of note is that they've worked with credible product designers (such as UK-born Michael Young and France's David Turpin) to improve the usability and styling of their handsets.

Currently marketing under the 'Moshi Moshi' brand ("Hello" in Japanese) they've obviously get sales targets on the Asian Market and are leveraging japano-kitsch to help sell their products. In addition to 3 current models of plug-in handsets, there is also a Moshi Moshi speakerphone which looks very interesting.

I've been a fan of Shopify for a while now - not just because they're fellow Canadians (based in Ottawa), but mainly due to their excellent hosted-ecommerce service. We're proponents of building context-sensitive web spaces however, often budgets can't afford us building clients a full-blown custom shopping system - that's when I'm proud to recommend using Shopify - they make setting up shop easy and offer extensibility through APIs and the ability to custom-theme a hosted store (using their easy in-house template language called Liquid).

Teaming up with published entrepreneur Tim Ferriss (he wrote a popular book called the 4 Hour Workweek), Shopify just announced winners to an amazing contest they cooked up - the idea was simple; a $100,000 top prize would be awarded to whomever did the two highest consecutive months of sales through a new Shopify store, with their help, in a 3 - 6 month period. Now, its tough to tell how effective the goal of winning prizes was to the thousands of Shopify customers who entered the contest but its interesting to look at the winner of the Grand Prize; a San Francisco-based iPad accessory maker called Dodocase.

As the New York Times reported yesterday, Dodocase was founded by two chaps (one of which is a Y-combinator alumnus) who saw a need for related products to sell alongside Apple's iPad. Patrick Buckley began designing a classic case for the iPad which, in my opinion, has been styled to mimic the internationally renowned Moleskin notebook. Taking his prototype to local book-binders, the firm was launched and began taking orders through their Shopify-powered e-store, receiving 10,000 orders for their cases in just a few months after their launch.

Now, $100,000 of gifted investment can help any start-up but its interesting to see that at $60ish per unit, Dodocase has been highly profitable straight out of the gate. Patrick Buckley and Craig Dalton may have created their product without the incentive of winning this competition but I think its safe to assume that once they saw their product sales coming in, their goal may not have just been to win the Grand Prize. Sometimes such a carrot can take an entrepreneur's mind off of profit goals beyond a short term period; which has apparently aided the success of 500 such Shopify stores launched during the competition - who all realized some financial sustainability by its end.

I've above-attached an info-graphic with some interesting numbers Shopify derived from the competition and will keep an eye out for comparisons between regular Shopify store sales stats.

The new set of backgrounds on our site comes thanks to Tanakawho - an excellent photographer in Tokyo who has gained some fame on Flickr thanks to her keen eye for capturing innate sentiment in objects whilst maintaining a natural sense of balance. She works mainly with point-and-shoot cameras and produces some of our most favorite photos on the web.

The images load in random rotation throughout the site and are also available as a pop-up gallery by clicking on the above thumbnails.

This video got cut and released a little while back to announce our friends at JUMA's Spring-Summer 2010 collection's launch. Inspired by our May 2010 Studio Series podcast episode, JUMA chose to soundtrack the video with Neon Indian's excellent 'Summer Heat.'

I really enjoy how rough the video is - right from the over-exposed footage to the use of pause-motion overlays and quick scene-cuts.

For a long time it seems newspapers have been crying out for the blood of pseudo-journalists who use the web to publish rapidly, and often case, without adequate research, grammatical acumen and so on. This is why it was so bloody refreshing to have just came across something which exemplifies the need for Newspapers to maintain their relevance in the 21st century through innovation and the welcoming embrace of technology.

The Guardian newspaper has initiated an 'Open Platform.' The embedded slideshow in this post will lead you through it but basically, they've created Application Programming Interfaces (or APIs) to their wealth of content online! This means that the public can create web tools and spaces that feature content from the Guardian online - using that content as their main crowd-draw, more easily than ever before. A fantastic example of the platform in use is a site called 'What could I cook?' - it pulls in recipes from the Guardian, displaying them alongside other/local content with the cited author being the Guardian.

The ramifications of this embrace of technology are huge; should enough sites use the platform, the Guardian, by way of its leveraged content base, will become an essential source for other people's business models and communities online. Whether a direct business model is forthcoming through this approach remains to be seen but for now, I think its a clever gambit for an age-old business to maintain relevance in today's technocratic society.

Though apps released through Google's Marketplace for Android mobile devices may not be as numerous or jazzy as Apple's bevvy of micro software developed for iPods/Pads/Phones, something's just happened to make it incredibly accessible to anyone with a creative idea for an app.

Announced recently, the Google App Inventor for Android is a very simple interface to allow virtually anyone (it was created with school children as initial testers) to create an Android App. Using a simple graphical lego-like drag'n'drop program, you can now create your own apps in seconds - just like this video shows.

*On a related note, I've been doing a lot of research lately into new hardware devices sporting the Android Operating System which will challenge the iPad's market-share and attractiveness. My findings will be posted here later this week and I'll try to explain then why the App Inventor may play a large role in self-promoting adoption of Android to consumer electronics users.

This is the 5th film in our series featuring interviews and events with people we're interested in.

This discussion features:

- Rahaf Harfoush (@rahafharfoush)
- Qasim Virjee (@qasim)
- Jaime Woo (@jaimewoo)
- Lee Dale (@smack416)
- Behrouz Hariri (@behrouz_hariri)
- Matthew Burpee (@matthewburpee)

There's something so exciting about returning from the printer's with a fresh stack of new business cards!

With being in the new studio (2 months ago Design Guru moved across the road from our old space at the Centre for Social Innovation - more on that soon), and recently choosing 'the right' typeface for our word-mark (Florencesans), its really fulfilling to see this physical representation of our updated identity.

The motif of 'loose leaf paper' imbues freshness and innovation in this new card design and is printed on fairly lightweight 14pt white stock.

Last month saw me travel to three cities which had Apple stores; I was with my brother who was visiting from Kenya at the time and we found ourselves visiting the stores in NYC's Soho Area, a shopping arcade in Las Vegas and finally at West Edmonton Mall in well, Edmontown Alberta, whilst he considered buying (and then bought) an iPod Touch and Macbook Pro.

When I’ve watched people in each Apple store pick up an iPad for the first time, its obvious that they aren’t sure what to do with it. I found this really curious (it was my first reaction when I played with one a couple months ago) because they don’t even jump straight into Safari and check their gmail, like on the conventional computer setups in Apple stores. Instead, they immediately seem satisfied to play around with hand gestures to seemingly first feel confident in being able to use the iPad – which is noteworthy because I think its become such a desired object that most folks who’ve considered buying one felt obligated to make the purchase rather than urged by some sense of necessity.

The iPad is certainly cool and has a ton of uses, though they all seem ancillary to other devices which do more, albeit in perhaps a less easily-tactile way. I've felt compelled on whimsy to purchase one yet confused by a feeling of guilt driven by the non-necessity of having the device for a specific function in my life (which isn't currently fulfilled by my touchscreen phone, laptop(s) and so on). Of course, there must be a correlation here between my needing to justify buying one and their price - a $600+ read-blogs-on-the-toilet-device certainly seems extravagant!

I asked some friends and colleagues what they've been using their iPads for - here are some responses:

Reading! Kobo, Kindle, Instapaper and Safari are by far my most used apps.
- @flashlight

It's my weekend device - laptop pretty much stays at office
- @mkuplens

Google Reader, comics, ebooks, video, IM. Experience is better than doing any of these on a laptop or phone.
- @joncrowley

Reading the news on the couch.
- @matt416

Breakfast/lunch/dinner table computer.
- @adamschwabe