Kyle Cai

The first annual  Kids at Play Interactive (KAPi) Awards held at International CES this year judged from a pool of 500 contenders.

The 2010 winners are:

1. Best Children’s App – Wheels on the Bus from Duck Duck Moose Design for tapping the potential of multi-touch for children. See the full review.
2. Best Interactive Toy – Tag Reading System from LeapFrog Learning for using technology to help children decode print. See full review.
3. Best Children’s Web Site or Service – Deep Brain Stimulation from Edheads for empowering children with a powerful, realistic simulation.
4. Best Music and Rhythm Product – The Beatles Rock Band from Harmonix Music Systems, Inc. for setting a new standard in the rhythm-game genre, and helping to bridge the generation gap.
5. Best Computer Software – World of Goo by 2D Boy and Brighter Minds Media for playfully introducing powerful scientific building concepts in a puzzle setting. See thereview.
6. Best Title for the Nintendo DS or DSi – Professor Layton and the Diabolical Box by Level-5, Inc. and published by Nintendo for offering children a quality problem solving experience.
7. Best Hardware or Peripheral Device for Kids – iPod Touch (2009 Edition) from Applefor giving children access to thousands of affordable multi-touch experiences.
8. Best Informal Learning Experience – SCRATCH v. 1.4 from the MIT Media Lab for effective use of public grant money to create a product that anyone can use at no cost.
9. Best Video Game for Kids – LittleBigPlanet: Game of the Year Edition from Sony Computer Entertainment America Inc. for playfully transforming a game console into a powerful creativity tool.
10. Best Virtual World – Club Penguin by New Horizon Interactive for the Disney Interactive Media Group for continuing to innovate with new features and translation features.
11. Digital Pioneer for Kids – Mitchel Resnick from the Lifelong Learning Group at the MIT Media Lab for leading the team that created the SCRATCH programming language, recognized as the individual that has made the largest impact on children’s technology design.

The Google I/O Conference 2010 this year is pretty amazing, full of surprises, promising work that Google has put forward, and most of all, the constant teasing about Apple:) The biggest highlights I’d say from this 2-day conference are:

Chrome Web Store

Addressing the challenge of the internet with full of random good and bad web applications. Chrome Web Store is a natural fit for their long-term strategy on Chrome and ChromeOS with 70M chrome users today and at a steady growth, a marketplace for web apps live in the Chrome browser with a demonstrated app-store business model is almost a guarantee for Google.

HTML5 & VP8

The love of HTML5 at Google continues with announcing open web media format VP8 partner with WebM. And this time, rather than targeting all proprietary IP leaders, they had Adobe allied presenting their level of supports for HTML5 and open media including the Dreamweaver HTML5 extension and  VP8 codec in the Flash Player.

Google App Engine for Business

The Google App Engine with improved features now offers enterprise customers a scalable infrastructure for hosting their own web apps. This would become a major competitor for could services like Amazon EC2.

Wave

The return of Google Wave and now publicly available without invitation clearly tells us it wasn’t one of their usual successful breaking products at launch. Let’s see how mature it is this time on Wave providing a collaborative working environment.

Android 2.2

Android 2.2. Codenamed Froyo, has presented a lot of additional features, improvements and a 2-5 times performance boost from last build. I particularly like the internet tethering and cloud synchronization on the fly. Android marketplace is looking promising too with over 50,000 apps. When Vic Gondotra, VP Engineering of Google, demos flash on Andriod, says “Turns out people on the Internet use Flash.” is a hilarious joke, he nails the audience.

Google TV

OK, this is big news, TV meets web, Web mees TV:

Google TV is a new experience for television that combines the TV that you already know with the freedom and power of the Internet.

It simply makes sense for Google to do so, I am particularly excited about getting rid of my silent PC in the living room for the single purpose of watching shows online.

Google has indeed being the most innovative internet and software technology company constantly providing the best services and innovations to the consumers. What I really like to see from Google is for them to have some of the best industrial designers. It seems Google has done everything right about the software and providing every possible solutions for the industry partners to utilize themselves at their own wills, but forget to provide standards not only about their software but also about the best and constant usability and user experience from consumer perspective. By then,  Google will be done with their catch-up game, I will have no doubts about Google being able to address the one man behind 1984 problem.

A neat Lego Presentation from 2009 Google I/O Conference, particularly loved when they could have taken into legal actions to take down those hackers for the Lego proprietary kits but instead they led them grow into passionate community. Apple, learn it!

Harvard Business Review has recently posted a series of discussions on how leadership might look in the future.

The best leaders:

• Are friends with their subordinates but make decisions on their own
• Compete with their own direct reports and make sure they are better than others
• Speak honestly, but take into account others’ status
• Use indirect language and metaphors rather than get straight to the point
• Avoid taking risks

Now, with the economic centre shifting rapidly eastward, many multi-national companies require their leaders equipped with global midset and cross culture savvy.

Having Global Mindset requires:

Intellectual capital: Global business savvy, cognitive complexity, cosmopolitan outlook
Psychological capital: Passion for diversity, quest for adventure, self-assurance
Social capital: Intercultural empathy, interpersonal impact, diplomacy