Best internet April Fools 2013

4 Replies Christopher Roberts

Monday (April the 1st) saw hundreds of high profile April Fools’ Day jokes hit the internet, but which were the top April Fools spoofs online?

7. Virgin

At number 7 this year, is Virgin Atlantic’s glass floor planes. On his blog, Richard Branson posted on how Virgin Atlantic Airlines (in which he owns a 51% stake) are planning on launching a glass-bottomed plane. Branson commented on how he was “thrilled to announce that Virgin has created another world-first with the introduction of the technology required to produce the world’s first glass-bottomed plane.”

Glass-bottomed planesVirgin Atlantic also posted the jape on its official blog, stating that thanks to private funding from Richard Branson, the technology had now been developed to give passengers the experience of a transparent floor.

The floor of a plane couldn’t really feasibly be made transparent though; the luggage and engine have to go somewhere!

6. Metro

One of the first articles I came across this April Fools’ Day was the Metro’s April Fools’ Day 2013 round-up. The Metro had taken screenshots of all the top April Fools this year, including Goolge’s, Facebook’s, YouTube’s, Tesco’s, The BBC’s and more.

I only realised when I got to the end of the post that they were all spoofs! The Metro’s April Fool was to Photoshop loads of fake April Fools. Tesco’s 3D food printer, YouTube’s $1,000,000 giveaway and the BBC’s story of how Curiosity rover had joined Twitter, were all very well designed, believable, and well worth a read!

5. The White House

As we the above pranks show, April Fools’ jokes aren’t just limited to a personal level, companies and the media like to play them too, but what about government? Well the US government tried to fool its Twitter followers this year, posting a ‘special video from the president’ – watch it below.

%CODETWEETWHITEHOUSE1%

4. Technology Bloggers

Okay, my post on Monday which informed readers how the Higgs boson has been found  wasn’t true. The Higgs is thought to hold the key (or at least part of it) to help us better understand the origins of the universe. I did also mention in the post how the particle could potentially make time travel viable, and also be the key to ultimate power, enabling us to use nuclear fusion as a power source.

Last month scientists thought they were closer than ever to identifying the Higgs particle, and this is true. However it is still yet to be proved to exist, and it might not be the miracle particle that I made out it could be. Most of my post was made up, as an April Fool – I hope nobody minded.

April Fools from Technology Bloggers! 🙂

3. Google

Google is becoming famous for its April Fools. This year they played several. The most high profile was probably Google Nose, which had the strapline “Smelling is believing.” This April Fool claimed that Google could bring uses the smell of things they were searching for, by “intersecting photons with infrasound waves” they can “temporarily align molecules” to make your screen smell like what you are searching for. Clever stuff – if it were real!

A treasure map of the world

The world, as viewed through Google Treasure Maps

The search giant also created a treasure map version of Google Maps. Google claimed it had found some old treasure maps which once belonged to an infamous pirate Captain Kidd, and it had scanned them and added them to its online mapping service.

Another April Fools joke that Google played was seen in the launch Gmail Blue. Gmail wasn’t blue enough, so they made it all blue, because blue is better! It doesn’t make any sense, but is very comedic – watch the video below for more.

%CODEYOUTUBEGMAILBLUE%

On Monday, when checking Technology Bloggers Analtyics, it turned out that we had 41 visitors from the International Space Station. I took a screenshot, this is no joke!

ISS traffic stats

We had 41 visitors from the International Space Station!

Okay, maybe it was a joke, yet another Google April Fool.

These are just a few of Google’s 2013 April Fools jokes.

2. Twitter

In third place is Twitter. Twitter’s fool was to trick users into believing that they would soon have to pay for vowels!

It was a half believable story that the social network published on its blog, and it did show innovative ways that people were trying to get around having to pay the five dollar a month fee so you can “use our premium “Twitter” service which also includes vowels” as opposed to having to use the free version: Twttr. Some people substituted o’s (owes) for 0’s (zeroes) whilst in an example in the blogpost, Joan Rivers used the partial/semi vowel ‘y’ to replace all vowels!

%CODETWEETJOANRIVERS1%

Personally I am not sure that twttr.com would ever really have taken off. Wh-t 1s thy p01nt 0f – Tw1ttyr w1th n0 v0wyls? 😉

1. YouTube

This year, I think that YouTube had the best April Fools’ joke. YouTube claimed, in a video post, that the website was no longer accepting submissions. That’s right, submissions, like entries. This is because the website was simply a massive competition; who could submit the best video?

YouTube logoThat’s right, the competition of YouTube is over, and over the next ten years, the winner will be decided, and on April the 1st 2023, the site will relaunch with just one video on it. The best video. The winner of YouTube’s 8 year video contents!

A pretty good April Fool, but that isn’t why it wins this year. The reason YouTube is number one, is because of the time and effort they put into their April Fool.

%CODEYOUTUBEAPRILFOOL2013%

The video above shows the initial video YouTube put out for the April Fool, but what many people never saw was the 12 hour live stream they did! That’s right, YouTube got two presenters to stand in front of a camera and read out video after video, videos which have been posted on the site and are ‘up for nomination’ to be the ‘winner’ of the YouTube contest. Click on this link to see the video, and check out this link to read more on the official YouTube blog.

Which was you favourite April Fools’ Day joke this year? Was it one you played, or had played on you? Do you think that smaller April Fools’ like putting salt in the sugar are no longer that significant, when companies like Google, (who own YouTube) Virgin and Twitter are playing jokes on millions – maybe billions?

Turning Human Waste into Plastic

2 Replies Jonny Hankins

One of the unsung heroes and villains of modern life is human waste, or poo as we like to call it. It is like death and taxes in that well known phrase about certainty, there is an awful lot of it around, and it is full or carbon.

A few years ago there was uproar when we discovered that farmers were using human waste to make their plants grow faster, a practice that like many of life’s more unsavoury issues has remained largely out of the public gaze for years. But what do we do with all of this waste? We can just pump it out into the sea, or dump it in landfill sites as is common in the USA, although these don’t really seem like great solutions to me. Good news is on the horizon though, a company in California has started to use it to make plastic, taking some out of the dumping category and making use of the carbon.

Admittedly we have the old gag reflex again. A plate of carrots grown with the aid of human waste to go with your minced beef with horse trace pie with a plastic bottle made out of human sewage full of fresh, crystal clear mountain water to wash it all down. But just think about the potential.

Waste Not.

Make Use of Human Waste

Plastic can be produced using human waste, bottles can be made from it, and it is biodegradable, so why not? This BBC video tells the story of an experimental bio-plastics lab called Micromidas, where this process is being experimented and researched, and where human waste is already being turned into plastic.

The process involves making a kind of nutrient soup from the waste to which bacteria is added. They produce something called PHA, a type of polyester. They feed on the waste and take up the carbon and turn it into this form of plastic. Then the plastic containing parts are separated and cleaned.

The material is then dried, the plastic extracted and made into pellets. It can then be used to make practically anything that we currently make using fossil fuel based plastic. There is after all no shortage of raw materials, so proponents hope to replace the old fossil fuel production with the new.

The process is very much in experimental stage, but the researchers hope to be able to produce on mass within the next 2 to 3 years, bringing the price down so that it can compete in a global market. Good for everyone, and the environment.

Just as a slightly less obnoxious adjunct I would like to add that Micromidas are also setting up a lab that is working on turning cardboard into Paraxylene, a chemical once more used to make plastic bottles, again in the hope of getting into and cutting out the fossil fuel market (usually Paraxylene comes from oil). Read this report about their work.

Zappix iPhone App Review

9 Replies Steve August

There are apps that do just about anything these days, including starting your car for you. And while you are waiting for your car to start up, why not make that annoying phone call to the cable company about your monthly bill? If you answered, “Because I don’t want to wait on hold forever,” Zappix could be your one app for your customer service needs. This app provides the user with a simple way to maneuvering through irritating automated customer service wait times.

The simplicity of this free app arises in the very beginning when the user signs into the app. After entering the straightforward information one can access a large number of major companies, non profits, and government agencies, with new ones to come all the time. So whether or not it is the cable company or the court house the user needs to call, Zappix has you covered. If the company the user is trying to get a hold of and is backed by Zappix then the appropriate menu appears for the user to significantly cut back on the wait time.

Companies list in Zappix

Zappix uses a visual means that even the not so savvy smart phone user would understand. You can connect it with all the popular social media such as Twitter and Facebook, which in the end connects you to the companies Twitter and Facebook pages; making it that much easier for you to get a hold of someone. A user can also find the customer support email, and write to the company if the issue calls for more than a minimum number of characters.

Everyone has those days where it seems that everything is happening at once. Bills need to be paid, kids need to be picked up, soccer practice and ballet lesions after dinner all come with one thing consumers want more of – time. With the direct links to mobile websites and information pages Zappix takes out the need to Google the information and jot down the phone numbers which the user then needs to find time call. And to make it that much quicker the app uses stores the “Recent” contacts and “favorites” the contacts that the user specifies.

Since there is nothing perfect in life, though this app may seem to the user like the closest thing, Zappix also has its downside. Because the app is so new the number of companies does have an ending point. Though more and more companies are being added to the list daily, some users find that not every company specific to their needs can be found by searching the company name.