Happy New Year, folks. 2012 came to visit, I'd use this opportunity to talk about the new startup I'm working on - It's called Spiralcake.

For the last couple of years, I was always trying to start a real new startup doing mobile app development. Last month I left my previous job, working on an iPhone app project at home. I once talked to a friend of mine who is a freelance graphic designer about the plan and asked him to be my partner, working together and start a mobile development company with me. He said "Let's do it!" and then we started figuring out a company name while eating spiral cakes. And that's it, that's the story of how Spiralcake was founded.

So what is Spiralcake? Spiralcake is a mobile development lab in Shanghai that focused on creating enjoyable apps and games. The founding team is made up of a couple friends and I in December 2011. I'm very excited to be working on new startup with these talented guys. Right now the office is setting up, website is live. So next steps, our goal is to make a parkour game for iOS. Because we are all very passionate about iOS platform games. In the next few months, we'll be very busy developing the app and we believe it's going to be a lot of fun. Hope you'll love our apps as much as we enjoy creating them. Stay tuned by following Spiralcake on twitter @spiralcakeapps. 

To learn about future Spiralcake products, sign up at http://www.spiralcake.com. 

Our new adventure has begun.

Wow, 2011 was so unbelievable. Here is my 2012 New Year's resolutions:

1. Walk more.
2. Dink more water.
3. Traval internationally.
4. Make an iOS game with Spiralcake team.
5. Maditate at least once a week.
6. Keep vegetarian.
7. Read one book per month.
8. Level up cooking skills.
9. Take more pictures.
10. Go to bed earlier.

Happy 2012 all!

Words cannot describe how much you inspired us to be better in life. Thank you for teaching me to think different.

Some of my favorite quotes by Steve Jobs:

Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma – which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of other’s opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.

Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work, and the only way to do great work is to love what you do.

You can’t connect the dots looking forward, you can only connect them looking backwards, so you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. As with all matters of the heart, you'll know when you find it, and like any great relationship it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking. Don't settle.

Almost everything – all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure – these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.

Stay hungry, stay foolish.

Rest in peace, Steve. (1955 - Forever)

This visualisation of the song “Definitive Daft Punk” by Cameron Adams aka The Man in Blue dissects a mashup in realtime to show you how each of the 23 parts contributes to the greater whole. The Definitive Daft Punk visualised combines a circular waveform of each of the songs concurrently being played with an audio map timeline at the bottom showing each song color-coded. Also, the entire piece is composed from the latest HTML5 and CSS3 technology. Awesome stuff.

In order to explain the layering and interplay that goes into something like a Girl Talk album or The 139 Mix Tape I decided to take my own mashup of Daft Punk's discography – Definitive Daft Punk – and reveal its entire structure: the cutting, layering, levels and equalisation of 23 different songs. By dividing up the sound data for each song and computing its appearance in realtime, the resulting visualisation gives you an understanding of the unique anatomy of this particular mashup.

The entire piece is composed from the latest HTML5 and CSS3 technology (canvas, audio, transforms & transitions) so you'll need a newer browser to view it in. I recommend Chrome because it pulls off the best performance with my mangled code. All of the waveform and spectrum visualisation is performed in realtime, so your browser is rendering a music video on the fly!

Hopefully it gives you a new insight into the artform of the mashup, otherwise you can just stare at the pretty shapes.

See "Definitive Daft Punk" visualised in realtime. (Chrome is recommended by the author)

Here are some funny designs by Minga, a terrific creative studio from Argentina. These minimalist illustrations can very easy explain us the true meaning of "WTF?". It's amazing how creativity can be sparked just by a little idea.

More WTF?