As you can see – the buffets occupy a big part of the fair. There are two more just like the one in the picture on the other side of the room. And while you’re enjoying your Italian asparagus you are very likely to find yourself in a conversation about the differences between slot dies and spin coats, or the advantages of nano bio technologies. This blog post is not about this.

Paper electronics applications

Rainbow Waters is one of the companies worth keeping an eye on. They integrate technology with clothing design to create stuff like this:

A sound responsive dress they designed for Made in Future festival in Milan. The louder the music, the more animated the visuals.

Same concept, different design. Here is a Picasso explosion dress
Low Volume

High Volume

A water and sun reactive dress
In the presence of sun, the flowers in the dress turn purple.

Magnum Cute Circuit. A dress connected to Twitter. Tweet pink or black and the dress changes colour.

This is a dress displayed at the fair. It recognises when someone gets closer and changes the visuals.

Novalia

Chris Jones from Novalia was there as well. We visited his studio in Cambridge some months ago was interesting to see what kept him busy lately. Unlike most companies at the fair, Novalia succeeds in bringing some design into paper technologies and create final applications themselves.

This is a poster connected via Bluetooth to an IPhone. Touch the poster and you’ll hear the drum beats on your phone.

The Energy Pet – is a poster that reflects the energy usage in a building. The electro chromic ink allows the poster to change colour when people use less energy – showing some fruits and leaves growing.

They’ve just finished a dev kit consisting of a printed capacitive touch, Bluetooth and an IPhone app. You can assemble it yourself and add your own graphics on top. Those black buttons can do whatever you want – from sending a tweet, to playing a tune on Spotify to activating your camera.

Which kind of reminds me of Makey Makey – a plug and play device created by two guys from MIT Media Lab – that turns any object into a playable’ key’.

You’ll find loads of examples online of people playing shark games online with fish ball controllers or using Star Wars figurines as music controllers.

This is a bus shelter prototype from Fraunhofer Visual Computing
The pavement detects the bus arriving and this triggers a change in the bus shelter visuals. Everything is powered by solar panels.

University of Heidelberg
is working on a disposable silicon patch that would replace the classic pulse oximentry devices. Imagine a transparent patch that you place on your skin and the colour change indicates the health of your body. They’re developing different types of patches that would work for different organs.

gastro4you is a device for restaurants that helps you order or pay a bill faster. You touch one of the icons and the waiter knows straight aways what you want. And since it doesn’t require any batteries – it would be really interesting to know what a furniture designer would make of it.

Paper electronics is a great niche for designers. The technology is already very advanced – the paper gets thinner and thinner while holding more complex technology inside. The materials bend and stretch more. Also the printers get bigger so now you can potentially print huge wallpapers or outdoor – where every inch of it can react to light, wind, temperature, touch, movement, etc.
But the applications are still far from making the best of what is out there. I’m curious to see what paper electronics will bring to the next 50 years of design – whether it’s fashion, architecture or medicine. Imagine buildings that constantly respond to the way we live, clothes that reflect the way we feel, or even our skin informing us on the health of our organs.

If you need anyone to guide you through the paper electronics world – there’s a new magazine that can make it easier for you.

I was at the Centro Cultural Peruano Norteamericano, #PixelHack 2013.

I immediately smelt the enthusiasm and the positive attitude behind the 12 showcased works.

And that’s how my journey into the Peruvian digital world started.

In the past few years, artists, hackers and other professionals have got their heads down, with a problem-solving attitude, on the local cultural issues, developing a system of efficiency and independent initiatives.
While traveling through the Peruvian cities of Lima and Arequipa, my Italian and basic knowledge of some Spanish let me get around pretty well but, when I entered most remote areas, I encountered some difficulties communicating with locals who were speaking a language completely obscure to my ears.
With some Google’s research and a bit of “bar talking” I discovered that in Peru over 40 languages are spoken: while Spanish has become official with the colonization, Quechua and Aymara are still largely used in the central Andes area and many others are talked in the northern Amazonian region.

Can you imagine how this could affect the education system?

In a country characterised by its geographic morphology with the Andes, lacking in transportation, with kids walking over 5 km a day or hitchhiking to get to school, or even busy on helping their parents to work the land, the huge variety of languages becomes an additional barrier for a cultural development process.
Having seen these scenarios with my own eyes, I developed a spontaneous curiosity towards the projects linking linguistic issues and open source software.

That’s how I get to know Angela Delgado Valdivia, Directora de Cultura at the Peruvian North American Cultural Centre, and Kiko Mayorga, founder of EscueLab.

Finding simple solutions for complex problems is one of the main objectives for EscueLab, a not for profit organisation based in Lima that uses technology for the development of intellectual and creative freedom and has been built on the motto “No hay cultura sin cambio y no hay cambio sin experimento” / “There is no culture without change and no change without experiment”.

AMTAWI DIGITAL

“Amtawi” in Aymara means “Agreement” or “Memory”. “Amtawi Digital” was a documentary photography workshop / experimental study in Lacachi, Puno in April 2011.
A Lacachi primary school serves a group of 44 children who have had computers since 2008 through the OLPC One Laptop Per Child program.
OLPC have an integrated camera and this has been used as a tool for digital participation on native culture.
OLPC laptops run open source software that can be programmed according to the language spoken in the area. There are blue case laptops and green case laptops hosting different programs according to the child’s school level.

more infos on OLPC here.

RUNASIMIPI

Quechua is a language spoken in the most traditional and rural areas.
Young people who move from the countryside to the city discredit their indigenous language, considering it antique and useless in today’s modern life.
With this kind of introduction it’s hard to believe that this language could be linked with the future, but a team of experts worked night and day to change this perception, creating Runasimipi/Quechua software to translate over 1541 sentences.
The icon is a rip off of the famous Linux icon – now the Penguin wears a Peruvian hat and holds the famous bag containing coca leaf (which men share with each other as a sign of respect, when meeting in the countryside or in some remote islands).
There’s also a version of Word called Abiword, similar to the famous one, with the difference being that it can be copied and modified without being charged.

More infos here: http://runasimipi.org

TORTUGARTE QUECHUA

Educational software for primary school used to teach art, math and geometry and recently translated in Quechua. It lets kids in rural areas have the same level of knowledge as the kids living in the city.

ABLAMOS QUECHUA

Ablamos Quechua (Let’s Speak Quechua) It’s a project described by its creators as a “techno-socio-cultural experiment to re-establish connections”
A twitter account called @hablemosquechua, generates Quechua sentences, starting spontaneous conversations online and teaching this language to the community of followers.

It’s interesting to see how digital and its versatility used with a problem solving attitude can link past and future, the rural area with the metropolis and even overcome the stigma kids hold of their indigenous origin.
Ah! and alongside all of this, even gave some freshness and shadow to a tourist who enjoys getting lost in a new city.

The panel all love social media – being early adopters of digital, their careers have all obviously benefitted from this endorsement of social. More importantly, the value that social media has brought to the businesses and brands they work on has been invaluable.

The biggest value of social for the panel was the closeness it brought to the consumer – it is now easier than ever for a consumer not only to have a voice, but to contribute to the way the business is run.

It can be all to easy to dismiss consumer complaints as trolling, but Lindsay had an interesting example early on in the launch of ASOS in the US. A man was bombarding the Facebook page with negative posts – and when Lindsay got directly in touch with him, she found that he was living in Manhattan and working for a big, creative global brand. He had a complaint about his delivery – and then wasn’t happy with the way he was handled afterwards. Once Lindsay and ASOS listened, and addressed his problems, it meant that he stopped posting all over the ASOS Facebook page, but more importantly, stopped his complaints to what would have been an influential group of friends and colleagues in New York. This is important, as his presence on social meant that ASOS could fix the consumer’s problem – but also helped ASOS to manage their perception and reputation to a group of early adopters of ASOS.

It shows how important and valuable social is – even when it means having negative feedback on something you’ve worked hard on, from someone you don’t know – and without the politeness filter the internet and a keyboard can often remove. ASOS could learn from the man’s issues, and improve their business as a consequence.

In 2013, there are so many different touchpoints the consumer can have at any one point – and if they can purchase something from your online store at 3am in the morning, surely they should be able to contact someone at the other end of Twitter or Facebook. There is a growing need to shift our customer relations to 24/7 availability.

The panel suggested that rather than a “love-hate” relationship with social media, businesses can have a “love-fear” relationship instead. Social can be a daunting task, with multiple channels – and a consumer complaint can quickly get out of hand if it isn’t dealt with quickly and effectively. The panel had interesting ways of dealing with this – Nancy gets a text every time someone tweets, so she is able to reply straight away. For Nancy, there is no longer the divide between “in real life” and on the internet – she is always behind a keyboard – just different ones at different points of the day.

It was also interesting to hear Nancy expand a little more on monitoring social – when to moderate, and when not to. With Handbag.com, she found that their best moderators were the community themselves. They were so loyal to Handbag, that they were the best judge of when someone was inappropriate – and when someone was controversial, but shouldn’t be censored. Again, it was this idea of “love-fear” relationship – social media is always valuable, but can be ridiculously daunting for the person behind it – and actually, trusting the community worked really well for Handbag.com.

Another point all the panel agreed on was how important it is for the highest up in the business to be interested in social media, and fully appreciate the value it brings to their business – it can’t be something just left to junior team members. Burberry was used as one example – both the CEO and Christopher Bailey went to to Silicon Valley to visit Facebook, Google, Twitter etc, and they were determined to become the best case studies of using these platforms.

Similarly, Lindsay talked about how the ASOS CEO would go onto the street outside the office and talk to their target audience on the street. Social is a way to be monitoring this conversation at all times – and if the CEO is constantly on top of what is being said about their company, the rest of their team are going to follow suit.

I’ve also heard something similar about the CEO of O2 – he looks through Twitter in the evening, sometimes contacting people talking about O2 himself. With the failure of the O2 mast last year, the panel also talked about the success of O2′s social after this event. For the first few hours, O2 was replying to complaints with a standard line from their press release – and consumers were getting more irate. And then suddenly, they started replying to people in a fun and interesting way. The account became humanised, and people actually enjoyed having a conversation with the network who they’d been complaining about in the first place. The most important thing with this was the trust that had been given to the people running the account – they were able to do their job well, without being scared of moving away from corporate speech.

The panel also talked about data, and how much knowledge about consumer habits businesses can get from this. Businesses could have the ability to know the exact conditions that someone is more likely to buy something, and position themselves to take advantage of this effectively. Lindsay had a particularly interesting insight – when the BBC was recently doing a review of broadcasters worldwide, they found that no one has really started to use data as a tool for content generation. The networks still rely on the writers. I can imagine this is something that will divide our agency – when creativity is so core to our way of working, trying to measure or rely on data to generate creativity seems like a scary prospect. But then, I’d be interested to see what sort of things HBO, or the BBC would produce by using data from millions of people to generate the content.

In the panel discussion, there were a few ways that would be good to see working better with social media. It would be great to be able to get a more connected user journey that linked Facebook, Google, websites browsed: more effective, comprehensive and universal measuring tools. There was also a discussion about  linking social more directly to ROI – people can both interact with a brand, and buy their product with a couple of clicks. I’ll be interested to see how e-commerce gets more integrated with social media over the coming years. Of course, mobile was also talked about – this year, 30% of all shopping on Boxing Day was done through mobile – and this number is only going to continue to go up.

The panel were all immensely passionate about social media, and couldn’t say one thing they hated about it. Social media can sometimes be difficult, as it brings you closer than ever to a demanding consumer. However, ultimately, the consumer is the one interacting with your brand or business – and actually if you listen to them, they can help you improve and bring a lot more value to your business. Social media is here to stay, and at its most effective if it is loved from the very top of the business.

I saw a conker on the street that was the perfect shape of E.T’s head. I drew E.T on the conker, sent it in the post along with a link to my website and now i’m a Junior Creative here at Lean Mean.

Earlier this week I got published in a book called New Graphic Design: The 100 Best Contemporary Graphic Designers, and the ET conker made it into the book.

“This ad hit all the right buttons: it was fast-paced and exciting. I did at some point have a couple of heart palpitations but, thankfully, the antibiotics in the processed meat hidden inside the crust of my pizza calmed me down.”

Reebok: Gerald Lind, 42, drug-dealer, High Wycombe: “In ’83, I used to hide skunk in my Reebok Classics. But, back then, any running we did wasn’t to some nightclub in Heaven, like in this ad, it was into a friend’s Mini Metro to skin up and listen to Haircut One Hundred.

“I doubt anyone who made this ad was alive in ’83. If they had been, they’d know that street kids were nowhere near as fit as they’re portrayed here. Most of the ones I knew had a 20-a-day Curly Wurly habit – and that’s on top of all the dope! But I suppose that’s advertising: the past ain’t what it used to be. Which reminds me: my old teacher had an orthopaedic shoe. We used to say she was wearing Reeblocks. I still think that’s the most memorable thing I’ve heard about Reebok.”

Vision Express: Tom Longly, 45, unemployed: “They say never hit a man in glasses. But this didn’t stop my ex-wife. Or her son. But I feel better for seeing this ad. I liked the music and I shouted out when I spotted that famous cook – I would have liked a bit more of him.

“The other day, I was on my bike listening to Anthony Robbins’ Personal Power and I ran into the back of a parked car. I hit the floor and, as I patted the ground for my glasses, a shout echoed through my ears: ‘Should have gone to Specsavers, mate. HA HA HA HA.’ I held up what was left of my glasses and saw that it was a police car leaving me in its dust. I don’t think this Vision Express ad will penetrate the social consciousness to such a degree.”

Virgin Trains: Lisa Lovenut, 16.75, head of Digital Acceleration and Integrated Inspiration 3.0: “Here we see the new appropriating the old, but not being as inspirational or integrated as the old. We need to ask: should we be advertising at all? Or should we be making things worth advertising?

“Let’s forget for a moment that the trains are the product and need advertising and, instead, bring some Nike+ to the situation. Regardless of the problem, what product doesn’t earn advocacy via creating another product?

“Content drives brand advocacy – are we getting any of this with a poster? Will anyone having to stand on a train even see this? But I bet we could hit them with an app! We should really look into what we can do with Friends Reunited and build some ideation buzz here. Maybe crowdsource something. Then add some storytelling. These ads do look nice, though.”

The Sunday Times: Michael Meadows, 28, care worker: “I don’t read The Times and I don’t really like fashion. But that image of Kate Moss as the Queen – well, I’ve always said, when pushed, that I’d shag the Queen. What man wouldn’t? It’s the Queen! So this poster is every man’s fantasy in one image. All it needs is Mirren’s tits.”

His research moves around simple solutions and complex behaviour using industrial materials like wires, plastic bags, small motors and screws, displayed in an obsessive way, generating platform of sound.

Zimoun explores and investigates sound giving at it a physical shape, sculpting the audio as an artist does with marble.

Zimoun : Compilation Video V3.0 | Sound Sculptures & Installations, Sound Architectures from STUDIO ZIMOUN on Vimeo.

Zimoun : Compilation Video V3.0 | Sound Sculptures & Installations, Sound Architectures from STUDIO ZIMOUN on Vimeo.

One of his project has an organic feeling and sound: he amplified with a microphone the sound of woodworms eating a piece of wood.

Zimoun : Compilation Video V3.0 | Sound Sculptures & Installations, Sound Architectures from STUDIO ZIMOUN on Vimeo.

Facebook have announced the ‘Facebook phone’ – or rather a set of apps, called Home, which can be downloaded on to Android phones to put the social network at the very heart of your device. It launches on 12 April, alongside an HTC phone which will come with Home as standard. http://ow.ly/jLKxc

Custom audiences allow Facebook marketers to enter data collected offline about their target markets from various CMS systems– be it phone numbers, addresses or Facebook user IDs – as the target for their ads on the network.  Facebook then match up the data with their user database, ensuring that ads are accessible to a wider range of marketers, regardless of their prowess on Facebook.  It’s expanded and more open to third parties than ever. http://ow.ly/jLLpe

If Home wasn’t enough, you can also make video calls through the Facebook Messenger app over WiFi. It’s a completely free app downloaded from iTunes, and just requires your call buddy to have Messenger open somewhere on their device. http://ow.ly/jLLVi

Google Keep has officially launched, providing an integrated note-taking function into the Googlesphere (i.e. Drive). It works in a similar way to Evernote, syncing as you jot things down. http://ow.ly/jLMfD

Twitter have taken their Cards feature to the next level, allowing app developers to bring their product to their audience directly deep-linked within the tweet. It could be a moneymaker in the future, if the app makers are charged for clicks gained from their tweets. http://ow.ly/jLMGC

Arguably something all of Ad Land should apply to, Camp Grounded is a summer camp for technology-fatigued adults who want to take four days off from the digital world and get back to basics with nature. Activities include archery, yoga and marshmallow roasting. http://ow.ly/jLOUf

As it is announced that libraries will be archjving the web, the British Library have curated a list of their top 100 websites. It’s a fascinating mix that pits giants like eBay and Amazon against more niche gems like Shit London and The Dracula Society. http://ow.ly/jLN84

Louboutin have enhanced their social offering specifically for their ecommerce launch in China – they’re now on Weibo, Tudou and Youku. http://ow.ly/jLPpQ

Are you a part of The Fox Problem? It’s the first ‘TV’ series to be streamed out of a Google Hangout. Tune in on Tuesdays from 7.30pm. http://ow.ly/jLPBu

If you ever smashed an iPhone, this one’s for you. Your device may learn to shift its mass mid-fall, saving its soul from shattering. http://ow.ly/jLQ4K

This one will be a considerable definition to help you classify a game, but what Space of Play, a Berlin based game studio creates for different console game platforms, challenges every time this definition.

PROTEUS

Proteus is a meditative game, about exploration and listening. There’s no action, no monster to kill or princess to save, but as one of the Space of Play founder said at Resonate Festival, Proteus manage to gets you engage for at least 45 minutes.
Play with Proteus feels like walking on a musical piece, you are not going from A to B but you are hearing where you are going.

Could it be called a game?
Yes, because you are an avatar, you have a starting and ending point and you constantly adjust yourself based on what you have listened or discovered, realizing about the structure behind.

B.U.T.T.O.N.S

Buttons is a physical game, where 4 players challenge each other on taking control of the consol.
The game starts with simple actions like
1 put down the controller,
2 take 5 steps back
3 do something stupid like “the first player who pushes 30 times the button wins”

Could it be called a game?
Again, yes because even if the system doesn’t track the players they adjust and control each other becoming the system. The players create the structure behind the game that control if rules are respected.

THE STANLEY PARABLE

It’s an experimental first person narrative game that explores the concept of obedience, free will and decision.
When we play games we don’t question the mission: we accept rules like “kill the monster to save the princess” or “jump to earn money and jump higher to earn more money’.
In the Stanley Parable something different happens: player don’t accept the mission and don’t obey.

How? – The narrator voice tells you what you are going to do before you actually do it. Playing on the illusion of having a choice put the player in the position of breaking from the narrator will finding his own paths in the story. The funny thing is that actually there’s not a different path.

Could it be called a game?
Once again, yes, because the player continuously adjusts himself and takes decision.
The game becomes the area where the player moves while challenging the concept of existence of the game on it self.

Nappa’s Game Talk: The Stanley Parable from ThePutzCast on Vimeo.

The work of and especially this last example of interactive storytelling moves the question from “What’s a game?” “how can technology help us understand human behaviour?”.
Isn’t the Stanley Parable a modern tool for a psychological essay on behaviour and control of a behaviour.

Remembering the “Milgram experiment” (where one of the element that Milgram found was that there is more obedience with proximity) will be interesting to see how a virtual-social presence can influence the final result.

Science and Art were far from being best mates 50 years ago. Take a look at this picture (from Casey Reas lecture) and you won’t find it hard to spot the artists VS the Microsoft scientists.

In the last years the boundaries between science art and technology got more and more blurred and as a result we find projects that combine biology with design, behavioral studies and machines, or physical objects that integrate technology in an invisible way. All these projects aim is to create new forms of interaction and challenge the way we live and play.

Resonate is a 3 day festival – now in its second edition happening in Belgrade, Serbia.

This year’s speakers include: Casey Reas, Joachim Sauter (ART+COM), Zimoun, Moritz Stefaner, Zach Gage, Golan Levin, Raquel Meyers, Anthony Dunne (RCA), Revital Cohen, Karsten Schmidt, Spaces of Play, Memo Akten (MarshmallowLaserFeast), Andreas Müller (Nanikawa), James Bridle, Liam Young (The Unknown Fields Division), Andreas Gysin, Greg J Smith, Kyle McDonald, Peter Kirn, Studio NAND, onedotzero etc.

Spaces of Play – is a game studio from Belin where game designers, visual artists and musicians come together to create games as you never played before.

In these games you don’t have to be the fastest, or press the controller the quickest. Sometimes the game is in the accidents that happen on the way, or by questioning the rules of the game itself, new games take shape.

Just like this game they designed which purpose is not going from A to B, but consists in the music you create accidentally on the way. The “side effect” of the game (bumping into office furniture while walking from A to B) becomes the game itself.

They managed to transform John Cage’s 4 Minutes and 33 Seconds into a game that makes you feel unique.

4 Min and 33 Sec of Uniqueness is a multiplayer game where all you do is wait for 4 min and 33 sec to finish the game. If anyone else in the world joins, you lose. That’s the price you pay for not being the only one in the world doing a unique action at the time. This is what the game looks like – a black screen gradually turning into white.

As simple as it might sound, this game says a lot about human nature. What do you do when someone makes you lose? Do you wait for another 4 min and 33 sec and let your opponent have his own “moment of uniqueness”, or you restart the game straight away, or join start the game just seconds before your opponent would finish?

Florian Schmitt I Hi ReS

Hi Res – a company that combines graphic design, fine art, product design, film and music with Adobe’s Flash technology. Now you can find their shops in NY,London, Hamburg and Berlin.

My favourite is a ballet performance they did for the launch of the new Land Rover Equivoque designed in conjunction with Victoria Beckham.
The visuals work on 3 layers: a movie layer, an interactive layer and an effects layer controlled by a multi touch pad.

Florian partnered up with Andreas Muller to create Nanikawa – a company that explores new interactions between man and machines. They created the visuals for Kasabian’s tour 2011 where the visuals changed in real time with the music and the live filming – integrating the crowd and teh band in the projections.

Less say more. An installation for the new Hyunday 140 where lights are used to gradually reveal parts of the car. The 200 lights that compose the light rig could be controlled online in real time.

A lamp that shines more when you head it towards a place that is meaningful to you or towards someone you love.

Golan Levin – makes machines with eyes that act like humans.

The “Double-Taker (Snout)” is one of the BIG eyes – a 3m tall industrial robot arm resembling an elephant truck with a big eye at the end. The eye reacts to people’s movements. Somewhere between Big Brother and Sesame St – The Snout is a new species of surveillance that wants to interact with us. A creature continuously surprised by the presence of its viewers.

Opto-Isolator
“What if artworks could know how we were looking at them? And, given this knowledge, how might they respond to us?”
The Opto Isolator is an artwork that blinks back at you. It becomes shy and looks away if you stare at it for too long, and blinks a at you when you blink at him.

Ursonography (2005: Jaap Blonk and Golan Levin) is a new audiovisual interpretation of Kurt Schwitters’Ursonate, a masterpiece of 20th Century concrete poetry in which speech is reduced to its most abstract and musical elements. Jaap Blonk memorized 30 minutes of a made up language projected in real time with the help of speech recognition software in synchrony with the actor’s voice.

The Free Universal Construction Kit

Then he showed a video of his kid trying to put together bits and pieces from different Lego type games without much success. This lead to
The Universal Toy Adaptor – a 3d printed tool that allows you to stick anything to anything – like a universal adaptor for unrelated toy combinations.

One of his future projects involve creating art on the moon hoping that the lack of atmosphere will make it last for a long time from now.

Joachim Sauter

Joachim talked about the way digital has evolved from being completely separate to tangible objects to being fully part of them. This slide shows the last stage of the process where the cloud and the object become one.

You’ve probably came across his BMW installation, or one of its many imitations. 714 metal spheres are suspended from the ceiling on thin steel wires and animated with a help of mechanics, electronics and code to form the iconic shape of a BMW car.

“Kinetic Rain” is quite similar. It’s got the same meditative, hypnotic movement, but it’s placed in an extremely busy place: the Departure-Check-in-Hall of Terminal 1 at Singapore Airport. 608 rain droplets made of aluminum covered with copper moved by a computer, controlled motor hidden in the ceiling.

An installation created for the “Pavilion for the Disabled” consisting in 100 prosthetic hands using mirrors to reflect the light on the opposite wall. The choreography starts in an anarchic pattern and finally forms the Chinese symbol of movement and action. He created this free of charge but had one whole year to complete.

Keeping the mirror theme – he built this installation for the Deutsche Bank headquarters

He did exactly what you’re not supposed to do with a logo – break it into pieces. The is made out of a faceted mirror, resembling a crystal, and blue light projected onto the opposite wall. Visitors walking up the stairs at first see only the mirror, reflecting the blue light and the room around it. From this angle it looks chaotic, but as the visitors get closer, a concrete form gradually begins to take shape before their eyes, ultimately becoming the bank’s blue logo.

For those interested in new media, interactivity, visualization, media art, and the digital world this is a good read – ART + COM Media Spaces and Installations

Ivan Poupyrev – directs the Interaction Group in Disney Research’s Pittsburgh Lab where he focuses on this new trend of blending the digital and the physical which he calls – “physical computing”: including research fields from haptic user interfaces, to shape changing computers, virtual reality and spatial 3D interaction.

He uses a new sense technology (Swept Frequency Capacitive Sensing) called Touche that can recognize complex touch interactions in everything from everyday objects, to liquids, or even the human body. This video shows how Touche can transform a plant into a controller or electrical circuit that makes music and creates visuals.

Botanicus Interacticus is an Interactive Living Plant installation that uses the capacitive touch technology and a mix of mirrors and screens to create an aurora borealis effect on top of a real flower.

That’s how Memo Akten opened his talk at Resonate. Visual artist, director, hacker and poetic scientist that mixes numbers with feelings.

“Reincarnation” is one of my favorite piece from all of his outstanding work.

Reincarnation from Memo Akten on Vimeo.

With custom software he has tracked the motion of a dancer, generating a visual with flames containing the humans forms in motion.
Like when you are looking at the clouds and seeking recognizable shapes, in Reincarnation your eyes are trying to give an anthropomorphic meaning to the flames moving. You find yourself wondering: is this one dancer or two? Is she now crawling or what?

In a big proportion of his work, sight and hearing are a unique medium.

He gave some examples outside the interactive media world that made him look like a common person, for example in “Tom and Jerry” the sync with sound is just perfect!
Here a T&J’s cartoon, not the one presented by him, but still a good example and a real pleasure to watch.

Few recent examples of his work are:

Meet your Creator

“Meet Your Creator” R&D from Marshmallow Laser Feast on Vimeo.

While presenting this huge project, made for Cannes 2012, he revealed the approach behind:

“How you make crazy big projects? You chunk them down into baby steps”

Depeche Mode Fragile Tension

Depeche Mode ‘Fragile Tension’ from Memo Akten on Vimeo.

Webcam Piano

Another of his works that caught my attention was Webcam piano, a beautiful project where users can play and compose conventional music by playing with their fingers in front of a webcam.

It’s true that every kid is born as a scientist but probably the majority stops at the first frog dissection.
Here’s a game that might help us to get back on track.
>PLAY FROG DISSECTION

#creativity#technology#alittlebitofnonsense

Clouds: beta from Deepspeed media on Vimeo.

Kinect has been a big thing in the past few years. Designed for Xbox in 2010 has been hacked by designers, media artists and curious minds.
Recently James George and Jonathan Minard attached it to a Digital SRL to shot a documentary on coding and interactive arts, presented at Resonate, with impressive visual results.

“The project has come to life with the aim of replicating the organic feeling of a painting exploring the beauty of code”

Clouds looks like the beginning of a new visual style in filmmaking.

It will be interesting to see what else could be generated when the storytelling goes beyond the digital world.

I had the pleasure of visiting Belgrade, in Serbia, for 3 days, attending Resonate, a festival on music, digital art and new media.

The city that has decided to leave its scars visible, to remember those dark days (bombed on 1999 by Nato during the war in Kosovo. ntr.) revealed a vibrant and eccentric feel while building the present and shaping the future.

The Dom Omladine, main venue of Resonate festival was full of local and foreign students, media artists, teachers, hackers and all the possible curious minds out there.

For three days I felt like I was back at University, looking on the board for the schedule, going up and down the building to catch different talks and spotting an empty seat through hundred of heads. The difference was that now, I was listening to the most futuristic teachers out there.

Speakers were, to name just a few: Golan Levin, Memo Akten, Studio Nanika, Hi-Res! Joachim Sauter and many more. Not forgetting the evening party with Mouse of Mars. (Obviously not a bureaucratic University)

I caught my plane back to London on Sunday morning and 79% of the speakers were on the same flight.

This made me think that even if we are in a digital arena, where time and space are stretched becoming playful tools at our service, the metropolis, and especially London, remain the main hub for the digital players.
If that Sunday morning flight had crashed, right now the world would be back to the hieroglyph era.

So it was with trepidation that we opened this year’s Campaign School report. To our delight we had our best score yet, a mighty 8. It was like whacking that bully in the nuts all over again. Joyous.

Please read the full write up below, we’re dead proud.

RICHER STORIES

• Facebook want to create a richer, more beautiful News Feed, without the ‘clutter’ surrounding the stories which bring people to the platform
• Photos become central to the stream, which is now two, not three, columns wide. This allows all posts, whether image, text, video or ad, to take up the majority of screen space, with more prominence given to visual assets
• Links to articles/news sources are displayed in a magazine format, with more prominent headlines, longer summaries and a publisher’s icon
• The News Feed will continue to highlight news and events from liked Pages

CHOICE OF FEEDS

• A drop down menu will allow users to choose which stream of content they want to view
• Demand for all news to be collated in one place has resulted in the ‘All Friends’ feed, so you never miss a single movement
• New feeds include Music, Photos and Following, which will show only the news from the Pages and public figures that you have liked

MOBILE-LED DESIGN

• Much of the design has come from Facebook’s work on mobile, using minimal screen space to prioritise key features and utilities
• The pop-out black bar, which many are used to seeing on the left hand side of their mobile app, now comes to desktop, eliminating the right hand bar (previous home of Ticker, Chat and ad space)
• Facebook have worked hard to create consistency across numerous devices and screens, which should create a better user experience for all users, wherever they are and whatever they’re using

These three aspects come together to form what Zuckerberg calls ‘a personalised newspaper’ – drawing on both personal and public news sources, in various formats, to create a more colourful feed. These are the stories without clutter; note too that Facebook no longer use their full name as a logo, but a more simple, streamlined ‘f’ to demonstrate their back seat role.

Rollout will be slow and considered – users can sign up now, but it will be some time until we see the new designs on the majority of profiles.

For advertisers and Page owners, whose Reach has been significantly damaged in recent months due to Facebook’s internal mistakes, questions mainly surround the anticipated effectiveness of paid media on the new News Feed. Facebook maintain that nothing about how users interact with ads has changed – however the sheer prominence of posts in the new feed, in terms of pixel space, is undoubtedly a bonus.

The algorithm which determines who sees your Page’s news will remain unchanged, although the focus on images discussed here might suggest a return to image-led assets, after a period of experimentation with text-only updates.

Advertisers should also consider the placing of their brand’s posts in the new Following feed. Brand posts used to sit intermingled with personal news; however they can now be viewed in stark contrast to each other, within the same forum. For advertisers with major competitors within similar Facebook demographics, it is more important than ever that Facebook content is creative enough to engage and enthuse both current and potential fans.

Despite the crutches they hobble home from work with their heads held high.

Their attitude deserves admiration.

FACEBOOK

Facebook are trialling a ‘buy tickets’ function, which could further tie the platform to the intricacies of your social life. Not only would the Facebook calendar become integral, but it poses questions as to how they can make money out of potential commissions from the big ticket sites.  It’s currently available in the Netherlands, but keep an eye out for the ‘Buy Tickets’ button on your event invites.

BMW scored highly when they took a design idea submitted by a four-year old child to their Facebook page and made it real. Charmingly it features 42 wheels, 19 engines, 8721 horsepower and a trunk full of toys.

A recent study shows that videos posted on Facebook through the native video functionality, rather than linking to YouTube, gain a 40% higher interaction rate. But why? Well, being native, there are more places for Facebook to showcase such content, e.g. in the Fan Page gallery, and more importantly in this day and age, they perform better on mobile (as opposed to a YouTube redirect). It seems however that we are still eerily attached to YouTube, with Page admins posting 3684 YouTube links over 458 Facebook videos in January alone.

TWITTER

Amex have partnered with Twitter to allow their customer to sync their card with their social account, in turn letting them make purchases with the use of special hashtags. You simply tweet your reply to the offered deals and products alongside the hashtag, wait for Amex to reply, and the purchase is made. Initial deals were made on Kindles, Xbox, Sony cameras and jewellery. It has received a mixed reaction – Twitter isn’t known for its social commerce – and only time will tell whether tweeters are ready and willing to drop cash through the platform.

Gaffe of the fortnight goes to Burger King, whose account was hacked and briefly displayed a McDonald’s avatar, whilst making slurs against its competitors and generally offending everyone around. Weirdly though, it piqued everyone’s attention and gained them 450,000 mentions and over 30,000 new followers.

Heineken USA stepped in on February 14 to help its charming army of lads who had forgotten to book a dinner table for V Day. Stragglers simply had to #tweetforatable and let the brand do the work. They promised they would be ‘cool, man of the world’ restaurants – only a few lucky ladies would be able to confirm that claim.

In bigger news, Twitter have finally released an Ads API, allowing partners to easily manage marketing on the site. They’ve chosen five partners for the initial launch – Adobe, HootSuite, Salesforce, SHIFT and TBG Digital – and the hope is to make advertising on the platforms better for both brand and consumer.

INSTAGRAM

Ray Bans and Instagram are a match made in hipster heaven. It’s therefore no surprise that the sunglass giant have created their own in-store filtering service, allowing fans to submit photos and get them reinvented through their Ambermatic lens. It’s another ironic twist in digital photography.

VINE

The new Twitter app is still finding its feet – but perhaps its best utilisation so far is http://www.vine-comic.co.uk/

LONDON FASHION WEEK

#LFW has been a triumph for those brands willing to play with digital platforms. We’ll be looking at this in more detail in a couple of weeks, but for now here’s the digi headlines:

TopShop + G+

Burberry + RFID personalisation

#MatthewMagnified

Pegged as a taking down of the egos of agencies, and the brands they worked for, Weigel challenged the assumptions that we can make about our audience. We shouldn’t:

• assume the consumers are interested
• assume they’re ours
• ask for devotion
• expect the consumers to work at it
• assume that you, the brand, complete them

Looking at sales data, the vast volume of sales comes from an average of one purchase a year, across brands. While we need to target the loyalty of key fans who make multiple purchases through the year, Weigel stated that these consumers can help to generate publicity, not revenue. The vast majority of sales volume comes from the one time buyer, who has very little knowledge of your brand and what it stands for. We should focus our attentions on these consumers.

Weigel maintained that our task isn’t nurturing enthusiasm, but overcoming indifference. This statement was challenged by an audience member – what had led him to buy the Ralph Lauren jumper that he was presenting in? Is it really true that there is no emotional connection with brands, even the one time purchasers? This debate definitely left the audience with something to mull over after we left.

Weigel was providing us with a wake up call, a call to arms. Whilst we shouldn’t make the generalisation that there is no emotion in branding, we can’t forget that our brands are only a small, incidental part of everyday life – a brand is not vital to a consumer’s life.

It is our job to create something that is effortless for people to interact with – to be part of what interests people.

Normal stereo works by changing the volume of the left and right channel dependant on where the sound is coming from, but when we locate a real sound in space we use a lot more information than that. So normal stereo lacks a bit.

When real sounds hit our real ears, the difference between left and right reflects interference caused by the shape of our head and our ears and the phase shift created by sound hitting our ears at slightly different times. So if you record and play those differences back, our brains are fooled enough to create a strong feeling of immersion.

So what if you want to generate binaural sound on the fly as opposed to pre-recording it, as we need to do if we are to make interactive experiences like games?

Take a sound with x, y and z co-ordinates in space relative to you, the listener. How do we create a different left and right channel to mimic the effect of your head, ears and that sound in that position?

What we need is a Head Related Transfer Function. This is some equations that process a mono sound based on its position to create 2 sound channels that sound just as they should to real ears. This will actually use data taken from an average head, so will work better for some people than others. The perfect HRTF would use data from your own head to maximise the brain fooling potential.

So, cutting to the chase, this kind of dynamic binaural sound has been available for a long time, and is used in games. The news is however, that it’s available as part of the WebAudio API, currently being supported by chrome. We can now generate 3D binaural sound on the fly, in the browser.

I’m not the first to have a play with it by any means, but I thought I would combine 3D sound with the accelerometer in my phone. Here’s a slightly silly experiment. A socket.io server is running locally connecting a page running in Safari on my phone to monitor head movement, to a page on my desktop running in chrome. The movement of my head is used as the rotation of the “camera” in a simple three.js scene. The 3D sound is placed in the position of the ball on the screen. The end result is that the sound always sounds like is coming from the ball regardless of how I move my head.

What is interesting is how natural it sounds. With the phone in your hand you can hear a strong 3d effect as you move it around. As soon as you place it on your head, so is tracking real movement, it just sounds as if the sound is coming from the screen even though it’s coming from your head phones.

I have no idea what this is for, but it works. Maybe when the Audio API becomes more available on mobile browsers, along with the WebRTC stuff, we’ll see more immersive 3D sound, multi-user web apps, and maybe we’ll see more people with phones gaffer taped to their heads.

This week I went to the TEI conference in Barcelona. TEI stands for Tangible, Embedded/Embodied Interaction and has a claim to being the main academic conference devoted solely to physical computing. Subjects ranged form haptic aids for the blind, to toys with conductive fur that react when you stroke them. With talks from people ranging from first year grad students to MIT Media Lab.

I was there to learn the state of the art, get inspiration and to demonstrate Lean Mean’s latest R+D project in conjunction with Queen Mary University. A thing that, for the purpose of the conference, is now called the Vibro-Sign. A haptic communication device that connects to an Android phone via Bluetooth. You draw on the phone and the device draws on your arm.

Here’s me and Nanda Khaorapapong, our Queen Mary researcher, during a demo. We had a fair bit of interest, and met people working on similar devices, which is at least a confirmation that we’re thinking along the right lines. It was good to meet some big thinkers in the area too, and we got some great advice about how we should develop it.

The highlight though had to be the final keynote by Bill Verplank.

Here he is:

A venerable master of the field of interaction design, he worked on the earliest GUIs at Xerox Park and actually invented the term “interaction design”. He has an amazing lecture style of drawing as he goes to an overhead camera. Calm, and quiet and covering everything from physics to plate tectonics. It was one of those brilliant experiences where it’s less like learning and more like being bathed in wisdom. Check out his work.

It was interesting to be a such an academic conference, understandably at times I had to work hard to apply what  was being said to my own commercial world, but it was none the worse for that. I think the main thing I took away from it was seeing how in such a young field as tangible computing, that’s so interdisciplinary, there aren’t any rules and you have permission to mess around in a areas you have no business in. There were commercial people at their most academic, academics at their most commercial, artists doing engineering, electronics people doing psychology, and its these situations of clashing ideas and knowledge that you get the most innovation.

Stuck to the pole are around 50 photos of Hollywood hunk, Channing Tatum’s face.

Rumour has it that if you smooch the face with the shiniest forehead you will be blessed with a day of good fortune.

GRAPH SEARCH

So we all know that Facebook is launching its third ‘pillar’, the Graph Search, which will create a comprehensive internal search functionality within the platform. Although we’re all still waiting for access, it scored its first funny last week: http://actualfacebookgraphsearches.tumblr.com/

SHOW SOME EMOJI

Facebook is also trialling an emoticon-enhanced status composer, which will alert everyone not just to what you’re doing, but potentially how you’re feeling about doing it. Its implementation would bring a touch of emoji text speak to the desktop platform, and fend off emoji apps on mobile. If successful, it could help advertisers target certain demographics through either activity or emotional state. http://techcrunch.com/2013/01/30/facebook-visual-sharing/

VINE

Oh hi new platform! Vine launched earlier this week and has caused a conversational storm in the social media teacup. If you haven’t tried it already, it’s an app created by Twitter that lets you make a six second video and embed it within your tweet. Vinepeek.com is an independent site that was quick to collate new Vine content, and makes a good general intro.

The good: like tweets, it’s short and neat and easy to use. Micro-video blogging (catchy) was arguably the next frontier for social media.

The bad: everyone took short videos of their desks, and it was mind-numbingly boring. Only time will tell how the platform can be used creatively and, in a brand sense, effectively. http://gizmodo.com/5978709/the-single-dumbest-way-people-are-using-vine

But then they turned to porn, which was funny at first but a damaging blow for the platform in its earliest days: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/twitter/9831960/Twitter-video-app-Vine-makes-porn-editors-pick.html

The ugly: Twitter and Facebook are at loggerheads once again, as Facebook has withdrawn permissions to post Vine videos direct to walls and timelines. A similar altercation came about last month when Instagram (Facebook) prevented their images displaying in the new Twitter cards feature. http://mashable.com/2013/01/25/facebook-defriends-vine/

PINTEREST

Will soon be getting a redesign:

http://blog.pinterest.com/post/41728994538/were-testing-out-a-new-look

We also spotted a nice use of it by US singer Alicia Keys, who has created a board for each of the songs on her new album:

http://pinterest.com/aliciakeys/

LEGALITIES

Social media has been a minefield for lawyers since its inception. This story raised the issue of ‘ownership’ of followers – can you take them with you?

http://paidcontent.org/2013/01/24/new-york-times-editor-to-take-75000-twitter-followers-out-the-door-with-him/

INSTASPAM

We’ve all seen them – bloggers with their massive SLRs getting close-ups of their steaks. Phones were always considered the more discreet option, but now it seems New York restaurateurs are tiring of people religiously Instagramming their plates:

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/23/dining/restaurants-turn-camera-shy.html?smid=tw-share&_r=0

SPOTIFY

Listen to Help is a charitable initiative from BBH Barn, who are using the streaming platform to collect cash for Sound Seekers, helping deaf people in the developing world. All you need to do is listen to the track to get the donations going:

http://listentohelp.org/

Ambiance

That summertime glow, cold drinks, sitting in a park and not catching pneumonia – those mystical months we dream of, and so very rarely see. Our statisticians* estimate many a holiday booking off the back of this ad.

*if statistics are guesstimates, then sure.

The Perv Factor

Did you and your partner make it through December 10, the National Statistical Day of Break Up? Were you one of the influx of Facebook friends flaunting an engagement this Christmas? Well, good for you yeah, but for the single population January is not only devoid of cash, weather and holidays, it’s pretty dull on the dating front too. What does one do, invite a prospective lover round for a thrifty meal of pasta alla pesto? No. So allow us a moment of shameless pectoral approval, it’s a spot of sunshine on a rainy urban scene.

Nostalgia

That theme tune lives in our collective memory, having wormed its way into our ears circa 1994. Like its advertising sibling, the Coca Cola Christmas truck, it has become a cultural landmark in the collective mindset. And it’s strangely lovely to know that despite the Facebook launch, the ad’s home is still on television. Some ads really do benefit from a big screen.

‘If you’re fed up of looking at snowy pictures, look away now!’ one of my friends posted on her wall this morning.

Over the past few days there have been gazillions of photos uploaded to sites such as Facebook and Instagram and perhaps a gazillion million mentions of #snow on Twitter.

Why? Because we love it! We love snow and we love taking photos.

But somewhat surprisingly photography hasn’t always been considered an art form. In the 19^th century it was very much considered to be an advancement of science, cameras were a machine and machines didn’t make ‘art.’

Alfred Stieglitz (born in 1864) was an American photographer and modern art promoter who very much pioneered the Pictorialist movement. ‘For the Pictorialist, a photograph, like a painting, drawing or engraving, was a way of projecting an emotional intent into the viewer’s realm of imagination’^{(Daum, p 8)} …it promoted photography as art.

‘Winter – Fifth Avenue’ is one of the photographs that he is best known for and he used the weather and more specifically the snow to layer in atmosphere enough to incite emotion from the viewer. In fact, he stood in this New York blizzard for three hours to capture this moment and in doing so took, what is thought to be, the first ever photograph of falling snow…

#alfredstieglitzthebigdaddyofsnowpics

Last night Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg announced the launch of the third ‘pillar’ of the social network – the Graph Search. This new element to the ever-growing platform sits along Timeline and Newsfeed and allows users to make ‘natural’ searches of all of the information shared by their friends.

PRECISION SEARCH

The ‘natural’ search terms are a huge improvement on typically rigid search terms – Facebook will allow you to search for information based on likes, interests, locations of photos and language used in status updates, and can handle multiple search terms quickly and effectively. It also brings a new precision to search – Facebook will bring up defined answers to your query, rather than the multiple possibilities we are now accustomed to through mainstream search engines.

DATA

Although Zuckerberg denied Graph Search is a direct challenge to Google, Facebook has drawn on Bing to power searches beyond the limits of Graph Search. Facebook can only handle searches on information within its social graph – i.e. the information already shared by its users – yet the depths of this information are only just beginning to be explored. In terms of data protection, the update has no effect on users’ privacy, collating only the information currently available in the public sphere according to the individual’s privacy settings.

USAGE

It is thought that Graph Search will challenge recommendation sites, in that people are more likely to search for (and like) events, products and brands liked by their friends. It could also prove useful in assessing the likes and preferences of certain demographics, and friends of friends of users who have liked certain brands and products. For market researchers, this is a quick and neat way of finding out the shared preferences of their Facebook audiences.

Graph Search will be rolled out slowly, and initially in beta mode, although all users will be invited to have a look around the new elements via their home page. The API will not be open to developers for some time, although the possibilities in this sphere could be enormous. A mobile version is surely in the pipeline, as are apps, however for now the update exists to improve user experience on the platform.

Twitter has now launched its own filtering processes for images, whilst the now Facebook-owned Instagram appears to be taking a defensive stance against networks impinging on its niche for ‘vintage’ photography.
They then caused a ruckus by updating, and then withdrawing, changes to their terms and conditions: http://mashable.com/2012/12/20/instagram-updates-its-terms-of-service/

MUG-SHOT TO PINBOARD
• Pinterest has been used as a crime-fighting device in Pennsylvania, thanks to mug-shots being pinned on/from a local newspaper’s board: http://mashable.com/2012/12/07/pinterest-wanted-criminals/

SURREY LOLS
• Surrey Police haven’t missed out on social fun – they used the festive period as an excuse for hashtags such as ‘#DeckTheCells’, ‘#ChristmasCracker’ jokes, and ‘#IceIceBaby’ during the incremental weather. One to follow?: https://twitter.com/SurreyPolice

#ONFIRE?
• London Firefighters may also be joining in the social fun, with Twitter monitoring being explored as an alternative to 999 calls: http://www.informationweek.com/security/mobile/london-firefighters-pursue-twitter-monit/240144966

FOUR MORE YEARS
• The top tweets of 2012: headed by Obama, highly influenced by X Factor http://wallblog.co.uk/2012/12/11/a-year-on-twitter-a-look-back-at-the-tweets-that-made-2012/?utm_source=twitterfeed&utm_medium=twitter&utm_term=Digital,+social+media,+SEO,+social+networking,+digitla+media+paid+content,+pay+walls+&utm_content=Digital,+social+media,+SEO,+social+networking,+digitla+media+paid+content,+pay+walls+

REALTIME AD SPACE
• MumsNets are trialling a more responsive advertising space that will allow advertisers to adapt their marketing on the site according to immediate feedback from the forums and community. Is this the start of continually monitored, ever-evolving content? http://www.marketingweek.co.uk/news/netmums-creates-real-time-platform-for-advertisers/4005287.article

2013 PREDICTIONS
JWT 100
• JWT’s 100 to watch cover everything from adult playgrounds to yogurt shops, by way of JOMO – get up to speed here: http://jwt.co.uk/thinking/100-things-to-watch-in-2013.html

MASHABLE 11
• Mashable pinpointed 11 Big Tech trends to look out for, though arguably second screening came about a while ago… http://mashable.com/2012/12/06/tech-trends-2013/#m!20d8

$UCKERBERG
• Facebook is reaching new levels of monetisation. Want to chat one-to-one with Zuckerberg? $100 please. http://mashable.com/2013/01/11/facebook-message-mark-zuckerberg/

NI HAO WEIBO
• Hints that China’s Sina Weibo will be expanding into new markets with a partial English-language interface: http://wallblog.co.uk/2013/01/09/chinas-twitter-like-service-sina-weibo-expands-into-english/

• SOCIAL DROP OFF?
Reports show a drop in Facebook usage in the UK over the festive period, as well as the anticipated drop in Instagram users after the aforementioned terms and conditions debacle. For Facebook, it could suggest a ‘saturation point’ has been reached, with the network having to reach out further and faster to developing nations, rather than relying on its core markets.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2013/jan/14/facebook-loses-uk-users-december?CMP=twt_gu
http://wallblog.co.uk/2013/01/14/instagram-loses-half-of-its-active-users-in-a-month/

This has been neatly summed up by Kevin Kelly, who writes about how our instant access to greatness and weirdness is shifting our expectations:

“We no longer want mere presentations, we want the best, greatest, the most extraordinary presenters alive, as in TED. We don’t want to watch people playing games, we want to watch the highlights of the highlights, the most amazing moves, catches, runs, shots, and kicks, each one more remarkable and improbable than the other.”

When we find something that doesn’t meet these expectations – if it is a video that doesn’t promise something that will surprise and/or amaze us – we quickly lose interest.

Of course there are no rules for this, no winning formula. There is nothing meaningful we can deduce from the fact people can watch in an instant feats of human achievement they’d never before imagined (mostly due to their obscurity). But it is useful to remind yourself and your client before you launch your TV ad on YouTube, are we confident we’re more interesting than a snapshot of driving etiquette in the Urals?

86 minutes. An hour and twenty six. I work in social media and even I think that’s huge. What would the holy family have to say about that?

Oh.

Thankfully the majority of people quizzed said they would be using social platforms to wish others Merry Christmas, as well as thanking friends and family for gifts. Well, that’s nice. But how many statuses will be given to shameless present boastery and one-upmanship? Do we really need to see your dog wearing antlers, again? And will Instagram die a foodie death under the weight of SO many identical Christmas dinner snaps?

It’s becoming ever more apparent that we are social media monsters of our own making, and on a normal day, that’s fine. We make gestures towards realigning our priorities: this year we took two minutes of respectful social silence for Remembrance Day; we chilled out at thequietplaceproject.com; we could even win stuff by sacrificing our social presence for three days. But this Christmas, why not revel in some quiet – just for a day – and focus on all those old fashioned notions of family, food and bad TV? The networks aren’t going anywhere. And if you’re really, really dying to thank someone for a gift, I challenge you to write a letter. On paper, with a pen. You’ll feel better for it.

Looks like everyone wants a piece of the action now, so feel free to pile in:

www.casinoel.co.uk

As a developer, we are continually faced with challenges in making turning in designs into something real – we’re always reading up on stuff to keep us current, we’re finding out about best practices and ultimately striving to become a better developer as each project comes. We also challenge each other with ideas and ask for input about how we should approach things.

Recently I had a conversation with a few developers in the industry and the topic of the conversation was accessibility. As a whole, we make a lot of fun and interesting content for clients and one of things that I, personally am guilty of is not thinking about the the end user that have special requirements and I know I am not alone when I say this. It’s so easy to forget about there are people out there who are blind, deaf or disabled and to add furthermore shame, I’m hard of hearing – I wear hearing aids and I don’t even think about it.

So what is it like to experience what it is like to view a site as someone who has a disability? Well – for me it’s easy I can take my hearing aids out and hey presto – deaf to the world. Video content with no subtitles, I’m screwed – audio playing in the background – yep take that off the list. Having a voice over giving instructions – yep that won’t wash with me. That’s just hearing.. imagine if you’re blind. What would you be able to do then? Fortunately we have screen reader software out there – that makes things easier – but to give you a taster – if you’re on a mac – go to the universal access panel on your settings and check voiceover and see the results there… while you’re at it do the black/white option for people who have impaired vision as well. See how your screen looks and how easy/not so easy to view on your screen.

Now imagine if you have a physical disability and you couldn’t navigate around your computer by means of a mouse? What then? One way is to navigate by means of the tab button or access keys. Bet some of you guys didn’t know anything about access keys? Or what the government guidelines are for standard access keys? So as a developer, how can we as developers make accessibility as one of the key things we should check? Well MIT suggest doing a 5 minute check to check for accessibility problems that your website may have, they are as follows:

1). Turn off Images in your browser (make sure the placeholders are turned on)

2). Turn off support for javascript

3). Tab through the page, try navigating without a mouse

4). Try to change the standard font colours and styles

5). Try to increase the font size through your browser settings

6). Turn off support for stylesheets, do your site still make sense?

Obviously, design and budget constraints come into play – but the above steps are so straight forward and something we should all think about. So the next time you build something, or view something as an end user – think about it, is this piece really accesible to everybody? Who would be missing out? Better still – take the above 5 minute test and if the site fails – then tell the webmaster or who ever owns the content – let them know. We should all strive to make our online portal accessible for everybody and the only way that will happen is if we ask for it and make people aware of the needs of the users who need help in getting access.

Both Downing Street and the Church of England chose to tweet the official announcement of the new Archbishop of Canterbury. Although Downing Street has been active on twitter for some time, it’s a big move for the Church; you can follow at @C_of_E.

FACEBOOK COUPLES PROFILES

If you’re listed ‘In a Relationship’ on Facebook, you’ll soon find your profile merging with your beloved’s to create a shared timeline of all your shared photos, events, likes etc. You’ll be able to share the experience even if you’re not coupled up with the new ‘See Friendship’ function, replacing the old Friendship Pages.

FACEBOOK AUDIENCE

The big bad world of Facebook can apparently be boiled down to thirty six distinct types.

INSTAGRAM MENU

Because Instagramming your food in restaurants is the new norm, Comodo restaurant created a channel.

WATCH AND SHOP

Hackett have launched an interactive shop-able video for their autumn/winter collection. Click on the clothes as they appear to be taken to the items in the online shop:

COPY AND PASTE RULES

Despite most sites now having ‘sharing’ buttons, encouraging us to tweet, Facebook and blog links, the most popular option is still by far the traditional copy and paste

PINTEREST GETS PROFILES

For businesses, that it. The pinboard giant is now catering specifically for the brands and retailers who use the platform to showcase visual material. They don’t currently have any additional functionality, but may help convince businesses that it’s ‘ok’ to use Pinterest. It may open the doors to a more robust back-end offering, with the ability to integrate paid activity.

DON’T WASTE ADVERTISING SPACE

The Telegraph was the first publication to run advertising space within Flipboard, in partnership with Halifax. The Telegraph hopes to see more engagement with their mobile audience, to expand reach and create a new channel for advertisers.

WE’LL RETWEET LINKS WITHOUT READING THEM

Research shows that people are willing to retweet links that they haven’t necessarily clicked themselves. Dan Zarella has also found that there are subtle differences between the types of tweets likely to get retweeted, and those that get clickthroughs.

VINTAGE

Diesel are challenging fans to go internet cold turkey for three days, in honour of their relaunched 20^th anniversary Yuks. Their logic is that the shoes didn’t know a digital world, so neither should you (for a while). There are 20 pairs of Yuks to be won, if you think you can handle it.

PINTEREST ADVENT

They may have jumped the gun a little, but the 30 Days of Pinspiration are upon us. Each day non profits, pinners and brands are sharing what inspiration means to them, whilst showing off their best boards and pins.

YOU’RE MY HERO

The Hero button is a neat life hacks that cuts down the number of unnecessary notifications you get on your devices by creating a rule based on a digital action. It’s currently free on the App Store.

MORE ON THE FACEBOOK ALGORITHM

(A.K.A. LIKEGATE A.K.A. THE REACH WARS)

http://craigdpage.blogspot.com.au/2012/11/facebook-algorithm-changes-y-u-mad.html

http://techcrunch.com/2012/11/16/facebook-page-reach/

I HEREBY DECLARE THAT MY COPYRIGHT IS ATTACHED TO ALL…

Rubbish. Facebook users will have seen a new round of ‘copyright protection declarations’ in statuses this week, rest assured they are as meaningless as always.

BABY HASHTAG

Seriously.

As a developer who’s worked in advertising for a decade, I have seen a marked change in the the types of projects I work on. When I started out my time was pretty evenly split between banners and microsites. Now every project I work on is completely different from the last; from installations, to social applications, interactive videos and data visualisations. We are creating more long lasting products rather than throw away short term campaign sites. Because of the type and additional complexity of the work we are creating, bugs have become more of a talking point.

So what is a bug? We’re not talking about insects; in the world of software a bug is an error, flaw, mistake, failure, or fault that produces an incorrect or unexpected result. So a bug would be an iPhone app crashing when you go to watch a video or a website showing you someone elses details when you log in.

Bugs occur because of human error. Despite the reputation – developers are actually human and can therefore make mistakes.

A bug is often caused by something very small. It could be something as simple as a typo; one part of the code could use milliseconds but the rest of the application uses seconds or a third party API returns something unexpected which isn’t handled correctly.

Every developer creates bugs. At Microsoft, in 1992, there were about 10 to 20 defects per 1000 lines of code during in-house testing and 0.5 defects per 1000 lines of code in the released product. Apple released iOS 6 on September 19th 2012, followed by iOS 6.0.1 on November 1st. This release was to fix a host of bugs and this practice is becoming the standard industry approach, with many in the industry believing it is better to get something out there with bugs than delay a launch striving for perfection. The problem being that even then there will be bugs.

Bug-free is not an option, nothing humans do is perfect. All we can do is lower the probability of bugs. NASA probably have the nearest thing to bug free code, but it comes at a price. Rumour has it that space shuttle software costs $1,500 per line to develop. In our last project we wrote 30,000 lines of code; I’m not sure Unilever would have been prepared to pay 45 million dollars. As the probability of bugs goes to zero, the development costs go to infinity.

Well planned and stringent testing helps us to pick up the vast majority of bugs meaning we can deliver high quality projects, but we have to accept that some bugs will always slip through; there can always be a scenario we have not have tested for. We therefore have to educate clients and help them understand the processes we go through – it is important they understand that bugs are inevitable and not a crisis.

More and more software development companies use ‘Public Betas’ before making a final public release. Software should always be considered to be a work-in-progress and incremental updates should be expected and planned for. This is especially important in web development where dependencies on third parties (Facebook for example) and the continual stream of new devices coming on the market, with regular updates to operating systems and browsers, are making web development an ever changing landscape.

Don’t go trudging around the high street in the cold for your Christmas shopping, come join us instead for the first edition of the Freezing Art Fair: a charity evening of music, art and mingling with beers, mulled wine, good food and a live auction of nearly 30 donated signed prints, original drawings, paper sculptures and photographs by la creme de la creme of today’s creative talents. All proceeds of the night go to Save The Children to support their action in Syria, visit www.freezingartfair.com for more info and to discover the artists involved

Like us on Facebook and RSVP on the event page at www.facebook.com/freezingartfair / follow #freezingartfair on twitter.

Don’t wait! Get your £5 ticket at http://freezingartfair.eventbrite.co.uk/

Thursday 6th Dec from 7pm till 11pm / live auction starts at 8pm; downstairs at Mother (the creative agency, not the club) in Shoreditch

Add your face to The Public Toilet from the 17th November at www.thepublictoilet.com to show support for the 1.1bn people who can’t go in private.

Tease yourself here:

And then watch this space.

DISLIKE

A dislike button extension has been launched on Chrome that allows you to mark Facebook content with a ‘thumbs-down’. At the moment only others with the extension installed will be able to see your dislikes; it’s got a few issues but it might open conversation on a wider range of buttons.

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/dislikes-dislike-button-f/acmlfebmbccbmdaihmpefcfehaodlecb

GANGNAM WAS A GENUINE HIT

A case study is available that shows that Gangnam Style was a genuine organic online sensation, with little manipulation of online activity and a solid execution plan.

http://www.thedrum.com/news/2012/10/30/case-study-how-gangnam-style-went-viral-campaign-yg-entertainment

JAZZ UP YOUR HANGOUT

Google+ is rolling out new features for Hangouts, to make them both more functional and more entertaining. The sidebar collates all frequently-used apps, plus colour-coded notifications and announcements.

http://mashable.com/2012/11/01/google-hangouts-new-features/

INSTAGRAM FINALLY LAUNCHES ONLINE PROFILES

They look just like Facebook, with an animated header. You still can’t, however, upload photos and use filters on the desktop interface.

http://instagram.com/junips

NEED MORE SOCIAL NEWS?

Try the Facebook Monthly Download for news, case studies etc.

http://www.facebookmonthlydownload.com/october/uk/d/newsletter/index.html

FACEBOOK GLOBAL PAGES

Global brands used to have big issues with Facebook brand pages – they could have one for everyone, or loads of little local ones. Now, Global Pages mean brands can have separate local pages all under a single URL – visitors are simply directed to their relevant local page. We Are Social have reported on it here:

http://wearesocial.net/blog/2012/11/facebooks-global-pages-answer/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+wearesocial+%28We+Are+Social%29

TWITTER INTERACTIVE IMAGES

Twitter are using ThingLink to power interactive images within tweets. Icons pop up across the image when users hover on them, with options to open video, audio, sites and other images. Click here for an example: https://twitter.com/JoyCollinsMusic/status/265961783221698560

http://mashable.com/2012/11/07/thinglink-interactive-images-twitter/

ELECTION SPECIAL

The US presidential election provided endless social online tools, features, memes and stunts. Some of the best:
Barack Obama’s victory tweet becomes most retweeted of all time
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/nov/07/how-barack-obama-celebrated-twitter

The lady with the flag in her hair becomes an internet sensation
http://www.buzzfeed.com/lyapalater/flag-head-lady-becomes-an-american-hero

Both the New York Times and Wall Street Journal dropped their paywalls for all content and apps for a 24 hour period
http://nymag.com/daily/intel/2012/11/journal-dropping-paywall-for-election.html

Google Poll Finder helped citizens find their nearest ballot box
http://e2.ma/webview/tk3cg/6c5e1367e052cd201410d92a32500b8e

Facebook real time voting visualisation, did it help increase turnout?
http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-205_162-57545778/facebook-launches-real-time-visualization-of-2012-u.s-election-voters/

LULZ
http://whitepeoplemourningromney.tumblr.com/

Romney’s ‘victory’ website accidentally goes live
http://mashable.com/2012/11/08/mitt-romney-website/

Beyonce and Jay-Z showed their support for Obama
http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_md2n6dLqqF1rfgfeyo1_500.gif
http://www.averagejoesblog.com/i-got-99-problems-but-mitt-aint-one-video/

The D&AD and One Show joined forces a couple of years ago to create The Pencil Rankings – an aggregation of awards dished out to agencies. They use a points system to come up with a league table of agencies based on how they have performed at The One Show and D&AD awards. I can’t see it online now, so perhaps it’s been junked. I can’t say I will miss it. Why?

Well, is another ranking system really necessary? Do we not already have enough ways to boast to friends and clients how well regarded we are when being measured against arbitrary points systems and subjective analysis?

Creative work should be awarded on its creative merit – there is no disputing that, and we won’t see the end of it any time soon (rightly so). But there’s a huge difference between an award-winning ad and a piece of work that improves a client’s business. We need to understand that difference – is your client paying you to make a measurable difference to their business and work their marketing budgets as hard as possible? Or to win you some plastic statues?

Awards are great, but we shouldn’t lose sight of the end goal. An effective ad isn’t always award-winning, and an award-winning ad isn’t always effective. It’s on those rare occasions when beautiful creative and indisputable effectiveness come together … well, that’s what it’s all about!

There was an interactive installation, like “dance room spectroscopy”; an audio installation like “stories from an invisible town’ with memories recorded and packed into boxes; a walking orchestra like “a sleeping bird”, and other interesting events, but my favorite was an interactive video project where by touching water you control a video.

The guy explained to me in a simple way that our bodies are made out of electricity, and touching the water connects to a computer to close a circuit, so we become a conductor.

It means that if you put your finger into a bowl and someone else put his finger into another bowl, and then you hold each other hands, you create a bridge that controls the video. At a certain point 8 people were holding their hands. I think it is amazing!!

Then came the time to walk into a dark room where my movements stopped the rain to fall down.

Impressive.

My friend was enormously pleased, a little bit more than me considering the fact that I was wearing black clothes and apparently the camera prefers slightly brighter colors to hold the liquid.

Here some picture of people holding each other hands while touching the water (in these ones users give two inputs at the same time: color and shape)

• “Rain Room’ by Random International.

http://random-international.com/work/rainroom/

• “Hidden fields”

• “Stories from an invisible town”

http://www.invisibletownstories.co.uk/

• “A sleeping bird”

Image from http://www.ofsleepingbirds.com/

The answer is political advertising (read more at http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2012/09/24/120924fa_fact_lepore).

Perhaps where the two have diverged most obviously over the years is negative campaigning.

You don’t see attack ads in our line of work.

But if scaremongering befitting of the Leader of the Free World, why not of a big global brand?

Attack ads do work, after all. So why not?

Visa Pour L’Image is a photojournalism festival taking place in Perpignan. Big names like Magnum, VII, NOOR, Getty Reportage come here every year. If you want to show your work, you can book a portfolio review at Palais du Congrais during the Professional Week.  There are exhibitions  in churches and convents all over the town, conferences at Palais Des Congrais and night screenings in Campo Santo.

This year the Young’s Photographer’s Award is named after Remy Ochlik, who died in Holms this year with Marie Colvin.

The winner is Sebastian Liste with a reportage on a community living in “Galpao da Araujo Baretto”, an abandoned chocolate factory in Salvador de Bahia, Brazil.

                  Remy Ochlik’s girlfriend handing the award to Sebastian Liste in Campo Santo

His project captures  what makes the people in the factory a community, how their lives are governed by their own rules and forms or organisation. Some women would cook and sleep with men for a living, others would provide food. Somehow the community survived.

In March last year the government evicted the families and demolished the factory in preparation for the 2014 FIFA World Cup and 2016 Olympic Games. More than 130 families who lived in the factory have now been relocated in the outskirts of the city.

JONATHAN TORGOVNIK – USING PHOTOGRAPHY TO CREATE SOCIAL CHANGE 

Intended Consequences documents the women who were brutally raped during the genocide in Rwanda and the children they bore as a result.

The reality

In 1994, one million Tutsis were slaughtered by the Hutu majority in less than 100 days, that’s 20% of the population.

16 years later and 20 000 kids growing in a society where their mothers continue to be stigmatised and rejected by their own families, who cannot accept being related to the enemy. And since the government cannot jail more then half of the population, the “enemy” continues to live just across the road.

The process

This is a self-founded project that took almost 3 years to complete. In order to find these women, Jonathan worked with different local NGOs and together they managed to find the victims even in the most remote areas. The images capture the conflicted feelings the mothers have towards their children. Some were surprised by the love they felt after giving birth, others admit not having any feelings whatsoever.

The change

When it comes to photographers documenting conflict zones – there’s always the issue of how your pictures can make a change in the lives of the people you photograph.

In this case, it all started by simply asking Stern to add a paragraph asking readers to help. The response was much more than Jonathan expected. So he didn’t stop there. For the next year he dedicated all his time to build Foundacion Rwanda. Two million pounds have been raised since then. All the money goes into building schools and helping integrate the women and their children into society.

If you want to get involved click here

ROBIN HAMMOND – MENTAL HEALTH IN AFRICA

9^th of July 2011. After 20 years of civil war South Sudan declared its independence. This reportage talks about a different side of the war – the psychological scars left on the population, the trauma of mass rape, the grief of death, the insecurity of displacement.

According to World Heath Organization 1 in 3 Somalis suffer of some form of mental disease.

The institutional system, devastated by the war cannot deal with the huge amount of mentally diseased. People end up chained in prisons cell lying naked in their own excrements.

Instead of trying to make changes in the structure of the institutions, the local NGOs are approaching the spiritual healers in the area, this being the first place visited by mentally diseased.

The aesthetic of his pictures was an issue that was often brought up in his talk. Why make beautiful pictures when you’re facing such a horrible reality? His answer is that if it wasn’t for the quality of the pictures we probably wouldn’t be talking about mental health in South Sudan.

The camera was always a barrier between him and what he saw. He said he fully understood the reality of the situation in the editing suite.

After South Sudan he continued his project in Uganda, Somalia, Democratic Republic of Congo, Dadaab refugee camp.

Click here to get involved.

ILVY NJIOKIKTJIEN – AFRIKANER BLOOD

Imagine being 16 and waking up in an extreme right camp with an authoritative commandant teaching you how to be a true racist. This is what’s happening today in South Africa.

Afrikaner Blood is an incredible project by Ilvy Njiokiktjien. She won Canon Female Photojournalist Award last year and 2^nd prize singles World Press Photo Award this year.

The project documents the 1994 Born Free Generation of Dutch and German descendants in South Africa, following their 9day racist indoctrination in an extreme right camp.

Despite the strong reactions these pictures provoked abroad, the commandant of the camp was so sure he was doing the right thing, he kept inviting Ilvy to come back and continue her project.

STANLEY GREEN – STANDING AT THE GRAVEYARDS OF E WASTE

Stanley  is a good friend of Visa Pour L’image. He works for  NOOR, one of my favorite agencies in the world.

This is Stanley Green. The video announces his new book – Black Passport

STANDING AT THE GRAVEYARDS OF E WASTE

Facts

There are more than a billion computer users around the world and over 4.6 billion cell phone users.  The IPhone life spam in only two years.

Ghana, Nigeria, India, China, and Pakistan are the worst places where E Waste is being dumped. In China E Waste is a big business Some of the first E Wasters got rich and now hire immigrants to do the job they used to do at the beginning.

The chemicals in E Waste are extremely poisonous for the nervous system and the brain and could lead to paralysis, cancer, birth defects, or skin ulcers often reported among children swimming in rivers.

The beginning

The idea of the project started when Stanly was photographing Greenland.  The sight of the huge amount of discarded junk coming from all over the former Soviet Union, Europe and Asia lead to a photographic journey that would cover three continents and over 60, 228 km.

The project is all shot on film. Instead of scanning the negative, he scanned the actual prints.

More here 

STEPHANIE SINCLAIR – CHILD BRIDES

Everyone was talking about Stephanie in Perpignan.  She dedicated the last 8 years documenting premature marriages in India, Nepal, Afghanistan, Ethiopia, and Yemen.  Her project started in 2003 in Afghanistan when she met a girl who attempted suicide by self-immolation. A lot these girls die in childbirth, others commit suicide by setting themselves on fire, or end up in prostitution if they try to escape. In 8 years Stephanie met only one happy case of a girl married to a local priest.

Some photography advice from Visa 2012

Find a new angle on the story

Robin Hammond  was sent to South Sudan to report on the referendum taking place at the time. On his way he saw a couple of people with mental disabilities, stopped the car, started to investigate the situation, realised what a massive issue that was, and this became his main focus for years. Now this project is covering most of the Sub Saharian countries.

Work with Local NGOs

Jonathan Torgovnik was talking about a different kind of photojournalism – which he calls detective photography. He worked with many local NGOs in Rwanda and helped discover the women who were brutally raped during the war their children they bore after the conflict ended.

Make a change

If your project ever gets published, ask the journalist to write a paragraph inviting people to help the victims in your pictures.

Stanley Green – Photographers need to be good writers. Stories are everywhere. You don’t need to go to war to become a photojournalist.

Think why the photographic technique you use is relevant to the story you’re trying to show.

That’s it for now. Already looking forward to Visa 2013.

Tip – If you’re thinking about going, book your hotel far in time. Most hotels in the centre are fully booked a year in advance.

A very useful website which explains the inner workings of Facebook. Great for explaining social metrics to clients.

http://whatisedgerank.com/

MOSS INSTAGRAM LOOKBOOK

Fashion brand Moss Clothing has shunned typically expensive and laborious photo shoots for a catalogue shot entirely on an iPhone5 using Instagram. They also used hip hop artists Das Racist in place of models.

http://www.psfk.com/2012/10/das-racist-instagram-lookbook.html

WHERE’S OUR REACH AT?

As seen in the last Digest, Facebook has made changes to the algorithm which have seriously damaged reach of brand pages and posts (if you’re not paying for loads of ads). A couple of the latest articles:

http://dangerousminds.net/comments/facebook_i_want_my_friends_back

http://observer.com/2012/09/broken-on-purpose/

PHEED

Pheed is a new hybrid social network that integrates chat, photos, videos, audio and live broadcasting. You create a ‘channel’, and if you think it’s really good, you can charge people to follow it. Celebrities have already signed up to cash in on fans (phans?) who can subscribe or see content on a pay-per-view basis:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/social-media/9620688/Twitter-rival-Pheed-banks-on-celebrity-channels.html

MOBILE FANS
Brand pages on Facebook are gaining significantly more fans from mobile users – 5% in May has increased to 19% in August. This supports and further encourages the platform to play to the behaviour of smartphone users.

http://allfacebook.com/pagelever-new-facebook-fans-mobile_b102357

SOCIAL TOOLBOX

50 of the best free (or almost free) online tools available for content creation, listening, engagement and analytics.

http://thenextweb.com/socialmedia/2012/03/18/50-mostly-free-social-media-tools-you-cant-live-without-in-2012/

TBG DIGITAL SPEAKS TOO SOON
Facebook advertising specialists and Preferred Marketing Developer TBG Digital has lost its badge of honour after reportedly discussing Facebook beta developments and therefore breaking confidentiality agreements.

http://www.digitaltrends.com/social-media/tbg-digital-loses-facebook-badge/

FOLLOW ME
Taylor Swift took following to a new level by inviting some of her fans to literally follow her on her new album media tour.

http://mashable.com/2012/10/22/taylor-swift-red-media-tour-followers/

Here I am with the priest on my second day

There are no written rules in the monastery, no television or radio, no politicians or police. Each monk has his own role to play in a world vanished from what’s outside.

It’s dark and I‘m sitting in a small room with Jesus and Virgin Mary looking at me from every corner.

This is where Christians confess their sins.

I’m wearing my long black clothes and facing the head of the monastery, the Staret. He’s got a long beard, sharp eyes and talks to me about times long passed, when monks used to dig holes in the ground for no other reason but to cover them later. They don’t have time for that nowadays.

There are 36 monks living in the monastery. Their jobs include taking care of the stables, feeding 200 chickens twice a day, washing dishes, cooking, serving food to anyone who passes by, digging into stone, driving, and staying awake between 2 and 6 AM to conduct religious ceremonies.

Work is seen as a divine test. It’s a way to exercise your commitment to Jesus. If you pass, your role may change. Sometime I would pass a monk feeding the animals and hear him singing religious songs.

This bull has never left the stables.  The monk who feeds him says he was born to live enclosed.

Cockfights cause excitement all over the world. For a few moments, these small, American roosters turn a dusty corner of the monastery into a violent spectacle.

There’s a very clear division of labor in the monastery.

In this photo, the head priest watches, while the stable monk sweeps.

In this hierarchy the monks get a lot of hard time from their superiors. This, again, is seen as a divine test and is meant to make you lose all profane feelings of self-worthiness, or pride and help strengthen your faith.

“I’ve been invited to move to Jerusalem”, one of the monks whispers to me, when the chef tells him off for scratching a pan. It’s midday and we’re washing breakfast dishes. He looks lost in his thoughts now and keeps silent for the rest of the time.

Trees are often used as metaphors to convey religious beliefs and moral stories. A monk that moves monastery is like replanting a tree in new ground. Eventually it will dry off.

The religious ceremony takes place every night between 2 to 6AM.

Liturghia is the most important part and starts at 4:30 AM.

This is the moment they say the earth and the sky become one.

Time is marked by the sound of the “toaca” – a wooden hammer beat onto a long wooden board. Every beat has a meaning and you can hear it at night from miles away on the other side of the forest.

My next stop is a much brighter place  – Moldovita

This is one of the monasteries we Romanians are very proud of. It was built in 1532 by the king at the time – Petru Rares, as a defense gate against the Ottomans.

History is literally inscribed on the monastery’s walls. Nuns call it vandalism. Art historians write books about it.

Today more than 50 nuns call this place home.

Every nun who ever stopped here, stayed for her whole life. The oldest nun is 84 and hasn’t left this place for more than 60 years.

Since the monastery is a very popular touristic attraction, nuns are much more open. The outside world doesn’t feel like a threat here.

Nuns say they like to see “life coming from outside the windows”.

Stareta Nun believes everyone’s got a talent and this is the place where you’ve got plenty of time to bring it out.

There are painting workshops where religious portraits are made, and later sold to churches around the country and abroad.

The sewing workshops use some of the latest technology in religious pattern making.

The sewer nun admiring one of the latest holly icons produced by a pre-programmed machine

Outside the workshops, working life seems stuck in time.

Nuns taking care of a sick newborn calf.

I’ve never seen a cow behaving so much like a dog. This particular one would follow us around everywhere we went, waiting constantly to be pet.

The real dog says goodbye for now.

Many moons ago, in a more innocent time, the phrase ‘Dear Jim’ was associated with people sharing their dreams and aspirations with an eccentric old man.

We thought it would be a charming way to welcome you to our agency: a place where creative, strategic, and occasionally farcical dreams come true. Since 2004 we have invited you to email us at DearJim@leanmeanfightingmachine.co.uk

Now we’re not so keen on it. Our email address has been sullied, and we need your help to create another.

What should it be?

Tweet your suggestions for our new contact email to @fightingmachine by 4pm on Friday and we’ll choose a winner.

If the winner fancies it, they can have their picture mounted on our wall, to remind us daily of their help in getting us out of this fix.

Facebook are testing variations on the ‘Like’ button, in an attempt to drive e-commerce on the social network. Retailers are able to upload ‘Collections’, which customers can browse and choose to ‘want’, ‘collect’ or ‘like’ items which will then offer them the chance to buy from the retailer’s website. Facebook hope that the move will capitalise on users’ tendencies to chat and compare purchases amongst friends. It’s not yet known exactly how much Facebook will make from its referrals, but US giants Victoria’s Secret and Neiman Marcus are signed up for what could be a lucrative pilot scheme.

FACEBOOK PERSONAL PROMOTION
If you can’t bear the thought of your latest witty status update languishing at the bottom of your friends’ Facebook pages, you’ll be pleased to know you can now pay to promote yourself. The shameless scheme is open in the US, where the going rate is around $7 per promoted post. No word yet as to when/if it will come to the UK, but the quality of content promoted will certainly be questionable.

UK’S TOP FACEBOOK PAGES
SocialBakers have issued a report on the UK’s top brands on Facebook, in terms of number of fans as well as engagement. Note the lack of correlation between the two lists – typically smaller brands reach higher levels of engagement, against giants such as Cadbury.

PLAYGROUND.FM
A newly launched app for iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch which seems to have found a way around music royalties. You’ll log in via Facebook, and create and share playlists by dragging your tracks across from iTunes or Spotify Premium. There’s an in-built social element, in that you can see what others are listening to and you’ll be recommended playlists based on what you listen to. Only time will tell how much the service needs to lean on ads and sponsored activity to keep it going.

GOOGLE CULTURAL INSTITUTE
Google have partnered with 42 different archives and museums across the world to create an online museum, covering mainly 20th and 21st century events. It has a fully searchable timeline, loads of rich content and is very well designed.

COOL THINGS WE’VE SEEN

The Tower of London has used Facebook Timeline to its advantage, tracking events and dates back to 1066 when the Tower was built.

Grey Poupon mustard has shunned efforts to become the most-liked page on Facebook, and is instead challenging prospective fans as to whether they have the requisite good taste to associate with the brand. The app scans your profile and judges from your friends, interests and written style to determine whether you’re the right fit. Fantastically pretentious, doesn’t it make you want to try it?

Adland must act now, an employee from Lean Mean Fighting Machine, who suffers from depression, says.

In many ways, I’m a lot like a professional footballer. There’s my athletic physique, my fleet-of-foot co-ordination and the two Bentleys I park outside my tiny flat in South-East London. Most agree it’s a wonder I’m not playing for Crewe Alex more often, especially now Dario’s back.

Despite my natural flair for the beautiful game, there has only been one occasion when my world and the Professional Footballers’ Association’s have crossed. That was on the occasion of my nervous breakdown.

I’m an employee at an advertising agency in London. I’m good at what I do and I am someone who suffers from severe depression and anxiety. At the beginning of 2012, I lost control of my illness and had a breakdown. I was extracted from London’s adland for an undefined term. While I was off work, my state of mind meant I didn’t leave the house. I slept through spring and, on several occasions, weighed up whether I’d be better off committing suicide. My recovery took months. But I did recover.

This industry of progressive, interesting and interested people isn’t famed for its progressive approach to human resources. That’s not the case where I work. My agency of beautiful misfits gets along just fine in that department. I was backed all the way by its management team and my colleagues. It was touching. When I did make it back to match-fitness, my agency still believed in me enough to allow me back to work. I was touched. My experience of depression was handled by sympathetic, enlightened and experienced agency folk.

While I was “on leave”, Gary Speed committed suicide. Depression was cited as having set the co-ordinates of his path towards taking his own life. It was a tragic loss for his family and his fans. His death saw depression being talked about on the front pages of newspapers. Suddenly, I was reading about someone else who had depression. Not the poor sod in every NHS leaflet, but a man of honour and responsibility. Slowly, stories came to the surface of other sportsmen’s struggle with the illness. At the time, I can remember thinking that the only good thing about any of this horrendous loss and illness is that depression is being talked about. Finally.

The following summer, the PFA mailed every one of its members an information booklet on depression and anxiety. Its message was simple: being a footballer doesn’t make you a superhuman. Despite the seemingly endless opportunities afforded by the trappings of a life led at the top of the sport – many people’s dream job – footballers suffer from depression too. By God, it has killed one of the game’s elder statesmen. I’m not a professional football player, but I did manage to get hold of a copy of the booklet in question via my Alderley Edge connection (I’m a Cheshire lad by trade). It’s good. Really good. Simple, truthful and reassuring. It set me thinking.

At any one time in the UK, 21.5 per cent of women and 13.6 per cent of men will be suffering from depression or anxiety*. That means a number of your staff are probably struggling with something on the mild-to-severe scale. Depression is among the leading causes of disability, affecting about 151 million people globally at any one time**. Yep, that’s a lot. More than what your last campaign reached. A lot of footballers, bank robbers, architects, nurses, financial consultants and account directors.

The problem with depression is that it’s not visible. You don’t wander into the office one day with the obvious effects of the illness written all over your face like shingles. It’s not cool to talk about it at work for fear of being labelled a loon or, worse, a vibe-killer. Often, the first sign of something being wrong is when it’s too late. That person breaks down, or worse.

The point is that we need to talk about this illness more. More people need to be comfortable with the fact that it exists, that they or their staff might suffer from it and that it is OK. They’re not alone. There is help and support available. Frankly, if the PFA can inform, coach and support its members on the subject, it would be a shame if we broad-minded, creative, largely liberal folk can’t do that too. We should be able to top their direct mail too, by the way. Do I believe we will stand up to the stigma? Not enough to put my name at the end of this article for fear of retribution or limiting my career long term. Wake up, adland. Wake up, UK.

* Adult Psychiatric Morbidity In England, 2007 (2009) edited by S McManus, H Meltzer, T Brugha et al ** The Global Burden Of Disease (2008) by the World Health Organization

TUMBLR

Updates to the platform means it’ll see significant outages on the weekend of the 5^th/6^th October. Full notification here.

TWITTER

New layouts for Profile pages, pretty old news now, but for a more detailed explanation of what it means for brands see their blog.

FACEBOOK GIFTS

New functionality launched by Facebook allows users to purchase gifts directly in their newsfeeds.  It’s based on the same format used by Karma – a company that Facebook acquired earlier this year. Surprisingly for Facebook they’ve actually made an effort for it to work on Mobile, as well as on the desktop version. It’s currently on trial in the US market. Have a look at the full article on it here.

FACEBOOK OFFERS

Facebook Offers promote both In Store and Online promotions to a brand’s fanbase. The offer is created and redeemed through Facebook, with the offer sent directly to the user’s email account. Although this was initially a free service, Facebook will be charging brands from October 2012, with the price determined by the size of their fanbase.

SOCIAL MEDIA WEEK

SMW took place last week, not just in London but across the globe. There were innumerable talks, panel sessions and booze-ups covering all aspects of social. We attended We Are Social’s FMCG panel, featuring marketing reps from Cadbury, Bulmers and Dr Pepper (see the blog for the full write-up), and a conversation about earned media between Philips Global Branding division and a start-up online magazine called Urban Times. You can catch up on some of the sessions online.

FACEBOOK FACIAL RECOGNITION

Facebook are shutting down facial recognition software in photos due to a privacy investigation. It became default last year, meaning members had to actively opt out in order to avoid their name appearing in tagging options. They’ve got four weeks to resolve the issues, although it is expected that a new way will be found to keep the facial recognition feature. Full story here.

APPLE MAPS

If you’ve seen this blog mocking the iOS 6 update, it will come as no surprise that Apple Maps have been a total failure, with only 4% of iPhone users using the app. Apple CEO Tim Cook has gone so far as to encourage iPhone users to download Nokia or Google Maps instead, and they’re no longer calling Apple Maps ‘the most powerful ever’ on their website, as quite frankly that would be lying.

MOBILE VOTING

Not just for X Factor, but for real life presidential affairs. It’s by no means happening yet, but this is one of many anticipated pieces on mobile voting in the run-up to the US presidential election in November. It could be a powerful tool to combat political apathy, but as outlined here, the security risks are huge. Canada have got their eye on it for 2013, so the rest of the tech-heavy democracies might want to ready themselves for a similar conversation.

There was a debate in the office over the release of the iphone 5 and iOS 6 started by the honourable Sam Ball. The question posed, “Could there be an Apple back lash starting, I wondered if its because Jobs is no longer at the top…”

Let me start with a bit of a background. The release of the new maps – a key feature in iOS 6, has turned out to be a bit hilarious to say the least, unless of course you are in China, where it has been received with enthusiasm. Now there are some gruntings about the scratches the aluminium body that the iPhone has. So quite rightly people will start to talk about the standard of Apple’s quality control and what the future holds for Apple.

Personally, I think the question people should be asking themselves is not what do you make of apple back lash,  but “are you going to buy the next iphone?” Because ultimately this will decide how Apple will play the market – backlash or no backlash – if there’s a market for the current iphone it’s going to continue it’s business model. I mean take a look at the pictures of people queuing in line for the next iphone. The iphone generates more activism and interest than an act of monstrosity happening in some war torn country.

iOS

If you look at the evolution of iOS – there hasn’t been much of a significant change in terms of the iOS itself. Sure there’s been features added to it, but that doesn’t mean it’s a new iOS. In fact, I find the name to iOS is misleading ie iOS 4, iOS 5 etc… sure it has had features added to it, but the actual os itself – hasn’t really changed. Each update seems a bit “meh” – more of 1.2, 1.3, and so forth. I predict if it follows apple’s history iOS X will be the game changer – you heard it here first remember that. Now people will probably argue the underlying architecture, structure etc has changed – but the consumer is not going to see that.

So why are we getting this drip drop of features? Well at the moment, Apple hasn’t really had much competition so to speak… sure there’s Android, however the legal patent war have been put in place for our entertainment purposes. So from a business sense – let’s take a step back and look. If there’s no real competition – would you quickly bring out significant changes or gradually release them? Of course the current play has resulted in some discontent… but it hasn’t stopped people from buying iphone 5. Until people stop buying iphones, they are going to continue their approach.

Nokia/Microsoft and Blackberry

I like what they have done, they’ve gone back and come up with a different approache – and tackled the operating system with some thought. Better late than never and I do hope they do work and add competition ergo more innovation to the market. Because, I’m kind of bored with what’s out there – nothing is exciting me. You stick whatever hardware features into a phone and tell me it’s got the power to do this, the power to do that. Really, it’s a phone first – I haven’t seen anybody come along and said we’ve created something that will change your life, like Apple did with their first ever release of iphone. Video calling features have been added – but didn’t Three release that years ago?

Anyway back to the point about Nokia/Microsoft and Blackberry, what I can’t help but wonder is that do they provide viable long term competition, meaning when they do come out and become established as competitors, will they be ready for the next iphone operating system and/or android? Because I can bet you – while Apple and Android are selling us these minor features as a new operating system (which let’s be honest they aren’t) someone in the back office is working on the next big and significant thing.

So come on then, tell me all you iphone users, will you buy the next iphone? How about you non iphone users? That will decide whether a backlash will happen or not.

A preface to this post: I’m reading a book that dissects the credit crunch (it’s a one-off, believe me, but it’s rather good) and quite frankly, it has painted the world – particularly our Anglo-American capitalist corners – in a rather negative light. Tainted by such a view, it was perhaps easy to pick out the gory battles currently being fought on the social front.

Needs must

The need to drive sales pitted against the desire to entertain a community is a recurring theme (in fact that very rephrasing mashed two of the biggest questions of the session into one overarching issue). Managing a page, profile, channel etc. brings needs against wants – you may want to post the latest lolcat meme, but how much cereal/toilet roll/candy is that really going to sell? Consumers are, of course, human beings, equally likely to be tickled by gifs as the rest of us, but they are also savvy – a warm and fuzzy feeling isn’t always enough to change a behavioral habit, but neither do we wish to be victims of sales abuse.

Make or break

There were a good few sighs when not just one but two of the panel used Innocent as an example of strong social presence. Their popularity is undeniable, but are we not over that yet? An astute audience member questioned whether a ‘divorce’ between entertainment for entertainment’s sake, and the promotion of the underlying product, was nigh – and surely if the two sides become irreconcilable, the social campaign is shot?

Keeping up

Another potential tiff lies in the inability for mega entities to catch up with the enhanced 4G lightning speed of social development. It couldn’t have been made clearer when conversation turned to monies – with one brand dedicating 100% of spend to social, and another handing over only 5%, it will be some time until social sits on par with the other disciplines within an FMCG campaign.

Crux

So has social hit a wall of its own making? Well, hardly. It might be having some dramas en route, but a glance at industry news today shows that there are big-ass brands willing to take a punt. MySpace has dragged itself out of retirement to get down with the kids once again, and Kellogg’s have launched a shop where you quite literally put your money where your mouth is. A social currency might be a political minefield, especially as we’re still not even settled on best metrics, but to have a marketer rank social endorsement so highly confirms that word of mouth isn’t just hot air. Social has reached the new frontier, and those who don’t risk it won’t be getting any richer.  Is it me, or does capitalism suddenly look a whole lot sexier?

Through the Window from michela nicchiotti on Vimeo.

Jebb Avenue. Brixton Prison

“Through the Window” is a psycogeography project, that investigates urban landscaping and the effect on emotions and behaviour of individuals, it’s the result of a personal experience, living close to the Brixton Prison, on Jebb Avenue.
The Apartments where guardians used to live surround the building and during the last decade few of them have been sold to private and rent out to people, like me.
This miscellaneous of life conditions, has made me wonder about the relationship between the building where I live and the building where prisoners live.

The buildings are really close to each other that you can hear the prisoner’s voices from inside the flats.

The pictures and the sounds for this project have been recorded from my apartment from May 2011 to September 2012

To illustrate the point he showed two films that Lions Gate pre tested. The first is a film which got the highest ever score in pre testing.

The second the lowest ever score.

1st

They say there are no true gentlemen left.

Well on Friday we showed that the withering stump of British manhood still has enough spunk in it to quash an attack from those cowardly, monarchy-phobic French.

I mean were we really going to just stand by and let them humiliate our future queen like that?.. Not on your nelly.

This is Lean Mean Fighting Machine, not Lean Mean Wet-Flannel Machine.

So we stood up, and we defended poor Kate’s honour in the only way we knew how. We donned Middleton masks and got our hairy man-nipples out in a show of solidarity.

Our uniquely defiant stance gathered pace on the internet, it went viral on Buzzfeed and was picked up by Yahoo, SabotageTimes, The Poke and many international news sites and bloggers. Here’s a few of our favourite tweets:

We like to think someone forwarded it to Kate, so she now knows that British men were prepared to stand nipple-to-nipple with her in her time of need.

Nips Out For Kate

In 1949 Dr. Timothy Nugent started the American National Wheelchair Basketball Association. In the same year he also started a research program at the University of Illinois that led to the first accessible architectural standards. This was real progress: taking design for the ‘able-bodied’ and adding to it to make it accessible (or ‘Barrier Free’) for the ‘disabled’.

Subsequently, the concept of Universal Design was coined by the architect Ronald Mace. It put more of an emphasis on designing for everyone from the ground up. This was a much more elegant approach. It’s always better to re-factor design to do a lot with as little as possible, rather than tack features on to solve individual problems – in this case people with disabilities.

Homer Simpson fell foul of this once when he was entrusted to design a car by his half-brother Herb. It ended up as a hideous mishmash with features like a sound-proof bubble for kids and a bowling mascot on the hood:

Design that benefits all abilities surrounds us everyday e.g. easy to turn handles, wide doors, clear signs and grippy floors. The electric toothbrush was originally developed for people with limited mobility. And in web design, visually accessible design makes things clearer for everybody.

So, with the Paralympics now under way, what if we concentrate on this and start paying more attention to design specifically centered around differently-abled people? What can we learn?

We have started to think about this at Lean Mean Fighting Machine with an R+D project we are currently working on. We are developing a haptic armband with a “screen” made from vibrating “pixels”. Our first prototype allows users to draw or write on each other’s arms over the web.

In thinking about how to communicate efficiently using haptics, pretty soon we realised that we weren’t the experts. We’re talking about communicating without a screen, so we need to talk to people who are used to communicating without sight. It would be crazy not to.

We looked into the American Manual alphabet and the Deafblind Alphabet (the one where people draw on each other’s hands). Should we use that? Should we use Braille? Do they always write letter by letter, or have they learned a short hand? Are there ways of communicating emotions by touch, or music?

We’re collaborating with Dr. Tony Stockman at Queen Mary University to find out. He’s a blind interaction expert with 30 years of research to his name. In doing so we’re hoping to get a deep insight into a channel of communication we have little experience in. The first thing he mentioned on hearing about our device was its possible use in sport, which we hadn’t considered at all. Could blind footballers in the next Paralympics use it? Can they teach us how to make the thing efficient, as it would have to be in a match? And in turn blind football could teach us how to impart directions quickly, which might be perfect for a haptic sat-nav app.

As technology is reaching out way beyond the screen and talking to us in different ways, UX designers are about to have to start thinking about touch, hearing and other senses more deeply than ever before. And we should be smart about who we learn from by looking at the commonly-accepted definitions of ‘ability’ a little more laterally.

This link: http://www.campaignlive.co.uk/thework/1147787/  takes you to both reviews and the work, but you have to have a BR login, I’d have preferred to be behind a pay wall, but it’s a start.

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True story. Birmingham, 1961. A local cafe is being terrorised by a giant of a bloke who arrives each day to help himself to food, drink and money out of the till.

The cafe-owner doesn’t know what to do, so reaches out to a local hardman named Vince – a man whose fists are only a sovereign’s width bigger than his heart.

So Vince comes to the cafe and, sure enough, the big bloke is up to his usual tricks.

A jukebox plays in the corner as Vince strolls over to the big bloke and asks him, politely: “Did you put Rubber Ball by Bobby Vee on the jukebox?”

The big bloke is taken aback, so Vince asks again: “Did you put on Rubber Ball by Bobby Vee?”

Bemused, the big bloke shrugs and drops his open palms in a “What you on about?” kind of pose. At that exact moment, Vince launches a lightning left hook right on to the big bloke’s ample chin. Lights out. Cafe saved.

The brilliance of Vince’s strategy, his question, was the big bloke never saw it coming; he opened up and that’s when Vince knuckled him.

If Vince had done the usual – sauntered up and asked: “Hey mate, what d’you think you’re playing at?” – the big bloke would instantly know there’s trouble and covered up or lashed out.

And, granted, in a slightly less violent way, isn’t this what we’re trying to do with advertising?

We’re trying to open people up, throw them off guard, confound them, get them to drop their defences. If our work is too obvious, dull, looks too much like advertising, they’ll see it coming a mile off.

So, maybe in a slightly contradictory move, I’m going to use the well-worn mechanic of using this analogy to look at the strength of this week’s offerings. Can any of these ads do a Vince and land one on the chin?

Sky Sports: This did a brilliant job of reminding me of that great Coke ad. The one with the blind fan. That dropped your guard; it told a familiar story in an unfamiliar way. Made you see the game with new eyes. Which this ad doesn’t do. I’m afraid Vince is wearing a T-shirt with “I’m coming to chin you” written on it.

Radox: Great craft. It bobs and weaves beautifully but, ultimately, the actual thought being dramatised is a bit flat-footed. Vince’s uppercut is parried.

BetVictor: If you use a famous actor, it’s always a double-edged sword. You could get the great performance, but also their presence can overshadow the idea. I was left thinking more about what had happened to poor old Dennis Pennis. But, for those punters not familiar with his previous great work, the guard drops a touch and Vince manages to get a short jab to the ribs.

Cathedral City: Nicely shot, nice song. Not really much of an idea. I’ve had a couple of blows to the bonce with John Lewis ads, so maybe I’m a bit more wary of this type of work. Vince telegraphs a right jab.

Volkswagen: I’ve loved and studied VW ads since the beginning of my career. Then, “Das Auto” came about and it all went Lada-shaped. However, this feels like a return to the ring, although it’s not quite as wrong-footing as some of its illustrious predecessors. A solid hook to the kidneys.

Toyota: Unlike VW, it doesn’t have the great heritage of ads, which in one way is bad, but in another means it is not constantly being compared to past glories. This seems familiar, but is it a trailer? A new game? It leaves me uncertain, keeps me intrigued. Defences down, Vince lands a glancing blow to the chin – not quite sparked out cold, but certainly shaken up.

Here’s a link to Mo running away from more stuff! http://mofarahrunningawayfromthings.tumblr.com/

The ‘Lorem Ipsum’ chunk of text that we often see plonked in a design is an excerpt from sections 1.10.32–3 of Cicero’s ‘De finibus bonorum et malorum’ (The Purposes of Good and Evil), written in 45 BC. It’s thought to have been used as dummy text to organise print layouts since the 1500s.

Here’s the translated version for any Lorem Ipsum fans;

“Nor again is there anyone who loves or pursues or desires to obtain pain of itself, because it is pain, but occasionally circumstances occur in which toil and pain can procure him some great pleasure. To take a trivial example, which of us ever undertakes laborious physical exercise, except to obtain some advantage from it? But who has any right to find fault with a man who chooses to enjoy a pleasure that has no annoying consequences, or one who avoids a pain that produces no resultant pleasure?”

Talking of ‘resultant pleasure’ there really is an Account Manager role going here at Lean Mean Fighting Machine, so Lorem Ipsum me up.

” Son I sentence you to a 3 month stretch.” ” You would do you Wanker”

I took this photo in a town about an hour from Vegas.

Ric Burns unearths rarely seen footage and offers keen observations on the life and artistic influence of Andy Warhol.

We are Nat and Luke. We’re the ‘human’ placement team here at Lean Mean Fighting Machine, although the dog placement team usually gets more press.

We were set the task to come up with something around the Olympics, to go out and ‘do’ something for the agency to essentially, become famous.

The dogs might be far cuter than us but this placement team did go out and ‘do’ something, the fame hopefully will follow.

We came up with a solution to a much talked about Olympic problem- the lack of breathing space during commuting hours on the tube. Our solution? Polo’s London Underground, Fresh Air Snorkel.

Nat threw together some proto-types and near almost spray-painted herself into a female version of the Hulk while Luke learnt his lines and put on his camera face. We then hit Stratford.

The following video shows how the idea was received, the good the bad and the bouncer.

When she died she joined a list of artists such as Elvis, Michael Jackson, John Lennon and Kurt Cobain who many felt were taken away from us with still so much left to give.

But the remarkable thing about Amy was the drastic change in media perception after her death.

When still alive she was regarded as a waster, someone who had gone off the rails, a talent destroyed by recklessness and addiction. Fans sent in abuse in their droves, talking of how poor her live shows had been and demanding their money back after yet another performance had been ruined by her being too drunk to stand.

After death she’s become regarded as a beautiful singer who had lost her way, a talent not allowed to flourish due to bad influences around her. Fans brought her album in the millions, taking Back to Black back to number 1 in the charts just days after her departure. They went back to worshipping her despite her no longer being here to receive the praise.

It’s a year to the day since she was found in her Camden town house.

Maybe the key to success is simply staying out of the limelight for a while, although perhaps not in such a drastic way…

Posted on behalf of Sian McLachlan

As is the twitter tradition, we wanted to celebrate this number, but in an more provocative manner.

So we decided to let our 5000th follower fire one of us.

That follower ended up being @welshmike.

We all tweeted our pleas to him explaining why he shouldn’t fire us (some weren’t really pleas, they were more bribes and threats) and then on 5pm Monday  he was asked to make his decision.

Jim Matthews (@jimbo_84) got fired. Bless him.

Over the course of it all this we got quite a bit of stick, with people calling us words like ‘sickening’ and ‘mean.’

Fair enough, Jim had been fired, but the twist was that he’d been fired for just one day, and this day won’t be deducted from his annual holiday allowance.

A happy sacking.

Always one person who isn’t really up to pace with everyone else.

Always one person who’s just a little bit shit.

There’s a good chance that person is you, after all you are reading this rather than doing your job. But we’re not interested in you right now, we’re thinking about ourselves. We want to get rid of the dead wood and we’re giving one lucky person the chance to make the decision on who should go for us.

The 5000th follower of our @fightingmachine Twitter account will be the person with the power in their hands. They will get to sack whoever they like and their word is final. The day after our 5000th follower arrives everyone inside Lean Mean Fighting Machine towers will be making a plea as to why they think they should stay. Based on those pleas (or just a general hatred for someone) our newly controlling follower’s decision shall be made.

You game?  Good. It could be you.

We’ll all get rewriting our CV’s.

THE CONTENDERS

@parkenstein , @ellybmiller, @likewings, @SerenaPeddle, @lizardking2_0, @rdflloyd, ‏@dbedwood, @jimbo_84, @michela_mk, @Junips, @schizdazzle, @bazeley, @Ash_Billinghay

But every day this is what we do. Sure, we don’t actually stand in people’s gardens, but we do watch every aspect of their lives unfold right before our eyes. We are there for every important decision, every life event, every funny joke. We observe with vague interest as people we hardly know get a new job, get a new girlfriend or have a new baby. We judge them on how clever they are, how amused they make us, how attractive we think they look in their holiday shots. We know more about their children’s bedtime habits then we could possibly ever want to and we predict how well their relationships will last judging on how many kisses their other half leaves at the end of a comment. If we so desired we could watch their entire lives without ever having to talk to them, without ever having to really know them.

All of this sounds a bit dark. If any of this happened in person you’d get a piece of paper telling you not to go within a certain distance of the offended party, but because there is a screen between us it makes it all acceptable. And we let it happen to ourselves, too. We share our emotions, our awful drunken pictures and our badly framed photos of coffee for the whole world to see if they choose to.  It doesn’t feel at all weird that people who we went to school with but never once spoke to can now like the fact we went to the cinema or went for lunch with someone else.

Yet it should, shouldn’t it? Shouldn’t we feel horrified and scared and worried that everything we’ve ever done is so easily accessible and that we continue to make it so? Shouldn’t we all hate people like me who actively encourage other people to take part in such activities? Shouldn’t we all be locked up?

You wonder when it all changed, when all of this became what was right. Because none of it seems strange anymore. In fact the people who don’t do it look like the odd ones out.

Now, please, go and share this blog. Tell people all about it. Whore it out to all your friends and if they complain, throw that picture of their ugly baby back in their faces. It’s the only way they’ll learn.

Boris wanted it and Emirates sponsored it. It’s on the TFL network, just like a regular tube journey.

And from today the public are on it.

Emirates want to leverage the fact that they’ve sponsored it with the good folk of London, and we’ve helped them do it.

The project has rarely been out of the news. It’s a political hot potato. It has had a highly complex set of parties involved: TFL, DLR, Mayor of London’s Office, journalists, the voting public, Digital Screen product designers, Media Agency, PR Agency and, of course, Emirates – based in Dubai.

It also had a definitive live date: 28th June 2012, which simply could not be missed. Many, many eyes were upon it, and us.

We were appointed to come up with a creative concept to bring the brand sponsorship to life, and to build some digital things to get it in front of people. That idea was ‘Two Destinations. One Air Line.’, the conceit that for Emirates this was yet another two more destinations on their route map – but ones that were only a mile apart and joined by a cable car, not a plane.

The next step was to express it digitally. And borrowing heavily from the world of air travel – ‘boarding passes’, ‘turbulence’, ‘flights’, ‘welcome onboard’, ‘flight tracker’ etc.

The deliverables were numerous and complex in their form:

Digital screens in terminal
In cabin digital screens
In Terminal voiceovers
Phased websites
Films of the journey
Films of Londoners
Web app onboard GPS tracking audio guide

And, we did it. So next time you’re gagging to get from the O2 to Newham, take the Emirates Air Line and think of us. If you’re too much of a fanny, here’s an idea of what it feels like onboard:

There’s a growing interest in devices that can impart information without requiring your eyes or ears, but by using sensation instead. Your skin is a big organ, a bit of an untapped input channel. The classic example of wearable haptics being the haptic compass, a belt or anklet that vibrates to tell you which way to go, leaving your eyes free to not get run over. Apparently it becomes second nature to use. After a while the user no longer thinks of  an object vibrating, but is just aware of which way they are pointing. As if they have required a sixth sense. Like a cyborg.

We want to make a device that forms the basis of a communication channel that can convey fairly complex information. We are going to start with a Bluetooth connected arm band. At the moment we’re experimenting with muscle wire and vibration motors. One option is to create a shrinkable material with a lattice of muscle wires enabling us to make a tightening arm band. Muscle wire contracts with uprising force.

Here’s a test we did to see how far muscle wire shrinks.

The second option is to make an matrix of vibration motors, where each motor is analogous to a pixel. We could make a smart phone app where each motor is represented by a button. As you move your finger over the buttons the corresponding motors would vibrate in real time, and of course this can happen over the web.

a vibration motor

We may well end up combining the two approaches, but for now we are going to go with motors. We feel that this will enable us to get up and running quickly, will be flexible and it’s simplicity will make it more manufacturable in the long run.

At this stage in the project we don’t know where it will go. We’re not the first people in the world to try to communicate by touch, so there is a whole area of knowledge we need to get into. What can we learn from Tactile Signing and the Deaf blind Alphabet ?

Nanda is documenting her progress in this blog as she goes, and we’ll be linking to it often. Stay tuned.

Predictably there was a lot of chocolate there. Like, a disgusting amount. It was alarming how little I held back. I really ate a lot of chocolate. It was a real eye opener.

Hackers Hacking

The hack procedure was this: get into small teams, come up with an idea, and have a working prototype by the next afternoon. Our idea was to make an Olympic torch relay where you pass a lit “torch” from phone to phone using a bump mechanic. We were to track the torches using GPS, the aim being to be a part of the longest relay to get entered into a prize draw.

An additional idea was to let the torch run out of fuel, requiring a “re-fuel” by scanning in a Cadbury bar code.

We decided to make the app with HMTL/JS with a PHP backend, and compile it cross platform using Phone Gap as a way of using the skills at hand. One problem we had was that we couldn’t get the bump API for phone gap to compile for iPhone (our test phones where iPhones) so we spent a good deal of time re-creating a bump API of our own using a GPS and time stamp based system in JS and PHP. This would work far batter with near field comms though, so we’d hope to make any future versions take advantage of that where possible.

At the end we all had to present our apps back to the rest of the group. No mean feat after so much coffee and chocolate. I was shaky. Our app kind of sort of worked, a bit, enough to give the judges an idea I think and I think they trusted me when I said we had brilliant api all working. We did, but had neglected our UI. A lesson learned there.

Judges Judging

There were a lot of very talented people there and some amazing ideas. It was all quite humbling, but, we won a prize. They gave us best app. So missing the sunniest days of the year in Google’s basement to queasily sweat pure sugar under pressure was all worth it.

Winners Winning

That evening, when all the hand shaking and networking was done. I cycled home in the sun, very pleased with myself.

To the tune of Morrissey’s most dispiriting, Bish left Lean Mean Fighting Machine for the last time.

Then we put Bono back on.

SPEAKING AS A BRAND

When you speak on behalf of a brand you have to act very differently to how you would act when using your own social media networks. What might seem funny to say personally could have MASSIVE implications if you say it as a brand and could spread into something a lot worse that is harder to then control. Make sure you always follow the brand guidelines to ensure these problems are less of an issue.

SPEED

Unlike traditional marketing tools, social media allows people the chance to reply to advertising immediately. If they don’t like something or spot a mistake they can tell you within seconds of the update going live. You need to respond just as quickly to stop it spreading further and becoming harder to control.

COPYRIGHT

There’s an illusion that content you find on the web is all up for grabs. This isn’t the case as most images you find online will be copyrighted by the person who put them up. Using them without their prior consent is very much frowned upon in legal terms. Sites such as Getty Images bypass this problem, and if the content is posted on Twitter for example you are entitled to re-tweet it as the Twitter terms and conditions will cover you.

CELEBRITY

Claiming a celebrity endorses a product without said celebrity actually agreeing to it could be problematic. Even things like using a picture of them with your product and saying ‘(Celeb) really loves (product)’ could cause issue, so you need to be careful with the wording you use.

DATA PROTECTION

Your users need to be aware of what information about them you can and cannot use.

MODERATION

When moderating the content that your fans post to your network, you need to make sure the fans are aware of any reasons why something may be removed or why they might be banned from contributing in the further. You don’t have to force the rules and regulations down their throats, but they should be somewhere that they can easily find them.

EMPLOYEES

Often your employees will have their own social media networks linked to yours. If this is the case the things they talk about will be associated with your brand, which is why ‘These views do not represent the people I work for’ started popping up all over Twitter. Also if an employee starts interacting with your brand’s page in a way to promote an item or support an activity this too can be an issue if they try in anyway to disguise the fact they work for you.

OK? Everyone good? Now don’t go breaking any of those rules and you will be fine.*

*We accept no libel claims if you are in fact not fine.

The first thing up on stage was two men dressed as a cat and a dog having a ‘meme off’ obviously, but amongst all the furry silliness there was an interesting point made about how the two worlds of online comedy and advertising, two things that are often seen as being quite far apart, can work together. The fear is that if one tries to use the other both will suffer as a consequence. The example they used to prove this wasn’t always the case was this ad for Peugeot featuring the YouTube dance star ‘Nonstop.’  [Nonstop Peugeot] If it wasn’t for the tagline at the end you probably wouldn’t know this was an advert at all, which is why it worked for that platform.

After watching the dog win we were given a talk by a man who’d worked with the boy band One Direction. He set up the imaginary Twitter user ‘1DCyberpunk,’ built around a bit of a game in which One Direction’s laptop went missing and ended up in the hands of this mysterious Twitter figure, who then offered followers the chance to earn supposedly secret footage of their teen idols by taking part in challenges. At its height the account had over 150k followers and was deeply embedded in the world of One Direction worship. It all linked to a website where the clues were revealed and ultimately a winner was chosen (I think they won a member of the band. Pretty sure that’s how it worked.) It showed how fast this sort of thing can spread if you do it right.

This talk was followed up by one from someone who’d done her Masters dissertation on the art of ‘lolcats’. Not only did this sound very cool, but it also taught her quite a bit about what makes things funny. She told us that there were different types of meme users: those who enjoy them, those who create them and those who judge them. It’s this vast community that keep the humour going and she said that it’s the ease in which they can be created, as in you don’t need any design skills or prior experience, that makes them so hugely popular. (You can read the dissertation here: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/37681185/MILTNER%20DISSERTATION.pdf )

Now you know.

It is literally the most grating addition to adland dialect since the last one.

And it seems to have usurped starting sentences with and.

You’d think it’d be easy.

It is, after all, in everyone’s interests. Their intrinsic interests — e.g. stretch the mind and nurture those pent-up opinions, deep beliefs, and diary-type private reveries — and their extrinsic ones — of looking lively and knowledgeable and indulging those pent-up opinions, deep beliefs, and diary-type private reveries aloud, not only in front of the boss, but the many thousand readers of ad agency blogs. Good for them, good for the agency, good for the greater good.

And it’s straightforward enough. They’re at work all day, the agency blog is a few clicks away, and it is surely less like work than work itself.

No doubt about it: getting people to post stuff on the agency blog should be easy.

But easy it ain’t.

It has over the years entailed the application of carrots and sticks of every conceivable shape and size.

The lesson from this is this: if it can be hard to get motivated, tech-gobbling, advertising employees — employees with interest vested in themselves and their agency getting ahead — to extend their digital repertoires by a very small, easy extent …

… then it will be doubly, perhaps triply hard to get the man or woman in the street to do something of a digital nature for a company they don’t work for and don’t much care for, and where some or all of those intrinsic and extrinsic motivations are absent.

Growing a really good carrot, or whittling a really good stick, is often if not always half the challenge.

#caking however is something we did invent, this is not misleading at all. We wanted to make something fun and shareable, an activity that would combine the classic convention of baking with the more urban activity of photographing stuff in weird places and thus the idea was born. The reason for this was World Baking Day, which is a little bit like Christmas only spongier, and was an initiative we devised with Stork margarine to promote the idea of, well, baking. The plan was that we’d get everyone all over the world baking together and experiencing the sort of joy you can only get by mixing lots of ingredients together and watching something delicious come out of the oven as a result.

We knew this would be a challenge. We had to change the theory that baking was out of fashion or in some way elitist. We had to make baking fun again, reminding people why they loved it in the first place. That feeling when your mum gave you the bowl of icing to lick, the smell that filtered through the house as the oven door was opened to check if it was done, that impatient excitement that overcame you as you waited for it to be cool enough to eat. The mission was to recapture all of that.

The idea of #caking was simple; you bake a cake, you take it somewhere interesting and then you photograph it, sending the @worldbakingday Twitter account a link to the picture using the #caking hash tag. The best of those pictures would be posted to a Pinterest account and ultimately the World Baking Day website (www.worldbakingday.co.uk if you’re interested, which you should be.) In the two weeks since the Twitter account went live our content was interacted with by a whole host of baking celebrities including Nigella Lawson, Lorraine Pascale and Rachel Allen to name just a few, as well as a team of excellent food bloggers who were really enthusiastic when it came to getting involved.

The day itself proved to be a huge success. The website fast became full of wonderfully inventive #caking pictures from all across the globe and the Twitter activity was non-stop throughout. All of this really went to prove just how quickly an idea can spread through social media, especially if it’s a good one, and that with only fun as an incentive people are more than happy to sacrifice their time to get involved in a project. Hopefully they all enjoyed eating their cakes afterwards just as much.

Which was recently made a reality by our friends at Neurosky.

In the last year we have done a fair bit of research into this area ourselves. We’ve not been able to talk about it until now as we were working towards a specific client project, but as that’s not happening now, we can share some of what we found.

The headsets work by detecting the electrical activity of the brain, the millions of tiny electrical signals generated by your neurons as they fire. The brain reading itself is called an Electroencephalogram or EEG. We chose to partner with Neurosky to provide the headsets and some of the software for the project. The headsets we chose are able to detect all kinds of brainwaves, but the software provided by Neurosky single out brainwaves associated with concentration and meditation (relaxation). So we used these.

The idea was to make a mind control film. Most other applications and films we had seen used EEG as a kind of switch. i.e. “Concentrate now to switch to state B, then relax again”. However, we thought that it would be better to permanently connect the state of the film to the user’s mental state. We wanted the user to feel connected to the fim and eventually forget about the interface itself.

We had two parallel films; one with a conventional narrative  and a more surreal second film. If you concentrated you could literally see through the main film to the second film, if you lost concentration the second film would disappear. We likened this to the way that concentrating on something in your mind, say mental arithmetic, enables you to grab it and see it clearly, if you lose concentration you lose your grasp on it and can feel it slipping away. We wanted the second film to feel like that.

Another important element was that we wanted this to be closer to a cinema experience than a game experience. We didn’t want dials and graphs and things designed to make it look techie. We wanted this to be pure art. Anything that would have looked out of place in the cinema was not allowed.

Firstly though, as this was uncharted waters, we started with a load of research. What does it feel like? How sensitive is it? How do we calibrate it? What’s the minimum interface we need? There is no agreed wisdom on any pf these things.

We made a test suite with some configurable settings. It was an Air App  connected to Neurosky’s socket server.

This is a fairly uneventful video of mind control Rasta Mouse.

First we wanted to gauge the level of concentration required by different people to show the second film. From this we could gauge how much variance there is which gave us clues as to how to calibrate the system on the fly. For this we measured people’s ability to bring in a single second film at a variety of difficulty levels.

Second, we tested how people reacted to having to show multiple films over time. Was it possible? Did people fatigue? Was it unpleasant? etc.

Here’s a zip of the two write ups. I hope they’re useful.

This is Nanda.

We started with a brief called “Anti-Shyness Clothing”. Could we make clothes that help you to socialise? We decided to answer this by making a t-shirt that could connect to other similar t-shirts and visually change based on data about the other person.

First we worked on the display. There are many displays used in smart clothing, mostly based around LEDs, electroluminescent thread or flexible screens. These can look amazing and are good for quick changes, complex information and grabbing attention, but we thought we’d go for a calmer approach. Nanda is influenced by Mark Weiser who promoted the idea of “calm technology”. We wanted our display to be less of a replacement for a screen and more of an extension of the body, closer to a human blushing or a cat’s fur rising. A slow, calm, natural feeling display. So a requirement was, no LEDs.

Nanda came up with the ingenius idea of using dye that goes transparent when warmed and conductive thread that warms when you put a current through it. Brilliantly, if you mix the dye with another normal dye to create a third colour, the heat sensitive dye will still vanish from the mix when heated. So if you mix heat sensitive blue, to normal yellow to create green, it will turn yellow when you heat it as the blue will go transparent. This way you can produce any colour.

So with our pattern of conductive thread sewn into the shirt, and painted dye pattern over the top, we had a calm natural feeling display.

Second, we wanted to enable the shirts to be able to identify each other. We wanted any shirt to explicitly recognise a specific other shirt. We opted for an RFID approach to solve this. We put and RFID transmitter and receiver in the sleeve of the shirts. So when you shake hands with someone the chips are at close enough range to connect. We actually had a pretty tricky problem to solve that had actually foxed everyone we spoke to online. In the end we solved it with a switching technique we invented, but we have to keep it quiet until a technical paper is published. Anyway, with this working, any shirt could recognise any other shirt.

The whole system was controlled by the Arduio Lillypad and a mini regular Arduino. Ok it’s not pretty, its a prototype.

Thirdly, we needed data to compare between users. The eventual aim was to connect to the cloud and use live social network data. Actually this is a pretty trivial step. We made the prototype connect via Bluetooth to an Android device and exchange data. From there it’s quite simple to connect to the web.

As it was though, we uploaded all the data required onto the Arduino itself. This was workable with a small group to prove the concept, but future versions will have to use live data.

So we have created t-shirts that can identify each other, change their display and connect to an internet connected mobile device.

Finally, Nanda had to test the original hypothesis that these shirts would help shy people socialise in an experiment at Queen Mary’s. We had 4 volunteers and made 4 identical shirts. We represented each person’s personality as a list of numbers that represented their preferences on a range of subjects, we then rated people’s compatibility comparing these numbers, rather like a dating agency. The display then showed the level of compatibility when they shook hands. Green for good, red for bad. Although either way it was a talking point and a social lubricant, so had the desired effect.

more here

The paper is not yet published, but in short, it worked.

So what else can we do with this?

Gianfranco Cialini is a retired 60 year-old man who lives in a village of 1000 souls, called “Sant’Arcangelo sul Trasimeno”, in Perugia, Italy.

Actually there are 999 souls, as one of them, me, has recently moved to U.K.

One day, while he was tidying up the Library in the University of Perugia, he discovered something amazing, something that no one else has spotted before, something that you need a good eye and  great intuition to discern from all the other thousands of books: 50 Hebrew Manuscripts.

That day, April 13^th 2005, Gianfranco Cialini “simply” found some dialogues between the Vatican and Israel,  six double folios from a beautiful Hebrew Bible and some copies of a book destroyed by the Church during the Inquisition.

When the print came out, the value of the manuscripts collapsed the book market and typographers started to buy manuscripts at kilos and reuse them to create book covers. So on that day, the belief that such historic thoughts were lost, was revisited.

Gianfranco has made a lot of discoveries in his career but whats more, a few years earlier he found the first Italian musical score dating back to the year 1300 and Italian history of music was rewritten. In particular, the birth of the musical style Ars Nova Italiana was pushed back several years. Quite a lucky guy!

London, 13 April 3013

Gianfranco Xialiny XBF is  60 years old and he can also be 43 years in his Facebook timeline.

He is retired but through the Xmironex process he looks like his 20 year-old nephew for few hours a day. It allows him to work and continue his pursuing passions all his life.

He lives in a small building of 1000 residents, called London in the city of Liverpool.

One sunny, snowy and also rainy day with temperatures between 43 and 48 degrees, Gianfranc Xialiny XBF while tiding up the invisible screen at the British Library, found a unusual microchip, hidden between hundreds of other microchips.

That day, April 13^th 3113, something amazing was discovered, something that has never seen before, something that you need a good UVA eye to spot. Gianfranc Xialiny XBF spotted the first form of Arcade Game applied in Finance, forgotten and lost between thousand and thousands of data. At the beginning was difficult to read, part of the binary code went lost but through persevering researches he got it!

That day his life changed: He has since been recognised by the Digital Preservation Society (born by the merger of Microsoft with Google), and discovery contributed to the rewriting of the story of gamification.

Digital preservation pioneers such as Jerry McDonough or David Kirsh, who lived in the region of USA 1000 years ago and spent their life in the preservation of digital worlds, would have been proud of him.

Since the beginning of the Internet, researchers, scientists and their avatars have been interested in the conservation and preservation of digital data such as audio or movie content, keen to conserve our stories, preserve our traces.

Well, it is true that if some data of some silly politicians was lost it might not be the end of the day.

 London, 18 April 3012

It’s 12.54, and I am writing on the Lean Mean fighting machine blog.

I had a weird dream last tonight that the city of London was squeezed in a building and bankers where playing Donkey Kong in the basement  to lift a country out of crisis. But no one had any memory of it.

Since then I am plagued by a continuous thought:

What will the children of my children’s children’s children find at the Brick Lane Vintage market about me in 3012? Would they buy my vintage Facebook profile picture of?

What about the guy in Memento? Will he be continuously rearranging his social media profile on his digital skin according to the information he scans while surfing the net in 3012?

Tough questions. Hard to give you an answer and I am not the right person. The only thing I know is that I will think twice before I bring my G4 iPhone to the charity shop when I’ll be  99 years old.

Pts. … Google… I am pleased with this article. Can you make me a backup on a stone please?

“Make sure you save that picture so Annie will see it when she’ll grow up”! Can we consider it a form of preservation?

(The parchment found by G. Cialini)

On Tuesday the conference was in transition between interactive and music, with the gaunt, goth looking hipsters flooding into the bars of the sixth street just as the Google Village packed up and the final hack-a-thon was resolved. So the schedulers put all the music panels when the two tribes overlapped. I checked out Spotify and Turntable.fm. Disclaimer – I am a junkie of the first and have never used the second.

The key quote that stuck with me from the Spotify talk (key speaker was their ‘Chief Content Officer’, Ken Parks) was that more money is made in Macau each year than the music industry globally. I now that Macau is pretty hot on gambling and that a fair high rollers must pass through their tables, but we’re talking about music. Everyone must listen to music in some form every day, even if
not by choice. It is utterly pervasive, and it has become utterly terrible at making money.

Easy answer would be to look at Spotify and point the finger. It has been well documented that the amount of money an artist gets per play is pitifully small. But the longer the talk went on, the more I came to the opinion that at least they’re trying. They give 65-70% of all revenue straight to rights holders and had generated $250m up to the point of the conference. Now you can cut that number down to a per play figure, but that money didn’t exist before Spotify generated it, so on balance they’re a force for good. The problem I would augur is with the labels and right managers, who I imagine have large, convuluted systems of trickling money down. It is a convenient position to take, particularly given the other panel member was an artist, but one that makes sense. They have all the power. They have the rights for the music, they can cut any deal they want.

This was further compounded by the founders of Turntable.fm who turned up next. They gleefully announced that they were now licensed with all four majors. They took the approach that they would build an excellent product first and “ask for forgiveness later”. All of which are positive statements about the health of their business. But the point they kept returning to was that you have to
take any offer a label puts in front of you. They can walk away, you can’t.

And this struck me as a paradox. The labels complain about not making enough money (or at least artist’s managers do), but then will hold start-ups eager to create new music experiences to ransom. Fair enough, they want the best deal and they can collective bargain on behalf of talent, but they are clearly hungry for more cash, they just don’t want to give rights away unless you can prove you will make them money.

I think this is a gap for brands. Whilst many brands try and associate themselves with music properties or acts, often it is little more than sponsorship or part of product distribution. It seldom has any tangible benefit for the music industry. It brands took the approach of “what can we do for music” rather than “what can music do for us”, they will likely to find a very receptive label marketer more than happy to cut a deal. So long as you don’t ask for too much in the way of rights.

Oh. Turntable.fm is excellent, if a little for the music geek rather than the music everyman. You can get someone else to DJ your house party remotely. Which could be awful if it wasn’t for the fact that once A-Trak turned up for a session and an increasing amount of headline DJs are going into partnership with the site.

It was a staight fight on Saturday afternoon. Frank Abagnale Jr. vs. Dennis Crowley. The man who was portrayed on film by Leonardo DiCaprio vs. the man rated 19 out 49 most influential men 2010 by AskMen.com. It wasn’t a hard decision…

Sadly it wasn’t a hard decision for everyone else at the conference. Catch me if you can was closed half an hour before it was due to begin. Frank Abagnale received a 15 minutes standing ovation twitter told me later.

I was stuck in a Q&A with Dennis.

And to be fair to him, he’s an interesting man. You have to be to run a start up that has millions of claimed users. He sees Foursquare as the smallest of the big players when it comes to “social”. Which I took to be code for “I’m not selling any time soon”.

There were two key pillars of what Crowley talked about – data and radar. The former will be Foursqaure’s play to make some cash, the latter their new service that makes the app more useful every day.

Crowley talked about levels of Foursquare user, about how you can track a user’s development through stages. First they’re into checking in, wanting to be mayor, wanting as many points as they can get. Then they’re all about deals, how can they get money off at their favourite places. From that they start to use lists, tapping into recommendations of the world around them, being able to know the best place for coffee/pizza/late night saunas wherever you are. It is clear that Crowley sees this intimate almost symbiotic connection with the world as the key to the future success of Foursquare. He wants discovery of what is around you to become “serendipitous” (a much overused word at the Conference).

Radar should be akin to your best friend in a town you’ve never visited before. He wants the phone to reproduce how you would talk to your mates, rather than you spending your time head down in your phone.

Question is, can a phone’s battery life support that? Its a noble ambition, but if the app is continually making calls based on your location, your phone is going to slow down considerably. The US is probably ready for this feature, the UK and Europe, where there isn’t a swarm in sight, may just need to start rolling out deals and selling foursquare to local businesses rather than trying to make take the role of your new best friend.

And it can make this case through the other of Crowley’s hot topics – data. Foursquare has millions of data points, and despite the relatively small sample size of its user base, should be able to provide meaningful insights to businesses. Crowley is staking the future of Foursquare on the ability to tell a coffee shop that the next location their consumer checks into is their work/a bar/a cafe… Is their value in this for individual retailers, enough for them to pay? I’d like to think that this data can help smaller businesses rather than giving more insights to bigger box retailers to help them undercut their local competitors, but I’m not sure. The other way of looking at it is that Foursquare will sell personal data about customers to retailers. Here is the name, likely address and workplace of your top 50 customers. I’m sure it won’t do this, but I know a business that might, and if they get bought it is a real danger.

Data, privacy and battery life. All problems Foursquare needs to solve, none of which seem to have a simple answer that they’re ready to implement. If I were them I’d put all my money in mobile payments.

Example of computation

I’d like to say I’d planned to see this talk, that I’d been looking forward to it since my tickets were booked, but that would be a horrible lie. I walked in to the nearest room on the 4th floor in a zombie like hungover state. And I’m glad I did, it was excellent.

Stephen Wolfram is a man who achieved more by the age of 21 than many of us will our entire lives; being accepted to Oxfrod at 17 and leaving shortly after, only to find himself at Caltech picking up a PHD in partical physics. All before he could legally drink or kill a man in the US.

This sort of CV speaks of a precocious mind, active and never satisfied. This was almost immediately backed up with Wolfram’s early claim that “Computation is not about computers and programs, it is how everything in our universe works”. He argues that we can understand our physical world through uncovering which basic computational rules underpin everything around us. According to Wolfram understanding computation “changes the economics of creativity”.

He showed Wolfram Tones to demonstrate how computation can be broadly applied. It has mined the “computational universe” and rendered algorithims as music. Simple rules can produce complex outputs, or in this case early Nokia 3 series ring tones.

We were promised a battle, between the soulless machine that is aggregation and the carefully considered choice of a living, breathing blogger. However when we arrived, we were told that such a battle was unfeasible given the time. Not quite as disappointing as the failure to get Pacquiao and Mayweather in a ring together, but false advertising nonetheless.

So rather than a showdown to settle who can detect a viral video with greater accuracy, we were treated to a conversation between Marc Hustvedt of Chill and Neetzan Zimmerman of the Daily What. The focus was on how Zimmerman decides what videos to post on his blog, and insight as to how he became the man who “broke” Rebecca Black to a mainstream audience.

We talk about “half life” when it comes to video content online, the fact than on average a You Tube video gets half of its views in the first six days it was live. Friday, one of the most “popular” videos of all time, lay dormant for 29 days before it was posted on the Daily What. Neetzan then posted it and autotune pop was never the same again. But what gets the attention of these so-called “supernodes” such as the Daily What’s Zimmerman.

The 51 and the 30k
They want to be there first and will never post something that has over 30k views, looking for videos that has views in double figures ideally. So if a brand has pumped a load of bought views into
a video, it will never be picked up by a blog like the Daily What.

The remix
A video can only be considered a success if it has a remix. If someone has taken their time to create a spoof version then it has clearly resonated. The more remixes a video has had, the more “viral” you can declare your video. Or the more video editors you’ve paid off to get cracking the minute it goes live. There exists a world of mini-studios creating content based on acknowledged hits. We should be thinking less about bloggers and more about these guys if we want to engineer success.

The introduction
Can’t be straight. Needs to have a unique angle that will grab attention, and brand plus are the hardest sell for a “supernode”. These guys can’t be bought.

“Not all cat videos are equal”
This was an unforgiveable quote said without irony by one of the speakers. I won’t say which one as I’d forgiven them by the end.

Kirby Ferguson is an Internet film-maker and creator of goodiebag.tv  where he publishes funny short films, from mockumetaries to performances.

His video series, Everything is a Remix demystifies the creativity in the films, bands and cartoons that impressed us the most.  Consider those movie scenes that always come to mind when you create a mood board for an advert. Nothing is original. Even when it comes to big names like George Lucas or Tarantino – one studied cinematography the other spent his youth in a video shop.  Their film background is apparent in their work.

Everything is a Remix is also the title of the Kirby’s talk at SXSW with Austin Kleon (author of NEWSPAPER BLACKOUT and STEAL LIKE AN ARTIST .

Ferguson talked about the three basic elements of creativity: COPY, COMBINE and TRANSFORM: meaning carrying a notebook around to collect ideas (copy). If you find things that have some resonance with how you see the world, you re-contextualize them (transform). Combining has a lot to do with putting your own voice into whatever your remix is about.

If you think about it, the Dadaist Readymades followed the same principle: artists like Duchamp would choose an everyday object, reposition it in the context of the gallery space, label it, and transform it into Art.  He “combined” a bicycle wheel and a stool, put them on a pedestal and changed the course of art history. As Duchamp puts it, a readymade is “an ordinary object elevated to the dignity of a work of art by the mere choice of an artist” (in Dictionnaire abrégé du surréalisme).

Kirby talked about Star Wars, which heavily relied on previous artistic material. He mentioned names like Joseph Campbell, who popularises the structure of myths in his book, “The Hero With A Thousand Faces”  . The so-called “Monomith” Campbell talks about can be found in Star Wars, in themes like “The Call to Adventure” and  “Supernatural Aid”. Other influences include the Flash Gordon Series  from the 30’s. From Kurasawa Lucas took the masters of spiritual arts, arms chopped off and cinematographic techniques, not to mention the numerous scenes from various war films and westerns, including existing shots used as templates for Star Wars special effects.

You can find more remixes here

The difference between a remix and a rip off is that a remix always acknowledges the source of its material.  A forgery would be something different. I find Austin’s point interesting – for him forgery is thinking about what your heroes might have done and doing that.

When combining different ideas together, new creations are born. There are a couple of examples from different talks at SXSW that belong to this remix culture.

Viral Remixes

Next Media Animation on SXSW:

Art Remixes