-
Great podcast via Gaping Void
Monthly Archive for November, 2006
Does your company make something extraordinary? BlendTec does and here’s a 50 dollar advertising campaign right there, including the cost of the rake. It’s been watched 280,000 times, favorited 474 times and has 113 comments, not bad ROI.
BlendTec has put up 10 videos of its blender demolishing various goods like marbles, cans of coke, credit cards etc. Overall I think the videos have been watched over 5 million times, and that is people that chose to watch them.
Thanks to Scoble for pointing that one out.
After wandering around the eerily quiet “Dell Island” on SecondLife it struck me that most of the buildings in SecondLife are built to mirror buildings in the real world, with stairs, and impenetrable walls, windows etc. But I can fly in SecondLife and walls and stairs are just annoying. I hate landing on the roof of a building only to have to jump off it, to go an find the frikin door. C’mon, it’s the future folks, lets start designing for the environment (no weather to protect folks from) and the users capabilities (we can fly and we don’t get cold). Maybe then we can get on with some real innovative features and environments.
As for Dell Island, it was deserted and pretty uninteresting.
This will be a super cool event, a live, head to head design competition, kind of like battling breakdancers, but on a mac, in photoshop and illustrator projected onto a big screen. Obviously sponsored by adobe, competition 7pm to 10pm, after party 10pm to 4am.
When: Saturday, November 18th, 2006 - 7-10PM (Competition); 10PM-4AM (Afterparty)
Where: Yerba Buena Center for the Arts
701 Mission St. @ 3rd St.
San Francisco, CA 94103
415-978-2787
Must be 21+
General Admission - Advance Tickets: $10; At the Door: $15 Hosted by: Thes One of People Under the Stairs.
Music Provided by: J.Boogie’s Dubtronic Science, Om Records
Nice little interactive “e-tailing gameshow” from Amazon, essentially they are putting up 4 products with super low prices ie. xbox for $100, or a full suspension mountain bike for $30. The community votes on which product they want for the cheap price. The winning product will have a limited quantity (1000 xbox’s), and will go on sale on thanksgiving day at 2pm EST.
No surprises on what people are voting for…. the $100 xbox
You may of heard of the Ambient Orb, a glowing ball that changes color based upon some underlying data like the stock market, or in our offices case at Nokia how much electricity we are using 
Blue means we’re using a reasonable amount, but if it’s glowing red it means we should turn off some lights. Anyway, Ambient Devices, started by a friend and colleague David Rose, is in the business of making information “glance-able”.
I recently heard from David about a new product called the Ambient Clock. Well you might say the clock is already pretty “glance-able”, but what they are trying to do is show appointments on your clock from a calendar. Kind of a “glance-able” schedule. What is really interesting about this is that they have integrating with the google calendar, enabling you to try out the Ambient Clock interface on your google homepage. A pretty neat way to prototype or beta test a piece of hardware.
Here’s a picture of my Ambient clock on my google homepage, note that it’s glowing orange because I have an appointment coming up:
This is what my clock would normally look like because I have no life 
Interesting though. I would be very keen on this if they could integrate with my outlook/entourage stuff.
You can participate in testing this out yourself, just go to ambientclock.com and check it out. I’m going to be really interested in what happens with this and the results of this kind of beta testing hardware on the web.
One question that comes to mind as I read the excellent UIE article The Freedom of Fast Iterations: How Netflix Designs a Winning Web Site the question comes to mind, what would have Netflix looked like if a big interactive agency had been involved? I Imagine it would have become an expensive, glossy, marketing web site selling people on the benefits of getting dvd’s in the mail. I think the reason this is a likely scenario is because the way agencies are compensated and judged it pays for them to create something glossy and expensive. Agencies are judged on the “deliverable”, the artifact they hand over, not how that site grows and flourishes over the course of years. People spending hundreds of thousands of dollars with an interactive agency want something delivered on day 1 that looks like it’s worth that money. Take for example The Coke Show, a very polished youtube-like contest that ran on the front page of Coke for a a month or two and got about a dozen entries.
Another question, are there any “fast iteration” agencies out there? The equivalent of IDEO for the web?
On a related note Peter Merholtz of Adaptive Path (who I had the pleasure of meeting for drinks the other night) wrote an interesting article that is somewhat related called Embrace the chaos - designers and systems with emergent behavior.
UPDATE: Don’t miss the great conversation that is going on at the UIE Brainsparks blog, great stuff
My sister (fionalongart.co.uk) over the weekend created a little art happening in the grounds of the Tate Modern in London. She essentially wrapped red ribbon amongst some tightly grouped silver birch trees in the grounds. She had no one’s permission to do this and lots of people asked what she was doing, and she just said it was an art project for rememberence day. I’m so proud of her for this little bit of art vandalism and wish I could have seen this in person. You can see more photos in this photo set on flickr
Latest Comments
RSSRoe, Stephanie Agresta
Tony Edwad
David Polinchock, christoph
sean
John Eckman, Life Tester
Paula Thornton, Steve