A year of blogging

Been writing this for a year now in that time

have posted 196 entries in a year
1700 unique visitors that is just under 5 a day ;-)
who spend about 1.50 secs on the site
from over 10 countries

Don't think we are going to make any power 100 lists but at least I can find useful stuff when I need to.

Decode - looks worth a visit

The is an interesting show at the V&A called Decode

V&A Decode generative identity from postspectacular on Vimeo.

The website (done by the boys at Saint) describes it as follows:

"Digital technology is providing new tools for artists and designers. Innovative, often interactive, displays use generative software, animation and other responsive technologies to install a 'live' element into contemporary artworks. Some works exist in a state of perpetual evolution; others are altered by the behaviour of the spectator.

From designs that draw on the barest fundamentals of code – the zeros and ones of the binary system – written by a single programmer, to art that encompasses a global collective of online creativity, many of the exhibits here defy traditional design categories. They blur the boundaries between practices, between programming and performance, creator and participant"

Here are some of the images - looks worth a visit.

Anything to do with data visualization is pretty intriguing at the moment - our Data Planner Darren loves this example of British, French, Spanish and Portuguese colonial history.

Visualizing empires decline from Pedro M Cruz on Vimeo.

Inconcievable

Unbelievable - no other words for it - must be a spoof.

Not sure but look.

24Hour Start up

What a great idea. These guys have given themselves 24 hours to start a business from scratch and launch a working website all in 24 hours.

Here is the site, and they have also set up a number of ways of watching their progress.
Video clips at Ustream

There is an interview with the founder on e-consultancy here and they have put the business up for sale on eBay



I applaud them as an experiment Whether its a viable business who knows but necessity is the mother of invention and I often think that more time does not always mean better solutions. Recently I helped out on Nabs FastForward course and the participants were only allowed 10 mins to present a complete pitch - to be honest it was more inspiring listening to a 10 minute pitch and realising what you can fit in and achieve than a 2hr one for sure. Good luck to these guys.

Orange Fuck up iPhone launch

Feeling a bit let down by Orange today. I was browsing the BBC Tech site looking for anything interesting and saw an article that Tesco are going to sell the iPhone. I open it up read it and it says Orange are reporting 30,000 sales on the first day of the iPhone going on sale.

I was pretty surprised as about 2 months ago they emailed me as a customer notifying me they would be selling the iPhone and asking if I wanted to pre-Register my interest. Here is the reply confirming I had pre-registered and that they will be in contact again nearer to the time. Well I have not had anything from them since.

So I'm a pretty pissed off Orange customer who is out of contract and if I do not hear from them I'll be giving O2 a call in the next couple of days to see if they are looking for new customers as I'm sure some will have left to go back to Orange.

Aside from totally mismanaging my expectations - why bother emailing people asking to pre-register then totally ignore them - they have obviously underestimated the response as their entire site appears to be down today. Really not making me feel they are the best operator/network.

The orange site today looks like this....

Five Years of Firefox

Five Years of Firefox



Posted using ShareThis

Mobile, cameras & projectors

Some time ago I posted about the future of mobile projectors, cameras, etc here. Recently at TED India this presentation was given - some amazing use of AR, projectors and cameras to turn any surface in to a screen including your own hands, and some nice gesture based navigation. Well worth a watch - especially from around 5-6 mins onwards. Love the gesture based hand camera.

Cool micro-engineering feat

There is just something about miniature things that are cool in terms of scaled down working models etc. - love to know how powerful it is. Also the fact it is displayed in a wine glass made me laugh.

This is just fun with Lego

By an artist called Walter Wick. Nice.

Brilliant application of iphone in physical world

Courtesey of pixelsumo blog this looks like a brilliant and simple application. I wish I had one of these as a child the magic of stories and interacting with the books characters, plots and situations would have been greatly enhanced. Although Steve Jackson went a little way with the turn to page 5 to fight the dragon, or 76 to run away type action adventure book.

Blowing up toy cars in slow motion

Something so wrong yet strangely satisfying about this - reminds me of being a kid and blowing stuff up with French bangers

CoD Modern Warfare II

Pretty much all week the only thing everyone in the office has talked about has been Call of Duty. Not being a massive gamer it's not really something that has bothered me too much.


The graphics look great in the trailer and I'm pretty certain it could entertain me for 6 months - but what has really interested me is the frenzy the release has caused. Some awesome pr activity from midnight queues, people in costumes, to facts and figures that seem to have entered the lexicon.

Anyway the only thing that really counts on something like this is how have they done after all the hype clears - and the answer is unbelievably well - the following is an extract from the WSJ Tech blog

The videogame market has a new high scorer: "Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2."

Activision Blizzard Inc. said first-day sales of the game, its much-anticipated shoot-'em-up title released Tuesday, hit 4.7 million copies in the first 24 hours in North America and the United Kingdom.

That topped the previous record holder, Take-Two Interactive Software Inc.'s "Grand Theft Auto IV," which reported 3.6 million units world-wide on its first day of sales last year. Activision said first-day sales of its game were $310 million in North America .

4.7 million copies in 24 hrs and $310,000,000 of sales in 24 hrs pretty much says it all - I'm in the wrong industry.

Just got my google wave invite

So far so good - have been using it with guys at work and it is fun. Should be interesting to see how we start to use it in everyday life.

We've launched a new Virgin Trains site

We've just launched the new Virgin Trains website and what a beauty and labour of love it has been.



Judge for yourself but we have enjoyed working on it with some great partners including, CX Partners, The Train Line, Virgin Trains, Widget Avenue, Cap Gemini & Rackspace.

And its even getting mentioned on e-consultancy blog - nice - although whoever wrote it must be a client as they want the logo to be bigger ;-) and a mention on brand republic.

Could this be a Sony Bravia TV ad

Almost better than the ads - We Like Colour – Commissioned by Central Illustration agency this mural is painted and re-painted using stop motion over 2 days courtesey of Mr Stuart O'Neil who has just joined the team.

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Loving this camera trick

Great viral from Samsung - that seems to be a given these days other than the terrible model in a limo effort which was pretty shit.

Here is the video:


It then asks you to watch it in HD mode on you tube


the handset's main selling point is its HD camera , then has a reveal link showing how they made the video - only go here after you have watched it in HD.

Lovely mechanic, very knowing of how to involve people, giving them credit and props in the reveal video.

Managing Expectations

There are a lot of posts about the twitter fail whale and similar initiatives and strategies for dealing with site down time or outage.

Obviously when you are in beta and your audience is verging on geek / tech savvy you have a bit more license, as Google Wave demonstrates with this piece of classic valley talk patois -I'm tempted to say it Helluva good.