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.

This looks like fun

Taking the functional and making it fun is pretty simple. Really nice ideas here from VW showing how you can change ingrained behavior for the better. Two simple things - getting people to take the stairs rather than the escalator,



and put litter in a bin


and recycle


It is called Fun Theory and is a beautiful little bit of work.

Props to DDB Stockholm

Mobile Experiment

I met John from PHD for a meeting several weeks back and took a look at his blog its a good one. A few weeks ago he mentioned an experiment he was going to do for a piece in Marketing - to see if he can live and do his work using only a mobile phone and no computer or pda for 48 hours.

It should be a really interesting experience - seems John is concerned about his ability to use and create documents in word, .ppt, and excel on the phone but I'm pretty confident he will manage - necessity is the great innovator so I expect he will find a gadget or widget that does something that makes this easy. Anyway might be worth trying yourself sometime to see how hard or easy it is.

The Twitter Experiment

I personally can't think of anything less interesting than Twitter, the minutiae of someone's life is not that interesting, do I care if Stephen Fry was stuck in a lift, do I care if some idiot twitters about the town a big client is located in and gets in trouble - no.

However, I do think there is a role for the right application of Twitter for a brand - not necessarily the brand taking part although this is possible if its done correctly.

More from a monitoring and research perspective. So it doesn't surprise me at all to see today an incredibly talented and clever guy like my old colleague Ashley Friedlein and his crew of Uber experts at E-consultancy have come up with something really interesting called the Twitter experiment.



They have written some code using the open api of twitter to publish live on their home page all twitter references to e-consultancy. It's great I'll be sending a copy to all of my clients and I wonder if any will be brave enough to try the same thing on their sites about themselves...go on I dare you.