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.