Month: August 2012

Five things on Friday #35

Things of note for the week ending August 31st, 2012

1. Dub the Dew
This isn’t that new but I just found another write up on it and well, I realised I just had to share. Mountain Dew decided that they’d ask the internet to help them name their latest apple-flavoured beverage.

The internet, responded.

This was – I KID YOU NOT – the Top 10 right before, some 48hrs after launch, PepsiCo [unsurprisingly] took it down –

  1. Hitler Did Nothing Wrong
  2. Gushing Granny
  3. Fapple
  4. Gushin’ Granny
  5. Diabeetus
  6. Grannies Squirt
  7. Gushing Grannies
  8. Gooshing Granny
  9. Fapulous Apple
  10. Gushing Green Granny

Brilliant.

You could blame the internet. Or you could blame 4Chan. Really, you should blame a naively conceived competition by a brand that should’ve known better.

2. Verified Twitter Accounts
Ever wondered how they work? Lance Ulanoff just had his Twitter account verified and was kind enough to blog the entire process. I thought it was interesting.

3. THIS. IS. EPIC.

4. Las Vegas Lulz
So that thing happened with Price Harry the other week? Yeeaaah, aside from a few red faces inside the palace, it turns out the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority were none too pleased either.

A fairly decent tongue-in-cheek full page ad in USA Today appeared earlier this week –

Love it.

5. The Darkness, covering Radiohead

There are no words.
via

Bonuses this week: this Designing BBC iPlayer for Xbox 360 article from the Beeb is a damn good read; Episode 013 of The Voicemail Podcast is out now and is full of the usual mobile-related banter (but with IFA/Samsung/Sony extras); and this Leo Burnett vs Asylum Films debate is worth ten minutes of your brain [UPDATE: now with illustrative background from LB’s CEO]. 

‘Til next time…

 

19 Batman things of AWESOME

So I’ve been hoarding a metric ton of Bat-related stuff for some time now…

And it’s about time I posted it all really.

Let’s do this –

1. Awesome Bat Converse (for me)

New shoes for moi

As spotted at the Converse store on Carnaby St.

2. Bat-leotard-tastic

For my Olympic gymnastics routine

3. Retro-Bat Dress FTW

For the girl

Both spotted at Lazy Oaf, Carnaby St.

4. A Red Carpet Giant Cowl of EPIC proportions

Red Carpet! :D

5. Holy Flaming Bat Symbols Batman!

6. Yeah, this is my Tumbler

New car

Yeah, I know. OK, so that last batch was from The Dark Knight Rises premiere… and yeah, it was pretty damn cool.

7. Nokia Maps 3D Gotham City

January 19th 2011. That was the day I first wrote the words ‘Nokia Maps: 3D Gotham City’ in my Moleskine —

Found it

July 5th 2012, this video dropped –

Then on July 6th, it went live. 18mths of hard work from a multitude of super-smart people and the dream became real. It still makes me smile.

8. Hanging out on the Batman set

Well, kinda.

The above image is taken form Batman Begins. It was shot on the grand staircase at the GORGEOUS St Pancras Renaissance Hotel… and here’s the GF hanging out on said staircase.

The Grand Staircase at the St. Pancras

Winner.

Ps. You HAVE to stay at this hotel. It’s one of the best, if not THE BEST that London has to offer.

9. Behind the scenes of Batman, 1966

Big up to Michael for putting me onto this. The photo above is great, but the rest of the set is awesome.

10. Amazing Dark Knight Rises Wallpapers

This is just one of many amazing TDKR wallpapers that are available to download. iO9 has the set.
Go, get!

11. Dark Knight Rises Reactions
I wrote a spoiler-free review of TDKR straight after seeing the premiere, but the film itself sparked a whole ton of various reactions, eclipsing even those inspired by PROMETHEUS.

To my mind, Comics Alliance posted the best collection of TDKR reactions to date. Seriously. My note on this one said — ‘Best post ever (may save back for a bat-post of some kind)’

12. Batman Maybe
A Batman-inspired version of Call Me Maybe? SIGN. ME. UP.

CONTAINS MASSIVE DARK KNIGHT RISES SPOILERS 

There are no words. No Batman-stache. 

13. Batman: Dark Knightfall
This super high quality six minute STOP MOTION ANIMATED Batman film has to be seen to be believed..

14. A Lego Tumbler? OH GO ON THEN

H/T Rodakk

15. David Cronenberg ain’t a Bat-fan

“I don’t think they are making them an elevated art form. I think it’s still Batman running around in a stupid cape… [A] superhero movie, by definition, you know, it’s comic book. It’s for kids. It’s adolescent in its core. That has always been its appeal, and I think people who are saying, you know, “Dark Knight Rises” is, you know, supreme cinema art,” I don’t think they know what the f**k they’re talking about.”

Fact.

16. History through Batmobiles

A quite frankly beautiful photograph, used to help tee up the Batmobile Documentary.. Amaze.

17. Super cool Batman Spray Can Art is super cool

I love this so hard

18. New Mondo Batcave poster

The mood (and detail) of this is fantastic. Good job.

19. Shanghai Batman

Shang. Hai. Bat. Man.

…and Bane.

…and Catwoman.

HIT. PLAY. NOW.

 

…and I’m spent.

Liked that? Tell your friends with the buttons below —

 

Six awesome PureView shots at take off

I’m trying out the new Nokia 808 PureView at the moment and, while there’s a full review to come very soon, I thought I’d share these long exposures I snapped just as we were leaving the runway a week or so ago for Cape Verde –

I am in love with the camera on this phone.

Enjoy –

Long exposures over Lisbon

Long exposures over Lisbon

Long exposures over Lisbon

Long exposures over Lisbon

Long exposures over Lisbon

Long exposures over Lisbon

Click through each image for the original Flickr uploads…

 

Five things on Friday #34

Things of note for the week ending August 24th, 2012

A bit later than usual (today is Aug 27th and I’m back-dating this post) as I HAVE BEEN ON HOLIDAY AND IT WAS AMAZING.

Ahem.

Shall we?

1. Evernote + Moleskine
My undying love for all things Moleskine-related is fairly well known around these parts so it was unsurprising to find tags, mentions and emails into their double figures when the Evernote + Moleskine partnership was announced. Don’t know what I’m talking about? Right, let’s make two things clear –

  1. Evernote is your virtual online notebook. You can upload all kinds of things to it, written notes, images, whiteboards, hell – even receipts. It’s basically there for you to store your whole written life and, what’s more, it’s 100% searchable and taggable. Kinda awesome, right?
  2. Moleskine is an actual notebook.

The two brands/products represent opposite sides of the same coin and as such, should be sworn enemies. In fact, they have been for some time. But no more! They are now in bed together and their first offspring is something called ‘The Evernote Smart Notebook’.

From TechCrunch:

The idea is to bridge the digital and analog worlds, allowing you to take notes physically, then import those notes into Evernote.

So the smart notebook uses specially formatted paper that allows it to work with Evernote. In the new version of the Evernote iPhone app, you can take photos of pages from the Moleskine notebook, and then they’re browsable and even searchable in the app. The notebook also comes with special stickers, which tell the app the notebook (the virtual kind) where each page should be saved.

I absolutely love this. Although I’m not an Evernote user (yet – I’m still trying to find my own use case), I can definitely see the benefits of being able to tag analogue pages for easy searchability online. I mean, that’s just ACE.

via RWW

Alas, it is iOS only at the moment meaning only iPhoners and iPadders get to play (for now). However, this is one really cool step in the direction of online and offline integration that I totally adore. More please.

Mark my words: it won’t be long until the Evernote sticker tags start appearing on a whole bunch of other things outside of the Moleskine…

2. Redesigning the America’s Cup

I don’t know if you know much about the America’s Cup, I certainly didn’t. What I mean is: up until about three years ago I didn’t.

Back in September 2009, as part of the final leg of the Lucozade Energy Challenge, we were flown out to the Caribbean for some yacht-on-yacht America’s Cup style racing… with actual America’s Cup winning yachts (see above and wikipedia).

Since then, the history of the game has fascinated me (seriously, it’s great – read up) and well, a recent turn of events are leading me to believe that we’re about to enter a whole new era of America’s Cup awesomeness —

When you win the America’s Cup, you get to decide pretty much all the details about how, where, and when you get to defend the trophy. It’s a little bit like H.O.R.S.E. crossed with Capture the Flag, a soapbox derby, being President in a game of Asshole, and lots of saltwater. After Ellison won the 2010 America’s Cup, hosted in Valencia, Spain, he wasn’t just interested in steering the ship, so to speak: Nope, he made like a nautical engineer and decided to redesign the whole thing.

There’s more over at Grantland, and keep an eye on this one – it’s going to be big.

3. POP
Need a universal charging station? Look no further. POP has been pulled together by an old sparring partner of mine and I actually really like the look of it (if my DT-600 ever fails, I’ll be first in line). There’s only a week left to buy one, so go get [kick-]started.

4. Facebook Mobile Gets Better
And Read Write Web have published a really well written article about how.

5. That Holiday (and CARNIVAL!)
Last Friday my girlfriend and I packed up our things and headed off to the island of Sal, for a week of sun, sea, sand and sangria. We spent seven days literally doing nothing, every day and it was amazing. Cape Verde is beautiful and this was pretty much what we woke up every day –

From a tech perspective, being able to use my Nokia 808 PureView underwater was pretty ace and I’ve got a ton of video to upload from that at some point (the images aren’t bad though).

Geekiness aside, it was exactly what we both needed and it was book ended perfectly too as – on the work front – a client win landed just as I was boarding for take off and then, when we got home, we were just in time for my first ever Notting Hill Carnival too – amazing!

2012-08-26-0504

I’ve got a ton of blogging to catch up on and a helluva busy four day week ahead.

Hope y’all had an awesome week.

Whatley out.

 

 

Five things on Friday #33

Things of note for the week ending August 17th, 2012

1. Extraordinary Travel Destinations

20120817-155749.jpg

Stunning. Just, stunning. Bucket list worthy even. The full set really does need to be seen to be believed.

2. Bad Robocop
New Robocop script has leaked and it apparently it’s not looking good. Sad times.

3. Telegraph Olympics images
Now the Olympics are over (and the Paralympics just ’round the corner), it’s a great time to pause and reflect at the awesome achievements that have taken place over the past two weeks.

You could start With the ‘50 Best Images of London 2012‘, and then maybe move onto these awesome tilt-shifted photos too – that’s what I did anyway.

4. Useful Foursquare plug-in ahoy!
I’m a big film fan. I’m also a big Foursquare fan. Regular Foursquare users might know that as well being able to check in to cinemas these days, you can also check in to films at those cinemas.

Now imagine if you will, when you checked in to a film, somebody was kind enough to leave a comment on that check in telling you whether or not you should stick around after the credits.

Yeah, that would be awesome right?

Well, imagine no more.

5. AND I AM ON HOLIDAY. HERE.

20120818-143308.jpg

Back soon.

Bonuses:
– Satisfying read: OFFLINE
– Real time ads – from AT&T

Saying goodbye to old clients

Written and scheduled August 17th 2010

This is an irksome post.

My blogging ‘strategy’ has nearly always been work on the work blog [link removed], mobile on the mobile blog and everything else in my happy place. But this post is fairly work-related. A post that I wasn’t allowed to put up (on the work blog) at the time.

Scheduled two years to the date that I wrote it – whereupon I will be so entrenched in the company that the post won’t ruffle too many feathers OR I would’ve upped and left in the pursuit of bigger and better things – this post means a lot to me.

It’s great to win clients, but sometimes I think it’s good to lose one every once in a while too.
You learn a lot more, and you grow.

______________________________

Farewell to [client]

We’ve been working with [client] for a little over two years now and, for now at least, it’s time to say goodbye. We’ve had a fantastic time over the past 26 months or so, helping them build their community through word of mouth. Be that through nurturing their nascent advocates or by reaching out to (and attempting to convert) their staunchest detractors; overall we’ve delivered some great work.

So much so in fact, that when it came to pitch for the new social media account (working with their newly created internal social media team), one competitor called our office and asked what the hell was going on – “Why are they asking us to pitch at all? You guys do such a good job already.” (this actually happened – and it was pretty humbling to hear that from a well-respected peer)

Alas, as the old saying goes, all good things must come to an end and, as [client] embark upon its chosen route of solely focusing on social media, we’d like to take this opportunity to wish them, and their new social media PR agency, the very best of luck.

Thanks guys, we had a blast.

August 17th, 2010

Commonplace Books

A couple of weeks ago, when out for a few beers with some friends, my mate Kai and I got into a discussion about how we use our respective RSS Readers.

Teleportation just ain't what it used to be

— this is the only picture of Kai that is ever worth using, ever –

The crux of the conversation came down to one thing: folders – Kai uses them, I don’t. Kai’s point was that he likes to choose what format to consume and when. For example, he may opt to read long-form content in the morning, and prefer visual / illustrative stimulation in the afternoon. A point that I both understand and recognise.

However, I prefer reading everything at random. It’s a habit I’ve kept for a long time but it’s something that’s recently been re-enforced by learning about the origins of the commonplace book, and its place in both history and the creation of serendipitous innovation.

What do I mean? Well…

In the book Where Good Ideas Come From, Stephen Johnson writes:

“Darwin’s notebooks lie at the tail end of a long and fruitful tradition that peaked in Enlightenment-era Europe, particularly in England: the practice of maintaining a “commonplace” book. Scholars, amateur scientists, aspiring men of letters—just about anyone with intellectual ambition in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was likely to keep a commonplace book.

The great minds of the period—Milton, Bacon, Locke—were zealous believers in the memory-enhancing powers of the commonplace book. In its most customary form, “commonplacing,” as it was called, involved transcribing interesting or inspirational passages from one’s reading, assembling a personalized encyclopedia of quotations.

There is a distinct self-help quality to the early descriptions of commonplacing’s virtues: maintaining the books enabled one to ‘lay up’ a fund of knowledge, from which we may at all times select what is useful in the several pursuits of life.

Each rereading of the commonplace book becomes a new kind of revelation. You see the evolutionary paths of all your past hunches: the ones that turned out to be red herrings; the ones that turned out to be too obvious to write; even the ones that turned into entire books. But each encounter holds the promise that some long-forgotten hunch will connect in a new way with some emerging obsession.”

———-

That, believe it or not, is what historians mark as one of the ways Darwin was able to come to his theory of evolution (he famously had no ‘EUREKA!’ moment, it came to him slowly – over months) and that, believe it or not, is exactly how I feel about my RSS.

It’s a big jump – from understanding nature’s beginnings to reading internet ponderings mixed in pictures of lolcats – but that’s how I see it.

Basically, you should use RSS. And if you don’t, why not try starting a commonplace book? I had one in school, and it was awesome. In fact, I think I still have it somewhere…

—–

Commonplace book links of note –

The Commonplace Book – Brett Bolkowy

The Ecology of Thought – The Chronicle of Higher Education

Good Ideas and Notebooks – EVSC

 

Five things on Friday #32

Things of note for the week ending August 10th, 2012

1. Christchurch Dedication
The building above is what’s left of the Christchurch Normal School that was damaged during the earthquake in New Zealand earlier this year. The additional images, that have been placed in as a kind of optical illusion, are only temporary as the building itself is due for demolition any day now. However, the work itself has meaning.

Mike Hewson, the artist responsible, wanted to pay tribute to the talented people that once lived there and covered the building with these mixed-media installations that did just that.

Thanks to Marek for the source.

2. Olympic Heat
Now that the first part of the Olympics is coming to a close, once wonders how the athletes themselves might celebrate. Well, wonder no more, ESPN has the scoop and they lay it down perfectly –

Home to more than 10,000 athletes at the Summer Games and 2,700 at the Winter, the Olympic Village is one of the world’s most exclusive clubs. To join, prospective members need only have spectacular talent and — we long assumed — a chaste devotion to the most intense competition of their lives. But the image of a celibate Games began to flicker in ’92 when it was reported that the Games’ organizers had ordered in prophylactics like pizza. Then, at the 2000 Sydney Games, 70,000 condoms wasn’t enough, prompting a second order of 20,000 and a new standing order of 100,000 condoms per Olympics.

It’s quite a long article, but the whole thing is worth a look. It’s a great read.

3. This is Now

This is Now pulls together real-time Instagram feeds and organises them by city. The usual suspects are covered and from Tokyo through to Sao Paolo, you can see exactly what’s going on where, right now.

And yes, of course I chose London – LOOK AT ALL THE OLYMPIC GOODNESS!

4. A man walks into a bank
Patrick Combs deposited a junk-mail cheque for $95,000 for a joke. The bank cashed it.
Free account set up required to read this article [on the FT] – but it’s worth it.

5. Thiel vs Schmidt
This isn’t new, but it’s something I’ve been thinking about a lot over the past few weeks ever since it happened.

First, a re-cap:

Eric Schmidt is chairman at Google and Peter Thiel is ex-CEO and founder of Paypal. A couple of weeks ago they appeared alongside each other at the Fortune Brainstorm Tech in Aspen and their topic of debate was ‘The Future of Technology‘.

Apparently these events tend to be quite plain and a bit boring (I can’t remember where I read it) however, this time ’round, Thiel wasn’t pulling any punches. Choice quote:

“Google is a great company.  It has 30,000 people, or 20,000, whatever the number is.  They have pretty safe jobs.  On the other hand, Google also has 30, 40, 50 billion in cash.  It has no idea how to invest that money in technology effectively.”

Which basically translates as Thiel saying ‘Hey! Google! You suck! You’ve run out of ideas!’

Thing is, while Schmidt didn’t actually agree with him, the two of them did kind of agree when it came to barriers to innovation, namely: the US government.

ERIC SCHMIDT: What’s very odd about this conversation is you’re saying technology doesn’t matter, that it’s all politics.

PETER THIEL: I didn’t say that. I said, in fact, it’s the only innovation available, which is your point.

ERIC SCHMIDT: But, you’re saying we’ve been stagnant for 40 years because of bad government policy. If technology ‑‑

PETER THIEL: I didn’t say we’re stagnant. I said our policies could be improved.

And then… most tellingly, the moderator of the session asks Eric directly –

ADAM LASHINSKY:  You don’t want to address the cash horde that your company does not have the creativity to spend, to invest?

ERIC SCHMIDT:  What you discover in running these companies is that there are limits that are not cash.  There are limits of recruiting, limits of real estate, regulatory limits as Peter points out.  There are many, many such limits.  And anything that we can do to reduce those limits is a good idea.

— The whole transcript is available to read online and I implore you to grab a cup of coffee and sit down and read it all. It’s brilliant. There’s just so much that’s alluded to… and it makes great pub-chat fodder too.

__________

Whatley out.