I can’t resist a good simple mash-up. Enjoy these (Coldplay is a cracker!).
Amy Winehouse is shit. Say no to drugs 
U2 are well shit. Apparently this is the actual recording of U2 taken from the mixing desk on the David Letterman Show. Oh dear.
And my favourite, Coldplay are shit. And here’s proof .
If you enjoyed these, watch some more over at his YouTube channel ‘dryadssaddle’ here.
Last Tuesday I went to a fab digi(ish) event held by the guys at Protein(R) – they hold regular free events that bring together interesting people to talk about interesting things in the world of science, technology, and design. I guess you could call them friends of AMV as we haven’t actually worked with them yet, but they are on my wish list. The event was rather small (nice venue though), with lots of friendly people. And it was as they promised…interesting.
First up was a lovely chap called Matt Jones from Dopplr.
Your average “Web 2.0″ site – a community for travellers. I wasn’t wowed by the execution, in fact he even admitted the site looked rather like a bank statement, but there were some interesting takeaways. I’m not going to go into a full on description of Dopplr’s services, but you can find more out here. I particularly liked..
Your very own logo – Everyone has their own logo and colour pallette based on things like the length and frequency of travel.
A website you never need to go to - This sounds negative at first, but it basically means that Dopplr can hook into Flickr, Facebook, iGoogle, etc., so you can enjoy all their services without even visiting their site.
Map mash ups – OK an obvious one for a travel community, but they have nice mash-ups and map visualisations.
Cute touches - Users have a fun representation of how far you’ve travelled – i.e. so you may have the velocity of a duck?!?
And the future of Dopplr? Monetisation apparently. Eek, to end on such a sour note…
Second up was Kate Morross - an ambitious girl, who has a fascination with three sided shapes, illegible typography, and freeform lettering. She was disappointingly likeable, and made everyone else in the room feel suitably inadequate.
She’s a 22 year old London based creative maestro. Practicing as an Illustrator and Graphic designer but does not narrow herself to those fields alone. So of course she was bored, and with the little spare time she had, she launched ISO & Isomorph Records (because that’s the sort of thing we all do in boredom?!). She’s worked with the likes of TopShop, Nike, Cadbury, and Motorola, and many more.
Perhaps nothing new and slightly over-rated, but you can’t help but love her.
And finally, a presentation called My City My Body from Tuur Van Balen. Yep, this was the science bit! A recent graduate who’s fascinated by how our cities are ultimately made up from our behaviours and experiences. And piss.
Here’s a brief summary from his site as I can’t put this into my own words…
Only a small amount of the pharmaceuticals and chemicals we swallow are taken up in our bloodstream, most of them pass through our bodies into the city’s wastewater. Since wastewater treatment plants are not designed to remove pharmaceuticals, the contents of our medicine cabinets eventually end up in the drinking water. This results in local differences in tap water, based on the food we eat and the drugs we take.
I branded tap water from three different areas: Notting Hill tapwater benefits from the highest density of organic shops, tapwater in the city of London is enhanced with various stimulants and Golders Green ‘produces’ a very fertile water due to the low concentration of people taking anti-conception pills.
This branded tap water was then sold on a sunny Saturday morning on Broadway market and people were asked to also put their tap water on the map, speculating it’s special qualities. On the project website, people also added stories about their tap water to the map. The result is a new map of London, revealing potential local city-body ecologies or biotopes.
You can check out the wrongly named “piss map” here.
All in all an interesting evening. Check here for future events. Drop me a note if you know of any brands who’d be interested in sponsoring such cool monthly events.
Check out this Web Trend Map from Tokyo based design agency iA. You can look at all your favourite websites on the train system of Toyko. Not useful you say? Well I like a mash-up and this is pretty cool.
Websites are placed on the map using a host of criteria. Facebook has moved to Nippori because Nippori is boring but it’s still an important station. I concur, we’re all getting a bit bored of Facebook. eBay has moved to dirty Ikebukuro which is iA’s punishment to them for their slutty redesign. Fair comment. More here.
Download the huge A3 version here.
Ooh I love a Google Maps mash-up anyday. Garbage Scout features photos of recyclable items submitted by people, overlayed onto Google Maps. The idea is, if you see people put out reusable stuff with their garbage, so you just snap a picture on your phone, and send an SMS to Garbage Scout. Then you see your picture of the item and description on a Google Map, like below. Neat.
Google maps are free (to anyone) to use and adapt – it’s a great way for a brand to offer customers a relevant service. I’d like to see more stuff like this that’s useful and helps the environment.
There’s been more and more talk recently (including myself!) about the blurring of the digital space with the physical real-world around us. I find this topic very exciting! My original post here.
I came across this great example today - where scientists have found a way to put digital art on city monuments in Edinburgh, which is revealed when a picture is taken on your mobile phone. Cool huh.
This technology works by people taking a snaps of a location with their mobile phone, then using MMS to send the picture to Spellbinder. Powerful image-matching algorithms are used to analyse the image that can deal with pictures of the same place being taken under different light conditions or from different angles. Once Spellbinder has worked out the location of an image it sends back an image with the extra ‘hidden art’ added to it.
This is an interesting way of adding value and meaning to the real-world through smart digital technology, with consumer participation at the heart. It also demonstrates the blurring of digital and real-world locations through mobile technology. See, mobile can be used for more exciting stuff than just ‘text to lose’ campaigns.
As more brands face up to this bigger integration, I think we’re going to see some really exciting, and potentially useful stuff, (along with some horrible intrusive stuff too I imagine!).
I stumbled across this great example of user-generated advertising. It’s a grassroots movement to get Nike to make the futuristic-looking sneakers in Back to the Future Part II. What a brilliant idea! You can join here, and it even has a thriving MySpace presence.
Amelia here discusses several brands out-sourcing their advertising (is this just lazy?) but more importantly points to user-generated spoofs that seem to be piling up on YouTube - these are led by the consumers themselves. Personally, I think there’s something really exciting about consumers championing brands themselves, but particularly when brands haven’t told them to do it. Just like this MyFly 2015 project. These campaigns and spoofs tend to be a lot more creative and funnier than bland brand incentivised ads. Brands are increasingly becoming obsessed with consumers generating their advertising for them, as if this is the answer to all their problems.
And so while I’m on the subject of user-generated content, and Back to the Future, here’s a quality spoof: Back to the Future meets Broke Back Mountain. Can’t resist a good spoof…
According to statistics, there are 1,018,057,389 Internet Users in the world [Source: Internet World Stats, January 2006]. But that’s just not good enough for two guys from Portugal, who have embarked on a crazy project to map all the Internet users in the world at MapMyName.
The precise number. In a month. Surely not?! The absurd calculations goes something along the lines of every Internet user tells three friends, and so on. The calculations leave something to be desired. Not to mention language barriers.
Maybe it’s because I like ambitious people like me, or just can’t resist a Google mash-up, but I thought I’d do my bit and spread the word. It’s only day 5 and there’s a whole month to go! Join at MapMyName.
