Apr 27
Here’s a mediocre brand experience from Nokia Belgium. There’s a sweepstakes component that enters you in for a chance to win the Nokia 7710 smartphone. You can also check out future Nokia concepts as well as learn about the Nokia Benelux Open Design Awards.
GOOGLE THIS WEEK ROLLED OUT a test program to serve ads into RSS feeds, the search giant confirmed Tuesday. The program debuted on Longhornblogs.com, a blog devoted to information about an upcoming version of Microsoft Windows. Robert McLaws, one of the authors at Longhornblogs.com, posted on the blog early Tuesday morning that the sites’ RSS feeds were now including ads served via AdSense. Although McLaws said on his blog that he couldn’t release many details, he stated that if Google decides to launch this product, AdSense publishers could expect to see a wider-reaching public beta within the next few weeks. On the other hand, McLaws wrote, the ads in the test feeds could be temporarily removed, or may be discontinued altogether. He did not respond to requests for comment from OnlineMediaDaily.
In November, Yahoo! announced it was looking into serving RSS ads, and in February, the popular blog BoingBoing.net announced it was experimentally hosting ads in its RSS feeds through a partnership with Feedburner, an RSS and Atom syndication technology company, and Overture. Also in February, Kanoodle and Moreover announced a joint effort to create publisher tools for serving ads into RSS feeds.
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[from the Register]
The Register may cover everything most sane people would ever want to know about technology, but for certified gadget obsessives Tech Digest and Shiny Shiny scour Gizmoville for the rest:
Nokia takes wraps off N Series phones including its ‘iPod killer’
Nokia today launched its first new series of phones in years. Aimed squarely the top-end gadget-loving/business user market, all handsets in the new N Series will sport music playing facilities, feature at least a two mega pixel camera and come with web browsing facilities, quite possibly from ace Norwegian company Opera.
They will all be 3G compatible and run using the Series 60 Symbian-based interface. If the first three phones, the N70, N90 and N91 (pictured), are anything to go by they will also combine traditional Nokia designs with rather classy components. Next year N Series phones will almost certainly also be kited out with digital TV tuners.
First to market is the N90, a classy 3G camera phone, which is slated for a summer launch. It will be followed later in the year by the N70 and N91. Read more about the phones on their individual posts.
Apr 25
Developed by Color Zip Media, ColorCode is the world’s first general-purpose image code that uses color. It is recognition technology designed with a new concept, in which index codes are recognized by a camera and linked to data.
Read more.
Apr 25
Check out this awesome game created by Grant Robinson.
Check out the site.
Apr 25
Each person constructs his/her image of the city. This image is made out of facts, memories, experiences, stories, news – mostly invisible data, and not only of architecture, buildings and streets. “SEARCHSCAPES: MANHATTAN” is an attempt to create a tridimensional map of Manhattan, using existing data from the web. The objective is to compare the city’s “physical spaces” and “information spaces” (search results). This is an attempt to materialize information: to give it dimension and physicality.
Check out the site.
Apr 25
[from core77.com]
In the spirit of freitag, meet rebound, the custom made purse from real books. Each one takes 8-10 hours to produce not including sourcing the book and and fabric. These purses are all made from real old hardback books, the pages are removed and the cover is left intact. The spine becomes the bottom of the purse, so the longer the book, the wider the purse.
Check out the site.
[from core77.com]
New York Magazine has a detailed design case study on Target’s new prescription bottle. The bottle is part of the ClearRx prescription packaging system, which is based on original designs developed and patented by Deborah Adler, a 29-year-old graphic designer. The final design of the new bottle was developed by Klaus Rosburg of SONIC Design, who worked with Target and Adler over several months to fully develop the system. The new bottle will be widely available beginning May 1.
Apr 23
R E S 1 0 E V E N T N Y C
Thursday, April 28 8-11 pm
467 Greenwich St. #6 (1 block below Canal)
RSVP to events@res.com
RES invites you to experience this year’s RES 10 in person as we celebrate the work of artists, designers, directors and musicians chosen by the staff of RES as the most interesting to watch in 2005.
The 2005 RES 10 includes:
T A L M A G E C O O L E Y
R A M O N & P E D R O
I N S T I T U T E F O R A P P L I E D A U T O N O M Y
D J / R U P T U R E
N A G I N O D A
N E I L L B L O M K A M P
M. I. A.
K O I C H I R O T S U J I K A W A
S O F A K E
S A I M A N C H O W
By invitation only. RSVP to events@res.com
Celebrate the opening of Jim Hodges’ Look and See with your friends at Creative Time.
Thursday, May 5th from 5:30 – 7:00 p.m.
The Ritz-Carlton New York, Battery Park
(Two West Street @ Battery Place)
Jim Hodges’ new 9-ton sculpture, Look and See, is a camouflage curtain that transports visitors to a refractive environment fusing their own fluid image with the opposing landscapes of skyscrapers and nature in Lower Manhattan. Hodges transforms materials explored in previous works-shattered mirrors, cutouts, and camouflage-and combines them with stainless steel for the first time, pushing his practice into new terrain. Jim Hodges is the fifth artist to participate in Creative Time’s Art on the Plaza, following internationally acclaimed artists Jim Campbell, Gary Hume, Zhang Huan, and Shirazeh Houshiary & Pip Horne. Art on the Plaza is an ongoing public sculpture series presented at The Ritz-Carlton in Battery Park in cooperation with Millennium Partners and The Battery Park City Authority.
Apr 22
We knew that young people were texting like crazy already, and now it seems that the thumbing trend is only getting bigger. Sixty-two percent of trendsetters and 43% of mainstream reported having text messaged in the past month.
• Of all segments surveyed, text messaging seems to be favored by teen girls: 62% of mainstream female teen respondents said they text messaged in the past month.
• The text messaging category is branching out beyond just communication, however. In Asia, text messaged novels are a popular trend. Look out for text messaging to be used in other entertainment capacities here in the US in the future.
• As more people adopt text messaging as a method of communication, there will be opportunities for marketers to use text messaging as a way to keep in touch with their consumers and to promote new products and events.
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[from nytimes.com]
He arrived on foot, and on time, wearing heavily grease-stained beige overalls and boots. He seemed to be in his late 30’s or early 40’s, with thinning light brown hair. He had the windburned eyes and blackened fingernails of an ironworker, along with the vaguely feral intensity of someone on the lam.
But he hardly looked like the kind of shadowy revolutionary figure who had once declared that his goal was to “tear the city to pieces and rebuild it.” Now, he says, smiling weakly, “I stop at stop signs; I pay taxes; I get up and go to work and get a paycheck.”
In the New York graffiti world of the early 1990’s, he was everywhere and larger than life, sometimes literally: the name Revs, usually accompanied by that of his partner in crime, Cost, could be found scrawled, wheat-pasted or painted in gargantuan white letters on overpasses, walls and roofs from SoHo to northern New Jersey. The work upended many traditional notions of graffiti and helped inspire a new generation of so-called street artists.
Then in late 1994 Cost was arrested for vandalism. Revs went underground and left the city for Alaska. And when he returned, his work went mostly underground, too – into the subway, where he painted long, feverish diary entries worthy of a Dostoyevsky character on dozens of walls hidden deep inside the tunnels. (He called this a personal mission and said he did not care if anybody else saw them.)
But over the last few years, he has re-emerged into public view and reincarnated himself in a way few of his fans ever expected, as a legitimate and (mostly) law-abiding sculptor. He has made dozens of works using construction-grade steel and other metal parts and has sought the permission of building owners to weld and bolt them to the outsides of buildings in the meatpacking district, the East Village, the Gowanus Canal area and Dumbo, where the gentrifying but still half-deserted streets have become a veritable Revs gallery.
Yet unlike many former graffiti artists who have turned their street credibility into successful careers as graphic designers or youth-market branding gurus, Revs has continued to shun, angrily, the worlds of conventional art and commerce. He makes his living about as far from the art world as possible, as a union ironworker, surrounded by co-workers who mostly have no idea of his reputation as a near-mythical deity of the graffiti world. His only gallery show, in Philadelphia in 2000, was to raise money so he could pay a lawyer after he was arrested for the subway graffiti. Otherwise, he has refused to sell his work or take commissions for it.
Apr 14
Here’s a nice little viral piece that educates users about Africa’s plight similar to Lifeswitch.
The interaction is also a combo of flickrgraph + the Matthew Mahon site. Lots of z-depth action in effect! Overall, the site is well done. I invested at least 10 minutes on the site trying to figure out what the site was.
Check out the site.
Is this site really necessary? I know that social networking is hot and everybody wants to connect to their various affinity groups, but connecting through a virtual mall just seems sad. Yub’s an online mall and social network that connects people and products. Yub currently carries over 2,787,219 products in it’s catalog, but more importantly, it gives the socially retarded a place to hang out and ‘be themselves’.
Check out the site.
Apr 13
Here’s a nice, clean, premium brand experience from Sony PSP Korea.
Check out the site.
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[from ARGN]
The new ARG that we reported on just a few days ago, The Art of the Heist, shocked players yesterday when it became a real world example of just that: A major heist in the middle of New York City!
Players found clues yesterday that there was going to be a party at a car dealership on Park Ave. at 7:00 pm last night, and made plans to meet up at what they anticipated to be some sort of in-game event. Once they arrived, however, they discovered that instead of a party, someone had apparently stolen an Audi show car! There was plastic over one of the doors, an area inside that showroom that was cordoned off with police tape, and security guards outside.
A woman with a clipboard handed out flyers, and there was a sign asking for further information, along with a phone number to report to. Calls to the number reportedly connected with Audi of America.
Since its beginning just a few days ago, The Art of the Heist has unloaded a boatload of material for players to digest, including acess to dozens and dozens of emails, videos, photos, documents, voicemail messages, and now a missing car. We have to say that this is the most explosive beginning to any Alternate Reality Game we’ve seen so far. Players have been busy developing resources and getting organized, as the links below will attest. Stay tuned for much more on this one.
[from 37signals]
It looks like Amazon is trying a new book detail page. The new page sports a huge 400px tall book cover, a cleaned up and stacked page layout (each section takes the full width of the page and is bordered by dashed lines, revised typography with bigger type for headlines, more consistent treatment of section headers, a revised buy box, and more. They even lost the sidebar. This new design definitely puts the focus on the book first and the rest of the site second. Interesting direction. Here’s a screenshot if they change it or if you can’t see it.
Go to the MTV Overdrive Site and log in using this information:
Login: iwantmy
Password: overdrive
MTV ANNOUNCED ON WEDNESDAY ITS plan to debut a Web-based video content channel called MTV Overdrive by April 25. The service–offered to the press to test yesterday–gives users with high-speed Web connections the option to either pick and choose from a range of MTV’s news and interviews, music and music videos, and reality shows, or sit back and let Overdrive pick for them.
The service is built around several genres: The Lineup, where MTV can display its choicest offerings; News; Music; On TV; and Movies, which offers a list of movie trailers. Jason Hirschhorn, senior vice president of digital music and media at MTV Networks, said he expected the service to offer at least 50 to 70 clips every 10 days for the news section alone. The average running time for each video clip is two to six minutes.
The service will be ad-supported, with 15-second video advertisements from the likes of Microsoft, Procter & Gamble, and Sony Pictures.
MTV Overdrive is delivered via Windows Media Video and Windows Media DRM (Digital Rights Management), Hirschhorn said it will soon release a version of Overdrive optimized for Microsoft Media Center Edition personal computer. Macintosh owners will not be able to access the offering.
Read more.
Apr 7
Continental AG from Germany just recently launched ContiFanworld.com. As an official partner for the 2006 FIFA World Cup, Continental AG has created a site full of soccer advergames to help fans deal with the long wait until the games kick-off in June 2006. Most of the games are simple, fun, and addictive.
What a weird campaign. Nintendo DS is encouraging users to grab a camera (and a mannequin hand) and photograph something cool to enter into their contest. They’ll pick a few of the best photos and send them a Nintendo DS or… some cold hard cash.
If you don’t have a mannequin hand, don’t fret, they’ll even mail you a mannequin hand!
Check out the site.
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