Lastminute viral
May 26, 2008 | Leave a Comment
OK so this isn’t the funniest viral in the world but it still made me smile. Set in Stansted Airport, characters such as airport staff, cleaners and policemen perform a song and dance to unsuspecting passengers. The viral is to promote their half-price theatre ticket deal currently running on their website.
IKEA offer furniture to The Sims players
May 26, 2008 | Leave a Comment
IKEA have teamed up with The Sims 2 creators EA Games to enable users to place IKEA products in their virtual homes. The offering will be brought out as an add-on software package later on this year and will offer products such as beds, coffee tables and sofas.
Muxtaping
May 26, 2008 | 1 Comment
Muxtape is a great site that allows users to upload their MP3’s to make mixtapes for the modern era. A particularly great one from Mr Lloyd Davis can be found here.
Brand tags
May 26, 2008 | 1 Comment
Noah Brier writes one of the best blogs around and has developed an experiment called Brand Tags. The interface displays a brand logo and asks users to insert the first word or phrase associated with that brand. Noah has included a list of all the brands added to date on the site, and if you click on a particular brand, you can see a tag cloud of all the words entered surrounding that brand. To date over 700,000 tags have been added. Great work Noah, I know this is keeping you really busy so hang in there!
PMOG fun
May 26, 2008 | Leave a Comment
Last week I was directed to PMOG (passively multiplayer online game) by Charlie, an application that lets you play against others simply through browsing the web. “With a game head-up display in Firefox, players can bomb each other, wage war over web sites, and lead other users on web missions. Ordinary web sites become caches for items and currency. PMOG fuses an MMO into our WWW.” I have only recently started playing but have successfully blown up a couple of people and can see myself becoming addicted very easily.
Innovation Edge 2008
May 26, 2008 | Leave a Comment
Last week I headed over to NESTA’s Innovation Edge conference at the Royal Festival Hall. I didn’t actually know too much about NESTA before I signed up to the event however they invest in early stage companies who put innovation at the forefront of their offering. The day was made up of talks in the morning and then breaking out into smaller seminars during the afternoon. The morning talks were actually very inspirational with some great speakers including Tim Berners-Lee. Tim discussed his reasoning’s behind making the World Wide Web open source by giving it all away for free and managed to say the best quote of the day when he described the frustrations he experienced of sharing information when new colleagues were brought on board “that’s why I invented the Web”….golden!
After Tim, Sir Bob Geldof came on stage and gave a very heartfelt and honest account of what inspired him to make it when he was living in poverty in Ireland. The main take out of the day that stuck in my mind came from Sir Bob who pointed out that as a nation we have become so engrossed in watching people fail that we have forgotten what we are trying to achieve. We should celebrate trying and not be afraid to fail.
After Sir Bob, The PM Gordon Brown came on stage to give a 15 min talk on the need to develop and support creative talents within the UK and how the government will support innovation within the UK which was pretty good. The afternoon seminars however, were a bit of a let down. I think there was a general feeling that innovation was not at the heart of most of the seminars which I found to be particularly true to one that I attended solely to hear Giles Andrews (founder of Zopa) talk about the company and what they are doing to develop their offering. Unfortunately the panel seldom let him actually speak and after loosing interest I returned to the main hall to speak with Six to Start.
All in all Innovation Edge was great and for those who couldn’t attend, NESTA have put all the talks on the site which you can view here.
