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Marc Giai-Miniet is a French artist who looks like Santa Claus and works like a madman, building much of his livelihood on small, fastidiously complex dollhouses, some just 36 inches long and 35 inches wide...
Marc Giai-Miniet is a French artist who looks like Santa Claus and works like a madman, building much of his livelihood on small, fastidiously complex dollhouses, some just 36 inches long and 35 inches wide...
From Design-Milk.com
"Designer Jonathan Robson has created a fun product for kids: a life-sized LEGO Space Helmet that plays downloadable audio tracks for comics. We want an adult-sized one!
Remember LEGO comics? Well, Robson does — he used to read them all the time as a kid, so he decided to create this LEGO helmet to make reading the LEGO comics even more fun and interactive. The helmet acts as a headset for listening to the audio, which comes from a USB port on the back of the helmet. Put the LEGO USB into the slot, and put on your helmet for an exciting adventure!..."
Read more at Design Milk: http://design-milk.com/audio-comic-with-lego-helmet/#ixzz1L3tWcCOE
“The two-page spread consisted of a dazzling model, Dorian Leigh, in an icy silver-sequin dress with a fiery scarlet cape; and on the facing page, the headline, ARE YOU MADE FOR FIRE AND ICE? You were, the ad stated, if you could answer eight of the following fifteen questions in the affirmative:
Have you ever danced with your shoes off?
Did you ever wish on a new moon?
Do you blush when you find yourself flirting?
When a recipe calls for one dash of bitters, do you think it's better with two?
Do you secretly hope the next man you meet will be a psychiatrist?
Do you sometimes feel that other women resent you?
Have you ever wanted to wear an ankle bracelet?
Do sables excite you, even on other women?
Do you love to look up at a man?
Do you face crowded parties with panic -- then wind up having a wonderful time?
Does gypsy music make you sad?
Do you think any man really understands you?
Would you streak your hair with platinum without consulting your husband?
If tourist flights were running, would you take a trip to Mars?
Do you close your eyes when you're kissed?”
What a great day! Excellent long post detailing the talks of the day:
"For the second year in a row, the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) Show hosted a panel of transmedia luminaries to discuss the state of the industry. This year’s panel, Transmedia: Telling the Story through Narrative Content, Games and Real-World Adventures was hosted by Henry Jenkins (Professor of Cinema and Media Studies at the University of Southern California, and author of Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide) and included Jeff Gomez (President and CEO, Starlight Runner Entertainment), Kim Moses (Executive Producer/Director, Sander/Moses Productions and Slam Internet), Gale Anne Hurd (Executive Producer, The Walking Dead; President, Valhalla Motion Pictures), Danny Bilson (Executive Vice President of Core Games, THQ, Inc.), and Tim Kring (Transmedia Storyteller, Conspiracy for Good, Heroes)....
"...Jenkins next introduced Gale Anne Hurd, asking her to speak on any struggles with the transmedia expecations for The Walking Dead franchise. Jenkins noted that the zombie series was based on “a comic book that’s well known by comic readers, maybe not so well known by viewers of AMC, and you had to work to keep both satisfied.” Gale responded,
Genre fans are already very familiar with transmedia, because most of the properties they respond to have existed in another medium . . . look at Lord of the Rings, [and] some of the films I’ve done, including The Punisher, which became a THQ video game which started as a comic book...."
read the full post on argn.com
"...Netflix, of course, has shifted focus away from movies-by-mail to a streaming model, and it's growing fast. The NPD Group reports that 61 percent of all movies distributed over the Internet are viewed via Netflix. That's nearly eight times the number boasted by Comcast [CMCSA 26.21 0.08 (+0.31%) ], the number two provider and majority owner of NBCUniversal, publisher of this website...."
Read the full article on cnbc.com
From Wired.com:
What do you do after working for Apple, a company whose mission seems to be nothing less than disrupting entire industries? Easy. You start a company to create your own ding in the universe.
That’s the idea behind Push Pop Press, a digital creation tool designed to blow up the concept of the book. Frictionless self-publishing is a fertile new space, but this particular startup got a little help from former vice president Al Gore, whose exacting demands on an app version of his book Our Choice: A Plan to Solve the Climate Crisis gave this would-be company its first real boost.
Developed by former Apple employees Mike Matas and Kimon Tsinteris, Push Pop Press will be a publishing platform for authors, publishers and artists to turn their books into interactive iPad or iPhone apps — no programming skills required.
“The app is the richest form of storytelling,” Matas said. “[Push Pop Press] opens doors to telling a story with more photos, more videos and interactions....”
Excerpt from Mark Harris' series on WorkBook Project:
"Organizing Our Data
The first thing I need to say is I am no expert on Transmedia or ARGs or anything like that. There are many other people who are. So this post is not meant as me preaching The Truth down from on high. This post is meant as an exploration of what I am working on now, in the hopes that it sparks some others’ imaginations. In the interest of us all learning, I’m simply sharing the process we’re going through right now.
The second thing I need to say is that this is not a tutorial, and not something that just anyone can do. I’m actually writing some software for this, and the things I’m talking about here will require more custom software to deliver to users. Eventually, if this works, I will likely write a set of WP plugins to simplify this process and make it something anyone can use. But for now, I believe that ideas are what count, and I think many people will be able to understand the ideas here and maybe contribute some of their own.
This is sort of an experiment in stretching WordPress beyond it’s original purpose. The goal here is to see if we can use WordPress as a place to maintain our entire storyworld, and then feed that storyworld out to our various platforms; Tweets, Text Messages, Phone Calls, Location-based content, blogs, etc. The benefit here is that all of our data is in one place, it can be queried, analyzed, related, tagged with metadata, etc. Another benefit is that we are using a good deal of free tools...."
When ScanLAB -- the brainchild of architects William Trossell and Matt Shaw -- set out to test the boundaries of 3D scanning, the team wanted to see whether the scanner could detect smoke and mist....
Dustin Grella's website & more videos are here:
Jeff Jarvis on New Business Models for News 2009 from CUNY Grad School of Journalism on Vimeo.
In a nutshell, Jarvis proposes that new business models can emerge when existing players reduce their costs through outsourcing (and crowdsourcing), focus on the value they can add instead of just reporting what has already been reported — which he calls “do what you do best and link to the rest” — and use social media and related services such as Twitter and Facebook to create a distributed news network. (For more of his thoughts, check out this Slideshare presentation from 2008.) Many of his ideas are already being put to the test by the Journal-Register Co., which CEO John Paton has turned into a “digital first” news organization, as I described in a recent post.
Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr user George Kelly
A.N.D is an interactive guide for people leading the way in contemporary design, photography, architecture, new technologies, and human thought. It is both a springboard and a community for those involved in advancing the fields above. Woody Allen once noted that 80% of success is showing up. With consistent updates we provide you with the other 20%: the right places, people and events.
A.N.D also serves as an online magazine that offers a fresh twist on today’s industry leaders and creative professionals. We do so by drawing focus on the voices of such leaders (bullseye) and expanding the conversation (themes and articles) . We work nonstop to create a clearer picture of what’s happening on our turf while keeping an eye out for progressive trends in the industry’s future.
Finally, A.N.D is an international creative cities club with its headquarters in New York. We are expanding everyday. Check to see if your city is on the list. If not, get ready to hit the road. Get ready to get involved.
We are forging together a worldwide network of contributors. Have any interest in taking part? Don’t hesitate to drop us a line at:
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Delivered locally. Delivered globally.
Excerpt from the original post - worth reading the whole article!
"...Jacques Monod, the Parisian biologist who shared a Nobel Prize in 1965 for working out the role of messenger RNA in the transfer of genetic information, proposed an analogy: just as the biosphere stands above the world of nonliving matter, so an “abstract kingdom” rises above the biosphere. The denizens of this kingdom? Ideas.
“Ideas have retained some of the properties of organisms,” he wrote. “Like them, they tend to perpetuate their structure and to breed; they too can fuse, recombine, segregate their content; indeed they too can evolve, and in this evolution selection must surely play an important role.”
Ideas have “spreading power,” he noted—“infectivity, as it were”—and some more than others. An example of an infectious idea might be a religious ideology that gains sway over a large group of people. The American neurophysiologist Roger Sperry had put forward a similar notion several years earlier, arguing that ideas are “just as real” as the neurons they inhabit. Ideas have power, he said:
Ideas cause ideas and help evolve new ideas. They interact with each other and with other mental forces in the same brain, in neighboring brains, and thanks to global communication, in far distant, foreign brains. And they also interact with the external surroundings to produce in toto a burstwise advance in evolution that is far beyond anything to hit the evolutionary scene yet.
Monod added, “I shall not hazard a theory of the selection of ideas.”
Read more: http://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/What-Defines-a-Meme.html#ixzz1KfgV...
Excerpt from original post on thewrap.com:
"YouTube will imminently launch a movie-on-demand service charging users to stream mainstream Hollywood movies off the world’s largest video sharing site, TheWrap has learned.
The new service means a full-bore challenge to Apple’s iTunes service – currently the most powerful player in paid video streaming -- and a welcome new revenue stream for Hollywood as home entertainment revenues continue their steep decline.
The service may start as early as this week or next, and is expected to be announced soon by YouTube.
Major studios including Sony Pictures Entertainment, Warner Brothers and Universal have licensed their movies for the new service, as have numerous independent studios, including Lionsgate and the library-rich Kino Lorber, according to movie executives with knowledge of the deals in place.
YouTube has been laboring to bring all the major Hollywood studios on board before announcing it, according to one executive involved in the deal. But so far Paramount, Fox and Disney have declined to join...."
Two excerpts from a longer article:
"Talent Hunt
In October 2010, a leading tea manufacturing company rolled out a ‘”Talent Hunt”, running a competition in multiple universities, with a task to build a fan page consistent with the brand’s tagline. With competing teams chosen from seven leading business universities, the registration process accepted all the business plans submitted within the allocated budget for executing a social media campaign within three weeks. It instantly became a hit due its specific target market, the educational institutes with the highest number of social media users..."
"...Pre Launch Campaign
One of Pakistan’s Leading cellular company launched it self with the help of crowdsourcing. Announcements were made through electronic as well as print media asking the audience to suggest a name for the brand. It ran a campaign for almost a month and then finally came up with a name as suggested by the audience with maximum number of votes. This activity gained the brand a lot of customers even before being actually launched...."
Jeff Scher describes his video on NY Times:
“Spring City” was photographed entirely by exploiting a neat quirk of the camera on my two-year-old iPhone. Shaking the phone vigorously while taking pictures in bright light will produce wonderfully rubbery, fun-house-mirror effects. Turning these still images into a movie required taking over 4,000 of them, wiggling the camera each time. The jiggling, jello-like movement is the sum of the differences between the the distortions. The resulting film becomes a big wiggly dance when set to Shay Lynch’s mambo...."
Excerpt:
"...For the past several months, the R&D Lab has been working, quietly, on a time-based representation of how the Times’ news content is being shared in Twitter’s social space. Its name: Project Cascade. Superficially, it’s a data visualization, but it’s actually a tool that could, ever so slightly, change the way we think about online engagement.
It’s the product of a collaboration among Mark Hansen, the UCLA stats professor who spent a spring 2010 sabbatical working at the Times as what Zimbalist calls the paper’s “futurist-in-residence” — that casual title alone offers evidence of the scope of the R&D Lab’s ambition — along with Jer Thorp (data artist in residence) and Jake Porway (data scientist). And it has, despite its pragmatic uses, a firmly artistic attitude: Hansen, along with the artist Ben Rubin, designed the “Moveable Type” screen installation in the Times’ lobby, and Thorp, whose work we’ve written about previously, has converted data from the Times’ API into visualizations that are both revealing and stunning...."
Having caught most of the day via the live stream, grazie to indiewire for summarizing key points of a day of great talks:
Transmedia Is Not Just Applicable to Entertainment
The Concept Isn’t Entirely New
The Living Room Has Evolved
Experimentation Is Essential
Transmedia Won’t Kill The Movie
From mashable.com
"...In November, viral video masters OK Go teamed up with Range Rover in the Evoque Pulse of the City project, in which they set out to create a huge “OK Go” sign, written in GPS across their hometown city of L.A. They used the Range Rover Pulse of the City app [iTunes link] to do the scrawling.
The project, and ensuing video for song “Back From Kathmandu,” garnered them tons of attention, as well as a MTV OMA nomination for Most Innovative Music Video.
At the time, OK Go also asked fans to create their own GPS-etched journeys, which have been compiled and edited by into the above video. Seems a fitting vid to feature on Earth Day.
This isn’t the first time a person has created GPS-spun art. This past summer, literature lover Nick Newcomen drove 12,328 miles across 30 U.S. states to scrawl “Read Ayn Rand” via GPS data inputted into Google Earth."
Getting your book in front of 160 million users is usually a good thing
"Pirate's Dilemma" author Matt Mason on BitTorrent.
by Jenn Webb | @JennWebb | Comments: 7 | 15 April 2011
Excerpt:
What are some of the obstacles environments like BitTorrent face as promotion platforms?
Matt Mason: One of the biggest problems peer-to-peer technologies like BitTorrent have is the stigma of piracy, but P2P is actually a new and better way of distributing information. Piracy has been at the birth of every major new innovation in media, from the printing press to the recording industry to the film industry — all were birthed out of people doing disruptive, innovative things with content that earned them the label "pirate" (including Thomas Edison).
I think of piracy as a market signal — it signifies a change in consumer behavior that the market hasn't caught up with. If an ecosystem like BitTorrent grows to 160 million users, it's not a piracy environment, it's just a new environment. Media is an industry where the customer really is always right. If people are trying to get your content in a new way, the only smart thing to do is to find a sensible way to offer it to them there.
Very interesting argument here - read the full article on O'Reilly radar
....I’ve never even heard of Misrata before, but for your whole life it was there on a map for you to find and ponder and finally go to. All of us in the profession—the war profession, for lack of a better name—know about that town. It’s there waiting for all of us. But you went to yours, and it claimed you....
Christopher Brinckerhoff's full article is on appolicious.com
"...HBO Go, the cable television network’s portal to accessing content online, was first made available to Verizon FiOS consumers last year, and will be available to HBO subscribers with iPhones, iPads and Android devices May 2.
The HBO Go app is the latest example of the ongoing migration of television programming to mobile devices. The app, with its recently expanded library of programs, is one of many approaches to offering television content on the go...."
Description from mashable.com:
"The research and development department of The New York Times has recently been pondering the life cycle of the paper’s news stories in social media — specifically, on Twitter. Cascade is a project that visually represents what happens when readers tweet about articles.
Even now, however, Cascade is more than just a nifty data visualization. Some journalists think it also gives us new ways of to think about and optimize for sharing and engagement on the social web, especially since it helps identify the most influential sharers, the more shareable terms, and more.
Its creators write on the project’s website that Cascade “links browsing behavior on a site to sharing activity to construct a detailed picture of how information propagates through the social media space. While initially applied to New York Times stories and information, the tool and its underlying logic may be applied to any publisher or brand interested in understanding how its messages are shared.”
Earlier this month, Detroit held the Art X Detroit festival, with help from the Kresge Foundation, featuring local visual artists, writers and performers. Soon after the festival closed, the Detroit Creative Corridor Center, an entity created by business leaders
to generate innovation and business growth, played host to a two-day conference called “Rust Belt to Artist Belt” with a mix of speakers — entrepreneurs, educators, policy researchers and artists.
Many artists and creative entrepreneurs in that city regard the arts as a tool. A couple profiled by the Detroit Free Press are developing a venue near midtown to showcase a range of progressive music, along with a gallery, a cafe and retail shops.
read the full article on courier-journal.com
Read the full post for Alex Levinson's analysis of the legal context & implications of Apple's data tracking:
"1) Apple is not collecting this data.
And to suggest otherwise is completely misrepresenting Apple. I quote:
Apple is gathering this data, but it’s clearly intentional, as the database is being restored across backups, and even device migrations.
Apple is not harvesting this data from your device. This is data on the device that you as the customer purchased and unless they can show concrete evidence supporting this claim – network traffic analysis of connections to Apple servers – I rebut this claim in full. Through my research in this field and all traffic analysis I have performed, not once have I seen this data traverse a network. As rich of data as this might be, it’s actually illegal under California state law:
(a) No person or entity in this state shall use an electronic tracking device to determine the location or movement of a person.
I don’t think that’s a legal battle Apple wants to face considering the sale of over 100 million iDevices worldwide. That raises the question – how is this data used? It’s used all the time by software running on the phone. Built-In applications such as Maps and Camera use this geolocational data to operate. Apple provides an API for access to location awareness called Core Location. Here is Apple’s description of this softare library:
The Core Location framework lets you determine the current location or heading associated with a device. The framework uses the available hardware to determine the user’s position and heading. You use the classes and protocols in this framework to configure and schedule the delivery of location and heading events. You can also use it to define geographic regions and monitor when the user crosses the boundaries of those regions.
Seems pretty clear. So now the question becomes why did this “hidden” file secretly appear in iOS 4?..."
THEATER OWNERS VS. PREMIUM VOD VS. NETFLIX
Movies and television may be media’s most volatile business arenas, with battles opening up on a variety of fronts.
Theaters owners and studios are inching toward open war as D-Day nears for Thursday's DirecTV launch of premium VOD -- Hollywood’s daring move at last to reconfigure release windows by making current movies available sooner for home viewing.
Through DirecTV’s looming “Home Premium,” Sony, Time Warner's Warner Bros., Comcast-controlled Universal and News Corp.'s 20th Century Fox are aiming to accelerate movies to home screens eight weeks from theatrical release -- shrunken from an average of 12 -- at $30 per VOD rental.
Also read: Theater Owners Ready to Retaliate Over Premium VOD
Worried that moviegoers might skip the megaplex for the home couch, some top circuits reportedly are privately considering retaliation, including killing movie previews and lobby posters of upcoming movies as well as other financial counterattacks.
Read Johnnie L. Roberts' excellent, long & detailed post on thewrap.com
Borrows visual aesthetic of Fernanda Viégas and Martin Wattenberg's visualization of body parts mentioned in different music genre lyrics. And the Fleshmap data viz can be found here:
About MondoWindow
MondoWindow Team | Press/Media
MondoWindow provides web based, in-flight, location-aware content and entertainment to wifi-connected airline passengers. MondoWindow is a map that tells you where you are and what you’re looking at as you fly; it turns the plane into a geobrowser, availing the passenger of points of interest, audio, video, games, and social interaction from partners in the top tier of each respective content area.
History
The company was founded by Tyler Sterkel, a technologist and museum curator, and Greg Dicum, an interactive producer and journalist. The concept grew out of Greg’s Window Seat books, a series that helped airline passengers understand the landscape beneath them.
MondoWindow is the first product for the wifi-connected airline passenger. As such, it leads the disruptive charge in the $6 billion in-flight entertainment (IFE) industry—an inefficient, bloated sector that is the last major consumer media space still largely untransformed by the Internet.
Current Status
MondoWindow launched a beta at South by Southwest in March 2011. The core technology, for which a provisional patent application has been filed, was developed by Stamen Design. At present, MondoWindow is developing key partnerships while continuing on its product development roadmap. The goal is to launch a revised beta version to the general public in time for the start of the summer travel season.
Excerpt from the interview:
"When you start conceptualizing a set, do you always start the same way? If so, what is your realization process like?
My design process always starts with listening to the music over and over and over again until it is in my head to the point where following songs becomes an almost subconscious task. That way I can concentrate on the dynamics, the feel and the emotion of the music and the lyrics. At the same time I always have a meeting with the artists themselves to discuss how they want to be perceived and to determine if there is any particular aesthetic that they are interested in. I see my primary role as creating an environment for the band’s live performance and that is determined but a combination of physical objects (lights, trusses, video screens, risers, complex sets, etc) and soft components such as video content, lighting programming, etc. To envisage that… I keep listening to the music and literally imagine the combination of elements necessary to create that onstage world. I then move on to drawing sketches and finally building models using a 3D design package on my computer. By the time I send out drawings to the band/management for approval the design is usually fairly complete in my head in terms of physical structure. Obviously the system then has to be programmed, content has to be created and the environment brought to life...."
Read more: Step Into the Light: An Interview With Radiohead’s Stage Designer Andi Watson — Imprint-The Online Community for Graphic Designers
Books are facing competition from a wide array of cheap digital entertainment—from Netflix Inc.'s streaming-video service to Apple Inc.'s iTunes store—easily accessed via tablets, options that don't exist on dedicated e-reading devices.
All of which has helped boost the sales of Mr. Locke, the self-published thriller writer. Mr. Locke, who published his first paperback two years ago at age 58, says he decided to jump into digital publishing in March 2010 after studying e-book pricing.
"When I saw that highly successful authors were charging $9.99 for an e-book, I thought that if I can make a profit at 99 cents, I no longer have to prove I'm as good as them," says Mr. Locke. "Rather, they have to prove they are ten times better than me."
Mr. Locke earns 35 cents for every title he sells at 99 cents. Altogether, he says his publishing revenue amounted to $126,000 from Amazon in March alone. It costs him about $1,000 to have his book published digitally, complete with an original dust jacket image. He also hires an editor to work with him at additional expense.
In March, he sold 369,000 downloads on Amazon, up from about 75,000 in January and just 1,300 in November. His titles are also sold by digital bookstores operated by Kobo Inc., Barnes & Noble Inc., and Apple.
Read the full story here:
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703838004576274813963609784.html
Through these and other cellphone research projects, scientists are able to pinpoint "influencers," the people most likely to make others change their minds. The data can predict with uncanny accuracy where people are likely to be at any given time in the future. Cellphone companies are already using these techniques to predict—based on a customer's social circle of friends—which people are most likely to defect to other carriers.
A wave of ambitious social-network experiments is underway in the U.S. and Europe to track our movements, probe our relationships and, ultimately, affect the individual choices we all make. WSJ's Robert Lee Hotz reports.
The data can reveal subtle symptoms of mental illness, foretell movements in the Dow Jones Industrial Average, and chart the spread of political ideas as they move through a community much like a contagious virus, research shows. In Belgium, researchers say, cellphone data exposed a cultural split that is driving a historic political crisis there.
And back at MIT, scientists who tracked student cellphones during the latest presidential election were able to deduce that two people were talking about politics, even though the researchers didn't know the content of the conversation. By analyzing changes in movement and communication patterns, researchers could also detect flu symptoms before the students themselves realized they were getting sick.
very very interesting data analysis going on - read the full post on the Wall Street Journal
Through these and other cellphone research projects, scientists are able to pinpoint "influencers," the people most likely to make others change their minds. The data can predict with uncanny accuracy where people are likely to be at any given time in the future. Cellphone companies are already using these techniques to predict—based on a customer's social circle of friends—which people are most likely to defect to other carriers.
A wave of ambitious social-network experiments is underway in the U.S. and Europe to track our movements, probe our relationships and, ultimately, affect the individual choices we all make. WSJ's Robert Lee Hotz reports.
The data can reveal subtle symptoms of mental illness, foretell movements in the Dow Jones Industrial Average, and chart the spread of political ideas as they move through a community much like a contagious virus, research shows. In Belgium, researchers say, cellphone data exposed a cultural split that is driving a historic political crisis there.
And back at MIT, scientists who tracked student cellphones during the latest presidential election were able to deduce that two people were talking about politics, even though the researchers didn't know the content of the conversation. By analyzing changes in movement and communication patterns, researchers could also detect flu symptoms before the students themselves realized they were getting sick.
very very interesting data analysis going on - read the full post on the Wall Street Journal
Really??? And how is our government going to enforce this??
"...Section 329 of the Canada Elections Act still prohibits transmitting the results of the vote in any electoral district to the public in another electoral district before the polling stations close in that other electoral district.
That means on May 2, it will be illegal for Postmedia News — or the CBC or Radio-Canada or the Globe and Mail or the National Post or any other national media outlet — to maintain a live website with up-to-date results. At least until after the polls close in B.C..."
Read more: http://www.canada.com/news/decision-canada/Twitter+Facebook+election+night+po...
RESTON, Va., April 21, 2011 /PRNewswire/ -- comScore, Inc. (NASDAQ:SCOR - News), a leader in measuring the digital world, today announced the beta release of the comScore Media Metrix Total Universe report, which provides audience measurement for 100 percent of a site's traffic, including usage via mobile phones, apps, tablets and shared computers such as Internet cafes. This never-before-available report, which will be available to comScore Media Metrix subscribers, will be released with April data in the U.S. and U.K. (with other global markets being released in subsequent months) for all publishers currently leveraging the comScore Unified Digital Measurement™ (UDM) tag. The initial report features standard comScore Media Metrix key measures, such as unique visitors, reach, and page views, providing an unduplicated view of site audiences across multiple media platforms.
read the full post on Yahoo news....
From wired.com/underwire
"...A small but mighty online force has swelled in hopes of getting nerdy action-comedy Chuck renewed for a fifth season. The latest in a series of online efforts to get NBC to commit to another chapter of the show, the We Give a Chuck campaign has been flooding Twitter with appeals to the show’s advertisers.
“The Nielsens are basically just a tool to tell a network and advertisers that people are watching the commercials aired during a show,” said Kris Schneider, one of the co-founders of We Give a Chuck, in an e-mail to Wired.com. “We decided that as fans we could tell them the exact same thing using Twitter. And unlike the Nielsens, which only seem to measure if a TV is on, we could show that not only were we watching, we were paying attention.”
The gambit is fairly simple: During airings of the show, fans send tweets to advertisers, like: “Just rewatched the last episode of #Chuck while drinking my daily @drpepper! Thanks for the Chuck support @pepsi!” The posts are then appended with the hashtag #NotANielsenFamily...."
Just a few recent stats demonstrating the reach and power of the F-FACTOR:
- The F-FACTOR is currently dominated by Facebook, as over 500 million active users spend over 700 billion minutes a month on the site. (Source: Facebook, April 2011)
- And its impact isn’t just on Facebook itself. Every month, more than 250 million people engage with Facebook across more than 2.5 million external websites. (Source: Facebook, April 2011)
- The average user clicks the ‘Like’ button 9 times each month. (Facebook, 2010)
And a couple of brand-related, F-FACTOR stats:
- Three quarters of Facebook users have 'Liked' a brand. (Source: AdAge/ Ipsos, February 2011)
- Juicy Couture found that their product purchase conversion rate increased by 160% after installing social sharing features (Source: CreateTheGroup, February 2011)
- Incipio Technologies, a gadget accessory retailer, found that referrals from Facebook had a conversion rate double the average (Source: Business Insider, March 2011)
- But it’s not just about Facebook. Take for example the explosive rise of the daily deal site Groupon, which used referrals from friends and colleagues to drive sales of over 40 million deals in the two and a half years since it launched in November 2008, via email ;-)
So, here are just five of the ways that the F-FACTOR influences consumption behavior:
- F-DISCOVERY: How consumers discover new products and services by relying on their social networks.
- F-RATED: How consumers will increasingly (and automatically) receive targeted ratings, recommendations and reviews from their social networks.
- F-FEEDBACK: How consumers can ask their friends and followers to improve and validate their buying decisions.
- F-TOGETHER: How shopping is becoming increasingly social, even when consumers and their peers are not physically together.
- F-ME: How consumers’ social networks are literally turned into products and services.
* This Trend Briefing is about the impact of consumers’ social connections on how they find, decide and purchase: i.e. what happens when consumption is increasingly social, rather than the personalized retailing opportunities on social networks (which is currently still the main focus of F-COMMERCE). For more on this see the excellent Social Commerce Today.
Lots of excellent deets in this Brief - read the full post on trendwatching.com/briefing
Excerpt from fastcodesign.com:
"The immense chandelier, designed by 3XN, will welcome guests to Copenhagen's Bella Sky Hotel starting May 16th.
3XN is a major player in Scandinavian architecture, so it's no surprise that they were approached to create a larger-than-life lighting installation for the Bella Sky Hotel in Copenhagen, which will be the region's biggest hotel when it opens on May 16th. The Bella Chandelier boasts 7,000 coolly glowing LED tubes linked in a minimalist pattern that took the best minds in design, science, and technology from 3XN's R&D arm GXN to create. Here's what it'll look like (ABOVE!)"
more pics & deets on fastcodesign.com
From fastcodesign:
"Leo van der Veen's ingenious app lets you turn any scannable product into an augmented-reality musical instrument.
Those ubiquitous QR codes may get all the trendy tech love these days, but the humbler Universal Product Code -- or barcode, as it's better known -- has some creative life left in it yet. An iPhone app called Barcodas turns any UPC code into a electronic instrument: just scan it with the iPhone's camera, and those black bars jump to musical life like a tiny player piano. Since almost everything on earth has one of these barcodes pasted on it somewhere, you'll never be at a loss for musical inspiration...."
more pics & deets on fastcodesign.com
Watch the trailer:
from the site:
"A PIONEERING 3D erotic comedy has taken the Hong Kong box office by storm.
People have always thought that you need 3D for this kind of content."
Next stop, the world.
The Cantonese-language production 3D Sex and Zen: Extreme Ecstasy had earned 17 million Hong Kong dollars ($2.2 million) as of Tuesday since opening last week, according to figures provided by producer Stephen Shiu.
That's nearly seven times the total take so far for Hollywood thriller Scream 4, which has earned $HK2.5 million ($320,000)...."
Read more: http://www.news.com.au/technology/d-sex-and-zen-extreme-ecstasy-beats-opening...
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