I am loving the thinking behind this German dog food sampling activity via FourSquare / Outdoor! Nice way of driving habit and trial. After all, puppy training is all about habit formation: reward good behaviour and do it consistently and repeatedly!
Tuesday, 29 March 2011
Friday, 18 March 2011
Friday irreverence
No excuses, this won't win any prizes for being a thoughtful or insightful post, but it made me smile.
My colleague Julia sent me this copy & image she'd found and loving a good bit of mashing and mischief as I do, it appealed to me at the end of a mad week.
In the not too distant future, YouTube, Twitter & Facebook will merge to form one giant, idiotic,super time wasting website called...
My colleague Julia sent me this copy & image she'd found and loving a good bit of mashing and mischief as I do, it appealed to me at the end of a mad week.
In the not too distant future, YouTube, Twitter & Facebook will merge to form one giant, idiotic,super time wasting website called...
Monday, 14 March 2011
Putting things in perspective
It's the 14th March, and the first time I've posted this month. Shocking. So much going on, so little time. My reading list is stacking up, I've barely caught up on last month's Mobile Congress, let alone last week's SXSW, so many things I have good intention of writing posts about.
It's so easy to feel caught up in the never ending stream of data and information around us, we all have to develop our own protocols and process for coping or keeping up in our own way. But iPad 2 launch last Friday or not, everything slips into real perspective when you look at the terrible events surrounding the earthquake and subsequent tsunami in Japan last Friday. I am incredibly thankful that all my friends in Japan have got in touch and reassured me they are ok, even if some have some pretty incredible stories to tell. It should be "sakura" season in Japan, a time for spring celebration and cherry blossom picnics, but with more aftershocks expected and lots of very "now" issues to contend with the Japanese will have little time for that sadly. My thoughts are with them all a lot.
Watch this scary and amazing video of the tsunami flood waters rushing through a town. Don't just do what so many of us do so often and just watch the first 30 seconds. 6 minutes of your life are few in the grand scheme, and it will put everything else in your day in perspective.
Check out this series of before and after earthquake pictures too.
You can make a donation to the relief effort via the British Red Cross, via Facebook Causes and via an assortment of other methods including iTunes too.
Google have set up a Japanese earthquake and tsunami crisis resource aggregator too.
It's so easy to feel caught up in the never ending stream of data and information around us, we all have to develop our own protocols and process for coping or keeping up in our own way. But iPad 2 launch last Friday or not, everything slips into real perspective when you look at the terrible events surrounding the earthquake and subsequent tsunami in Japan last Friday. I am incredibly thankful that all my friends in Japan have got in touch and reassured me they are ok, even if some have some pretty incredible stories to tell. It should be "sakura" season in Japan, a time for spring celebration and cherry blossom picnics, but with more aftershocks expected and lots of very "now" issues to contend with the Japanese will have little time for that sadly. My thoughts are with them all a lot.
Watch this scary and amazing video of the tsunami flood waters rushing through a town. Don't just do what so many of us do so often and just watch the first 30 seconds. 6 minutes of your life are few in the grand scheme, and it will put everything else in your day in perspective.
Check out this series of before and after earthquake pictures too.
You can make a donation to the relief effort via the British Red Cross, via Facebook Causes and via an assortment of other methods including iTunes too.
Google have set up a Japanese earthquake and tsunami crisis resource aggregator too.
Sunday, 20 February 2011
The challenges of design
Bad design costs the same as good design, so why oh why do so many people insist on the bad type?? In fact if anything bad design costs more because of the number of revisions often involved in getting from the good type to the horribly compromised approved version.
Many many years ago I took a cheap £3 standard two armed corkscrew and £27 Alessi "Anna" corkscrew to a product development meeting to try and ram into the heads of the dullard American design team I was working with the difference. The material product and tooling cost was slightly greater for the latter of course, but the retail selling price differential and the product margin was far greater.
I so often see the same issues repeating themselves, people lacking vision, or understanding of design principles, or even just the importance of taking time to get the brief right in the beginning. Fail to achieve that and you end up with a design dogs dinner or a user experience that sends people clicking elsewhere faster than you can say bad navigation. Not to mention the designer wanting to shoot themselves over scope creep and client meddling.
All of which was prompted by my friend Fran sending me this link to The Oatmeal (click here to read the entire cartoon story, it'll only take a tick and if you work in anything remotely creative you'll smile and nod knowingly).
Many many years ago I took a cheap £3 standard two armed corkscrew and £27 Alessi "Anna" corkscrew to a product development meeting to try and ram into the heads of the dullard American design team I was working with the difference. The material product and tooling cost was slightly greater for the latter of course, but the retail selling price differential and the product margin was far greater.
I so often see the same issues repeating themselves, people lacking vision, or understanding of design principles, or even just the importance of taking time to get the brief right in the beginning. Fail to achieve that and you end up with a design dogs dinner or a user experience that sends people clicking elsewhere faster than you can say bad navigation. Not to mention the designer wanting to shoot themselves over scope creep and client meddling.
All of which was prompted by my friend Fran sending me this link to The Oatmeal (click here to read the entire cartoon story, it'll only take a tick and if you work in anything remotely creative you'll smile and nod knowingly).
Thursday, 17 February 2011
Far beyond the looking glass
When Lewis Caroll wrote children's classic Through the Looking Glass, circa 1871, I very much doubt his imagination could stretch anywhere near as far as the possibilities that glass surfaces can take us today and will take us in the future. There's always lots of talk in thedigital and tech worlds about multi-screen devices and platform agnostic content, Smart-TV's that are web connected, tablet this, touchscreen that (it is the Mobile World Congress this week after all) but component manufacturers' vital role in the innovation chain often get overlooked.
Fair play therefore to Corning (a glass manufacturer) for publishing this nice (if a tad long) video showcasing the role of glass in our ever increasingly digitally connected future. Can't help but make those shareholder meetings more interesting.
Well worth reading this interesting interview yesterday with the super smart Helge Tenno on the connected future too.
Fair play therefore to Corning (a glass manufacturer) for publishing this nice (if a tad long) video showcasing the role of glass in our ever increasingly digitally connected future. Can't help but make those shareholder meetings more interesting.
Well worth reading this interesting interview yesterday with the super smart Helge Tenno on the connected future too.
Monday, 14 February 2011
Save the trees one PDF at a time: Digital Treasure
My friend Mark just flagged up this brilliant idea from the World Wild Life Fund.
Download the software to give you the option to save your documents as a WWF rather than a PDF - essentially the same format except the former is nicely branded, giving you an eco-prod into good behaviour every time you see it, AND means the print menu is disabled so you can't waste trees and energy on printing out stuff un-necessarily.
Yes, technically you can enable this setting in Adobe already, yes, there will still always be people that want to print documents, and just occasionally there are documents that really do need reviewing on paper but in a world of e-readers, tablets, netbooks and laptops, the excuses are getting fewer and fewer.
I think this is a brilliant example of someone having a BIG idea and using technology to facilitate it.
Super smart. I hope it catches on.
Download the software to give you the option to save your documents as a WWF rather than a PDF - essentially the same format except the former is nicely branded, giving you an eco-prod into good behaviour every time you see it, AND means the print menu is disabled so you can't waste trees and energy on printing out stuff un-necessarily.
Yes, technically you can enable this setting in Adobe already, yes, there will still always be people that want to print documents, and just occasionally there are documents that really do need reviewing on paper but in a world of e-readers, tablets, netbooks and laptops, the excuses are getting fewer and fewer.
I think this is a brilliant example of someone having a BIG idea and using technology to facilitate it.
Super smart. I hope it catches on.
Wednesday, 9 February 2011
Elasticity of distance and discounting
The fact that people will shop around and will make a degree of effort if a potential saving is perceived to be significant is hardly surprising. What is interesting though, is this attempt by JiWire (found via Techcrunch) to start to quantify the model particularly in this era of Groupon type social buying models, Facebook Deals / Foursquare offers and smartphone based price comparison services. Location based services are here to stay and it will be interesting to see how they are developed and exploited.
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