Three Minds On Digital Marketing @ Organic

Check out this legal firm in Boston - they're a 100 years old and are using a very contemporary video strategy to recruit summer interns and new associates from leading law schools. They've taken real associate stories, edited them down to 30 seconds and used actors to tell their stories ... pretty compelling!

http://www.choate.com/careers.php

Read more in the New York Times.

David Feldt

 

How much would you pay for the new Radiohead album? How about nothing?

Radiohead announced this morning that they're selling their new album for whatever you want to pay for it. Essentially they are giving it away as a free download.

How this strategy changes the recording industry as we know it:

1. MP3's are given away for free, but it generates interest in the release. In addition, in order to buy it an e-mail address must be given which can be used for future marketing campaigns.
2. The more saturation the band gets, the more demand for their live shows. Earlier this year Prince announced that he was giving away his new album for free in the Daily Mail. As a result, his 21 tour dates in London sold out.
3. The artist follows up the free download with CD or Vinyl package or box set for those who want the higher quality format with the liner notes and imagery.
4. Since Radiohead is no longer tied to a label, all the profits remain theirs.
5. While building their fanbase, they can tell their fans they're ready to record their next release and take pre-orders which they can then use  to record and distribute the next album.

We all know that most viral video content is usually short-lived and too amateurish for mass consumption.   One of the ways YouTube is trying to up the quality is by offering promotions and contests that call out to the community for content solid enough to appeal to a broader market.

YouTube, HP and Fox Searchlight are teaming to entice YouTube community to create a unique film experience based on three criteria.  These criteria tie in with the plot of the Searchlight release of Juno in December. The final set of short films will be chosen by the creative staff so the YouTube community can vote on the winner.   
It's a great way to tie in community buzz around a theatrical release and the prize will draw out talented community members who may not have been able to break away from the clutter otherwise.

This is a great example of how marketers such as HP and Searchlight can appeal to the YouTube generation, while YouTube creates quality content for the site.   

http://www.youtube.com/projectdirect

Chris Chavkin

• the move toward smarter technology and expert systems,
• the greater need for mobility and data portability,
• and the line between developer, designer, and end user growing blurry

While some believe that this idea of Web 3.0 is pure hype, there are plenty of items that pop up everyday in the blog-o-sphere that make a good case for the "next stage of the web".

One such example is the upcoming software, Adobe Thermo, that Adobe sneak peaked to the audience at the Adobe MAX conference this week. This software, while the details of how are still unclear, aims to make the development of RIAs (rich internet applications) an easier and more rewarding experience by empowering the designer. The idea is that by giving the designer the tools to create functional components and prototypes, it will improve the workflow between designer and developer, and allow each to do what they are best at.

Other examples of this evolution include Yahoo! Pipes and Google My Maps, that make it possible for any user to create a basic application through a GUI interface. In a short amount of time, I was able to create a wine pairing flavor map of Europe.

As the design and code behind the most engaging applications becomes all the more complicated, I am all for optimizing the process via a rich GUI interface. Other Web 3.0 ideas, I am more skeptical about. Upcoming blog post... expert systems, creepy or cool?

Marta Strickland

Mini’s new Clubwagon launch site is interesting. Mini has developed a program where their content is “aired” at specific times during the week. Even more interesting is the fact that it resides in a space where nothing is really “aired” and everything is on-demand. Mini will provide a 15-second piece to be viewed only through a 1-minute window of opportunity. After that window has closed and it won’t be shown again.

I ended up downloading an extension for my iCal, which will let me know when the next video will run. I set my reminders accordingly, made my cup of coffee and stared at the clock in anticipation. My grandmother always said at Thanksgiving that “anticipation is greater then realization.” The iCal alert had sounded. I logged onto www.theotherview.co.uk to view the latest video installment, but nothing! Blasted GMT time zone!

Anyway, I wait with bated breath still curious of what the actual content is. My actual take away is a great little widget to place on my blog/web site and a iCal extension. This has proved to be successful even without watching any content what so ever. I fell into “the make this viral for us” trap and had emailed 23 people here in our office all while thinking Mini. Now with out any TV media buy, or an online media buy for that matter, there are 24 people in the Detroit office making popcorn and getting ready to snuggle up in front of the computer and tune in to Mini.

John Stoll

The use of autoscroll, the animation, the clever mixing of technology and nature..all add up to an exceptional experience

http://www.rappcollins.com/

Jim Bachalo 

There is a lot of energy being put forth right now into the Semantic Web, making the web more readable for machines, instead of just humans. Rightly so, a smarter web in the end means a better user experience.

The idea is simple... for the search tools to be able to identify the not so subtle difference between something like "Paris Hilton" and a "Hilton in Paris". Now this could be determined by the format of the information (RDF), which would hold different attributes for a person (age, hair color) than a hotel (location, price). However, others have theorized that user search history, like whether you have recently looked up gossip stories vs Parisian restaurants, might soon come into play.

So, with that in mind, if these "expert systems" are really going to be taking a look into how we interact with the web and bring us news, content, and search results based on their interpretation of our tastes... is it cool or creepy?

Examples:
Amazon "The Page You Made" - Cool
Pandora - Very cool
Netflix "Our Best Guess" - Just slightly creepy
Google Search Goes AI - Full out sci-fi creepy

An exceptional experience in "expert systems" is still forthcoming.  And while I am all for a more intuitively organized web, I still would like to believe we are pretty far off from having machines understand the subtlety of things like taste in movies.  Does Netflix really understand my appreciation for things that are so bad they are good?  Doubtful. 

Marta Strickland

This is a very interesting little application - you can share your screen with anyone anywhere for free. The applications of this could be intriguing. http://www.yuuguu.com/ Baron Conway

As a follow up to their snazzy "Color like no other" campaign, Sony Bravia finally put out their awaited Play Doh Bunnies ad. It's definitely a cute ad that illustrates the idea and it goes well with its chosen song. However, it is not until you really think about how this commercial was made that your mind starts to spin.

The high quality version is well worth the wait on their painfully load heavy web site, but if you are in a hurry, you can watch it on YouTube.

Also cool to look at are these behind the scenes photos.

The English national rugby team has a reputation for toughness. Do you have what it takes to stare down this man? Finally, a purpose for Web cams... http://www.o2stareout.com Alex Churchill

Visit trulia.com. It's a significant leap forward in real estate search. The mapping feature simulates the conversation home buyers share with real estate brokers, including features like pricing heat maps, local real estate guides, and user forums. Even better, you get more information out of your search than a broker would provide. Bryan Fuhr

AIGA Detroit presents LUST: Lecture + Presentation

Wednesday, October 24, 2007
College for Creative Studies - Wendell W. Anderson Auditorium
201 East Kirby Detroit, MI 48202
7:00 PM - 9:00 PM
Cost: Free

Last December I visited Lust's studio in the Hague. These guys are incredibly dedicated to their often data-driven design work, and with the funding of the Dutch government behind many of their projects they have really been able to push the envelope. They are as sharp and as nice as they come.

Lori Bender & Sean Rhodes

If any one has any doubts about the ability of Flash 9 to create truly powerful Web2.0 applications, then take a trip to www.splicemusic.com. Splice music is a sophisticated sound synthesizer that includes virtual instruments, a realtime synthesizer, realtime effect plugins, realtime time-stretching, and much, much more!

It’s pretty obvious after using this, that just about any desktop application regardless of sophistication, can be (with a lot of hard work and coding, more than more than 800 classes!!! were needed for splice music), converted to a web application.  And if you’re a flash developer, all you need to know is that the person behind this is none other than German Flash whiz, Andre Michelle.

Jim Bachalo

On Friday, The Grand Rapids Art Museum (GRAM) celebrated the opening of its new gallery. The new space is the world’s very first art museum to be constructed following the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) Green Building Rating System.

What an Exceptional Experience!

The new museum truly recognizes the need to create environmentally sensitive structures that use less energy and promote good stewardship of natural resources. The structure in itself is a work of art, while also housing works of art.

http://www.gramonline.org/index.html

Plan on visiting it sometime soon!

Joe Lekovish

Indie heroes Arcade Fire created this mesmerizing interactive music video. The future is now! http://www.beonlineb.com/click_around.html James Crawford

The stop-motion video centers on a pixelated flipbook of sorts. This doubles as the mobile-friendly version of the video (remove the filmed background and...voila!) and carries in it over 100 "subliminal" QR (quick response) matrix codes. When you scan these frames with your reader-enabled camera phone you get URLs relevant to civil liberty issues, hand-picked by Chris Lowe and Neil Tennant. The individual frames can also be downloaded to create your own homemade version of the video, which are slowly popping up on YouTube.

The whole package—music, message, meme, media—comes together nicely. Like the best cultural phenomena, this can be enjoyed at several levels of participation—at least one of which involves a dance floor.

(Thanks to Les Orchard, whose tweet hepped me to this video.)

Sam Cannon

Rentokil, the UK's leading pest control organization, has invented RADAR (Rodent Activated Detention and Riddance), the smartest mousetrap ever. When a mouse enters the RADAR box pressure sensitive pads detect their presence and close the doors. A measured dose of carbon dioxide is released — killing the rodent quickly and humanely, with no toxins going into the environment. Best of all, when the nasty little deed is done and the mouse is a mouse no longer, RADAR sends you a text message or email to let you know it’s safe to step down from the chair.

http://www.uk.rentokil.com/services-and-solutions/service-solutions/mouse-radar.php

Mitch Mitchell

Before my daughter was born, I developed a serious obsession with baby names, and in particular the psychology and social dynamics of naming. I learned from the Baby Name Wizard that names follow a clear fashion cycle, meaning that certain names reach peak popularity in a given decade (Donna or Randy in the 60s, Jennifer or Brad in the 70s, Monica or Chad in the 80s, etc.), and that you can typically expect names to come back into style every 100 years or so, because children are not usually named after living relatives.

Freakanomics adds another twist- that there's a predictable movement of names through social classes, so that today's quirky coastal elite Milo or Violet is tomorrow's populist Eva or Jack. The Web is great place for the name-obsessed to congregate, particularly when you realize how infrequently a typical woman (and this world seems to be populated largely by women) have the opportunity to name a child.

Each post on name expert Laura Wattenberg's blog regularly receives more than a hundred comments. Now in a Semantic Web twist, Laura has teamed up with some hard-core complexity science consultants to offer, what else, a predictive tool for baby names. Nymbler applies a complex predictive algorithm (think the Netflix or Amazon recommendation engine) to suggest clusters of related names.

Adding artificial intelligence to naming is both both comforting (no more reading through 100,000+ Baby Names!) and disturbing, because as a society we like to think of a name as something unique and very much self-directed.  Does this start to take the magic out of it?

Misha Cornes

Great French site for Wilkinson Sword. You have to love this.

http://www.ffk-wilkinson.com

Adam Turinas

Crowd intelligence as digital art!

This is a cool little site that creates images based on a "survival of the fittest" model based on a population of 1,000 random pictures.

You allow the fittest pictures to survive. The higher your rating for a picture the more mutated offspring it produces.

http://mutatingpictures.com/

Baron Conway

This story about MangoMobile (another Omnicom company) caught my eye earlier today.

I’ve been watching the number of Flash-based phones increase steadily over the past couple of years and with wireless carriers upgrading their infrastructure the time is right for rich media marketing to hit the mobile browser market.

Of course not every phone supports Flash Lite and so alternative media is required if you want to reach mass media. For those interested in learning more about Flash Lite3 Adobe is offering this free online seminar.

Rodney Cooper

But the song rocks!

Check it out here

Wayne Mitchell

Whenever the term "virtual world" pops up in marketing conversations moans, groans, and cynical references to corporate exodus from Second Life inevitably follow. There’s a lot more to virtual worlds than Second Life. More and more virtual world platforms are emerging every day, many of which, keenly aware of the SL’s shortcomings, are eager to avoid the same missteps.

The most promising new platforms are scalable, in that they do not suffer the commercially crippling limitation of too many polygons in one place at one time. New virtual world platforms are able to accommodate large numbers of avatars in a single sim environment. Playstation Home and Metaplace are two such platforms at opposite ends of the virtual world spectrum.

PS Home is, to a large extent, a closed platform. The cost of the PS Home SDK puts it beyond the reach of individual developers and all potential users will need a PS3 to access it. While this sounds like a recipe for digital blandness, it is not. Playstation home will, almost certainly, be the most graphically advanced, commercially viable, virtual world to date.

In contrast, Metaplace will be accessible to all developers. The big idea behind Metaplace is to provide the tools and open standard markup language that will enable the mass creation of networked virtual worlds. Metaplace’s open standard markup language, MetaMarkup, is designed to be small enough to work in real-time, which is significant because it will allow anyone to write a client that will work in a standard HTTP browser. Imagine an online retail experience that offers the option to simply browse store shelves without having to boot a standalone client.

Dan Neumann

Tearitdown.org is a really simple but effective pro bono web campaign for Amnesty International done by a couple of creative directors, working under the pseudonym Middle Child, and the folks at Huge. The premise builds nicely on last year's award-winning "Your signature is more powerful than you think" campaign. By signing a virtual petition you tear down one pixel of a virtual Guantánamo Bay detention camp. Each pixel, once torn down, is replaced by the petitioner's name and their voice is added to a running tally. Once 500,000 signatures/pixels have been collected/torn down, the petition will be delivered to President Bush.

Sam Cannon

In a development that will surely delight budget-conscious CFOs everywhere, today marks the launch of a lovely new aggregator of entertainment-related blog content, Showhype.

Using a Digg-style interface and RSS feeds, it allows users to rate content from various and sundry sources of celebgossip. For the CFOs among us, this means that your staff won't spend as much toggling back and forth between The Superficial and Perez Hilton to see who delivers the snarkiest take on Lindsay Lohan's latest bender. Rather, the celeb obsessed among them can go straight to the killer and skip the filler. Even better, the site was designed by two Organic expats who shall remain nameless, but deserve kudos for a fine design. And it's owned by a really nice couple who are expanding the network they started some months back with Ballhype.

So click away, safe in the knowledge that you are making the world a more efficient place for the transmission of celebrity detrius and helping some good people in the process.

Daniel Turman

No heat. No towels. Just a 10-second, 400-mph blast of air.

I saw and then tried one of these in the Austin airport last week and thought it could be a cool techy way for us to go green in our own restrooms here at Organic.

http://www.dysonairblade.com/

Rob Neveau

The Finnish handset maker, Nokia, just made its largest acquisition ever. In agreeing to buy Chicago-based digital mapping provider Navteq for $8.1 billion, Nokia is staking its future in the evolving business of mobile search.

As mobile phones morph into handheld computers with global positioning capability, Nokia has secured a leading position in the market by controlling the mapping data that Navteq creates. Expensive...but an exceptional business acquisition!

Read more from BusinessWeek.

Chuck Russo

I'm not sure what I think about this new site from TurboChef. It's an incredibly rich Flash interface that describes the features of an ultra-premium appliance in fine detail, there are clever transitions that play with the cooking metaphor, and it offers the Web equivalent of a cooking show with celebrity chef Charlie Trotter.

But it still seems soul-less. If I was designing the site, it would be less about the technology (a nod to the Dyson vacuum?) and more about the emotional benefits - you get to do real, old-fashioned cooking, but in a fraction of the time. The feeling would be more about how the technology empowers the user - it frees you to make those gourmet meals you always dreamed of, to host fancy dinner parties, to make yourself asparagus instead of oven fries - not about the technology as the thing-in-itself.

I think the product designers who worked with TurboChef understood this very well. Although it's a $7500 oven, it has a retro shape and color that recalls classic Wedgewood ovens of the 1950s.

Is this a great site or a near miss?

http://theovenreinvented.com/

Misha Cornes

A trend in marketing/design circles recently: the use of a “planet” metaphor as a kind of navigational/experience device. I’m not sure what it signifies – there are no explicit connections drawn between the brands and the concept – other than that it’s a pretty cool and different device. (Well, becoming less different perhaps, but still kind of cool.)

Now, it may signify the fact Flash integrates video and 3D animations better than ever, making the creation of these experiences less arduous than a few years ago... or simply that marketers and designers are just living in their own cool little world. The sites are, clockwise from top left:

http://www.fordvehicles.com/flex/index.asp

http://www.moonpalace.fr/

http://www.nokia.com/nonstopliving

http://www.schiphol.nl/media/visuals/toekomst/

Elliott Smith

Creating a successful advertising model for virtual worlds should be easy. There are more potential ad forms, but, until recently, the market was not diverse enough to encourage the adoption of meaningful standards. Once ROI standards have been established, media buyers, marketers, and brand managers will have more persuasive arguments for continued or increased brand involvement in the medium.

One of the great promises of virtual worlds is contextual ad delivery. In most virtual worlds, advertisers will have access to almost every detail about your avatar and have the ability to scrape and save chat data. Since most people’s avatars are well removed from their true identities, privacy concerns are reduced.  An obvious example of this would be to serve ads for virtual goods based on keywords in your chat. Another might be to serve ads based on one’s in-world physical interactions and activates. Ad models for real-world goods are still being worked out, but even these lines are becoming blurred.

ESPN offers this story about the life and death of UNC mascot Jason Ray.

It was a well-suited choice for ESPN to allow users to further interact with the participants of the story and each other. This experience helps promote a surprisingly difficult cause in a far more compelling way than any single article or statistic could.

Joshua Fischer

The $100 laptop, a project of One Laptop Per Child, has been building momentum over the last three years. The price has risen to $200, with the ultimate goal of providing impoverished children around the world with their own PC.  In November buyers from developed countries will also get their chance to own one of these laptops - for $400. The purchase price procures not only get the laptop but a tax deduction—and the delivery of a sister laptop to a child in the developing world. Word on the street has it that the OS and all apps are built on Python, which is intriguing, and that the source code for every bit of software is instantly viewable.

http://www.xogiving.org

It’s difficult to think of a physical device better able to demonstrate a commitment to some core values (technological innovation, creativity, movement forward) and some soft values as well (education, empowering the powerless).  Read more from the New York Times.

Peter Balogh

Apparently, with widgets all the rage, the newest wrinkle is the Mini Me of Blogs, the blidget. As a sometimes late-night sports blogger, I found out about this trend when an unusual e-mail found its way into my inbox a few days back. It was from a Widgetbox employee and friend of former Organic Josh Morris. He wrote to say that he had been digging the blog for a while and had decided to create a blidget out of it. After explaining what the hell a blidget was, he went on to say that with my blessing he would make it public and let folks start downloading to their FaceBook pages and the like.

So I went to the site and checked out what they had done.

The interface is clean and legible enough. The title, intro copy and a wee image are RSS’d into the widget, albeit without any embedded YouTubelage. And if you register as the owner, they provide you with usage statistics. All in a convenient to-go package. Turman approved.

Daniel Turman

Google has created a fun way to help them tag/label all of their images within Google search.

Google Image Labeler partners you with another person online and you are given a time limit to match keywords for a given image that Google displays for you. Your point total is based on the amount of image tags/labels that you and your partner match This seems like an ingenious way for Google to provide more relevant search results.

Jason Law

For those of you who are Daily Show junkies, Comedy Central has launched a full archive of all Daily Show episodes/segments dating back to 1999.

What a great way to keep an audience engaged by offering not only newer segments, but historical segments to keep you interested while online (and most likely at work).

On a side note, the interesting point to take into consideration here is that this type of content distribution is at the core of the current talent guild negotiations. With content consumption moving from offline to online, this is type of programming is one of the major points (residuals for digital distribution & measurement for payout) that the WGA and Alliance of Motion Picture & Television Producers need to work through. Next year is even bigger with both SAG and DGA contracts up for renewal.

In any case what a great way to keep fans entertained while they are away from their DVRs and TVs.

http://www.thedailyshow.com/video/index.jhtml

Chris Chavkin

Built in Flash and Flex, another web2.0 application for creating quality presentations.

You can sign up for the private beta here: http://www.sliderocket.com/index.html

Some of the buzz

http://www.sliderocket.com/buzz.html

Jim Bachalo

The Moleskine Project launched on October 8th to quick success. Seeing as many of Organic's concepts are born in our very own oilcloth-covered notebooks, I thought this was relevant.

http://moleskineproject.com/

Max Zabramny

A couple of years ago, Jeff Jarvis blogged about his frustration with Dell's customer support. He wrote Michael Dell an open letter. It created a firestorm known as Dell Hell.

For Dell it has a happy ending. Dell started listening to its customers, giving conversations with them and turned things around.  It has totally changed the way they think about their customer relationships.

Now here’s the follow-up from Jarvis himself in Business Week. It's one of the best cases of the impact both positive and negative that social media can have on a company.  In the words of Dell’s CMO Mark Jarvis (no relation): "By listening to our customers..that is actually the most perfect form of marketing you could have.’”

Several Organic's responded to this thread with their own stories.  Tim Willison wrote: "I've got to agree that Dell's service quality has become fantastic. I bought an XPS laptop a little over a year ago. Two days out of warranty the battery gave up on me.  I called expecting to do battle. 'Forget about that warranty date', the service rep said, 'you warranty will expire after this phone call.'"

Frank Ribitch countered: "My most memorable call was for a fan that was failing in a laptop. It made a loud grinding noise, and simply needed to be replaced. The support agent read word from word from their script and asked me if I had tried to upgrade the systems firmware to correct the issue. This is a question that Dell always asks, and would have no affect at all to part experiencing a mechanical failure."

Has Dell turned the corner when it comes to customer service?

Adam Turinas and Mike Hudson

I am sure that everyone who uses a PC has heard of SnagIt, that great screen capturing software. I always wished they had a Mac version. Well, they do kind-of. It's called Jing, it a freeware project run by TechSmith, the company that created SnagIt.

I have been using Jing for about a month now. It is small sweet little widget that sits unobtrusively in the top right corner of your desktop, and it allows you to capture, video, save and share. It is great, easy to use - in fact it is my drug of choice for capturing screen shots etc. Even better it is cross platform working on both Mac and Windows.

http://www.jingproject.com/

Baron Conway

How do you get across the size and breadth of a new product offering?  Get your own zip code!  Saks Fifth Avenue has talked the US Postal Service into giving them a vanity zipcode (10022-SHOE).  Interesting example of differentiation in a space where few people would have thought to explore. 

I have inquired about getting my own zip code for the area around my desk here in San Francisco.  I will keep everyone posted.

Rick Corteville

I’m a bit of a movie buff and over the weekend I came across KillerClips.com completely by chance…  I hadn’t heard of this site but after googling “liquid hot magma” (Austin Powers) the domain name caught my eye. A Case of the Mondays is of course from Office Space. I usually go to IMDB to search movie quotes and the like but why read the quote when you can see it in it’s original form – the movie itself!  
 
It’s a fun idea and the site is still relatively small (129 movies to date) but it’s still fun to browse around.  I did look for copyright info and to see if there were any affiliations with any of the major studio’s but I didn’t find much. Which leaves me wondering...is this another legal battle waiting to happen? 
 
Patrick Dunphy

Design your own USB blank cassette just like the old mix tapes. All for around 40 bucks.

http://www.makeamixa.com/

Max Zabramny

I really like the strong use of typography on this shop's site.  For one thing, I think the lack of imagery is pretty bold for an interactive design shop.  Additionally, the information hierarchy is well done. The headlines are B-O-L-D! But when the thing really shines is when you resize your browser window and realize those headlines are being used as spacers in a liquid-layout.  Navigating to various areas and resizing windows, you come to realize that they have created upper and lower tolerances for those pieces of text to ensure they keep within a relative weight to the rest of the text.

http://www.firstbornmultimedia.com/

I just find it very strong. What do you think?
 
Tim Willison

I have been thinking alot about density lately and came across this.  You really have to appreciate the chutzpah of the idea, not sure what it is good for and the experience isn't exactly visually pleasing but just the audacity to think of the whole internet on one page is exceptional!
 
http://thewholeinternet.wordtothewise.com/
 
Bill Camp

While guerrilla marketing is often accused of defacing public property; London’s Street Advertising Services offers a better solution…with cleaning solution!

A street team uses high-pressure sprayers to wash a client’s stenciled logo or message right into dirty sidewalks and walls. They perform their magic during the night (fewer pedestrians to get in the way), using just water and steam. It’s all environmentally friendly, and no residue. And the after effects are a semi-cleaner city.

Wayne Mitchell

When Microsoft purchased aQuantive for $6B in cash in May 2007, the media, software, and Internet industries all took notice.  Microsoft gained ownership of interactive agency powerhouse Avenue A/Razorfish and, with that, the ability to buy and create interactive advertising.  Now, five months later, the interactive community is on notice again as Microsoft has made a $240M investment in Facebook.

 
The ordinary business story is clear… Microsoft is simply vertically integrating.  However, the $240M investment buys only a 1.6% stake in Facebook (the math indicates the whole company is valued at $15B - that's 2.5x more than aQuantive for those of you keeping score at home) so fears of Facebook only being functional on Internet Explorer can be put on hold – Microsoft didn't invest in Facebook to have that kind of control. However, Microsoft has now solidified its place along the entire online advertising value chain (buying, creating and selling).
 
Not known for backing down, Microsoft may have entered the speculative online advertising market in response to the new competition in their core business – software.   Google, which was coincidentally Microsoft's competition in this Facebook stake, has developed core strength in application creation having begun their growth through advertising.  Even though Google's applications don't, on their own, make money (they are free to users, but can be advertiser-sponsored), it seems that Google could be this close to creating free versions of the Microsoft software that people use everyday.  Now, with online applications eroding desktop applications, Microsoft has got to be worried about the relevance of operating systems on the whole.
 
Microsoft needs to learn.  It needs to learn how to leverage what they know, software, for what they want, to be an online advertising powerhouse.  For a company as cash-rich as Microsoft (an advantage it has over Google), $240M is a reasonable price tag to get a peek at the services and applications that Facebook is developing everyday (now funded by Microsoft) and have access to a whole new group of developers.  Microsoft's model may change and their past success in software design will simply be an input in the future Microsoft.
 
Betsy Morse 

In today’s New York Times, David Brooks writes an excellent piece on how the at-our-fingertips data engine is affecting our personal relationship with information.  Important reading for those of us creating more opportunities for human beings to find, filter, and, ultimately, not need to remember stuff. Photo credit: Gaetan Lee

Matt Rosenberg

The simple and intuitive interface, great use of transitions, engaging content and use of humor all contribute to making this site exceptional.
 
http://www.tripleslanguage.com/
 
Jim Bachalo

An interesting article from The Atlantic Monthly regarding the multi-tasking.  Neuroscience is confirming what we all suspect: Multitasking is dumbing us down and driving us crazy.   A few excerpts:
 
"This is the great irony of multitasking—that its overall goal, getting more done in less time, turns out to be chimerical.  In reality, multitasking slows our thinking. It forces us to chop competing tasks into pieces, set them in different piles, then hunt for the pile we’re interested in, pick up its pieces, review the rules for putting the pieces back together, and then attempt to do so, often quite awkwardly. Fact, and one more reason the bubble will pop: A brain attempting to perform two tasks simultaneously will, because of all the back-and-forth stress, exhibit a substantial lag in information processing."
 
"Multitasking boosts the level of stress-related hormones such as cortisol and adrenaline and wears down our systems through biochemical friction, prematurely aging us. In the short term, the confusion, fatigue, and chaos merely hamper our ability to focus and analyze, but in the long term, they may cause it to atrophy."
 
"Human freedom, as classically defined (to think and act and choose with minimal interference by outside powers), was not a product that firms could offer, but they recast it as something they could provide. A product for which they could raise the demand by refining its features, upping its speed, restyling its appearance, and linking it up with all the other products that promised freedom, too, but had replaced it with three inferior substitutes that they could market in its name:  Efficiency, convenience, and mobility."
 
This may be very foreign to the way many of us think...but perhaps you should read this article (on your Blackberry, while listening to music, and watching stock quotes) for a different perspective. 
 
James Heughens

Skyrails is a crazy 3D visualization of graphs/data. It looks like something from a movie.

Skyrails was designed to create visualizations of social networks, but it could be applicable to any kind of graph.  The system has a built-in programming language  to customize the graph and its attributes, designed for experts as well as novice users.

You can download it and try it out (on Windows).

Semi-unrelated, here is a reel from a Visual Designer who creates a lot of the interfaces you see in movies.

http://www.coleran.com/

Todd Fraser

3 separate entries about the upcoming gPhone in my NetVibes this morning...

Mashable reports talks between Google and e28 as a hardware provider and Verizon as a carrier:
gPhone: e28 Rumored to Provide Google Phone Hardware
gPhone: Verizon Fuels the Rumormill

Last FM reports that the gPhone might be coming to the market next summer and that Google should be putting out more official information in 2 weeks:
It's time we hear from Google about its mobile phone plans

All the entries are accompanied by pictures and descriptions that help us technophiles imagine what this gPhone might be. I’m keeping my figures crossed for the Verizon match up. I will gladly toss my Motorola Q out the window in a heartbeat for a YouTube-friendly phone that supports Google Maps to its fullest (including ratings, descriptions, pictures, and most importantly My Maps).

Marta Strickland

Ambient devices are new genre of consumer electronics, characterized by their ability to be perceived at-a-glance (also called "glanceable"). Tie this at-a-glance technology into an internet enabled device and you get something like the Ambient Orb, "a glass lamp that uses color to show weather forecasts, trends in the stock market, or the traffic on your homeward commute".

I've never had an ambient device, but this Nabaztag (aka WiFi enabled rabbit) is cute enough to kinda make me want one. According to this Yahoo! Tech review, if you speak into its belly, it will tell you about the weather. If he smells your car keys, he’ll excitedly tell all your friends that you are home. And he can teach your other iAnimals how to talk back to you.



Adorable, so long as I don’t wake up in the middle of the night to a self-aware Nabaztag army at the bottom of my bed. But all creepy AI indications aside, ambient devices are offer an intriguing and fun way for us to digest information easier in this information overloaded world. I put out a message to the Organic offices for people to tell me about their thoughts and experiences with ambient technology. Their responses after the fold...

Here's a fun site for Sparks, the alcohol+energy drink now owned by Miller Brewing.  It features the popular panning-camera navigation system first seen on WeFail's site for photographer Matt Mahon and later repeated on campaign sites for Wrigley's Gum and a site for the new Visa campaign.

Another interesting aspect of CPG sites is the insight that they give you into product marketing strategy.  I've tried Sparks and it's unbearably sweet, like an alcoholic Mountain Dew.  In fact The Marin Institute, an alcohol industry watchdog, wants to rename the "flavored malt beverarge" segment Alcopops. Navigating the site definitely feels like stepping into the mind of a teenage boy - air guitar contests, skateboards, doodles - but in a bold move, no shots of attractive girls.  Is it specifically targeted at underage drinkers?  What would an official site for Goldschlager cinnamon schnapps (with real flakes of gold!) look like? 

Misha Cornes