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• January 2007 (5)

  Culture | Postcard from Detroit

  Posted by Amanda van nuys | January 25, 5:13 pm

  The North American International Auto Show is full of interesting stuff, but when the crowds are around for the assorted press conferences, it can be hard to get a good look, much less shoot any pix. But since we were there for like 15 hours a day, hanging out in Cobo Hall on the late [...]

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  Culture | Car Talk

  Posted by David Feldt | January 25, 2:21 pm

  Each client that we work with has, in essence, its own language–acronyms, words, or phrases–that we must learn in order to converse in “their” world.  The automotive category is no exception, but we take it a step further by using it in our everyday vernacular. Perhaps it’s because the automotive industry is such a [...]

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  Culture | Paczki for Breakfast

  Posted by Misha Cornes | January 25, 10:51 am

  I was out at our Detroit office last week, and we stopped in at a
  Starbucks for an earlier morning coffee.  I asked hopefully about a hot breakfast sandwich, which has been slow to roll out in the San Francisco market.
  The Barista responded: "No sandwiches in Michigan, but do you want a paczki?"

  That’s pronouced (POONCH-kee) [...]

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  Culture | Camp Organic: The Movie

  Posted by Misha Cornes | January 23, 8:30 pm

  var api = VE_getCustomPlayerAPI(‘1.0′);api.embedPlayer(‘/gid328/cid1096/X9/7Z/1169232440n0nluujrhZU05GWx2OAi’, 320, 260, false, ”, ‘videoegg’, false, ”, ‘opaque’);
  My second Camp Organic experience was much more challenging than my first, for one reason – I could only observe. I was there to document the experience, which meant capturing the teams as they captured their subjects. But, as much as I tried, [...]

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  Culture | Live, from Detroit...it's Monday Afternoon!

  Posted by Misha Cornes | January 13, 12:43 am

  So, I got back from Detroit Rock City on Tuesday, toting a rip-snorting cold and a strong aversion to Southwest Airlines’ baggage-claim processes. Just the same I was also in possession of a thorough appreciation for all things automotive—even if I am as confused as ever by the business strategy being employed by certain domestic [...]

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• February 2007 (2)

  Culture | The Compassionate Creative: Calling for Advertisers to Let Empathy and Insight Drive Design

  Posted by Hilton Barbour | February 20, 8:18 pm

  Using empathy to drive process

  By Misha Cornes
  I don’t know a lot about makeup. When Organic started the pitch process
  for a major pitch for a cosmetics company, I thought Bobbi Brown was
  married to Whitney and that MAC was a line of Apple products. How could
  we get smart about women’s cosmetics? The answer was to immerse the
  team [...]

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  Culture | Courage is a process

  Posted by Hilton Barbour | February 15, 12:49 pm

  One of our sister Omnicom agencies, Design Forum is a leading innovator in retail design.
  Their chairman, Lee Carpenter, wrote a great article in a recent newsletter about what he learned in 2006. There was one piece that I thought was very relevant to the work we do and the challenges we face with our [...]

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• March 2007 (5)

  Culture | Two Kinds of Awesome (Revisited)

  Posted by Daniel Turman | March 28, 11:11 am

  Awesomeness does indeed take many forms. At the behest of an unnamed party, I drove from the Bay Area to Willow Springs International Raceway last week. It was about 800 miles round trip. At one point I was getting 54 miles per gallon. Yep, Civic Hybrid. It ended up recording nearly 48 for the trip, [...]

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  Culture | NAIAS Autoshow Trip

  Posted by Misha Cornes | March 27, 2:23 am

  A client team based in our Detroit office recently decided to have a little fun after a requirements workshop; they set off for the NAIAS Autoshow! It sure is nice to try out all those Bentleys…
  Check out the image of our very own Misha Cornes (Threeminds blog editor) making himself [...]

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  Culture | Spheres of Influence

  Posted by Hilton Barbour | March 26, 3:53 pm

  So what happens when you cross our persona practice with the ubiquitous world of social networks and WOM/viral?  Something we are beginning to call "Spheres of Influence" – an approach which is reminiscent to the game of Go.  While David Armano has done some work on how this might pertain to the blogosphere – we [...]

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  Culture | Dinner in the Sky

  Posted by Hilton Barbour | March 22, 10:36 am

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  Culture | South by Southwest

  Posted by Misha Cornes | March 15, 11:36 am

  I arrived in Austin for South by Southwest for a little talent scouting at this major interactive festival on Sunday in the early evening, where I checked in to the hotel and headed for the convention center to pick up my badge and conference info.  I noticed as I rode the long escalator up [...]

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• April 2007 (5)

  Culture | Organic Visits Chicago on the Hunt for Talent

  Posted by Misha Cornes | April 23, 11:43 am

  Twelve Organics joined me in Chicago for our first New Market Networking event on April 12th 2007. In an effort to source new talent and spread the Organic brand, we hosted an exciting evening ….
  Chris D’Alessandro presented “Futurecasting Personas:  Getting your client to adopt ahead of the curve,” as presented by Mark Kingdon and Chad [...]

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  Culture | Under a Southern Sky

  Posted by Amanda van nuys | April 20, 8:38 pm

  Forrester held their first Forrester Marketing Forum conference in
  Miami last week. Organic was one of three Gold sponsors of the event
  and the only digital marketing agency on the roster.  We had an
  action-packed two day session and Organic certainly generated a lot of
  buzz. Here are a few highlights:

  We had our first "unbooth" booth that was designed [...]

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  Culture | Spring Roti in Toronto

  Posted by Amanda van nuys | April 19, 12:22 pm

  Good Day Sunshine!
  Well, as most of the Organic community knows, Toronto is becoming well-known for their love and devotion to our favourite day of the week, Roti Thursday.
  Since Toronto has been a most dreary place the past few winter months, to receive the sunshine we did today it would have been an absolute shame not [...]

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  Culture | DoubleGoo!

  Posted by Hilton Barbour | April 17, 1:33 pm

  Last week’s news around Google acquiring DoubleClick has created a plethora of water cooler talk here at Organic.  Is it a good thing? Is it a bad thing? Overall, it could be an amazing step forward for Google if they don’t muck it up.
  On paper, the combined company has the ability to offer advertisers [...]

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  Culture | Experiences, Not Ads

  Posted by Hilton Barbour | April 17, 10:47 am

  Last week I gave a lecture at UC Berkeley’s Haas School of Business.   A former professor asked me to speak to her Integrated Marketing Communications class, and I spent some time talking to them about trends in user-centric design, inter-agency collaboration, and a view of the agency world from the MBA perspective.  It’s always fun [...]

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• May 2007 (5)

  Culture | What's Up With Toronto's Facebook Obsession?

  Posted by Hilton Barbour | May 18, 3:13 pm

  The buzz in Toronto this past week is all about Facebook – as of 2pm this afternoon, Toronto has 573,355 people in the Toronto, ON network on Facebook – that’s 11% of the population of the greater Toronto metro area (GTA) and is the largest regional network on Facebook by a significant margin.
  Ryan Feeley [...]

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  Culture | Real Organic kick-off the season

  Posted by Misha Cornes | May 18, 2:54 pm

  Real Organic kicked off their inaugral season in the NY corporate Soccer League. With Conor in goal, Adam and Emin switching out in back, Max, Tony T, and Seb flying up the wings and Bryan, our goal-machine upfront.
  We were unlucky enough to face the reigning Champions Presbyterian II.  We got off to a tentative [...]

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  Culture | "Sleeping on the Job"

  Posted by Misha Cornes | May 15, 10:54 am

  Who said sleeping on the job can’t produce an exceptional experience?
  *DRUMROLL* Introducing Metronap…
  “How does it work? You hop in the EnergyPod, the pod reclines, a privacy shield descends, and then you powernap for 20 minutes, whereupon the pod will wake you up with a combination of an acoustic alarm and a gentle vibration.”
  http://geeksugar.com/236137

  This can actually [...]

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  Culture | An animated view of "Bring Your Kids to Work Day" in Toronto

  Posted by David Feldt | May 11, 11:43 am

  This year we had a great group of kids in the Toronto office.
  My son decided that he didn’t just want to play or hang out with the other kids – he wanted to exhibit his talents and skills at film-making. 
  Here you go – a short animated film of his experiences in the office. It’s [...]

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  Culture | Introducing Ian Westbury, your Mix Sherpa

  Posted by Hilton Barbour | May 11, 6:32 am

  Back in August of last year, Sprint came to Organic looking for a way to create buzz and raise awareness for their recently launched Music Store.
  We went in knowing two things:

  the space was very crowded – Verizon, T-Mobile, AT&T/Cingular and even Walmart offer music downloads. Whatever we did, it had to stand out.
  the [...]

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• June 2007 (5)

  Culture | SF HR Team wrestling with Trivia

  Posted by Misha Cornes | June 26, 3:51 pm

  The SF office sponsored a beer bash trivia contest recently; it was a close competition between Recursos Hurmanos and  Eye of the Liger 2. Eye of the Liger won because they knew  a whole lot more about music. The questions they prevailed with:
  1.  Q:  "Who wrote and performed the theme song to Sanford and [...]

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  Culture | An Organic Affirmation

  Posted by Misha Cornes | June 25, 1:24 pm

  The Organic recruiting engine took another trip to windy city.  The objective was to assess talent.  Ten of us spent morning until night in interview mode.  It was as if Organic was being interview as well as the candidates.  The gift we all had was that the event was an affirmation of sorts, we all [...]

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  Culture | Interns on Board

  Posted by Misha Cornes | June 11, 11:22 am

  We have a great group of interns in the Detroit office, and they are already hard at work! We conducted the first of 5 lunches and learn presentations on Friday, June 1, where they learned about some of our work on new clients. They were taken through our launch process and given a comprehensive overview [...]

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  Culture | The Seven Wonders of Canada

  Posted by Hilton Barbour | June 7, 7:24 pm

  CBC radio often holds contests to get radio listeners to call in or email commentary on a variety of things. This contest though took flight.  Through the cbc.ca site people were asked to submit their "wonder of Canada".  There were over a million votes, and 25,000 entries.  Not large scale numbers in US terms, but [...]

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  Culture | Blades of Glory

  Posted by Hilton Barbour | June 5, 11:30 am

  Reinventing a tired category in the face of aggressive competition. Solving the problem by mining nuggets of customer insight. Converting that insight into a design idea inspired by popular culture. Customizing the design and marketing strategies to different market segments.  
  Sounds very familiar. 
  Check out this BusinessWeek case study about the redesign of the Norelco razor. I [...]

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• July 2007 (5)

  Culture | A training budget in action

  Posted by Misha Cornes | July 25, 2:44 pm

  Despite the many wonderful perks of being an interactive copywriter, my profession comes with a unique set of challenges. If a designer comes up with some off-the-wall cockamamie concept, I can spend a few minutes banging out copy towards it and be done. But if nobody loves my idea (even if I’m SURE it will [...]

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  Culture | Simpsonize This!

  Posted by Hilton Barbour | July 23, 5:21 pm

  In the 2+ years that we have been running ThreeMinds, no post has garnered more responses than last week's Simpsonize Yourself.  As of today, 29 71 people have weighed in, mostly to express their dismay about the broken experience.  This tells me a few things:

  The Web audience LOVES The Simpsons. 
  The concept of creating a [...]

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  Culture | A mind reading website that really works

  Posted by Misha Cornes | July 19, 3:10 pm

  Check it out:  http://www.mysticalball.com/
  Who knows how this works?
  Baron Conway

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  Culture | I do not like that Face book, Sam-I-am

  Posted by Misha Cornes | July 19, 12:23 pm

  I do not like that Face book, Sam-I-am
  http://weblogs.jupiterresearch.com/analysts/gartenberg/archives/2007/07/i_do_not_like_t.html
  via Michael Gartenberg at Jupiter Research | July 19, 2007, 10:45 AM
  The other side of Facebook, from my old friend David Bogner.
      [with apologies to the late, great Dr. Seuss]
      I do not like that Facebook puts me in a box.    I do not like [...]

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  Culture | Do Organics Like the iPhone?

  Posted by Amanda van nuys | July 18, 9:18 am

  We ran a poll this week on Organism, our internal Social Wiki, to see if Organics planned to buy an iPhone or not.  102 of us voted – a large enough sample to make some valid observations.
  Here are
  the results:

  26.5% of us do not like it at all!
  There’s a relatively large group who are [...]

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• August 2007 (5)

  Culture | Virtual Camp Organic Sneakers

  Posted by Misha Cornes | August 27, 2:08 pm

  Being a Camp Organic winner adds you to the eclectic group of Organics who can call themselves the proud owner of a pair of Camp O sneakers. These do not only look cool but are also super comfy. So when we wanted to create a few free-bees which we could give to folks in our [...]

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  Culture | Cranky old men lead the way at Mitsubishi Grand Prix.

  Posted by Daniel Turman | August 23, 5:18 pm

  August 22, 2007
  San Mateo, California
  In what was immediately hailed as a victory for crotchety, finger-dart averse, long-time Mitsubishi account stalwarts, Ray “Fireball” Atkin and Daniel “Flip Flop” Turman employed different strategies to find the podium at the Mitsubishi Grand Prix.
  Amidst stories of pre-race tensions between himself and second-place finisher Ali Grayeli, Turman took the pole [...]

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  Culture | Summer Camp Organic

  Posted by Misha Cornes | August 21, 8:19 am

  For our final project of the year, the ten interns were sent to “Summer Camp Organic” for one long challenging week.  Based on the real Camp Organic, the ten interns were split into two teams and were assigned a demographic profile around the Dodge Challenger.  The mission was to discover "the gift" for our target [...]

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  Culture | Relationship building is important!

  Posted by Misha Cornes | August 21, 8:06 am

  I had the pleasure of attending the Organic-DET outing to the Detroit Tigers game last Thursday.  I wanted to point out how important it is for us as a recruiting staff to continually build relationships with our hiring managers.  Please see the attached photo of Dan Sicko, Sam Cannon and I.  As you can see, [...]

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  Culture | Organic Beer and Hotdogs

  Posted by Amanda van nuys | August 21, 7:26 am

  Last week the M-Team rolled into Toronto and treated us to an early Beer Bash followed by a trip to the Sky Dome, (no Mr. Rogers, the new name didn’t stick) to see the mighty Blue Jays take on the Anaheim Angels. Lured by talks of hotdogs and beer, twenty five (or more) of us [...]

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• September 2007 (5)

  Culture | LiveNeutral

  Posted by Misha Cornes | September 27, 4:07 pm

  Organic has embarked on a journey to improve our environmental impact.  In June, we began by measuring our carbon footprint from utility use, business flights, and employee commutes for all of our offices around our network.  At the same time, we investigated the market for carbon credits.
  We identified three main sources of carbon credits:  [...]

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  Culture | Liu Design Lectures

  Posted by Hilton Barbour | September 26, 6:07 pm

  Consider This: the 2007 David H. Liu Memorial Lecture Series in Design begins tomorrow night at Stanford University. Leading off is Jan Chipchase, the mind behind Future Perfect and a Tokyo-based human behavioral field researcher for Nokia.
  Also featured over the coming weeks are Janine Benyus, my friend and mentor Sara Beckman from UC Berkeley's Haas [...]

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  Culture | Amazon's MP3 Store

  Posted by Hilton Barbour | September 25, 3:25 pm

  Amazon has launched a DRM free online music store – it's still in beta and the interface is not a slick as iTunes, but it is cheaper ($0.89/track), and has a good selection.
  AmazonMP3 Beta
  Finally some healthy competition for iTunes.
  Baron Conway

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  Culture | Shiver me timbers!

  Posted by Misha Cornes | September 25, 10:44 am

  Avast, mateys! It were that time of year again, the ridiculous International Talk Like a Pirate day….We all know that ye landlubbers who be sitting in offices all day do go a bit off in the head from time to time. Fortunately, thar be holidays that encourage and celebrate such happenings. Witness, Organic’s corporate HR [...]

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  Culture | Detroit office summer outing

  Posted by Misha Cornes | September 17, 10:38 am

  Hey battah battah battah…
  Almost 225 Detroit Organic staff piled into 2 buses and headed to Comerica Park to watch the Tiger’s take on Tampa Bay on August 9th, 2007. 
  The day started with a Tiger’s-themed All Hands, bringing everyone together to celebrate our many accomplishments in the last 6 months.  The sea of Tiger’s apparel [...]

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• October 2007 (4)

  Culture | Organic Comes Out

  Posted by Misha Cornes | October 9, 11:22 am

  Companies and organizations are recognizing more than ever that great talent is becoming more and more difficult to attain in a constantly-growing economic climate. There is now a growing trend to attract candidates prior to college graduation. A recent survey by Decima Research found that only 16% of professionals under age 30 deem salary [...]

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  Culture | Organic is going Green!!!

  Posted by Misha Cornes | October 3, 4:56 pm

  As you all have seen with the previous emails regarding making Organic a Green office; below is an update on where Detroit stands in this process.

  Switched all of our cleaning products to organic, biodegradable products (Method/Seventh Generation).
  Switched from Styrofoam to all paper products: all bio-degradable or recycled when possible.
  Switched to recycled paper.
  Recycling ink cartridges and [...]

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  Culture | Tell Detroit what you are doing....

  Posted by Misha Cornes | October 3, 9:44 am

  Recently, a new LCD screen was added in the lobby of the Detroit office to greet guests and ORG DET team members.  At first, the screen displayed a simple static image slideshow of our recent work.  That was not enough.  Members of the strategy and engineering team developed an application that displayed images of a [...]

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  Culture | Recruiting the YouTube Generation

  Posted by Hilton Barbour | October 1, 12:55 am

  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 [...]

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• November 2007 (5)

  Culture | Ain't No Party Like a Talent Acquisition Party

  Posted by Daniel Turman | November 30, 11:02 pm

  TORONTO — As the year is starting to wrap up and we celebrate our achievements in 2007, the Talent Acquisition team is busier than ever.  We hosted the 3rd  of our 14th Birthday Celebrations in Toronto at Brassaii.  The evening hosted great talent from around the area, energetic Organics, along with great music, food and [...]

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  Culture | What can $6 buy you in the City of Detroit? Well…

  Posted by Daniel Turman | November 30, 10:44 pm

  DETROIT — On Wednesday evening we attended The D Show in downtown Detroit (www.thedshow.org).  This show highlights the brightest and best work to come out of Detroit based agency offices.  The evening begins with the standard advertising networking hour that lasts well over 2 hours. 
  Since over 300 people attended this event, it was great [...]

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  Culture | Foiled Again: Why you shouldnt go on vacation

  Posted by Mike Hudson | November 29, 7:22 pm

  The other day as I was sitting in the office looking at all the white stuff coming down outside. Then, I got an IM from a team member on vacation.  Yes, we are such a tight knit team that even on vacation we are concerned about what’s going on in the DAA department!  As he [...]

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  Culture | New York celebrates Organic's 14th Birthday

  Posted by Mike Hudson | November 28, 10:27 pm

  How does Organic find exceptional talent across our office network? With multiple parties of course! New York invited digital talent to meet us for fun and drinks at Level V in Manhattan and over 50 candidates attended. The theme of our event was Organic’s 14th birthday. Networking leaders in the office mingled with candidates and [...]

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  Culture | Michigan Flash Festival

  Posted by Mike Hudson | November 28, 8:14 pm

  This past weekend Organic sponsored the very first Michigan Flash Festival on the campus of Schoolcraft College. In attendance were over 100 local developers and students, as well as large delegations from the area’s three Adobe user groups (SEMAFX, Detroit Adobe Usergroup and Flash Focused). We spoke to quite a few very talented designers and [...]

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• December 2007 (5)

  Culture | Season's Greetings: SF Gives the Gift of Achim This Year

  Posted by Daniel Turman | December 21, 5:26 am

  You all can stop shopping. Dig into this treasure trove and win “best present giver” as quick as you can hit “forward”…custom narrated video cards of merriment hosted by one of the more talented voice artists in our deep stable.

  Diverse friend group? No problem. The SF crew has got it covered with eight options, running [...]

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  Culture | Beautiful Minds at Work.

  Posted by vsadler | December 20, 10:57 pm

  Strategist Jay Joichi uses the panoramic windows of an unnamed Denver-area hotel to map out the strategy for the team. So far, nobody has descended irrevocably into madness.Daniel Turman

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  Culture | The Fold is An Unnecessary Design Limitation

  Posted by Hilton Barbour | December 17, 9:26 am

  If you’re a Web designer or IA, you’ve probably heard the following statements many times:
  “Make sure everything is located above the fold.”“If it’s below the fold, users won’t see it.”“Users won’t scroll to view additional content.”
  What exactly is this mythical “fold” anyway? It’s basically an invisible line on a Web page based on where the [...]

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  Culture | Holiday Party Beat: NY Styles and Profiles Into 2008

  Posted by Daniel Turman | December 14, 7:39 pm

  –Collage via Marina B.

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  Culture | Peace Out: Organic Helps 'Harvest of Hope' Find a Home Online

  Posted by Daniel Turman | December 14, 2:18 am

  NAPA, Calif. – This is the time
  of peace on earth, at least that’s what Heidi Kuhn said as we began an evening
  for the “Harvest of Hope” event hosted by the charity organization Roots of Peace. Heidi, the organization’s founder and very energetic spokesperson, led off the
  evening with videos showing its work in Croatia and Afghanistan.  
  Roots [...]

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