Touched by grace

This is pretty.

Filed under: Technology, robots

YouUp brings fun to webcams

Here is a fun application developed by the creative team at Ubisoft Montpellier in partnership with Microsoft France.
As the first entertainment platform for webcams, YouUp allows users to dress up their conversations with 3D costumes and special effects. Combining live tracking technology and Augmented Reality, YouUp integrates with MSN messenger, so users can enhance their video chat and video messages, finally using their webcam as a fun and interesting communication accessory. The use of Intelligent biometrics makes the tracking more stable as the session progresses.

The target audience is definitely young: the idea behind YouUp is mainly to bring some fun and emotional engagement to online chats. In France 20 million people use messenger every month, with 30% of those being young people, including children as young as 8 years-old. The concept is in line with Ubisoft’s successful efforts to reach an ever wider audience through casual gaming and web-based entertainment.

The app is inspired by playground card swapping games: kids will be able to exchange accessories ‘cards’, swap doubles and find users who have the cards they need to complete their collections. While the current beta version offers 35  collections of unbranded accessories and effects to play with, youth brands will get involved in the next version. Future developments will also involve the customization of accessories and costumes.
The app is free to download for Windows XP or Vista and instantly integrates with the latest versions of Windows Live Messenger.

Filed under: Digital life, Trends

Whatever it takes to get more people reading more comics

Getting more people to read more comics sounds like a noble endeavour. As an art form it keeps on evolving and there are so many great artists around that push the limits of what it does and what it can be. It is also a great medium to tell war stories, real life dramas and report on political issues.

So it is brilliant to see the launch of the first iPhone (and Android) comic reader, launched by  iVerse Media and Boom Studios, a comic book publisher in Los Angeles. iVerse allows to read comics that have been customized to fit on a small screen. The selection of comics available spans 99 cent “Star Trek” comics, free comics starring Flash Gordon and stories from Boom Studios.

I downloaded Hexed #1, which made my bus journey and introduced me to Luci Jenifer Inacio Das Neves, “Lucifer” for short, a sexy tomboy thief who has to steal the precious Carasinth from Quandrin the demon. All good, but that is where #1 stops and obviously #2 is not available yet, and by the looks of it, will not come for free.

In fact, iVerse offers lots of different comics to download but all the #2, #3, or #4 obviously come at a price.

It’s not the only downside: each comic installs as a separate app, so you can’t really use it regularly without  inundating the iPhone screens with comics or chucking them away one after the other.

Also the cropped format really would not make justice to the best drawn comics; but still it makes a good read for those that don’t require high levels of visual fidelity.

It would be so good as one app that would automatically update itself with new episodes.

But still it reads well, and I will probably read a few more part 1s before my curiosity fades, and hopefully before a better version of the reader is launched. I would even pay for new episodes if the comics were amazing and if the functionality improved.

Filed under: Digital life, Media

303GRAND

In my search for cool agencies that don’t do ‘advertising as we know it because it’s boring’ I came across 303GRAND, a revolving storefront for creative concepts by alternative-marketing company Street Attack.

So this is a space managed by a creative agency which offers to house, produce and promote temporary retail experiences on behalf of brands, organisations or artists.

How clever is that? It reminds me of KesselsKramer’s KK outlet in London, or Sid Lee’s new gallery-boutique-atelier in Amsterdam, which are both transformative agency spaces catering to creative minds. But 303GRAND carries no agency branding, and focuses on promoting commercial creativity and facilitates networking opportunities.

And it’s in Brooklyn.

Launching March 1st, the first two week event is called the Choice event series.

“CHOICE Festival, held on March 1st-15th, celebrates the GRAND opening of a brand new revolving storefront in Williamsburg, Brooklyn called 303GRAND. The event will be exhibiting a new medium each day including fashion, live art, technology, illustrators, photographers, film, paintings, street art, and much more.

The audience will be able to enjoy the work of NYC’s most brilliant artists, and will also be able to create their own artwork, mingle with like-minded people, learn from new innovations in art, and get a taste of what’s to come at 303GRAND.”

Filed under: Alternative marketing, Retail concepts, Trends

Ripping banner ads

I have been testing Add-Art, which replaces banner ads on web pages with contemporary art from a curated database. There has been lots of posts about this, including on PSFK.

It’s fairly easy to install the plug in, and to subscribe to a filter list to block the ads.
So now I don’t get ads anymore… and I don’t get art either. Brilliant. Makes some space.

I think it is a really cool idea though. It seems to work best on US sites so I hope it expands to more UK and European sites.
I would love to see online banners ripped from sites and replaced with art, or any content I am genuinely interested in, or movies I could watch across skyscrapers, leaderboards and MPUs. Would be fun. How does this work with media agencies? It doesn’t, does it?

Filed under: Advertising

Bloggers for Terrorism campaign

While researching bloggers’ activity in repressive regimes, I came across a slideshow of ancient looking photographs of young people holding guns (see above).  It turns out to be a campaign launched by prominent Egyptian bloggers in solidarity with Mohammed Adel, a 20-year old IT student and blogger who was arrested on a Cairo street in November of last year.

Adel is a well known Hamas sympathizer and fierce critic of Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak. The Egyptian government’s used photos of Adel holding guns with Hamas leaders as the basis for his emprisonment.

Based on the idea that the photos were used by Egyptian authorities to fabricate criminal charges against Adel, his fellow bloggers parodied the ’souvenir’ images and posted them on Egyptian blogs.

“Our aim is mainly to bring attention to how ridiculous the (Egyptian) government’s photo fabrications are (of cyber-activist Mohammed Adel). We are trying to cut-off an escalation of the process against him.” Mina Zekry, blogger and “Free-Adel” campaigner.

The main photo for the campaign (below), which some of the members now have uploaded as their profile pictures on Facebook, mimicks the style of the 1960s Black Panthers iconography.

Via GlobalVoices.org and Menassat.com

Filed under: Bloggers, social media , Egypt

Published, then removed

MacKinnon has tested censorship by Chinese blog-hosting companies. Her outcomes show how the deletion of content is inconsistent, decentralised, and outsourced to the private sector.

Filed under: censorship, social media

Connecting trends insight with creative strategy

Looking around for creative agencies that primarily position themselves as thinktanks, trends or innovation laboratories I came across Future Concept Lab.

Future Concept Lab is a research Institute specialized in marketing issues and trends in consumption. Its goal is to develop and share new concepts regarding products, communication and distribution. It is headquartered in Milan.

I was impressed by their vademecum (see below). It’s one of the best summaries I have read on how innovation and trends insight can be actioned to create new concepts and scenarios. Inspiring.

FUTURE CONCEPT LAB’S VADEMECUM:

- In marketing, a shift from military strategy to a visionary design outlook.
- Actively develop concepts and desires, in addition to passively analysing trends and needs.
- Follow trends to aim at targets; live scenarios to propose concepts and create your own demand.
- Cease pursuing trends and begin constructing them together with those who create them: this is the purpose of concepts.
- A permanent link must be established between those who stimulate projects and life scenarios.
- Working on new concepts means offering the advanced person an existential, ongoing and flexible service.
- It is difficult to navigate alone in advanced scenarios: you must seek partners.
- Planners, designers, artists must participate in the development of new concepts.
- You must be able to detach yourself rapidly and invent in advance what is not yet perceived as necessary.
- In conclusion: we will see the future only if we are prepared to design it.

There is more on why all businesses can use innovative thinking to develop new products which will be relevant to the future consumer in this article posted on LabforCulture.org.

Filed under: Strategy, Trends Insight , Future Concept Lab