St Mary's Hospital

Some weird things are happening over there, apparently... Check it out!

London Meme

Lolly tagged me a few days for a meme apparently going round the London blogosphere these days, I always like memes it's a nice idea and as she said it's nice to share some original bits of information about myself.

1. Top three non-work websites:

Well, I'm going to repeat Lolly here, but I spend my days and nights surfing the web for work anyway so separating work and non-work sites isn't that easy.

Nevertheless I'll go with TED.com as my first. It's my favourite website anyway even though I guess you could argue I use it for work as well. I love the interface and design, and of course love the content! I always learn something new watching TED talks, and now that I have an iPhone, I'm watching more of them than ever.

I'm tempted to go with Twitter for second position. I really started getting into it a few months ago and I really like it. I'm meeting cool people through it and I like the random glimpses I get into other people's lives I'm following.

I was hesitating to go for Netvibes for third, but I'll go with Deezer. It's a music streaming site and I often prefer it to Last.fm. Frankly since I started using it, I barely have any music on my iTunes, I mostly listen to streamed music. It's all free, and when you register you have access to almost all the music you can think of, you can also upload all you music library and access it from anywhere, create and share playlists, favourite albums and listen to them whenever you want, listen to smart radios, etc.

3. Three favourite cocktails:

Being heavily influenced by The Big Lebowski (I sad recently that The Dude was my favourite fashion icon), I'll start this with a White Russian. It's not a drink for every circumstances, but there are times when it's just the perfect drink.

A classic Long Island Ice Tea. It's a great and simple cocktail and it's where I was born! That said, I noticed that a lot of bars in London can't make a proper one - even though it's not very complicated...

To finish, not a particular cocktail, but I love "Rhums arranges" aka rum macerated with fruits or spices, they're so good! Check out my home made ones in the widget on the right hand column here.

3. Top 3 Karaoke songs:

Obviously we're going to go pretty cheesy here. I just sang some karaoke last week for our agency party, which was lots of fun! I like some old school Frank, and I think I'll go with Fly me to the Moon (or New York, New York ;o). Then back to the 70's with Sweet home Alabama from Lynyrd Skynyrd. And sometimes when I'm fairly drunk and have someone up for it with me: Fight for your right to party from the Beastie Boys!

I'll tag Will, Neil, and Sandrine next.

Sony Ericsson Bond

A bit of shameless promotion, iris Digital just launched the new Sony Ericsson James Bond site for Quantum of Solace. It's a very cool Flash website with secret agent type missions, for each mission you solve you get access to a fun little mobile application - with a very cool spy cam application for the last one! I'd love to know what you think!

Check it out!

PS: I completed all the missions today and got all the mobile apps ;o)
Nice little games! It's a shame I'm not allowed to enter the competition to win the VIP trip to Monte Carlo...

Playful

Cool, I'm going to Playful next week! Playful is a one day conference in London all about game design - apparently the talks are going to revolve around the nature of games as well and that's something I'm really interested in.

Funnily enough I'm doing an internal presentation here for the iris Digital team about Playing games so I'm full on into the topic - though my presentation is more about play as a concept and I'm not really going to talk about video games whereas it seems Playful will be. I'll definitely put the deck up on Slideshare afterwards.

The conference has a good speaker lineup, including Alex Fleetwood from Hide and Seek, Adrian and Dan Hon, who are sort of ARG gurus, and Iain Tait from Poke.

Smart Phones

Everyone is talking about new smart phones, so far the Sony Ericsson Xperia and HTC Google phone look pretty interesting but it doesn't feel like they will be able to top the iPhone in terms of design, interface and functionalities.

On the other hand, iPhone should be worried about this newcomer on the market: The Pomegranate phone - check it out!

Really nice website showing all the new phone's features.

The site is actually part of a campaign for the Canadian province of Novascotia. Weird and original idea - and for those who don't get it, the Blackberry come from Canada (At least I think that's why they went in that direction).

Palin comparison

Vic started a very cool project in the office yesterday and asked us all to draw Sarah Palin on a post-it note, the results are amazing!

Palin comparison

of course, my amazing design contribution:

Frieze Art Fair

My brother invited me to the opening night of the Frieze Art Fair yesterday evening. I had never heard of it, but it's a really big show, with art galleries from all around exhibiting contemporary and modern art pieces. It was just funny being in this particular art world with all these art type people (artists, gallery people, critiques, buyers, etc).

I didn't see much that really touched me but there was one piece I thought was particularly amazing and stayed glued to it for 5 minutes or so. It was created by Attila Csörgö and his work revolves around mechanical and geometrical devices.

The piece is called Platonic Love, here is a picture from his portfolio website:



From afar, it just looks like a mess of threads moving with no rhyme or reason, but get closer and after trying to figure out where all the threads go, which is connected to which, what counter weights what - all starting from a little engine at the bottom and you're quickly just lost in contemplation. After that you realise those little twigs held by all the wires actually move in unisson to form geometrical shapes. So they go from this cube, prism and pyramid as on the pic, move away and then regroup as a pentagonic shape - amazing!

The fair is on for 3 days until Saturday evening, and it's always refreshing and thought provoking to go see some new art, so it was great for that. We also discovered a really nice little Moroccan restaurant close to Baker Street for dinner, so I'll definitely keep that address in mind! The harissa was home made and frankly one of the best I've ever had, the tagine was delicious and the people were really nice and down to earth. Recommended!

Poverty

Image courtesy

I only learned about Blog Action Day yesterday from Neil, so not much time to write a very profound post - but immediately liked the idea. That said, as mentioned on the website, it is a hefty topic; particularly in view of the fact that participants are requested to keep within the topics of their blogs - which is actually forcing me to think about that too.

Rather than look at any kind of relationship between digital and poverty straight away, I'd like to stop a minute and look at what we're talking about in the first place.

Type "define poverty" in Google and this is the first result you get: the state of having little or no money and few or no material possessions. My parents didn't have much money when I grew up, it was a bit tough at times and often felt I was poor compared to other kids. It was true for a certain understood value of the meaning of poverty, and I'm going to ascertain this is the most common meaning - after all if Google says it's first, it must be true.

On the other hand, thinking about myself again, while I didn't have much money or material possessions my parents loved us (And still do), always managed to put a great meal on the table regardless of how much we had to prepare it with, my siblings and I went to school and got a good education, had access to clean water, health care, etc. Which brings me to the other main definition of poverty which relates to poverty as being a violation of basic Human Rights and Needs as defined by organisations such as ATD Fourth World.

A dollar a day have a good set of definitions for poverty on their website and point out correctly that poverty is too complex a concept to reduce to one single definition - it requires several points of view, depending on the specific issue you're looking at:

At the UN’s World Summit on Social Development, the ‘Copenhagen Declaration’ described poverty as “…a condition characterised by severe deprivation of basic human needs, including food, safe drinking water, sanitation facilities, health, shelter, education and information.” When people are unable to eat, go to school, or have any access to health care, then they can be considered to be in poverty, regardless of their income.

As I said I had all those things - so I don't consider I was poor. Maybe I was part of a statistic at some point, but that's about it.

Now I'd like to bring it back to digital and hopefully make sense. The conversations and ideas I'm generally living around are the global aspect of the internet, online communities thriving and sharing across the world to a degree that never happened before and it's all very exciting.

The digital world is extremely rich and varied; there are worlds of opportunities there I find wildly exciting. One of the reasons I love working within digital is that there will likely always be more to it that I can ever comprehend and I learn new things every day.

I generally feel like digital is very inclusive and has the potential to concern all of us to a degree or another, but actually looking at poverty I completely forget that this digital world I find so exciting has a pretty high access barrier right now. I forget that it is a privilege to own a computer with a fast internet access that allows me to participate in something like Blog Action Day. I forget that I'm part of a minority that has that access, and it often goes hand in hand with clean water, food, health care, and money. It's a luxury.

The latest statistics tell us about 22% of the world population are internet users. At what probably is the other of the spectrum, 21% of the world population lives in extreme poverty, and this is 2001 information, so out of date.

So what can digital do to bridge that sixty percent gap? Well Blog Action Day speaks for that better than I can: over 10,000 sites participating and an estimated reach of over 10 million people. I don't have a brand new insightful and creative way to end poverty - far from it - but I'd like to finish with two points if you're reading this:

1. Don't take it for granted - "it" is anything from the device you're reading this from to the sandwich you're eating at the same time.

2. Participate. It's too big a deal for one single person to have THE solution to poverty, but inside of the conversation taking place today something(s) will emerge and the more people participating the better.

Flickr

I'm doing some research for an internal presentation i'm going to do about play & games, and came across this. I just love all the game based photos from Ella's dad:



And this one, one step close to appropriate given the current conditions...

Live soon

I still need to finish changing my blog layout - or at least put it back in a normal sort of shape - though I have an excuse given I was moving this weekend. I moved to Rotherhithe on the river, it's definitely nice and much closer to work, but i'm already wondering if I did the right choice... Oh well.

I don't do much shameless promotion, but I will be soon as we have several pretty cool projects going live soon here at iris Digital headquarters; including a cool 3D cow, nice flashy site with slick mobile apps and a Halloween viral. More details soon, but check out this cutie in the meantime:



PS: Actually news in the press, so I could have talked about it more. In NMA Today:

Sony Ericsson is to increase its digital marketing investment significantly by allocating almost a third of its total marketing budget to online for its pre-Christmas campaign.

The mobile giant currently sets aside around 15% of its overall marketing budget for online, but is to increase this to 30% in the run-up to the critical Christmas period.

According to Nielsen Media Research, Sony Ericsson spent £865,546 on digital marketing between September 2007 and August ... this year, although this figure only relates to display.

Cathy Davies, Sony Ericsson's director of global marketing, said the company was deepening its commitment to digital as it looked to capitalise on the increasing amount of time consumers spend online. "Through our digital strategy we're really trying to communicate, not just tell people to buy our phones," she said. "We want to give them value."

As part of its increased investment, Sony Ericsson has launched a major international campaign surrounding forthcoming James Bond film Quantum of Solace, released by sister company Sony Pictures this month.

A campaign site dubbed Directive C902, developed by creative agency iris Digital, will go live in 42 countries from Monday. It features an interactive movie featuring four secret agent-style missions that showcase the Sony Ericsson C902 handset.

Visitors can download a 'spy' application to their phone that includes a fingerprint scanner and X-ray viewer and takes a series of surveillance photos.

The campaign is to be supported by a viral push from seeding specialist Unruly Media and an in-store push in flagship O2 stores.

"From our point of view, Bond is the hottest film property on the planet, so we've been working on this push for around 14 months," said Davies. "Digital can offer the full Bond experience and allows us to bring it to life, which is something you can't do with other media."

Important statement

INTERNET STATEMENT
Originally uploaded by altemark

Love this!

Blogger's relief

Just because I can't enough of doing digital pr and promotion for other brands, here's another one! I just received my Berocca blogger's relief pack! And actually I've never had Berocca before, but it's a good time given I've just had a bit of food poisoning over the weekend it's probably a good time for an extra vitamin and minerals intake (That aside, it tastes just like any other orange flavoured vitamin and minerals effervescent tablets).

Nice idea from Berocca to get some digital pr. At first I thought going under the idea that all bloggers are stressed out was a bit easy, but without going as far as stressed out, all the bloggers I know are defninitely busy people and the box is subtitled "Tailored vitamins and essential minerals for hectic lifestyles". Sounds appropriate to me, or close.



In the pack I get a load of fabulous items I've dreamed of having for a long time but never dared buying (Because they're useless perhaps... ;o) such a Dead Fred pen holder, USB panic button, etc...

Anyway, it's a nice idea all in all, so good effort!

Blogology

I was at the London bloggers meetup yesterday evening and it was a brilliantly organised event, I think fun was had by all! It was sponsored by Smirnoff and we were invited to the Diageo company bar, and they have a very nice bar (Thinking about it, well, yes you would expect them to have a nice bar... But hey , I don't take things for granted ;o)

The PR agency Splendid organised it (with Andy, thanks!) in the context of their promotion for Smirnoff and a particular drink, the Moscow Mule - which is essentially vodka, ginger ale, a pinch of ginger and a squeeze of lime. Quite nice, even though I'm not a big fan of ginger in drinks.

I think the best part was that they had a sort of fact sheet about each one of us and our blogs and the Diageo professional mixologists (bartenders in normal speak) prepared a special cocktail for each of us based on our blogs (and on the base for the moscow mule - so, vodka and ginger). They were really great and I think they had fun doing it too. Really nice touch!

Neil just posted about interacting with online communities, and here is a good example of how to do it well, in my opinion at least. And seeing the great feedback on the meetup page, lots of others agree - and most of these people also are professional bloggers, work in marketing, PR, social media, etc...

By the way, we also had lots of food served, so goo in the spirit of drink responsibly! I would have loved to say that it went absolutely berserk crazy with drunken and wasted bloggers dancing on the tables that had to be thrown out of the premises but it wasn't the case - all very civilised lounge like cocktail night. Actually talking about it, that happened at Twestival last week - a Swiss twitterer was thrown out of the bar after having thrown up in the bar (I met him outside while he was recovering).

Joke aside, iris has Brown-Forman as a client (Jack Daniel's among other brands) and I kept thinking they should really be taking some more risks in the digital space because Diageo is seriously winning points here! I guess here is an opportunity for me to raise some points ;o).

Apart from the PR part, it was brilliant to meet more London bloggers, always a pleasure to hear about different people's interests, good conversations! Some cool pics on Lolly's Flickr stream, including my personalised cocktail and me.

To finish we all had a goody bag with a bottle of vodka, so I'm going to be able to organise a little cocktail night - and I also need to have some more people taste my special rums - particularly the pistachio, almond and honey one which has been macerating for 3 months now!

Internet Memes on Dipity

Adam just told me of this, I'd not seen it before. It's absolutely brilliant! A chronology of internet memes on Dipity, from the beginning of the internet and the moment the term 'meme' was coined in 1976 to today. Pretty cool interface as well, just zoom in and out from the top of the page. Enjoy!

Ice Cream Weekly Digest

It's been a pretty busy week so there are a few things I can compile in a post.

I was at Twestival on Thursday evening (Thanks to Lolly for helping me get a last minute place ;o), I'm only a pretty recent Twitter user so there was a lot of cool people to meet and had a lot of fun! The bar was absolutely packed when I arrived so I also learned that it was better to go early to get a few free drinks, and also to avoid walking out for a cigarette break right before the raffle prize draw... That Nintendo Wii could have been mine, we'll never know....

We also had a live performance of the Twitter Song by @ihatemornings (I admit I only heard the song for the first time right before the event...)

I had to leave relatively early because I had a morning meeting with Google at their offices the day, which was pretty cool. I know everything about Youtube and its advertising/partnerships/branded stuff pricing and systems, which is essentially what we wanted to know about. Also talked about Google Gadgets and the fairly recent ad network they're developing.


Apart from that, I was quite happy I showed the Google peeps the Wario Wii Shake Youtube full page takeover everyone is talking about (Which is awesome by the way, check it if you haven't seen it! Now over 2m views in just over a week) and they hadn't seen it before! Big silence upon me asking about how much it would cost to do something like that again... Nice meeting anyway, and they have a really nice roof terrace.

In the afternoon, we had the second iteration of iris Digital's creative gathering where one person on the team has the run of the boardroom for a presentation while the rest of us sip some beer and enjoy. Matt told us about Lomo and Lomography, they are a Russian camera brand with a very active group of enthusiasts. It was pretty cool. Check Lomokev's Flickr stream for some beautiful lomographies. You may notice Lomographers have a lot of fun with cross processing their pics, among other things. I booked myself in for a talk end of October, though don't know what it will be about yet.

Image Courtesy

And apart from that I'm looking for a new flat and walked around a lot yesterday, I saw a really nice place in Rotherhithe - I may end up there, it's a really nice area and the flat was good as well... We'll see!

NMA Top 100 2008

I know it's not everything, but the NMA Top 100 Interactive agencies 2008 just came out yesterday and iris Digital is on there for the first time, number 63 on the list which is pretty cool

;o)

The eagle has landed... At the V&A!

The mystery behind the 7th Syndikate finally unravelled this
evening and I'm glad to say I had a really good time!

I almost ran to get to the Albert Memorial on time. I put on on
my hat and sunglasses as instructed while arriving there, along
with a newspaper under my left arm. I met with a few other
strange characters similarly dressed on the steps, and they were
generally as clueless to the purpose of this whole thing
as I was...


A few minutes past 6:45pm: the man with a tan mac and a
bowler hat, our mark to tail as agents of the
7th Syndikate, finally arrived. Needless to say we got
some funny looks from people on the streets, particularly
when having a drill sergeant experience in the underground
subway by the museums... Perhaps not as fun as when I got
to walk around Birmingham with my full on Indian wedding
suit (running errands for the bride who was a friend)
but still very cool.

Turned out we were going to the V&A and it was brilliant!

I like the V&A a lot and just walking through the doors
at night while the place is closed to the general public
was excellent!

The new exhibition this was all about is opening tomorrow:
Cold War Modern, A collection of designs created between
1945 and 1970.

We had a few drinks, a few explanations about the whole
ARG (alternate reality game)
and then got to see the exhibition before everyone else. ;o)

Here is some info about it:
The decades after the Second World War saw an intense
rivalry between the world’s two superpowers: the Soviet
Union and America. In the ‘cold war’ that ensued,
the two powers engaged in aggressive contests to build
their own spheres of influence. They accelerated the
development of new technologies to produce weapons,
launched ambitious space programmes and waged
propaganda campaigns across the world.

Vying to outdo one another, each deployed displays
of modern living, signs of progress and images of
future utopias. Art, architecture and design were drawn
into this Cold War competition to demonstrate a
superior vision of modernity.
I met some cool people while over there, though unfortunately
didn't get everyone's details - just leave a comment here or
on the Facebook group if you want to be in touch!
The campaign was created by 1000 Heads, they label
themselves the Word of Mouth People. I met Seb who was
in charge of the campaign and I learned they carefully
targeted 73 London bloggers with for this campaign.
Now I don't know about you, but in my book contacting
73 people and having 30 showing up is a damn good ratio!

Congratulations to all those involved in the campaign,
it was brilliant! (I kind of suspect Lolly may have
suggested I'd be a good candidate - thanks if that's
the case ;o)

A really cool exhibition, it made me think of the
Weapons of Mass Communication last year at the
Imperial War Museum, though this one was much better.

Some architectural designs, fashion of the times
(Manhattan in a glass bubble and Pierre Cardin's 
space dress were amazing, and there are lots more!)

Really good campaign and great exhibition,
I highly recommend seeing it!

Now part of the Syndikate

Been pretty busy these few days, between a big Indian wedding (One of my best friends); talking monkeys, Bebo, milk, angels and heroes at work (Intense but lots of fun on current projects!); and my mom arriving in town I didn't take much time out for blogging... That said, I followed up with 7th Syndikate and I just received this message confirming I'm now part of the conspiracy ;o)

I'm confident I figured out who it was for/from as well!

Hi Willem

You've been activated; you will now be known as Bill WG-104.

Stand by for further instructions.

Countdown begins now.

Curtis TH-915

-----------www.7thsyndikate.org-------------

The grey jackal skips joyfully across the pond

That's the title of an email I received a couple of days ago. From TRUST.NO.ONE

New ARG..? Or just a dodgy email?

I received a second email from Curtis-TH915 today. The first one had got into my spam box a couple of days ago and I hadn't noticed yet - nor do I generally open anything titled that way.

A non sequitur but Google Curtis TH-915 and this is where you get. Not so exciting. Try "I'm feeling lucky" it's even better.

It's all from 7th Syndikate.

Pretty strange email arousing my curiosity, gaming, mystery solving, scoobidoo-esque, search skills, role player and Famous Five enthusiast instincts! Something is wrong with the grammar/syntax of that sentence, but I'm sure you get the idea.

At least a couple of other people in the London blogosphere received the same message (Check your spam boxes maybe you have one too!), Melinda aka Miss Geeky twittered that it could be an ARG... Having looked into it, I think it might be as well.

If it is, it would be my first time getting involved in one, could be fun! (Or it might jut be something dodgy, but I don't think so at this stage - and they want buzz, well I'm participating without even knowing what it's about! And I don't care, I love games, love a mystery, I'm curious and it gives me easy content for a post ;o)

I figured it out by the way (It's not that difficult). Something's going on for (or in) 3 weeks. Watch out for the people randomly placing the words "big armadillo" in their conversations!

TRUST.NO.ONE

Web and TV, a sibling rivalry

I hadn't watched a TED talk for quite a while, so I was glad to watch this one earlier and I thought it absolutely brilliant (Well sure, they all are - or close). Peter Hirshberg is a Silicon Valley executive, entrepreneur and marketer - amongst other things, he's on the board of directors for Technorati.

He delivers a really fun and insightful talk starting from the fact that TV and computing pretty much started at the same time and they evolved as rival siblings.

For examples, he tells us about fundamental marketing methods

Marketing Lessons:
A. If you use our product...
You'll find true love, fulfillment, prosperity
B. If you don't...
You'll die

He also shows us the surprising first example of proprietary material locked in by the vendor, the Winky Dink crayons:



Check it out!

Wikipedia Trends

Photo by blmurch

I found out about this new project this morning, though I can't remember at all where I read about it so I can't link back to it, sorry... (Might have been an SEO blog, I was quickly browsing through a few I didn't know about this morning).

Anyhoo, check out http://stats.grok.se

It's a pretty cool idea, you can check through traffic stats for specific Wikipedia articles, month by month. Look at trends from one article to another. For example, the Barack Obama article was viewed 1,350,292 times in June, with a huge surge on the 4th June, also matched in Google Trends for June. I think it coincides with the religious stories with Reverend Jeremiah Wright, though I'm not sure that explains it. Comparatively, the thimble article was only viewed 4,424 times, probably a relief to find out people are more interested in the American presidential candidate - apart for the thimble enthusiasts, maybe.

It started to make thing about whether clients monitor the articles concerning their brands or anything related at all. I know some do for sure, but others don't. Just checking through, I noticed a couple of brands we work for at iris that don't have any presence. Even if there are probably a limited amount of people interested in finding out more about Utterly Butterly, they may be disappointed to find out there is no information available about it on Wikipedia.

Given Wikipedia is one of the main points of reference for any internet user, I think it's important for brands and products to be present, and it could also be an additional point of presence (for traffic/awareness) for digital campaigns - keeping within Wikipedia neutrality rules and guidelines, of course.

Drinking detergent..?

I was doing some research earlier and came across the Ariel website, I'm wondering if it's normal for me to think their current home page is pretty disturbing.



Let's look at this step by step:

1. Ariel is a washing liquid/powder and is classically branded in blue and green, because it's so clean, fresh and obviously feels/smells like the sea/sky/nature/apples/limes/etc.
   
2. Way too many people in the world don't have enough or any clean drinking water, which is definitely a huge issue and Ariel seems to want to get involved. I guess the relevance can be debated, but it's a noble cause, so why not.
3. However little clean drinking water you have, drinking detergent is not good for you.

So here we have a the pic of a kid in Africa basically appearing in a washing machine (animated blue bubbles going in a circle, pic shows up in the middle). Ariel branded, blue like no water has ever been before but interestingly the same colour as the Ariel liquid you can find at your local supermarket - or maybe same as a swimming pool. And the kid is drinking it.

Wrong.

No..?

The real tetris

A bit more easy blogging, I just recently saw the real Tetris video, it's absolutely awesome!

Kourtrajme - The Funk Hunt

Ben and my cousin just told me about a series of French short movies I hadn't heard about and some are really awesome, mostly visual with excellent soundtracks; They called their production house call Kourtrajme - Short Movie in French "verlan" slang, basically.

The Funk Hunt is the story of a vinyl record through time and musical styles from the 7o's to pretty much nowadays. The record itself is actually the main actor in the short and the music is brilliant!

Check it here if ever the embedded version doesn't work: Part 1 Part 2





Funky!