Simon's Cat got a book deal too

YouTube - Simon's Cat ' Hot Spot': "A demanding cat goes to great lengths in order to warm up and become the centre of attention.

This film was created to celebrate the release of the first Simon's Cat book. It brings to life one of the sketches from within its pages."

One Mobile Per Child

Telecoms and tech author Tomi T. Ahonen was one of the speakers at Picnic09. I know him as the one who coined term Seventh of the Mass Media to explain why services on mobile need not be copies of internet or TV content. During his Picnic speech, he talked about the short life span of mobile phones and the resulting hand-me-down mobile phones that wind up in the hands of teenager children. Or developing countries. Much to my surprise, he held a plea for development of WAP portals and MMS concepts: "The future of the internet, the next 1.4 billion users (currently there are about 1.4 billion total users of the internet), will be very strongly mobile phone based users. [...] It means the users will be accessing digital content on the three basic technologies that most phones today can support - SMS, WAP and MMS. Those are what you have to consider, not iPhone apps or 3G videos or bluetooth etc. [...] If you want to deploy games, music, advertising, even social networking, and want it to be a success for the next four billion, then you build it on SMS, WAP and MMS."
I remember WAP and MMS as products being pushed into our throats by telcos, who were frustrated they missed the SMS gravy train. I also remember absolutely disliking both WAP and MMS. I used MMS for a while to moblog pictures, but after that I was glad to get rid of it.
But there are some interesting creatives. A typical poster child for MMS advertising is the BMW Winter Tyres case. But will this be enough to stop creatives of focusing on developing iPhone apps "because they are cool" (not because of market share)?

Biscuits have feelings too

Bakers Precious Biscuits from Shy the Sun on Vimeo.

Bakers Precious Biscuits on Vimeo: "Designed and directed by Shy the Sun for Ogilvy, Johannesburg. Produced at Blackginger Animation in Cape Town, South Africa. For more information see shythesun.tv or blackginger.tv"

The Not So Secret Menu

10 secret menu items at fast food restaurants - CNN.com: "In-N-Out Burger's secret menu isn't so secret these days -- in fact, they've posted it on their Web site. But in case you're not in the habit of surfing fast food Web sites, here's the skinny on their rather un-skinny items: ordering something Animal Style at In-N-Out means you're going to get it with lettuce, tomato, a mustard-cooked beef patty, pickles, extra spread (it's sort of Thousand-Islandy) and grilled onions. [...] According to photos posted at SuperSizedMeals.com, one gluttonous patron requested and received a 100x100 at a Las Vegas store a few years ago. One item not listed on the Web site secret menu: the Flying Dutchman, which is two slices of cheese sandwiched between two patties, hold the bun."

While we were travelling along the U.S. West Coast last summer, In-N-Out kept fascinating me. First of all, it had a name that I associated with post-meal barfing (burger goes in, then it comes out), but still all the locals we met were very enthousiastic about the product. Secondly: I never saw any advertising for In-N-Out, except for the simple road signs along the highway. And thirdly: everybody talked about the secret menu without actually knowing what it was (or daring to order it for us when we finally got to one of those In-N-Outs).
To finish it off: once you get there, it gets really weird. Every single packaging item contains a Bible quote. Or rather: not the quote, just the reference. Like, Revelation 3:20 on your "Number Two" burger wrapping.

With the exception of the Bible quotes: brilliant un-marketing, proving their point that they make the burgers and fries freshly just for you. Oh, and they serve great "What you see is what you get" hamburgers, too.

Internet is a verb

Jonathan Zittrain: The Web as random acts of kindness: "Feeling like the world is becoming less friendly? Social theorist Jonathan Zittrain begs to difffer. The Internet, he suggests, is made up of millions of disinterested acts of kindness, curiosity and trust."
He gives three examples of kindness on the internet:

1. When the government of Pakistan blocked YouTube, it broke Youtube all over the world. But, within two hours YouTube was fixed. This was the work of the North American Network Operators Group, "an educational and operational forum for the coordination and dissemination of technical information related to backbone/enterprise networking technologies and operational practices." They fixed it, left, and did'nt expect any thanks or reward for it.
2. Wikipedia - not the user generated content part, but the troll fighting army.
3. Craigslist rideshare board and couchsurfing.org.

By the way, TEDx Brussels will be held on Monday, November 23, 2009 at European Parliament, Bruxelles, Belgium. Register to attend.

Paper is dead not news

Budget help from Mint.com

Did you notice that killer call to action: Understanding Budgets, "start tracking your spending with Mint.com". They used the infograph genre and a very common internet meme ("dead tree media") to grab attention for a financial service. Brilliant!

My Twitter Quilt

Portwiture "grabs photography from Flickr that matches the content of your most recent Twitter updates. The result is a serendipitous visual representation of your Twitter profile." Made just to see how far one can go mashing up social services. I'm not sure if it's art, but it sure is pretty.
Found via Mashable.

Memorable Negroponte quotes at PICNIC09

OLPC and MIT Medialab guru Nicholas Negroponte was without any doubt one of the most important speakers at the Picnic conference this year.

Nicolas Negroponte @ PICNIC09 from Rhinofly on Vimeo.

A few of his most memorable quotes:

• Computing is no longer about computers. It is about life. Look at how photography and TV evolved.
• Media innovation lies in the hands of the users. Creative use of media is what's going to push it forward.
• Every surface will be a display, and all laptops SUVs"
• Laptops: should be sports utility vehicles and can be schools in a box.
• Paper is dead not news. Only in English is paper part of the word for newspaper. News-paper is a very old word related to a previous era.
• Next half billion of laptop users are under 25.
• Kids (in developign countries) drop out of school because it's boring.
• OLPC was ridiculed, I am delighted when people ridicule me, I know I am right. (throws laptop on floor!)
• Teaching is only one way to achieve learning. School is only one place to find teaching
• 10 years is a long time in the future. It takes many years for a developing nation to become a "creative" nation.
• A centipede was asked which foot it would put forward first - it began to think about it and never walked again.

Facebook is the next BBC

As you may know, I have the ambition to become a paleofuturist one day. So I was all eyes and ears for MediaFuturist Gerd Leonhard talk about the Future of Social Media at the Picnic Conference.

The Future of Social Media Gerd Leonhard @ PICNIC 2009

View more documents from Gerd Leonhard.

In a nutshell:

The World’s Operating System is Morphing to an OS that's all about being followed, loved, etc by new friends.
Classic mass media are not social. They are getting out of touch with a world that's connecting. It's us broadcasting to everyone (including brands).
This has huge consquence for anyone who's in Advertising, Content & Media Communication, Education, or Politics. Example: Facebook Connect (connect with what you already have and use).
The web is now running on a new, social OS. Facebook is the next BBC: it's one of the new broadcasters, or more correctly: peer caster platforms.
The web is all about money, information, data, commerce, content, but also: conversations, and chaos. You can now meet people you never knew existed. Some of us have started trusting strangers more than CEOs of big companies.
There's a fundamental shift from closed to open. Open business, telecommunication, education, energy, media & content. Examples: anything open source.
But "open" is a real challenge. The desire for control is ingrained in our genes, our lives, our education. Open can mean out-of-control & chaotic. Openness can create risk. Open may feel unsafe. But we must, because the degree of openness and your revenue growth rate will be directly related.
And guess what: by definition,anything ‘social’ must be open.

To make my future job easier, I've mapped his social media predictions to a timeline. First two digits are the year, second set tells you in what month the shift will happen.

• 1009: Privacy becomes an action we must take. Example: Facebook privacy settings.
• 1009: Social Media is CRM. Social Business = Trust Osmosis: create trust in one place and it will move to the other. "Brands aren’t defined by campaigns any more, but by the consumer ecosystems we nurture to support them."
• 1009: Total Copyright Gridlock. The future of creation is not copying, but sharing. Copyright laws prevent sharing.
• 1009-1106: real-time, social, mobile: feedback, rating, comments, tagging... Source: trendwatching.com.
• 1009-1106: Digital Jet Lag (caused by information overload) becomes a serious issue, so we need filters. Curation & filtering becomes a huge business
• 1009-1109: intelligent, automated Social ‘Agents’ will give the Semantic Web a real kickstart.
• 1009-1109: Resistance to change retires! Source: FT.com ‘claws and effect’
• 1106: Socially Augmented Reality. Example: superimpose someone's network profile over you.
• 1106: the end of ‘disconnected’ Advertising, like the contextual advertising mistakes you sometimes see Google Ads make when they accompany a news article about disasters.
• 1109: one-way communications from a non-trusted source are 99% useless.
• 1109: Social ‘Books’, who are typically curated, interactive, real-time, commons-owned, connected, peer-reviewed and non-linear. Example: backstage.bbc.co.uk
• 1109: Social Business... or none. Trend: Extreme Reputation Economy. The absence of accurate, real-time and verified data about you or your business may soon mean that you virtually don’t exist.
• 1109: the cost of staying in touch drops towards zero. Source: Nokia Siemens Networks
• 1109-1209: the global, social ‘Brain’, that feeds on geotagging, bookmarking, real-time sharing, reviews, status updates, life-augmented pictures & streaming video
• 1109-1409: 30% Freemium in most ‘Content’ Industries. "Free"gets you to a place where you can ask to get paid. Find that pivot point.
• 1109-1409: virtual venues, telepresence & holography
• 1209: Social Advertising = 30% of digital. Example: ads that are served in the contextof realtionships, e.g. in Facebook.
• 1209: Social Capital will be become as important as actual money. Example: @johncmayer. The cult(ure) of API is exploding
• 1209-1409: Ownership will matter a lot less, mind- and market- share will matter a lot more
• 1409: 1/3 of the population will engage in social media and sharing
• 1501: Five billion people are connected to an over simplying network of mobile, fixed and broadband communication

To conclude, a hint to future business models for social media: scarcity is where the money is (and always has been). Right now there's an abundance of: new products and services, content, connectivity, machine intelligence, and the total amount of connections. But there's not enough of these: trusted opinions, conTEXT & trusted filters, private spaces, human ingenuity & creativity, and actual relations (not just connections). Every large and engaged audience can be turned into money.

Make the world go round

One of my personal wake-up calls during the Picnic09 conference was Bernard Lietaer's financial doomsday message. According to him, the worst is yet to come: "Please, get ready now for an unprecedented rough ride for as long as one decade. What all this means in practice is that we have now entered the period of an unprecedented convergence of the four planetary issues - financial instability, climate change, unemployment and the financial consequences of an aging society." He has an interesting Yin vs Yang take on the dynamics that have caused the bankruptcy of the old financial and economic models. In a typically rational and analytical Yang driven economy, the key driving forces are competetion, hierarchies, central authority, "bigger is beter", and a clear dominance of technology. The intuitive, empathic Yin coherence is more about cooperation, mutual trust, "small is beautiful", and appreciation of interpersonal skills. Lietaer's point was that the Yang-only model is now broken, and that we need to supplement or even replace it with Yin-driven models.
But to make it work, we don't need professors to tell us what the new models are. We need a new breed of professionals who are able to "sell" these ideas to both consumers and stakeholders. One of these professionals is Oliver Dudok Van Heel, who talked about the Lewes Pound project. Lewes, the county town of East Sussex, England, launched their local currency about a year ago as "a creative yet practical way for local people to make money work for Lewes." The pound notes look a little like vouchers but the idea seems to be catching on and spreading to other towns in the UK and abroad.
There's a 21 Lewes Pound note, too, to illustrate that 5% of each Lewes Pound is issued to the Live Lewes Fund, to grant funding for projects and initiatives in support of the local community.
I really like the idea and the way it's handled. It is a bit weird how a project in a town of 16,000 inhabitants is able to solve the economic crisis, reduce their carbon footprint, and strengthen relationships between local shopkeepers and the community. It's clearly very ambitious. But I'm very curious about the results and how all the other local communities who got inspired by the Lewes example will do in the next few years, as we're trying to sit out the perfect storm Mr Lietaer was predicting.

Sitting under the Twitter Tree

I really liked Microsoft's presence at the Picnic conference. Not your typical conference booth, but a Microsoft Surface embedded in a picnic table, silent disco sessions, free blue sparkly water melon ice creams (a hint at their just launched WebSpark product) and my favourite: the Twitter Tree. It could have been made prettier, and in spite of Henk De Hooge's tips it's very hard to go sit down on a FatBoy without looking like a clumsy dork, but: it was a nice tree to sit under. It had power supply near its roots, network cables hanging from the branches and I got offered free coffee *twice*.
Microsoft evangelist (yes, they still have them) Martin Tirion has embedded a Photosynth of the Microsoft presence at Picnic.

The 9 Streets of Amsterdam

De Negen Straatjes is "a collective name given to nine small, cosy streets. The Ree-, Harten-, Beren-, Wolven-, Oude Spiegel-, Run- and Huidenstraat. The Gasthuismolensteeg en Wijde Heisteeg also belong to them. [...] After almost 400 years the nine streets are still shopping streets. The 9 streets is home to a great number of vintage stores, alternative fashion, and specialized theme stores."
Fellow girl geek Sasvangent is not, as her name might suggest, from Gent, but from Amsterdam. She took us to a bit of Amsterdam shopping Thursday night. We were 2 (two) minutes late for Stout but spent an hour or so in Episode.
Picture taken just because of the Prince song.

Radio Manuela

One of the things I like most about the Picnic conference in Amsterdam is that they like messing with you. Take, for example, Radio Manuela. Can you see what's wrong with this picture?

It's ok if you didn't, because I hadn't noticed anything peculiar either. They were really broadcasting, interviewing people, playing some nice tunes for the conference goers. Except, as my favourite insultant Jonathan Marks pointed out, nobody was listening. Radio Manuela broadcasts on a frequency that nobody can receive on a regular radio.
Kind of similar of Twitter's fame cult, where most of the senders are simply talking to themselves. You still there?

Cult of cool

87 cool things, even a few from us. The "us" here is the Google Creative Lab, "a small team that strives to re-think marketing across every kind of media – currently existing or not, with Google as its sole client. Our job is to manage the Google brand, find new ways to communicate the company’s innovations, intentions and ideals, and do work of which we can all be immensely proud.”

I can't blame Google for insourcing their own marketing. It's probably still too early, but I was curious what this team's web presence would be like. All you can find so far are the profiles the Google Creative Lab is looking to hire.

I lost my pocket computer yesterday

"The computer in your cell phone today is a million times cheaper and a thousand times more powerful and about a hundred thousand times smaller [than the one computer at MIT in 1965]..."
I lost my pocket computer yesterday evening. Must have dropped it while getting in the car. I asked Gil to check on Google Latitude and there it was: last know position was in my street at around 18:00. Must have broken and shut down when it fell. I went back later that evening but it was gone. I've felt "off the grid" all day but fortunately a new device and sim card are on their way.
"So what used to fit in a building now fits in your pocket, what fits in your pocket now will fit inside a blood cell in 25 years."
Bet I can find ways to lose that too.

Dailyradar Trends

It's content is less impressive than, say, Gartner's Hype Cycle, but I like the way this project visualises data. The infograph above illustrates how (in the "Technology" section) Google's launch of Fast Flip helped them dominate today's attention market, and how AMD's $99 Quad-Core is one of the breaking tech stories right now.
And since it's about breaking news and emerging trends, it's a good match with Twitter: @dailyradar. And speaking of breaking news: I recently discovered Flackr.net, a "breaking news dashboards and news aggregation" service. Comes with a Twitter service, too, of course: @flackr. I like it.

Women hold up half the sky

Today I'm speaking at the IAB Displaylicious event (full programme.pdf). Roughly half of the internet population are women. They dominate most of the social networks. And most important purchase decisions are made by women. But what makes women click?

Women hold up half the sky

View more presentations from bnox.

The Noise Cancelling Room

Did you know that the acronym THX stands for Tomlinson Holman's eXperiment? Tomlinson Holman is an American film theorist, audio engineer, and inventor of film technologies. For GOOD magazine's Inventions series, he proposes an anti-noise invention. The technology is similar to the one used in noise cancelling headphones, except that he sees it on a slightly larger scale.

The Hurdle of Sign-up

What social software developers and designers think they hear when a user is about to sign up: "Oh my God! I love this software! This is exactly what I've been waiting for my whole life! Quick, sign me up for the lifetime plan! I'm going to invite every single person I know to sign up as well. My life is finally complete!"
What the user really thinks: "Huh? What is this? What does it do? Is it worth my time? Will it be a valuable piece of software worth switching to? Will I have to change what I currently do to use it. Does anybody I know use it? Do they like it?"
This presentation by Joshua Porter totally nails it!

Designing For Social Traction

View more documents from Joshua Porter.

Craigslist: it's ugly but still breathing

The Ugliest Website in the World: "Craigslist breaks all marketing and branding rules. In fact, it doesn’t market or brand or sell itself at all. There are no marketers on staff. “Only programmers, customer service reps and accounting staff work at craigslist,” Gary Wolf writes in an excellent Wired article. [...]Craigslist gets a lot of criticism for its ugly design that hasn’t changed since 1999." Craigslist's users, however, are not complaining. According to Techdirt's by Michael Masnick, Craigslist is actually smarter in how it "maximizes profits.": "It's doing it by not pissing off users and not trying to squeeze them for every possible penny today, knowing correctly that doing so is a horrible long-term strategy."
I don't think Craigslist is ugly but if you compare it to, say, Yelp's design there's clearly a big difference. But the same goes for many other great sites that haven't changed their design since 1999. Like the Internet Movie Database, for example. I don't think a "cool" design has any correlation with monetizing a web site. On the contrary: a non-design with a decently managed style sheet has more chance surviving changing internet usage than, say, a full-Flash über trendy design with pastel colours and rounded edges. Think, for example, the growing use of mobile internet and the smaller screens that come with it.
The only really good reason to kill of a design is when it gets in the way of usability. Like any page in Belgisch Staatsblad, for example.

Ghost hotel in Vrijbroekpark, Mechelen

The Free World by Dutch artist Marjolijn Dijkman "is a representation of the so called ‘ghosthotel’ in the Vrijbroekpark in Mechelen, Belgium. Originally intended as a grand urban vision for the provincial city of Mechelen, this ruin has become fossilized, a failed utopia in the middle of a nature reserve. [...] The ruin has turned into a ‘romantic’ setting for people looking for an escape from Mechelen, as can be seen in the many traces of human intervention one can find there. The Free World, from a graffiti found on the site referring to a famous rave track (Fuck the Free World) is an impression where a lost vision for the future and the current situation come together."
You can see the crescent-shaped hotel infrastructure clearly on the Google Satellite view above. It's called "verzonken hotel" (in English: "sunken hotel") here in Mechelen and is an unbelievably sad place to be. Would love to do an urbex there one day!
Found via i heart photograph.

Nick Cave and the tale of the Cat Piano

The Cat Piano from PRA on Vimeo.

The Cat Piano (blog) is the latest short film by The People's Republic of Animation. Narrated by Nick Cave. Directed by Eddie White & Ari Gibson. Produced by Jessica Brentnall.

By the way, if you were thinking this was about those other cats playing the piano, you need to respect No Cat Day on 9 September. 9.9.09 has been chosen as A Day Without Cats on the Internet . But so far not a lot of bloggers have signed The Petition.

We are as clouds

"We are as clouds that veil the midnight moon;
How restlessly they speed, and gleam, and quiver,
Streaking the darkness radiantly! -yet soon
Night closes round, and they are lost for ever."

Flickermood 2.0 from Sebastian Lange on Vimeo. Director and animator Sebastian Lange describes it as the next level of this experimental typographic orgy. View QuickTime version at basisbild.de/flickermood.
Poem quote is from Mutability by English Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley

Carice van Houten won't do online film

Dutch stage and film actor Carice van Houten freaks out during casting of an online movie. Great parody of the stuff that gets popular on YouTube. Made for Nederlands Film Festival.

Social Shopping

JustBought.it - Crowd Powered Shopping "is a location-based social shopping app that allows you to share photos and tweets on amazing finds as you stumble upon them. Go shopping and discover where the hottest deals are in town and get instant feedback from your twitter community!"
Reminds me of the crazy fun Girl Geek Shopping the Brussels Girl Geeks (and Eurostar) did in London, last March.
JustBought.it was made by Adarsh Pallian (@pallian), the guy behind Tweetizen.com ( a simple web-based tool designed to help you filter the daily influx of tweets, and easily find the ones that are relevant to you) and Chart.ly (a tool to share stock charts on Twitter).