'Cross The Breeze

Wait until September

August 22, 2008 by Kris Hoet 3 Comments

When The Kaiser really really likes something, It has to be good. And so it is. IKEA in Germany is running a campaign called ‘”Warte bis September” or in English “Wait until September”. Just go and check out the site, where you can see a guy called Nils … waiting. And you can send him an email or even better, give him a call to ask why if you want. He doesn’t seem to answer the phone all the time, probably when emailing or twittering (GTD right) and it really is a German campaign but like Marcus suggests, why not give it a try wherever you are in the world and give the man a call ;)

Check it out, curious to see what happens in September. It’s pretty clear though that Nils could use some furniture.

Call Nils on +49 40 22 61 11 61 or email nils@warte-bis-september.de. He can also be found on Twitter. Kudos to The Kaiser for finding this!

advertising, bringtheloveback, consumer, design, technology, video

advertising, germany, ikea, nils, september, waiting

Unusual unboxing

August 22, 2008 by Kris Hoet 2 Comments

Like I needed more convincing to go and buy the Samsung Omnia right? Even though this video is created by Samsung, it is a refreshing approach to unboxing gadgets like we see so many times on the tech blogs. Job well done! Now tell me when and where I can get it, curious to see if it matches up to the Diamond.

advertising, blogging, bringtheloveback, electronics, fun, gadgets, marketing, mobile, social media, video, viral

gadget, mobile, omnia, samsung, unboxing, video, viral

Photosynth: it’s here!

August 21, 2008 by Kris Hoet 1 Comment

I can’t count the number of times I’ve written about Photosynth anymore, but trust me when I say the number of times I wanted to say even more is even bigger. I remember how the first reactions (the oohs and aahs) were quickly followed by questions about the computing power that would be needed to create synths your own. Well, we’ve been having access (I work for Microsoft) to the tool that allows you to create your own Synths for a while and yes your personal computer will do just fine. And since yesterday, you can all give it a try for yourself (only on Windows for the moment though).

Explore the nicest Synths right here or start creating your own right away. Here’s how to do it. Read more about this fascinating technology on the Photosynth blog, or read some of the reviews that are popping up: Mossberg, Scoble, Webware, O’Reilly Radar, …

beta, bringtheloveback, inspiration, internet, microsoft, news, research, software, technology

livelabs, microsoft, photosynth, release, synths, technology

New power to Powerpoint

August 18, 2008 by Kris Hoet 2 Comments

I seriously start thinking that the various Microsoft labs are getting up to speed lately. There’s one innovation after the other, see that new 3D viewer I blogged about some days ago, but know that there’s even a lot more than just that: Sphere Surface, Touchwall, Popfly, DeepZoom, … etc etc.

It aren’t always big-ass tables though ;) A couple of days ago I noticed pptPlex on my buddy Steve Clayton’s blog. pptPlex offers an interesting way to make slide decks less linear and makes it possible to add visibly very small data to slides that can easily be shown by zooming in and out of slides while in a slideshow. I had to see this for myself first of course and it really is quite an interesting add-on for Powerpoint. Download it and let pptPlex do some of it’s work on an existing slideshow and you’ll quickly discover what the possibilities are once you really build a presentation to make the maximum use of this.

See it in action:

More videos and download of course at Office Labs. Check out the other projects while you’re at it ;)

beta, design, inspiration, microsoft, research, software, technology

deepzoom, microsoft, office, powerpoint, pptplex, presentation, slide, zoom

Photo tourism: stunning!

August 14, 2008 by Kris Hoet 5 Comments

Remember Photosynth? About 2 years ago Microsoft Live Labs release the tech preview of Photosynth and I hasn’t lost any bit of coolness ever since. It was presented at TED Talks by Blaise Aguera y Arcas (together with SeaDragon) and is one of the most watched videos of the complete TED video collection (which on itself is pretty awesome already). Watch that first if you haven’t done so already.

Long Zheng at istartedsomething.com reports on a new 3D photoviewer that was created by Microsoft Research and the University of Washington:

“The collaborative research team from the University of Washington and Microsoft Research who only two years ago in 2006 published their paper “Photo Tourism” and their technology demonstration “Photosynth” have again pushed the boundaries of what can be achieved by intuitively processing the abundance of digital images shared on the web. This week at SIGGRAPH 2008 they’re sharing with the world some even better technology they’ve been working on which they call “Finding Paths through the World’s Photos“. Don’t let the name fool you, it’s damn cool. If you’re not much of a reading person like me, take a look at this video demonstration.”

Here’s the video, pretty stunning indeed:

art, bringtheloveback, design, internet, microsoft, research, software, technology, video

microsoft, photo, photosynth, seadragon, siggraph08, tourism, university, washington

Consumer terrorism

August 13, 2008 by Kris Hoet 5 Comments

I was rather surprised just a few minutes ago while reading a blog post from fellow Belgian blogger Ine. The post is in Dutch so I’ll translate a bit for you. Ine talks about an email she received from the BDMA – association from Belgian Direct Marketers – about their new congress: “Revenge of the I”. The email has some of the almost standard mumbo-jumbo in there like ‘in ages of consumer empowerment, social networks…’ catch my drift? And that’s all fair to be frank, but then there’s this rather odd sentence saying (and it’s a translation, I’ll do the best to keep the original sentiment):

“During the congress we’ll deepdive into the current era of ‘consumer terrorism’ that is coming up with the rise of digital and social technologies such as blogs, social networks and email.”

Consumer terrorism?! No speakers have been announced yet but I expect to see people from the Computer Crime Unit and others to learn direct marketers how to deal with dangerous bloggers and Facebookers.

Although on a slightly different note, it reminded me of another marketing event/congress organized in Belgium: Customer First… or should I say Digital Marketing First, since that’s what they’ve changed the name to for this year’s event. What’s the idea behind that? Who decides these things? It’s like saying: forget about the customer, this event is about us against traditional advertising and stuff so we have to change the name here!”

In the meantime the Belgian marketing publications ‘MM’ and ‘Pub’ are still as they were 5 years ago, so are their websites (and yes it’s still forbidden to link to MM.be) so I guess I shouldn’t be surprised of all this Belgian Digital Marketers against Consumer Terrorism stuff anyway I guess…

advertising, belgium, conference, internet, marketing, media, quote, social media

advertising, bdma, congress, consumer, marketing, media, mm, pub, slogan, terrorism

24: The Unaired 1994 Pilot

August 12, 2008 by Kris Hoet 5 Comments

“They’ve gained complete access over our Geocities page….” This video is already a few months old by I hadn’t seen it before. If ever you’re into technology somehow and want to see how Jack Bauer saves the world with AOL 3.0 … here it is.