The great thing about analogies is that when you place a certain situation into another context or circomstances it often helps to make things understandable. This video is doing a great job at that, showing something that is very common between clients and agencies today into a fresh context… have fun ;)
Since Marcus decided (on purpose!) to have his little event in London pretty much the only week I wasn’t in town…. just kidding, I will have to share the slides with all of you who have missed it just like me.
Watch what happened when God created Twitter and be the witness of the first conversations between Adam, Eve and the snake!
My wife and I we don’t ‘do Valentine’. We don’t seem to be very representative for the country we live in though, as data shows that celebrating Valentine’s Day is more popular in Belgium than anywhere else in Europe. We’ve done a survey on that topic (together with Cross Tabs) on MSN/Windows Live in 16 EMEA countries which had over 78.000 respondents (Updated with link). We thought that with Valentine’s Day coming up it would be interesting to find out how flirting & dating has evolved in the digital age that is the 21st Century. And given the current crisis we were also curious how much that would impact your Valentine’s celebration. All of that resulted in some interesting data and I decided to put the key highlights in a presentation for your viewing pleasure:
People clearly find it easier to say ‘I love you’ over email, IM or txt messages than face to face as also this research points out (from the press release):
“The majority of people across Europe (66%) admit that they find it easier to flirt over IM than face-to-face, with shy South Africans much preferring this method of flirting (78%) closely followed by Arabia (77%), Turkey (76%) and Ireland (72%). Saying ‘I Love You’ for the first time is never easy, so it comes as no surprise that 1 in 3 have actively declared their love for someone over instant messenger rather than face-to-face. Cupids in the Netherlands (61%), Denmark (42%), Portugal (41%) and Spain (40%) top the league table for saying ‘I love you’ in cyberspace.”
Like I said earlier we also looked at how much impact the recession would have on the spending for Valentine’s Day and although that day is traditionally a time to ’splash some cash’, spendings in most countries will fall by almost 10% on average (see table below). I couldn’t help noticing though that European men spend on average 33% more on Valentine’s Day than European women ;)
There was a lot more data about this per country and everything which I obviously can’t all post here, but I should be able to point you to the right direction in case you’re wondering about more details (participating countries in the table above btw.). Once I get a link to the press release (which has also more data) I’ll add it right here as well.
This is so cool, it’s not the first time I’ve written about Photosynth but while I was playing with this new Silverlight viewer for Photosynth I got a little into this ‘point cloud’ views and again, must say that this really is awesome.
So I’m looking at this Photosynth (196 photos and 98% synthy – so a good one) and look at one of the photos in the collection:
We’ve all seen that right? ;) Then if we press ‘P’ we switch the viewer to this point cloud mode resulting in:
And that – and this is the really cool part – will enable you to look at these objects from an angle that you actually don’t have photos of like this:
Yes Photosynth remains one of the coolest things I’ve ever seen. Go check it out for yourself.
In the newspaper (Het Nieuwsblad) this weekend: “American Government shops at IKEA”:
“They might be driving in expensive cars, but when it comes down to furniture it seems that some people in the US government have a slightly less expensive taste. The people in this government limo have clearly gone to IKEA.”
Oh yeah? Apart from overly exaggerating with the eye-catching title I doubt if any of this is true, especially since IKEA is running this campaign as we speak… makes it quite a coincidence don’t you think? Kudos to IKEA though ;)
… lies in Belgium, finally I found some scientific proof. When I checked out the Twitter Grader page for Belgium the other day, this is what I saw, check out n.4 in the list.
My buddy Matth from Absoluut just sent me this little video of Papervision – Augmented Reality. I haven’t tried yet if it really works as smooth as shown in the video but it sure looks pretty cool. All you need is a piece of paper, a webcam and Flash installed. Check it out.
As I mentioned about a week ago in the ‘Blue Monster in Paris’ post, Hugh MacLeod was a regular guest at the Microsoft BizSpark and Live Mesh booth at LeWeb in Paris this year. We had agreed with Hugh to try out something different than usual and everybody who stopped by while Hugh was there could get a personal Hughcard and maybe even something more… like say a signed Blue Monster wine bottle for instance.
It was great to see a lot of people stopped by and had cartoons drawn on business cards, wine bottles, body parts, computers, etc. All good fun and a lot of times real conversation starters, just like we hoped it to be.
Those of you that were interested in the event will all probably have read what The Guardian had to say about it, well if you did then make sure you read Thomas Crampton’s answer to that as well. Every year when I look back at LeWeb it is with the eyes of both an attendee as a sponsor. Every year there are some things that could have been better (yes it was cold, yes I liked last year’s venue more, yes we were definitely spoilt re food last year, …) and there are always plenty of reasons why I will be back next year.
It’s still one of the best conferences for networking, there’s all kinds of great content to be discovered and you just know it’ll start a conversation just like the years before. When I checked with the program manager for BizSpark or the startups that were able to show off what they got as part of that program, feedback was very good. When I checked with the Live Mesh guys, feedback was good. And quite a few people went home with a personal cartoon… yeah it was good for me. Thanks again for joining us Hugh!
While I was reading about the “Top 10 Most Irritating Phrases in PR” I remembered something from a long time ago, namely the Web Economy Bullshit Generator. Just like Dave Fleet talks about how terms like 24/7, utilize, … annoy him the WEBG was created around a similar idea, sometime during the first dotcom boom. So bricks-and-mortar is not something we use anymore today but you don’t really have to add a lot of words to make this completely relevant again for your flashy corporate powerpoint presentations ;) It seems the world hasn’t changed that much after all :)
As you can see it comes with very easy instructions.
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