Mirror Mirror

The Magic Mirror [nytlabs.com], developed by The New York Times Research & Development Lab has just been selected as one of Time's "50 Best Inventions" of 2011. It is probably the best gadget to fullfil those urgent craves from the data addicted, during those few moments they cannot reach their smart phones. This is very neat but if you want to know what the weather is like outside surely you'd look out the bloody window:) seriously though this has great potential especially from a health perspective.

At first sight, the mirror looks like any normal plain, reflective surface. However, next to showing one's reflection, this mirror is also able to deliver daily news and weather details while brushing your teeth or combing your hair. It combines a Philips Mirror TV with a Microsoft Kinect camera to allow you to access all sorts of information while admiring your own reflection. For instance, the mirror can check one's daily calendar and social feeds, and displays all sorts of statistics regarding one's health, including historical sleep patterns or walking activity.

The top creative minds in digital, where's Australia?

Read this last night in Adweek a great piece by Gabriel Beltrone who wrote a who's who in the Global village of top digital creative's, and when you read the roll call and see what they have done you can't really argue with it. (Well apart from one in my mind but we won't go there.) But my point; no one was selected from Australia or New Zealand, yes I know other countries were left out too but I'm in Australia so I'm looking at this area. Isn't anyone from this neck of the woods who could challenge this group? If so who would it be and if not, why in your mind do you think that we haven't the talent? Interested to know. Read in full here

CAN YOU GUESS THE CREATIVES FROM JUST THEIR ILLUSTRATIONS?

Doing Good - so good you want to eat

Everyday objects that can be improved on, you just need to be a creative thinker ahhh this is a little idea that has everything that I adore about creativity; beautifully simple and functional, Thank you Gyeongwan Koo who turned a very good idea into an even better one. This idea starts life in your hands just like an ordinary set of chopsticks except it’s tipped with a starch cap hiding a seed. When you’re done with it, stick the starch end down into the ground and watch as new life climbs up your recycled chopstick. This idea is so good I could really eat it,what a tasty idea.

UX should be child's play

I watched this video a couple of times over the weekend and as it's pretty amazing in that the child only seems to know or understand the interactions of an iPad above a hard copy magazine, at first I smiled and thought; WOW how times are changing that our kids will naturally interact in iPad mode rather than a hard copy mind you it's not surprising considering this kind of interaction is already on everything from touch screens in public places to smart boards in our kids schools you can even drive a car and model airplane via your iPhone! So
when I looked at it a second time I couldn't help feeling a tad sad in the fact that, here is a child that finds turning a page in a magazine so alien, why should I feel sad? Having 3 kids of my own I encourage them to explore and do things that as a child I did - climb trees, make dens to reading books. There's still something very stimulating about books - the touch the smell to the sound of the pages turning etc. No iPad version can replicate that. Neither is right or wrong but I do think it's a right of all children to interact with much information as possible regardless if it's from an iPad or from a book.

Hopefully then we'll have kids who'll grow up to be thinkers rather than robots and just conditioned to think in a certain way.

Marketing directors losing direction?

A new IBM (NYSE: IBM) study of more than 1,700 chief marketing officers from 64 countries and 19 industries reveals that the majority of the world's top marketing executives recognize a critical and permanent shift occurring in the way they engage with their customers, but question whether their marketing organizations are prepared to manage the change. The four main challeges facing Marketing Directors are:

Data explosion: Every day we create 2.5 quintillion bytes of data - so much that 90 percent of the world's data today has been created in the last two years alone. The increasing volume, variety and velocity of data available from new digital sources like social networks, in addition to traditional sources such as sales data and market research, tops the list of CMO challenges. The difficulty is how to analyze these vast quantities of data to extract the meaningful insights, and use them effectively to improve products, services and the customer experience.

Social platforms: Social media enables anyone to become a publisher, broadcaster and critic. Facebook has more than 750 million active users, with the average user posting 90 pieces of content a month. Twitter users send about 140 million tweets a day. And YouTube's 490 million users upload more video content in a 60-day period than the three major U.S. television networks created in 60 years. Marketers are using social platforms to communicate - with 56 percent of CMOs viewing social media as a key engagement channel - but they still struggle with capturing valuable customer insight from the unstructured data that customers and potential customers produce.

Channel and device choices: The growing number of new marketing channels and devices, from smart phones to tablets, is quickly becoming a priority for CMOs. Mobile commerce is expected to reach $31 billion by 2016, representing a compound annual growth rate of 39 percent from 2011 to 2016. Meanwhile, the tablet market is expected to reach nearly 70 million units worldwide by the end of this year, growing to 294 million units by 2015.

Shifting demographics: New global markets and the influx of younger generations with different patterns of information access and consumption are changing the face of the marketplace. In India, as one example, the middle class is expected to soar from roughly 5 percent of the population to more than 40 percent in the next two decades. Marketers who have historically focused on affluent Indian consumers must adapt their strategies to market to this emerging middle class. In the United States, marketing executives must respond to the aging baby boomer generation and growing Hispanic population.
Full piece here

Snaptags better than QR codes

SnapTags are rings, with visual information aligned in a pattern of bars and breaks, that tell a reader app what content to pull up. And where the SnapTag is unique is that each tag also has an SMS short code, so people who don’t have smart phones can send and receive text messages that will connect them with a campaign, very smart.

I also love the idea that visually snaptags look so much cleaner and can be branded easily, the ease of use too in my mind could over take the growth of QR codes,as we know all the faffing around to get content from QR codes will always be a barrier for mass market comms, Snaptags could be a much better alternative.

This poster has a cold

The promotion for the new movie Contagion has truly gone viral. Ahead of the release of the film, Warner Bros Pictures hired microbiologists and immunologists to create an unconventional billboard.
Teaming up with CURB Media and ad agency Lowe Roche, they installed 2 huge petri dishes full of live bacteria in an abandoned storefront in downtown Toronto. Over a period of a few days, the bacteria multiplied and grew to spell out the name of the film, Contagion. Love this and the art direction and type reveal looks amazing, this also reminded of a campaign my old copywriter Jo Arscott did while at Saatchis where they produced a 48 sheet poster and sprayed the headline in glue - over the coming days the fumes and dirt from London streets revealed the message; 'This is what your kid breathes in everyday' it was for kids with asthma, love how both pieces play with the type and dramatised the key message.