Cooking with hair straighteners and other hair abuse

What do I know about hair that isn’t a nostalgic memory? Well, thanks to Dove and Rob and co I now know a lot more. They’ve just put together these two short films for Dove Heat Defence Therapy to show what hair styling tools can do…and that includes cooking an egg…

and doing some serious damage to candyfloss….

These films are to support the launch of Dove’s new Heat Defence Therapy range and in addition there’s lots of other films and stuff on http://www.dove.co.uk/heatdefence featuring hairdresser Jamie Brooks and some nice styling advice I can probably skip.

They’re not the first films we’ve done for Dove. In January we worked with British film maker Pinny Grylls to produce Intuition, a film short exploring womens’ first impressions of each other.

To inspire women to broaden their judgements of each other, the film shows how women will rightly or wrongly make assumptions about a person’s life. It’s a must-see if you’ve ever wondered how our looks can affect our lives and the way we react to others. If you missed it the first time around on the Dove website you can see it below.

June, the perfect time to make an Xmas gingerbread house

Better late than never and it does feature a small gang of jelly bears planning a burglary…

Daily Mail Fail

It appears that the Daily Mail website has a unique take on democracy. This little #Fail came about when I had the temerity to try and vote for an option that Richard Littlejohn might not like. Hurrah for the blackshirts!!!

Augmented reality future of mobile search and other AR applications

Back in summer 2008 I wrote a whitepaper for some of our clients about Cloud and Crowd based creativity and the need to break digital out into the real world away from screens and desks. Back then I included an image by the excellent Petit Invention as a concept vision for the future of mobile search.

Technology moves quickly and a couple of months later there was already a working prototype in the form of Wikitude AR Travel Guide. Using the Android OS on the G1 phone…

“users may hold the phone’s camera against a spectacular mountain range and see the names and heights displayed as overlay mapped with the mountains in the camera. Users may look out of an airplane window to see what is down there. Users may walk through a city like Seville, Spain, holding the phone’s camera against a building and Wikitude tells what it is.”

The application shows that augmented reality can go beyond the initial wow factor (and the peering around the back of an A4 print-out pointed at your webcam while trying to see something on your screen) and the Second Life comparisons.

IBM’s Seer Android Beta produced to support it sponsorship of the Wimbledon tennis tournament also shows a commercial application going beyond “marketing fluff”. Using it, visitors can find facilities on ground (locating the nearest restrooms), but more impressively, they can “point the phone at a tennis court, find out the court number and also who’s playing and more crucially, who’s winning”. 

Once AR comes to the iPhone properly in an easily accessible form then I think we’ll see a whole new level of usage. The 3G S’s compass combined with Google Latitude and Wikipedia overlays would definitely add up to a powerful and socially changing experience.

Priority Mail’s AR Box Simulator also points at a future for an entertaining application usage but in the meantime here is a collection of 10 augmented reality campaigns that are much more in the fun and novelty area.

Friday Video

Twitter and The Machine Stops

It is an old cliche that the fictional inspiration and vision of our modern interactive world stems from the typewriter of William Gibson. While to some extents this is true – after all Neuromancer inspired a fair number of technologists to go out and create their own interpretations of “Cyberspace” – perhaps the truest reflection of our modern reality is a lot older.

November this year sees the 100th anniversary of the publication of E.M. Forster’s short story The Machine Stops. Forster’s vision is of a world where “the entire population communicates through a kind of instant messaging/video conferencing machine called the speaking apparatus, with which they conduct their only activity, the sharing of ideas and knowledge with each other.”

The people of Forster’s future world have almost no real human contact and are totally immersed  in their virtual world of endlessly recycled, secondhand ideas at the expense of being able to survive in the real world when finally the Machine Stops. They have culturally evolved to a point of their own physical obsolescence.

I was reminded about this story that I first read at the tend age of 14 when I was putting together a presentation (or “deck” as some people insist on calling them, again inspired by Mr Gibson) about Twitter. 

I was putting together the quick “Two wider trend implications” bit about Twitter’s value as:

• A real-time search/help engine
  • Raw results, unfiltered and updated immediately.
  • No waiting for Google to crawl links
  • Breaking news, live event coverage (e.g. #G20)
  • A live-feed of what the web is thinking and sentiment tracking via Search.Twitter.com, Tweetscan, Tweetdeck, Twendz
  • Gmail outage: people switched to Twitter for help
  • People now ask their friends and peers for help, insight and expertise on a day-to-day basis

and 

• An open-source experience model
  • Twitter.com user experience is poor
  • Most activity is off-platform even when people are using a desktop PC
  • Huge list of APIs and Apps, large developer community http://Twitter.pbwiki.com/Apps
  • The core service actually needs the community in order to function effectively
  • A mainstream breakthrough for crowd creativity & open-source business trend

when I was struck by the thought that Twitter is the real embodiment of Forster’s Speaking Apparatus.

Twitter’s 140 character limit and reliance on linking to external applications, webpages, photos etc for real content value beyond simple utterances (so well parodied in McSweeney’s INTERNET-AGE WRITING SYLLABUS) makes it the perfect self-recursive media.

Indeed the prominence of ReTweeting R/T perhaps hints at this need to for Twitter to evolve before it eats itself. Harvard Business School’s recent study shows that “the top 10% of prolific Twitter users accounted for over 90% of tweets“. For Twitter to expand the number of value exchange providers it needs to expand the value creation possibilities beyond human RSS. It needs to be integrated into the concept of Social Periphery and maintain its roots in the real world rather than allow itself to be become a virtual one. Then again I’m probably grouchy because all my friends are still on Facebook…never going to be one of the cool kids….

Anyway in the spirit of recycling ideas and sharing I’ve uploaded the presentation below. I’ve missed a couple of credits (particularly to Matt at iLevel who did the sterling work on media opportunities), but I’m sure you’ll come across the ideas in other places where you can thank them directly:

2 years at Chemistry

It’s been two years today since I walked through the doors at Chemistry and it’s been some journey with some great people.

I’m working on a new whitepaper (about digital facism, Twitter and nodal points) but in the meantime I thought I’d share some of the images sitting on my iPhone that illustrate 2 years of digital stuff…

Martin Parr eat your heart out

Grogg(tm) from Monkey Island

I’m working on a gaming project at the moment and everyone knows I don’t need an excuse to launch into an old Lucasfilm and SCUMM speech but I saw this in the Chepstow…

It’s like it has just stepped out of “The Secret of Monkey Island”.

It was bound to happen eventually…a holodeck?

Sc-Fi has inspired some great technology in the past and now the people at EON Reality have trumped some of the augmented reality experiments out there with their iCube. Their other experiments are great inspiration for those of us on a “screens are boring” kick on a grey Thursday afternoon… 

I can’t wait for my jet pack.