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From Yahoo. Here’s a fairy tale that could only happen in the movies. Man makes YouTube video. Goes to Hollywood. Gets pots of money and a movie deal. Except this story is true. An unknown producer from Uruguay, Fede Alvarez, shelled out about $300 to create a cool video of a robot invasion in Montevideo, [...]

Categories: design | Add a Comment
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A very innovative use of the iPad to create light shows. It’s a great demo of ad agency Dentsu London’s mission: “Making Future Magic.” More details on the project and some other inspiring ideas here.

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You can now download a free chapter from our book The Business Playground: Where Creativity and Commerce Collide.

Categories: art | Add a Comment
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One talented artist has found a use for old music cassette tapes.

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Take a tripod, add some simple wheels and now you can create Hollywood-style moving shots with your little old non-professional camera. Featured in Fast Company with a demo video here.

Categories: science | Add a Comment
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Plenty of people’s Twitter feeds appear to be connected directly to their egos, but one scientist’s is actually wired to his brain. In April, University of Wisconsin doctoral student Adam Wilson — working with adviser Justin Williams, above — tweeted 23 characters just by thinking. He focused his attention on one flashing letter after another [...]

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Since time immemorial — or at least since Pong — one barrier that has stood between gamers and total Tron-like immersion in their video games has been the controller: the joystick, trackball, mouse, light gun or whatever. This year Microsoft demonstrated a technology, code-named Project Natal, that enables players to control games using only body [...]

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A couple of years ago, Seth Frader-Thompson was driving a Prius. Priuses have little screens on the dashboard that tell you what gas mileage you’re getting, in real time, as you drive. It crossed Frader-Thompson’s mind that houses should have something similar. So he built the EnergyHub Dashboard, a little device, with a screen, that [...]

I have two decades of experience creating and crafting brand positionings and strategies that have benefited numerous companies, both small and large, from established multinationals to startups. I use a straightforward approach (see my section on brand strategies) that starts with an understanding of the market, the company and the consumers and ends with a [...]

Categories: ideas, products | Add a Comment
inventions_electric_eye

MIT researchers are developing a microchip that could help blind people regain partial eyesight. Though it won’t completely restore normal vision, it will enable a blind person to recognize faces and navigate a room without assistance. The chip, which is encased in titanium to prevent water damage, will be implanted onto a patient’s eyeball. The [...]

Categories: advertising | Add a Comment
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If you bought a book by Belgian’s most famous crime writer, Pieter Aspe, you got this bag.

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Bad sound quality is destroying the music business. The quality of sound delivered through typical ear bud headphones devalues the music according to Jimmy Iovine and Dr. Dre, who as a solution have created a line of high end headphones called Beats. In this article in the Financial Times, Iovine describes how he is trying [...]

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Punk band Anti-Flag and useless.org released a limited edition tee shirt for Earth Day. The shirts are unwanted shirts that were gathering dust in Anti-Flag’s warehouse, that have now been repurposed with a new message. All proceeds fund a water and sanitation project in Sierra Leone. See more details here.

Categories: businesses, music | Add a Comment
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You will have seen the announcement earlier this year that pop sensation Lady Gaga has become the creative director for instant camera company Polaroid. The cynical amongst us might view this as a publicity stunt that won’t translate into anything more than a few column inches. After all, now that all pictures are pretty much [...]