Cannes Lions Direct Winners :: AdLand ad-rag.com
Meanwhile in Sweden, Sydsvenskan, the daily newspaper of the south reminded ad buyers all around that their paper was indeed, their first choice in media buy. Precision targeted (there should be a special award just for that) on a very narrow crowd, only 45 recipients from what I hear. Sydsvenskan had cut out and framed media buyers and other adpeoples actual first ad, their birth announcement, had it framed and sent to the right person. On the back of the frame it read Sydsvenskan Daily News is “your first media choice”. Congrats to Ola Obrant Andreasson, Christian Barrett, Frida Myllenberg and Peter Mayerhofer from The Fan Club ad agency in Malmö for the Gold award in the B2B DM category.
The 2005 Cannes winners for direct mail advertising category were on display at the main post office building. I happened to be passing by and I was really delighted to see all the creativity there. I especially liked all the physical objects the advertising agencies had come up. Some of these included a pencil with an extra long eraser end and a plastic sipping straw with a human body printed on the flexible bend in the straw. The straw was for an ad for a Yoga school and the pencil was a recruitment ad for “people who who are not satisfied with just any answer”.
There were also a few examples of ads that had high budgets, tried their best to become viral and still failed miserably.
Posted by api at 10:44 - No Comments »
Characterizing Legacy Residues in Plutonium Buillding 771
Rocky Flats Nuclear Weapons Plant, 2001
Photograph by A.W. Thompson
“The mind is not a vessel to be filled, but a fire to be lit.”
Plutarch
Posted by api at 10:01 - No Comments »
WATERHED – Circuit Bender
WATERHED (aka Patrick Gill) of BENTSTRUMENTS has bent tons of toyz for Bill T Miller. Some of these include… Hot Lixx Guitar, Talking Teacher, Jaminator Guitar, Coin-U-Lator, PXL 2000 Camera, Omichord OM-27, Realistic Reverb Tank, Boss Dr. Pad, and several Micro Jammers (Surf Guitar, Harmonica, Bongos, RapDrum, Banjo, Fiddle and Heavy Metal Guitar.)
Waterhed is a top notch pro bender and great dude. I have been very happy
with the pile of toys he tweaked-out for me. Highly recommended!
Circuit Bending is the creative short-circuiting of electronic devices such as guitar effects, children’s toys and synthesizers to create new musical instruments and sound generators. I stumbled upon Waterhed’s Benstruments while looking for information about modified Fisher Price Pixelvision PXL 2000 cameras.
His PXL 2000 sample film reminds me a lot of my own video art attempts in the 80’s.
Posted by api at 09:39 - No Comments »
News – Why Peter Jackson went to Ubi
Ancel’s 30-strong team swelled to 80 for the development of the King Kong titles, which have a budget of more than $20 million. Jackson will take a portion of the game’s profits, but they’re not saying how much.
The team flew to New Zealand in April of last year to meet Jackson, who told them his plans for the plot and described the way various scenes would appear on screen. They also got to see sketches of Kong’s home, Skull Island, drawings of creatures that aren’t going to feature in the film – such as giant bats – and of course the monkey himself.
“He showed gestures of Kong and explained how Kong moved,” Ancel told the NY Times.
“It was like an interview with Kong himself.”
I tried the demo of King Kong the game and it was indeed a much more cinematic experience than you might expect. There are only two levels in the demo, but even in that brief period one could see a special attention to both the ambience and dramaturgy in the game. There were cut scenes and neat funnel type visual filter effects that went along well with excellent ambient audio work. I rather liked the level where you could play King Kong in third person view. He really felt like a giant gorilla.
I also downloaded a few other game demos to see where the FPS scene is at the moment. Call of Duty 2 was massive, loud and full of chaotic action. Excellent technical execution and ,in a way, quite cinematic as well.
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RoamAlert Wander Prevention
The total solution for wander prevention
No other wander prevention system offers the same level of flexibility and scalability, combined with ease of use for staff and administrators.
Benefits of the RoamAlert system
To the wanderer:
Freedom to interact with other residents
Freedom to use facility’s resources
Safety from wandering into dangerous areas
To cognitive residents:
Freedom to mingle with all residents
Avoid “prison lock-down” image
To the facility:
RoamAlert becomes the first line of defense
Insurance coverage
Quick response to wandering
How would you feel about a RFID based tracking device implanted in your arm to prevent you from wandering at an elderly home?
Posted by api at 10:26 - 2 Comments »
Welcome to gizmondo.com
Gizmondo sets the standard for mobile gaming. With 400Mhz of processor power, a state of the art graphics chip from Nvidia and a huge, high resolution TFT screen, Gizmondo totally outclasses all other mobile gaming devices.
Built-in GPS technology allows players to discover the true meaning of mobile gaming. Some of the most exciting, innovative and interactive experiences the gaming industry has ever seen are currently in development.
I’ve been looking to buy a GPS unit for years now, but a suitable unit just hasn’t come along yet. I’d like to get something that supports custom maps and is reasonably small. Various PDAs have GPS built in these days and Suunto is even selling a GPS wristwatch.
Nokias 5140 cell phone has a GPS shell which is about 150 euros or so, I think. Nokia is also selling a bluetooth GPS unit which works with Series 60 phones such as N-Gage. Ipaq HW6515 has built-in GPS as well.
Anyways, to short-list my flavor of the month acronyms, here they are: GPS, GPRS, Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, SD card memory. I really don’t think it’s too much to ask.
Gizmondo comes close, but I don’t think it has any voice capabilities and no wi-fi either. I’ll just keep on waiting.
Posted by api at 14:20 - No Comments »
Gates, doors, windows, alleyways, deep holes, little sneaky openings into horrible nothingness, you get the idea? Entrances. Not descriptions, not statuary, trees, not wine glasses, fences, not signs, not celery.
Entrances.
To.
Hell.
Posted by api at 12:42 - No Comments »
Transworld : Book Details for Bravo Two Zero
In January 1991, eight members of the SAS regiment embarked upon a top secret mission that was to infiltrate them deep behind enemy lines. Under the command of Sergeant Andy McNab, they were to sever the underground communication link between Baghdad and north-west Iraq, and to seek and destroy mobile Scud launchers. Their call sign: BRAVO TWO ZERO.
Each man laden with 15 stone of equipment, they patrolled 20km across flat desert to reach their objective. Within days, their location was compromised.After a fierce firefight, they were forced to escape and evade on foot to the Syrian border. In the desperate action that followed, though stricken by hypothermia and other injuries, the patrol ‘went ballistic’.Four men were captured. Three died. Only one escaped. For the survivors, however, the worst ordeals were to come. Delivered to Baghdad, they were tortured with a savagery for which not even their intensive SAS training had prepared them.
Bravo Two Zero is a breathtaking account of Special Forces soldiering: a chronicle of superhuman courage, endurance and dark humour in the face of overwhelming odds.
I learned today that hurricane names are retired from the names list if one comes along that causes a lot death and destruction. Therefore, there will be no other storms called Wilma or Katrina coming around any time soon. I don’t think any patrol will be called B20 again either.
It’s a controversial book and many books criticizing this account have been published after the first one. Still, one can’t deny that the writer was indeed there on the field and that makes his view more credible.
A movie based on the story has been made as well.
Posted by api at 11:23 - 3 Comments »
Anonymous Portrait Gallery – The Outsider Pages
Anonymous art is wonderfully simple. What’s there is what the artist put into it, no more or less. Intentions and creative contexts, ethnicity, mental diagnosis, educational background, the artist’s art-historical role — all are ciphers. In place of biography there is mystery, and the creative process speaks for itself to viewers who are as anonymous to the artist as the artist is to them.
There is a purity to this, but also a crap shoot. The artist does not know (and intentionally or by misdirection does not care) where and how the art will be viewed. At flea markets, thrift stores, yard sales and junk shops, the audience, and the art, are left to their own devices.
That is not to say there is no context. The flea market creates its own environment, imparting a meaning to everything found there. The artifacts of creative effort, along with the old tools, scratchy LPs, broken furniture and collectible jelly jars share in a kind of negation: The lowest-common-denominator quality that unites all the junkscape’s objects into an ashes-to-ashes, all-is-vanity message — except in that magical moment when the right collector spots the right object.
“Outsider art”, thrift store art and anonymous art can sometimes be much more rewarding than most established “museum quality” art. Some people collect this stuff. Interestingideas.com is a bit dated, but it’s a good introduction to the subject.
Thriftstoreart.com has dozens of perplexing masterpieces on display as well. Highly recommended.
Posted by api at 09:38 - No Comments »
I/O Brush: The World as the Palette
I/O
Brush is a new drawing tool to explore colors, textures, and movements
found in everyday materials by “picking up” and drawing
with them. I/O Brush looks like a regular physical paintbrush but
has a small video camera with lights and touch sensors embedded
inside. Outside of the drawing canvas, the brush can pick up color,
texture, and movement of a brushed surface. On the canvas, artists
can draw with the special “ink” they just picked up from
their immediate environment.
I stumbled upon a video of this wonder of creativity at Youtube.com.
MIT media lab still rules.
Most drawing tools/pens we use today allow only a one-way flow of ink, and we are oblivious to how the content of the tool came to exist inside. What if we could not only have control over the outflow of the ink, but also have influence on what goes inside? Indeed, old fountain pens served as both tools to pick up and release the ink, and paintbrushes still preserve that function. We bring back this tradition of a drawing tool as both an input and output device, but instead of picking up the liquid ink, I/O Brush lifts up and captures photons.
Posted by api at 11:19 - No Comments »
Ness and I got sick of his whistling. Laws platform in the background.
Snow_girl is a stationed at the Halley Antarctic Research Station. She has uploaded dozens of amazing pictures to Flickr. Not only the surroundings, but also the social atmosphere over there seems to something really unique and wonderful.
Posted by api at 23:33 - 2 Comments »
BBC News | In pictures | Wildlife Photography 2005
Manuel Presti, from Italy, wins the Wildlife Photographer of the Year 2005 for his swirling image of a flock of starlings evading a peregrine falcon. The WPY is jointly organised each year by the Natural History Museum and BBC Wildlife Magazine.
Winning photos of year 2004 are impressive as well.
Posted by api at 09:18 - No Comments »
Tidalforce electric bike review
I have been riding electric power assisted bicycles for the last four years beginning with a Mercedes hybrid pedelec. I rode the Mercedes for over three years, logging over 7,000 miles in all. My daily ride includes mixed trails and roads and I rode the heck out of my Mercedes until the second motor failed and the second set of tires were literally worn bare. At that time, the Mercedes was the best electric bicycle I had ever had the pleasure of riding and I couldn’t conceive of getting anything else to replace it with. I was looking for another Mercedes when Wavecrest announced the release of its TidalForce M-750. Designed for the military special forces with a silent running motor and flat black Montague folding frame, it is a high testosterone ride to say the least and it got my attention immediately. The early reviews were very positive and it became apparent that this bicycle comes with miles and miles of smilage. I am happy to report that smiling is what I have been doing constantly these last few months. This TidalForce is a great replacement for my Mercedes Hybrid Bike offering superior performance and function across the board.
Electric bicycles have come a long way as well. Unlike the concept fuel cell electric motorbike below, TidalForce M-750 is available today. Not surprisingly, it has received rave reviews. I’ll try my best to test ride one while I’m in California in next December. $3000 is well within pain treshold for a high-end bicycle. They have three different motor options: 500W, 750W and a hefty 1000W for off-road riding.
The motor and battery pack integration in wheel hubs is pure genius.
EDIT: I just read two news items: In the European union pedal-assisted electric bikes are limited to 200W motors to be street legal and Wavecrest has apparently ceased the production TidalForce bikes 
Posted by api at 13:39 - 6 Comments »
World’s First Purpose-Built Fuel Cell Motorbike Makes North American Debut
ENV, pronounced “envy,” was engineered and purpose-built from the ground
up, utilizing Intelligent Energy’s world-renowned CORE, a radically compact
and efficient fuel cell, in order to demonstrate the everyday applicability of
fuel cell technology. The CORE is detachable from the bike and is capable of
powering anything from an ATV or a personal watercraft, to a small home.
“The ENV offers an exhilarating glimpse of the clean-and-green lifestyle
that can be achieved through fuel cell technology,” said Intelligent Energy
CEO Harry Bradbury. “In the none-too-distant future, people will be able to
use a bike like ENV to leave work in an urban environment, drive to the
countryside, detach the CORE and attach it to another vehicle, such as a
motorboat, before going on to power a log cabin with the very same fuel cell,
which could then be recharged from a mini hydrogen creator the size of a
shoebox.”
This sophisticated prototype is certain to hit mass production quite soon. Their website is very compelling and the real hurdle isn’t the vehicle, but the hydrogen refill station infrastructure. I’m not sure how to obtain hydrogen at the moment, but the company also has plans for $1500 “hydrogen-converters” that extract hydrogen from more readily available sources such as corn ethanol.
Posted by api at 09:49 - 3 Comments »
Halang glacier
A Greenpeace team visited the Halong
Glaciers in the A’nyemaqen Mountains, Qinghai-Tibet Plateau, to document the retreating glaciers in the region. Greenpeace found during the past 30 years, the glaciers of the Yellow River source region have shrunk by 17%. This could leave the region without glaciers by the end of the century and is an alarming sign of climate impact on the source of China’s mother river- the Yellow River.
I’m not sure if “retreating” is the correct scientific term, but glaciers all over the world are indeed diminishing in size. For more details see Word Glacier Monitoring Service
Posted by api at 10:10 - No Comments »
