Innovation Research Center

The future. Sick presentation at TED India by MIT student Pranav...

Mon, 23 Nov 2009 08:19:45 +0100

The future. Sick presentation at TED India by MIT student Pranav Mistry.

Umberto Eco's list

Sat, 21 Nov 2009 08:49:00 +0100

Spiegel has an interesting interview with Umberto Eco. Where he discuss the nature of lists.

The list is the origin of culture. It’s part of the history of art and literature. What does culture want? To make infinity comprehensible. It also wants to create order — not always, but often. And how, as a human being, does one face infinity? How does one attempt to grasp the incomprehensible? Through lists, through catalogs, through collections in museums and through encyclopedias and dictionaries. There is an allure to enumerating how many women Don Giovanni slept with: It was 2,063, at least according to Mozart’s librettist, Lorenzo da Ponte. We also have completely practical lists — the shopping list, the will, the menu — that are also cultural achievements in their own right.

And on defining what you like:

I would be a fool to answer that; it would mean pinning myself down. I was fascinated with Stendhal at 13 and with Thomas Mann at 15 and, at 16, I loved Chopin. Then I spent my life getting to know the rest. Right now, Chopin is at the very top once again. If you interact with things in your life, everything is constantly changing. And if nothing changes, you’re an idiot.

"The first impression we wanted the audience to have is “child-like.” They were about to watch..."

Fri, 20 Nov 2009 12:57:19 +0100

“The first impression we wanted the audience to have is “child-like.” They were about to watch a whole feature starring a bucket of bolts; we needed to grab their hearts as fast as possible. We never wanted this to be a man in a robot outfit. I’ve seen many animated robots that were visually appealing, but I rarely believed in them, because they didn’t seem designed to do anything specific. Not so with Wall-E. He was designed by the Buy’N’Large Corporation to do one thing: crunch trash. Over the centuries of gathering trash, it seems he’s developed a soul and a personality.”

- Pixar artist Ralph Egglestone on designing Wall-E. Great interview, do give it a read.

Via Alfred.

Fri, 20 Nov 2009 12:26:00 +0100

Via Alfred.

"People are taking the piss out of you everyday. They butt into your life, take a cheap shot at you..."

Fri, 20 Nov 2009 09:11:41 +0100

“

People are taking the piss out of you everyday. They butt into your life, take a cheap shot at you and then disappear. They leer at you from tall buildings and make you feel small. They make flippant comments from buses that imply you’re not sexy enough and that all the fun is happening somewhere else. They are on TV making your girlfriend feel inadequate. They have access to the most sophisticated technology the world has ever seen and they bully you with it. They are “The Advertisers” and they are laughing at you.

You, however, are forbidden to touch them. Trademarks, intellectual property rights and copyright law mean advertisers can say what they like wherever they like with total impunity.

Fuck that. Any advert in a public space that gives you no choice whether you see it or not is yours. It’s yours to take, re-arrange and re-use. You can do whatever you like with it. Asking for permission is like asking to keep a rock someone just threw at your head.

You owe the companies nothing. Less than nothing, you especially don’t owe them any courtesy. They owe you. They have re-arranged the world to put themselves in front of you. They never asked for your permission, don’t even start asking for theirs.

”

- Banksy (via ambivalence) (via wreckandsalvage)

I honestly believe that a public advertiser should have to pay each person a mili-penny whose eyes fall upon it.

(via tedr)

Must. See.

Thu, 19 Nov 2009 09:31:00 +0100

Must. See.

Christopher's Gentle Fist

Tue, 17 Nov 2009 14:49:44 +0100

cdixon:

Buying something on Amazon today I noticed this graphic near the checkout button:

Apparently if I enter “Christopher’s Gentle Fist” on other websites I can use my Amazon shipping and payment info:

I would argue that when we’ve gotten to the point that we are asking users to type phrases like “Christopher’s gentle fist” in order to buy underwear and laptops, it is time to rethink our online payment security model.

Department of Surely We Live in the Future. $50 worth of...

Mon, 16 Nov 2009 17:02:00 +0100

Department of Surely We Live in the Future. $50 worth of eyetracking software and hardware built it. I really just want to say “Mega fucking super awesome”, but I’ll settle with “Game changing”.

soxiam: “let’s take a perfect product and craptimize it with...

Mon, 16 Nov 2009 10:12:09 +0100

soxiam:

“let’s take a perfect product and craptimize it with technology because we can.”

"Google actually relies on our users to help with our marketing. We have a very high percentage of..."

Sat, 14 Nov 2009 18:32:00 +0100

“Google actually relies on our users to help with our marketing. We have a very high percentage of our users who often tell others about our search engine.”

- Sergey Brin (via hiten

)

An excellent strategy that has clearly worked. But Sergey doesn’t mention PR. He doesn’t mention the advertising that Google buys. Who mentions the advertising that Google buys?

(via mikehudack)

All in all it seems to be little awareness regarding the hustling that goes on in successful internet companies. Maybe the Zynga case will shed some light on the actual activitities that makes success. Rather than oversimplify it the way Brin does here.

"There’s a story about the spot paintings, possibly apocryphal, that I love – that Hirst..."

Sat, 14 Nov 2009 18:26:46 +0100

“There’s a story about the spot paintings, possibly apocryphal, that I love – that Hirst started selling kits to make up the paintings for tens of thousands of pounds. In other words, he was charging people a fortune for painting them themselves. Hirst grins. Of course it’s true. It came about when a man said he’d like to buy a spot painting painted directly on to a wall and Hirst asked how he planned to do it. “He said, ‘Oh, just make me a certificate and give me some paint and tins. So I went through it in my head and worked it out – the certificate certified ownership of the artwork, the artwork must be painted by an authorised representative and the spots are these dimensions, these colours, and the spot painting can’t exist in two places at the same time. I bought my own tins, mixed the colours, put it all in a box, a brush for every tin, so you get 150 tins and 150 brushes, compass, pencil and a certificate.””

- Interesting and long interview with Damien Hirst. Which he ends with “Warhol said a brilliant thing. He said if anybody slags anything off, make more.”

nevver: Film Noir Photos Let’s get excited.

Fri, 13 Nov 2009 08:10:55 +0100

nevver:

Film Noir Photos

Let’s get excited.

Dear Every Site That Paginates Articles

Mon, 09 Nov 2009 10:51:45 +0100

marco:

I’m sure you split stories like this into two pages for a good reason: to save my bandwidth. After all, the remaining 3,126 characters of the story’s body (1,530 bytes as transferred with gzip compression) would have increased the page’s total size by 0.32%.

No, I’m just yanking your chain. I know you’re double-charging your advertisers for the same story by artificially inflating your pageview count. It’s just like the old auto-frame-refresh trick, but this one’s better because most of the ad networks haven’t banned it yet. That’s their problem, right? Why should you leave money on the table? You’re a business.

But it doesn’t really work as well as you had hoped because only a tiny percentage of viewers will actually read page two. You know that, but you don’t care, because you won’t give up a chance to make a few extra cents. Who cares if it annoys the crap out of that tiny slice of your audience? Who are they, anyway? The people who actually read your content thoroughly instead of skimming the headline and moving on? That can’t possibly be your most important audience segment — they’re just the most involved and attentive. Repeat customers. You already have their “eyeballs” that you can sell to your real customers. And these dupes get their eyeballs double-counted. What a steal!

Keep up the great work, publishers.

The Darwin Experience

Tue, 03 Nov 2009 19:07:22 +0100

I got the opportunity to visit the recently opened Darwin Centre this weekend. Read more about why it’s a bit special here. It certainly involves an interesting mix of physical objects, touch screens with the website and a bar code card acting as your very own harddrive of the experience.

Thanks to Max and Molly for taking me along.

"A mind is not blown, in spite of whatever Hollywood seems to teach, merely by action sequences,..."

Tue, 03 Nov 2009 12:17:59 +0100

“A mind is not blown, in spite of whatever Hollywood seems to teach, merely by action sequences, things exploding, thrilling planetscapes, wild bursts of speed. Those are good things. But a mind is blown when something you always feared but knew to be impossible turns out to be true; when the world turns out to be far vaster, far more marvelous or malevolent than you ever dreamed; when you get proof that everything is connected to everything else, that everything you know is wrong, that you are both the center of the universe and a tiny speck sailing off its nethermost edge.”

- - Michael Chabon on Storytelling for kids

(via @eovemar)

dubliner: juliasegal: When Jay-Z gets hungry… Yup, there’s...

Mon, 02 Nov 2009 22:45:32 +0100

dubliner:

juliasegal:

When Jay-Z gets hungry…

Yup, there’s more than my yearly salary in one food receipt.
A YEAR’S SALARY.
FML.

"…as Edson explains his world. Carbon-fiber angels watching the city by day and night, never..."

Tue, 27 Oct 2009 20:56:41 +0100

“…as Edson explains his world. Carbon-fiber angels watching the city by day and night, never ceasing, never hasting. Universal arfid tagging and monitoring where clothes on your back and the shoes on your feet and the toys in your pocket betray you. Total surveillance from rodovia toll cameras to passersby’s T—shirts or I-shades snatching casual shots; only the rich and the dead have privacy. Information not owned but rented; date stamped music and designer logos that must be constantly updated: intellectual property rights enforceable with death but murder pay-per-view prime time entertainment and pay-per-case policing. Every click of the Chillibeans, every message and call and map, every live Goooool! update, every road toll and every cafezinho generates a cloud of marketing information, a vapor trail across Sampa’s information sphere. Alibis, mulitple identities, backup selves - it’s not safe to be one thing for too long. Speed is life. She will be trying to work out how she can exist - must exist - in this world of Order and Progress, with no scan no print no number, a dead girl come back to life. As he is a dead man, driving west through the night traffic.”

- from Brazyl, p. 179

thedailywhat: Flow Chart of the Day: “Never put off until...

Sat, 17 Oct 2009 19:37:00 +0200

thedailywhat:

Flow Chart of the Day: “Never put off until tomorrow what you can do the day after tomorrow.” — Mark Twain.

[via.]

Throwing in some market research as well.

"Interestingly, a good novel likewise pulls me from myself. But it does so in a completely different..."

Thu, 15 Oct 2009 12:36:28 +0200

“Interestingly, a good novel likewise pulls me from myself. But it does so in a completely different way. A good novel brings me up against, or into, a fully imagined otherness. A single—transitive—otherness. I read about Prince Andrei dying on the battlefield and I am sharpened inside myself. I am given a single measure of experience and I hold it alongside mine, and when I mark the page and close the covers I am as full of singular existing as I have ever been. I have not found that, even a hint of it, in my online reading. I think it’s because the one reading encounter directs me into myself, the other sends me outward in widening spirals. Which is not always unpleasant—it’s just not gratifying from the point of view of these ultimates I invoke for myself.”

- Sven Birkerts, online vs offline reading experiences.

Seems like a good start.

Tue, 13 Oct 2009 10:14:49 +0200

Seems like a good start.