Right-Half Chow

Satellite Dish Camouflage

These guys just came up with a wonderful idea, just looking around in my neighbourhood there must be hundreds of satellite dishes polluting the view (not that the architecture is that much to boast with but you get the idea): there's at least six in view from my kitchen window. Now if only someone would come up with an incentive to make people actually use these stickers...

Yves Behar on the 100$ Laptop

A fantastic idea to start with, and a great design to boot. Christmas brings about the charity spirit, I was very impressed with the MusicForLife action by Belgian radio station Studio Brussel too, what a fantastic result even if it was hard to top last year's success. If you look at what a small country and one radio station can do (more than 3.300.000 Euro) you can feel the combined potential with new products and designs like these.

The Portal Song

Another rant about the lack of originality in modern computer games, and praise for the ones who do it different. Sorry for that...

Enter Portal, a game based on the very popular Half Life 2 engine, with one of the most endearing characters ever encountered in a game, even though it is an Artificial Intelligence project. The credits song (music by Jonathan Coulton) started to lead a life of it's own and this animation by VGCats is a fantastic interpretation.

It does some incredibly clever things with physics and -you guessed it- portals, and what's even more important: you will finish it within 3 hours. And I didn't mind: there's a whole market with people who are strapped for time and still willing to indulge in the occasional game. Options there are mostly limited to arcade-llike games with repititve gameplay (which can be fun) but this is something entirely different.

Enter the Aperture Research facility and navigate (in the broadest sense of the word) it's obstacle course. Then sit there with a big grin on your face and a lot of confusion in your head. Lyrics for the song below might give a slight hint. The movie below contains some very very slight spoilery type info, but nothing you can decode fully if you haven't played the game yet.

Oh, and remember: the cake is a lie...

This Was A Triumph
I'm Making A Note Here:
HUGE SUCCESS
It's hard to overstate
my satisfaction.
Aperture Science
We do what we must
because we can.
For the good of all of us.
Except the ones who are dead.

But there's no sense crying
over every mistake.
You just keep on trying
till you run out of cake.
And the Science gets done.
And you make a neat gun.
For the people who are
Still Alive

I'm not even angry.
I'm being so sincere right now.
Even though you broke my heart.
And killed me.
And tore me to pieces.
And threw every piece into a fire.
As they burned it hurt because
I was so happy for you!
Now these points of data
make a beautiful line.
And we're out of beta.
We're releasing on time.
So I'm GLAD. I got burned.
Think of all the things we learned
for the people who are
still alive.

Go ahead and leave me.
I think I prefer to stay inside.
Maybe you'll find someone else
to help you.
Maybe Black Mesa. . .
THAT WAS A JOKE. HAHA FAT CHANCE.
Anyway. this cake is great.
It's so delicious and moist.
Look at me still talking
When Theres Science to do.
When I look out there,
it makes me GLAD I'm not you.
I've experiments to run.
There is research to be done.
On the people who are
still alive.

And believe me I am still alive.

I'm doing Science and I'm still alive.

T feel FANTASTIC and I'm still alive.

While you're dying I'll be still.

And when you're dead I will be still alive.

It's not your brand

It's not what you tell people you are, it's not how you tell people to treat it, and it's not how you want people to feel. Coke went back to the original recipe, Nike brought back discontinued sneaker lines, Apple implemented a battery exchange program...

And Burger King cannot live without the Whopper, and as I'm a fan myself: damn right they can't. If there is one burger on earth that you shouldn't mess with it's the whopper, and that's coming from a guy in a country where Burger King doesn't even have one restaurant.

It's a pretty good idea to use it in a campaign though, acknowledging the fact that you are made by the people who buy you. Fans of brands in action, and even though I'm quite pleased with the lack of fastfood joints around here, the movie got me craving a Whopper like nothing else...

The Year in Ideas - NYT

Not another 'you were the star' article but a great list of ideas that sooner or later will have an impact on our lives. Even though you might question the usability of research on the relation between strippers' ovulation and their income...

Have a look at the cardboard bridge, the biodegradable coffin (what a wonderful idea), and lots of stuff on games, suprisingly. No, not digital ones but poker, checkers and rock, paper, scissors.

Crispin does Nike

The first Nike spot by Crispin (Via MakeTheLogoBigger). Apart from the music in the end it's pretty stimulating... and I know I'd feel intimidated, taking over a legacy like that:

FoodPairing

If you are a bit of an amateur cook, you could do worse than check out this site (Belgian, but in English, so don't let that be a hindrance). It allows you to check out the different flavor components of a selection of ingredients. Not in abstract flavor terms, but deconstructed in terms of other ingredients.

Kind of handy to find a practical taste-bridge when experimenting in the kitchen. Kind of reminded me of visualthesaurus, but this is static and better suited for dinner tables...

Harder Better Faster Stronger

If it wasn't a song title from their catalogue it would have to be the terms used to describe the new Daft Punk Live album. It captures the energy of one of their best concerts, is one of the most aptly mixed and masterd live albums I've ever got my hands on and just screams for you to go out and party instead of listen to the cd (which is an achievement in itself).

In celebration, this wonderful 'Daft Bodies' movie to the tune of... (keep watching, it takes a while until the gimmick starts):

The future is coming, but not tomorrow?

The Belgian Marketing Foundation had it's annual congress last friday and saturday and, apart from the ever excellent drinks and chat with colleagues and friends who happen to be in the same line of work, it was a bit of a downer on the speaker front. Lots of 'look how great we (as a Belgian company) did in the last few years, and I'm going to show you an uninspiring slideshow which could just as well be used for a bunch of venture capitalists the day before.

One of my highlights was the keynote by Peter Schwartz upon which people were commenting that it was 'not really marketing' afterwards... Hell! that's probably why he was interesting, because he shakes up the way you see your job and your life, it makes you think about marketing and where it's headed. While most other speakers just give solid, but very boring, confirmation that others are trying to do similar things and conquer recognisable problems using strategies that come straight out of the marketing manuals. They should forbid half of the speakers to talk about marketing in specifics, that might make it more interesting.

Schwartz talked about the way our kids will measure their lifespans in centuries, proclaimed enthusiastically that 'there is no limit to growth', talked about the rise of Mercedes families and the even larger number of bicycle magazines, of biochemistry and the way it is changing, on technological innovations that are more than a new way to carry film and audio, and so on...

The rate of change sped up so greatly in the last few years that we've become reluctant to try and depict the future, so it's kind of fresh to see someone so enthusiastic about what's coming up next. It's the seventies and 'flying car predictions' all over again, except that most of us became too afraid to predict anything because your car is still on the road today...

Then again, it looks like even technological forerunners like Google, YouTube and MySpace aren't really that courageous when it comes to predicting the future either, as evidenced by this piece from the Guardian, referenced on PSFK. If all you can dream about is your own product in new forms, what the hell are we supposed to expect from you?

Pimp my Billy

Ding3000, a German design house, have some pretty good ideas on how to 'pimp' the classic 'Billy' bookcase by Ikea...

If you opened up 'home' magazines lately you get the impression that there is a lot of this kind of stuff going about: the customisation or personalisation of standard serial objects. Most of the initiatives fall into the ornamental category though (differnt colour, flower motif, ...) but these really add something to the original object. Personally I really like this easily added 'Stütze' which makes sure that books, binders and whatever you put on it stays upright, even without bookstands. Check the other 2 here on Coolhunting.