The Beatles: Mostly played in major key, apparently

Designer Michael Deal embarks on an impressive if not somewhat obsessive effort to illustrate the work of The Beatles in infographics.

Here’s an example showing the musical key distribution of their albums and a conclusion that on average they played mostly in a major key:

Looks kind of like Magical Mystery Tour had the most minor key of any of them. Wasn’t that their least popular album? Coincidence?

http://www.mikemake.com/media/72772/Keys2.5-webfull_o.gif

Other samples here:
http://mikemake.com/#72772/Charting-the-Beatles

 

The relationship between music and graphics begins with musical notes on paper ahead of a recording session. Interesting to see graphics at the other end.

@iclazie

HT Flowing Data

iPad vs Kindle vs Rock

So how does an iPad really stack up against its competitors? We did a quick analysis and compared it with the Kindle and a ten thousand year old rock. The results are in:

Sidenote: Just for fun ok! Also full respect and homage to the original iPhone Vs Rock parody from a few years ago (author unknown) here:

The world’s first augmented reality t-shirt

Good old rock, paper scissors. With this t-shirt you don’t need a friend to play. Just stand in front of the webcam and hey presto. I’m now thinking of ideas to build on this. Watch this space Check it out (via)

@handypearce

The Banksy Movie

I’m very much looking forward to this. Not because I’m jumping on the Banksy band wagon (Back in my uni days I went to one of his first exhibitions and failed to buy a piece of his work for peanuts … foolish) but because I’m pretty sure it will be nothing like the trailer and do something completely unexpected.

Anyway, here’s the trailer if you haven’t seen it already:

Inspiring examples of tactile creative execution

Before computers became useful and the internets invaded our homes, people made things from wood and fabric and paint and sticks. It was messy and sometimes smelly and quite often you’d cut your finger.

What I love about these examples is they demonstrate people going out of their way to use real world materials and knowing when to slow down and consider a different approach. An approach that might seem absurd at the time but could lead to great things.

HunterGatherer makes simply beautiful things. Then they make them appear to move. These guys love their wood grain.

HunterGatherer from Arkitip, Inc. on Vimeo.

Johnny Kelly likes paper a lot. Someone should tell him he could really cut his finger on that.

Making of ‘The Seed’ from Johnny Kelly on Vimeo.

I’m seriously hoping no interns were harmed in the making of this bit of stop motion animation from THANK YOU in Denmark.

BOOGIE Prisen from THANK YOU on Vimeo.

Here in the studio at Amnesia Razorfish we’ve been known to occasionally step away from the keyboards to create things out of real materials.

Sandor Moldan and Mike Kleinman worked bizarre magic on the previous incarnation of Mountain Dew’s site for Australia. Claymation zombies and bitchslapped rhinos adorned a hand crafted mountain of delights. (The site is no longer live, unfortunately.)

…and more recently Sandor and @eunmac created a wave tank for the background effect in the site we concepted and built for P&O Cruises Australia.

Check out the “making of” here…

@iclazie

Thoughts on Silverlight

Great article and helpful insight about Big Spaceship’s experience working with Silverlight.

“I had the pleasure of diving headfirst into Silverlight in building the Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show. I walked in with the same sort of attitude that I believe is prevelant across the industry at the moment — Silverlight is an inferior platform, that we were working with a Flash wananbe and that this would be to the project’s detriment. Why use Silverlight when I can already know Flash so well? It does the same things as Flash anyway, right?…”

Read the full article…

via Big Spaceship

@dankrause

Pepsi powered mobile phone

My iphone ran out of battery last night … pesky thing. I’m too impatient to wait and see if Steve has a solution to this problem so I started searching. Anyway, I stumbled across this piece of innovation: a phone that runs on pepsi … well any fizzy pop.

This little beauty is made possible thanks to a bio battery:

Bio battery has the potential to operate three to four times longer on a single charge than conventional lithium batteries and it could be fully biodegradable. Meanwhile, it brings a whole new perception to batteries and afternoon tea.

Genius. More here

@handypearce

Kleinmania hits Threadless

Our very own Michael Kleinman presents (another) sequel to the most amazing shirt in the world.

What started as a bit of a laugh could end up as a 4-color screen print with plastisol ink and a chino additive for softness.

Mike is too proud to ask for votes, so I’m asking you to go check it out and get clicky on the 5 if you like it!

The Internet Built My Cable Organiser

Something that has always bothered me about my MacBook Pro is the power cable. Sure, it has those nice little hook things to wrap the “small” end around, but what if you use the extra long power cable? You know, the other that it actually EARTHED so you don’t DIE? That can only be wrapped loosely around the power pack so it can later uncoil and suffocate the contents of your laptop bag.

Happily, I saw the PowerCurl on an Apple blog the other day and ordered it immediately.

Even more interesting than the product itself is the site that birthed it.

Quirky is a “social product development” community. Users can pay to submit an idea for a product which is then evaulated and refined by a larger community. If the product gets enough love, then it goes into manufacture with a percentage of profits going to all the users involved.

Check out  the “quirky in 30 seconds” video:

So I’d like to thank Jeff Scholen of Atlanta, Georgia (and a cast of several dozen others) for the PowerCurl.

Apples new touch gestures for the tablet

Ok Ok I don’t know anything about the tablet, but I read this article on crunchgear and FingerWorks, a company Apple bought a few years back, has an interesting patent about how to extend multitouch gestures.

Check out the video where some of them are explained – funnily enough with the help of a Microsoft Surface table.

It’s going to be even more confusing if all that gets implemented.

My Top 10 gadgets at CES this year

I wish I had the time (and money) to go to CES this year, but thankfully all my favourite tech sites were covering it very well.

So looking at all the new gadgets coming out I thought I share my favourites with you – they are in no particular order

1. The transparent laptop screen – Samsung 14 inch Transparent OLED

2. HP Slate tablet – Apple is meant to do it – MS and HP have done it

3. A.R Drone – a Quadcopter controlled by your iPhone (we mentioned it here already)

4. liquid Image HD snow goggles and underwater goggles – all you need for your own discovery movies

5. Peregrine Glove Game controller

6. LBO Light Touch – have an interactive surface on any surface (we mentioned it here already)

7. Finally some USB 3.0 products – superspeed here we come

8. PlasticLogic Que Pro eBook reader/tablet – very sexy

9. Project Natal – can’t wait to connect this to my Xbox360

10. Zyxio Sensawaft – move your cursor with your breath

something additional – these didn’t quite make it into my top 10, but are still pretty cool

The instant Camareas are back – non digital – Polaroid makes a comeback with the Polaroid Pic 1000

Lenovo bringing out a phone

Panasonic 152 inch 3D TV and wireless HDMI transfer

MSI Dual screen multitouch tablet

Light touch is like surface on any surface

The CES is on in Vegas and everyone is just flooding you with new and exciting gadgets.

And one of the things that caught my eye is the Light Touch by Light Blue Optics.

It is a laser projector that turns any flat surface into an auto-focused and image-adjusted 10-inch touchscreen with WVGA resolution thanks to its laser- based pico projection engine dubbed HLP (holographic laser projection) and infrared touch-sensing system.

When I first saw the press release and all its nice staged photos I thought it can’t be that great and responsive, but engadget had a hands-on and it looks pretty cool.

They show off a few apps and the picture one is a lot like  surface if you ask me.

Unfortunately there is no price anywhere.

Refreshingly Fun: What we’ve been doing with Pepsi

You’ve probably seen the billboards and bus ads by now, but in case you weren’t aware, we recently launched the digital side of Pepsi’s new Hit Refresh campaign. MTV are pushing it on television, we’re running it here on the ‘net.

It’s pretty cool, a mash-up of Pepsi re-inventing their image and placing a huge focus on digital marketing the combination of which turned into a Twitter based scavenger hunt, with the prizes coming in the form of cold hard cash. Well, not cash so much as 101 slick little EFTPOS cards loaded up with $250 each.

A brief run down: the refreshment company activation team (known as Pepsi Refreshers) make their way out into the world, choose an obscure location in a well populated Australian city, and then start tweeting out clues about where they are from the Pepsi Australia Twitter page. We’ve rigged it so that game playing, money lusting, Pepsi fans can also catch these updates on the Facebook Page, or at the Hit Refresh site, in order to more effectively race each other to the prize.

This is excellent because the entire thing can essentially be run from a smartphone, an easy thing for a Pepsi Refresher to have on them at all times. Plus, the players themselves aren’t tied into any particular service in order to keep up with the clues. It’s infectious, interactive, and incredibly efficient – social media at its best, really.

Creative mastermind Toby Caves really took advantage of the fact that APIs and widgets basically rule the internet now, and the main campaign site grew into a deliciously crafted overview of everything that’s happened, and is happening in the competition at any given time.

The latest clues are fed in from the Twitter page, Facebook fans are prominently displayed, a schedule and Google powered map let people know which cities the Refreshers are going to pop up in next and the Winners Gallery shows off all those lucky sods with their fancy new free money cards. It’s all ruled over by an explanatory Flash header, and coated in a vibrant blue that only exists between shades of Pepsi and Twitter.

Speaking of those cards, we feel like they’re a bit of a win. Based on the global Refresh campaign posters and candy colour palette, they are a bit more recognisable and fun than straight up cash in your hand while still being just as usable.

Stamped with the new Pepsi globe logo, we’ve also slapped some helpful thematic suggestions for spending the well won dollars. Things like style, scene, and so on – after all, if you win a prize you shouldn’t be using it to pay your bills (unless you really need to, then it’s ok). As a general rule though, prizes are fun, should be used for fun, should be spent on your self, and we wanted to encourage that.

We wanted the prize cards to be like the campaign, simple, effective, fun and it feels like we nailed it.

No, it’s not modest or polite to rave on about oneself, but this is a pretty exciting project for us, and the response so far has been amazing, so we thought we’d throw out a few more details and see what you all think.

Check out the campaign, hit us up in the comments and let us know.

The Hype about Avatar

I have to say that when the first trailer of Avatar appeared I was fascinated by it and even though I haven’t seen the movie, everyone I talk to is telling me how awesome it is so I can’t wait to finally find the time and see it.

What I find interesting is the whole 3D thing about it. There are hardly any movies out there that show it without 3D and a few people that have seen it in 3D have told me that they are going back to see it again without the glasses. Especially the fast moving scenes just blur out and you can hardly see anything. Did you experience the same?

Also the movie made over USD 1 Billion within 17 days of its release – that is amazing. I know the movie was estimated to cost USD 237 million with $150 million for promotion, but that still means that within 17 days they made their money back and tripled it.

I thought that we are all aware of the fact that this movie is fiction, but there seem to be people out there that are getting depressed by the fact that the dream of Pandora is being intangible. If you are one of them than check out this forum – you might find help – http://avatar-forums.com/showthread.php?t=43

But if you still don’t have enough and you want to at least make yourself look like a Navi, here is how you can do it digitally in Photoshop

Anyway – I will try and see the movie as soon as possible and add a few more dollars to the enormous amount they already made.

Let me know what you thought of it in the comments.

AdNews running competition to find in house social media expert.

A subtle but very interesting social media career opportunity appeared on the AdNews newsletter yesterday. In a bid to find the perfect person to run social media at AdNews (or as the ad says “The AdNews Online Ninja”) AdNews has asked for “an original idea that achieves spectacular results” brought to life using digital means along with the plain old CV. There’s not a lot of time to get busy – applications close on Jan 27.

Details here:
http://www.yaffa.com.au/adnews/OnlineNinjaAD.pdf

Below: Pop Digital culture – Ninja beats Pirate.

Feed43 for turning pages and odd feeds to a valid RSS feed

Have you ever looked at an html web page and wanted to get the content of that page in a feed? Or maybe you use a service like the Google Calendar that has feeds but not in a standard format?

I was recently asked internally to find a way to feed that content in as an RSS feed so it could be loaded into a WordPress.com site – out of the box, they don’t support Google Calendar – and I stumbled upon a tutorial for converting that feed into RSS using Feed43.

The tool works by entering the feed you want, and then setting up some regular expressions to pattern match the data you want, and then outputting that into a feed – believe me, it’s easier than it sounds.

The service allows you to take any site the outputs a structured document – an XML feed, html, etc – and make that into a useable feed. It’s ideal for sites where you want to make an RSS feed, but don’t want the overhead of creating an RSS feed on your server – one less page to maintain.

It even works for those pesky non-standard RSS feeds that people seem so fond of creating (still don’t understand why it’s so hard to stick to a simple standard like that given the benefits of doing so).

The only downside I can come up with is if the source document changes, the feed will stop working until you modify it. Oh, and you might want to make some of the feeds private for your own use. You don’t want to start infringing on copyright do you?

It’s a free tool – they say in the FAQs that it will always be free – but registration gives you an opportunity to manage your feeds more, and the paid service gives you more control and faster updates.

Feed43 is well worth checking out, even if you want an RSS feed for one of your pages without the overhead of actually making the feed.

Technorati Tags: RSS,Feed,News,Syndication

People Power Keeping Wikipedia Alive and Well.

A note posted by Wikipedia Founder Jimmy Wales recently (here) speaks for itself. Whilst Brin, Page, Zuckerberg, Stone, Dorsey (Google, Facebook, Twitter founders) are the corporate internet rock stars, Jimmy along with Larry Sangar and others can stand proud seeing the results of recent fund raising for Wikipedia which is a non-profit organisation and currently the 5th largest site in the world.

Wikipedia stands tall above all others as the ultimate proof of concept for crowdsourcing – a model few would have considered possible 15 years ago, but now commonplace in most social media and digital strategies. Congrats to Wikipedia on continually proving everyone wrong

“Thank You from Wikipedia founder, Jimmy Wales

Wow. What can I say? Thank you.

We’ve just ended the most successful fundraiser in our history, $7.5 million USD raised in less than 8 weeks.

Incredible. But I’m not surprised.

In 2001, I took a bet on people, and you’ve never let me down.

You have created the largest collection of human knowledge ever assembled: 14 million encyclopedia articles in 270 languages, still growing and getting better every day. You have supported, funded and protected it.

Advertising doesn’t pay for Wikipedia. You do. Wikipedia is the fifth most visited website on earth – 340 million people last month – and we run our servers and pay our lean staff entirely with donations.

Your donations keep Wikipedia free to use and free of ads. Your donations keep spreading free access to knowledge all across the earth.

Thank you for everything you give to make Wikipedia a reality. I’ve been inspired by your comments, and feel privileged to witness your passion for Wikipedia.

• “When I’m at a loss for answers in life, you are always here to rescue me!” – Lauren Sierra

• “To my 6-year-old son, Wikipedia is a wonderful window into the world’s knowledge.” – Pilgrim Beart

• “Wikipedia é muito importante para todos. É uma conquista da humanidade.” – Fernando Borba

• "Wikipedia is all about fulfilling one simple need: immediate access to high quality information on any topic you can think of. That is why I’m glad to support it." – Joao Nunes

It’s an amazing story. There’s nothing else like it.

And if you haven’t yet made a contribution to support Wikipedia, it’s not too late. You can still make a gift to support the free and open sharing of knowledge. Just click here.

I also encourage you to support our friends:

• Creative Commons makes it easier for anyone to share and build upon the work of others. Make a donation to Creative Commons.
• The Electronic Frontier Foundation defends the rights of all Internet users. Make a donation to the EFF.
• The Free Software Foundation promotes the development of free software and supports the rights of computers users. Make a donation to the FSF.

Thank you again.

Wikipedia forever,

Jimmy Wales

Founder, Wikipedia”

Social Media Site with a twist. You pay up if you don’t Stickk to your commitment.

Interesting twist on an old idea but using social media – with a financial incentive. You chose your goal but if you don’t stick to those goals you lose the money you pledged to keeping that goal. You have to appoint a referee and of course gather your supporters to watch you keep or lose your money. Visit the site: http://www.stickk.com/

 

 

Below:
Example of someone trying not to drink so much. You can see that so far they have lost $20 of the $240 pledged.

 

 

The end of The Gruen Transfer?

One of my less exciting daily digital pastimes is keeping an on expired .com.au domain names. Today I noticed that one of the domains that just became available on 01/01/2010 was www.gruentransfer.com.au. So it appears this might be the end for that particular URL (unless somebody forgot to renew it). So what does that mean for the show and a third season? Read on before you jump to conclusions… 

Below: The URL… www.gruentransfer.com.au nothing to see here.

 

 

Why abandon a URL?
Firstly, there is no obvious record that the ABC actually owned this domain in the first place or that it was actively used. In the instance of The Gruen Transfer, the primary URL for the show is a subdirectory off the ABC website (here) but in my experience it’s usually a good strategy to keep relevant domain names in the back pocket no matter what. Most often, the excuse given for letting a domain lapse is “we weren’t using it” but there are a few reasons for keeping URLs which relate directly to something that is active even if it is not the primary domain such as protecting intellectual property and to form a part of an SEO/SEM and Link strategy. In addition digital consumers are known to occasionally go for a direct punt on a url into the browser address bar so a DNS redirect or meta refresh is an easy tactic to handle traffic from this.

Recommendation:
Regardless of past ownership ABC should register gruentransfer.com.au and thegruentransfer.com.au. $55 for two years is a worthwhile investment for them (if the show is to continue).

Stats:
Every month hundreds of .com.au URLs expire without being renewed in Australia. Here’s some stats from AuDA for 08/09 – hopefully the 2009 results will be available soon.

Note: There are several services that provide information on expired domains which can easily be found using Google or Bing:

~@eunmac