No man can serve two masters

The withering rejoinder

The Media Futures conference I went to the other week, reminded me of a little phrase that a planner I used to work with (Abe) said was invaluable. The basic idea is that whenever anyone makes some claim or tries to peddle you a message, the immediate response to this should be 'so what'.

This 'withering rejoinder' as Dr Brian Winston put it, is the acid test for whether any innovation really is likely to change the society it goes into. It is also the thing that every person asks themselves whenever they see your marketing hyperbole.

Use the 'so what?' test next time. You will see it works.

Vodafone McLaren Mercedes Valentines message

Through the looking glass

Sweden has an embassy in Second Life.

The real Swedish embassy in Washington DC has a video wall with a webcam that points into a room the Second Life embassy.

The Second Life embassy has a video wall that points into the real embassy in DC, so the overall effect is that there is a looking glass between the two worlds. It’s a bit of a head-fuck.

Have a look at this Fox News TV story about it.

Now hear the word of the Lord... 2.0

The countdown has begun

Sorenta Shakedown - Sony Ericsson / Vodafone campaign

This is the final result of the little trip to Rome at the end of October. The site is live in across all the markets now, and the ads are live. The celebratory bottle of Limoncello will be breached shortly...

Some nice flash actionscripting of the shake function on the phone - I think it's called SenseMe. Get the old boy's hang-dog expression. I love it.

We used a tobacco filter on this shot. At least that's what they told me while I was busy carrying the bags, drinking coffee and scoffing Italian cakes.

Very pleased with the end result - especially amazing was the shoestring budget managed to stretch to about 15 crew on set, plus all the cast, a grade in the Framestore and subtitling in eight languages!

However, the project is unlikely to be contributing in any meaningful way into Mark Collier's holiday fund.

First life to second life phone calls are here

You know what it’s like. You’re chatting to your robot friend whilst skydiving from a floating marshmallow castle when you realise you’re late for work.

Wouldn’t it be great if your second life didn’t have to end where your first life begins?

We think so too, so we created Vodafone InsideOut. It lets you call and text between Second Life and the real world. The Beta service is live, so you can try it out now.

Second Life phone service from Vodafone now launched!

The beta is available until end November this year.

Lewis and Fernando: Dream Chasers

We've been working on this video podcast for the last couple of months, short videos from the pre-season build up with Lewis Hamilton and Fernando Alonso - surprisingly it has picked up massively over the last few days. Not sure why.

You can find it at iTunes or via Feedburner

The internet: demonstrated

From the nightclub / alternative culture night megatripolis circa 1994 - via www.megatripolisarchive.co.uk/

The wisdom of penguin

With apologies to everyone who works at Dare, as this came round on email on Friday, here is Penguin getting with the program, and that program is web 2.0. From the Penguin blog:

Over the next six weeks we want to see whether a community can really get together, put creative differences aside (or sort them out through discussion) and produce a novel.

Their motive, as perhaps you have guessed, is not entirely based on a pure social experiment in 'crowdsourcing'. The terms and conditions can't be modified in the wiki:

By posting your submission on the Wiki Novel and the Site, you grant us a non-exclusive, perpetual, royalty-free, world-wide licence to use, reproduce, modify, adapt, translate, publish, distribute and display any content you submit to us in any format now known or later developed. If you do not want to grant us these rights, please do not submit your content to us.

I guess apart from the slightly distasteful money grubbing of the ts n cs, there is one major problem with the concept. Creating a large and coherent whole out of small individual submissions does work, as wikipedia attests, however, I will be you that no-one has read every page wikipedia has on its site. Its genius emerges, like the intelligence of ants.

Unfortunately a controlling mind what is required from a task like writing a novel. At least someone has to know what happens to each character, and what the arc of the story is. And considering what the opening paragraphs currently read like and the fact that there are so far 44 characters and counting, this doesn't seem to be happening. Wikipedia also has a panel of committed moderators/contributors built up over time who fulfil the governance side of their site.

Somehow I don't think that anyone is going to be prepared to do that for Penguin, and put coins in the pocket of the man.

That said, who knows, if an eyeball can evolve from the primordial soup, maybe we could get the Pickwick Papers out of a couple of hundred tortured 18 year olds.