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This blog has moved

This blog has moved to www.innovationfeeder.wordpress.com

Please visit me there!

HBO Voyeur

In New York City HBO has just launched it's latest project - HBO Voyeur.
A brand new project directed by Jake Scott (...son of Ridley). It’s a multimedia display where you can peep into the goings-on in eight NYC apartments in one building, and see how the lives of their occupants are intertwined.

Check out the full story on :: Streetpeeper

Google goes green with Blackle

When your screen is white - an empty word page, or the Google page, your computer consumes 74 watts. Yet when it's black it consumes only 59 watts.

Mark Ontkussh wrote an article about the energy saving that would be achieved if Google had a black screen, taking in account the huge number of page views, according to his calculations, 750 mega watts/hour per year would be saved.

In a response to this article Google created a black version of its search engine, called Blackle, with the exact same functions as the white version, but with lower energy consumption.

Check out the full article :: EcoIron

Unbusiness cards

For those of you who don't work for a big cheese corporate with fancy pants business cards, Moo is definitely worth a look. They've taken what is essentially a fairly boring & standard product, the old business card, and breathed into it, a new lease of life.

Enter the unbusiness card. These pint sized little beauties are about half the size of your normal business card so they already look different. Plus they link in with Flickr so you can use your Flickr photos on the back of each card (you can use as many images as you want to make a variety of cards) to personalise them.

They're tiny, they look hot & they're cheap. What more could a girl want? except maybe a proper job...

Check it out :: Moo

Invite yourself

Call me a neophiliac but I love to be the first to try something new and this site is mecca for people that love a good beta. Instead of surfing aimlessly round the web looking for new startups launching betas or waiting patiently to be invited to join the first band of trial users, InviteShare let's you invite yourself to the party.

The site has covers a bunch of startups in beta mode and lists the invitations available. It lets those sites post the number of invitations available and minions like me request an invite to participate.

Won't you tell us how to get to Amie Street?

One of my favorite new music distribution services turns one year old today - Amie Street.

Amie Street’s business model is dead simple - Artists upload their music for download on the site. Users download songs, with the starting price at free. When downloads pick up for popular songs, the price starts to rise, all the way up to $0.99. If a song gets to $0.30 or so, you know its popular. The artist keeps 70% of revenues after the first $5 in sales. Songs are sold DRM-free in MP3 format. Users can also generate credit in Amie Street by recommending songs. Only a few recommendations are allowed, but if the song you promote does well, you get credit in your account that you can use to buy other songs.

Well known artists are starting to use the service. Barenaked Ladies, Master P, Romeo and the Meat Puppets are all distributing music on the site, which has now sold over half a million tracks to users.

Their pricing model encourages music lovers to discover and buy new music. If a song is free, it hasn’t been discovered by a wider audience. If a song is 98 cents, it’s already a must-hear hit.

Taken from :: Techcrunch

Geek is back

Remember the guy with glasses in the back row who never quite got it? Who never kicked the football far enough or could scull enough beer fast enough to enter the kingdom of coolness? The guy who nobody wanted to be, that is, until technology became cool and suddenly everyone got online, was talking html, pretending they understood the significance of metaverses and online gaming and suddenly the future's cool again.

Now we see the rise of fancy marketing phrases like 'participatory journalism' and 'we-media', every tom, dick and barry has a blog and what'd you know? geek is back.

And it's not just technology, we've got people geeking out over the future of the planet, organic macro wholefoods grown on environmentally sustainable farms, grassroots activism, economically sustainable social justice ventures.The cloud of coolness surrounding apathy has well and truly lifted and now it's cool to be into something. These days it's not just "what do you do?", the million dollar question has become, 'what are you into?'.

So whether you're geeking out over greenhouse gas or gluten, stand up and be counted, because life isn't a spectator sport and geek is well and truly in.

Swaptree now in beta

The latest addition to shopping & trading online is Swaptree, a site which lets users trade books, videos, music and games peer to peer.

You simply log on and create a list of things you're looking to trade and a list of items you'd like to trade for. Swaptree reviews your lists and sets up the trades for you, the idea being that you're willing to trade anything on your 'trade' list for anything on your 'want' list.

It doesn't cost you anything to trade so it looks like their business model depends on advertiser revenue rather than any user generated revenue.


They're in the midst of beta testing and are set to launch 4th July to the public.

Check it out :: swaptree

Storytron

Gamers wanting a deeper narrative, story lovers wishing they could step inside the action, or simply anyone interested in the next wave of gaming will want to check out Storytron, software for interactive storytelling that is now available in pre-alpha.

Creative types can use Storytron's Storyworld Authoring Tool (called Swat) to construct a "universe of dramatic possibilities" by establishing the personalities and agendas of a set of characters, along with other elements like locations, props and occurrences. Players within one of these created Storyworlds are story protagonists; their actions shape events.

Some in the gaming community are skeptical of Crawford's efforts but if you're an intrepid early adopter, you can download a version of Swat and start creating your dramas today.

by Jonathan Gottlieb
Check out the full story at Coolhunting.com

hell.com

The idea of net.art has been around for quite some time and is starting to get some attention on the web as several projects become more visible.
Wikipedia defines this kind of Internet art as art projects for which the Net is both a sufficient and necessary condition of viewing/expressing/participating.Net.artists use the web to communicate – often utilising URL addresses as part of the piece or message and also to give the ‘piece of art’ a sense of ownership. And in English... this basically means that if the artwork is made up of a URL and then a clever message on the homepage when The URL loads, then that particular work cannot be reproduced without the URL because the URL is intrinsic to the piece. Got it? Here’s an example – log on to www.hell.com and you will receive the following homepage. This my friends, is net.art.

Whilst some of you will be scratching your heads trying to work out why someone would bother creating that, looking at that or even writing about it, remember that part of being innovative is looking for people who think and approach things differently. Net.art is a completely different approach to not only the idea of art, but also the function of web pages and internet addresses.

So geek out over that.

lonelygirl15

By now we’ve all wasted countless hours downloading video content from Youtube.com, the latest portal in the rise of me-media. Anyone can create video content and upload it onto Youtube where users can search by subject or content creator. One set of videos which has been creating quite a stir of late is LonelyGirl15. The downloads started out as a series of videos apparently filmed and edited by a young teenager who is homeschooled by strict religious parents. The videos appear as if they are “home diaries” fi lmed by her friend Daniel and cover the day to day aspects of her life as a teenager.

Since the videos started airing there has been much controversy online about whether the footage (always tightly scripted, shot and edited) is the work of a professional fi lmmaking group. Adding to the speculation is the URL www.lonelygirl15.com
(currently inactive) which was live and registered 2 weeks before the
first video appeared on YouTube. A quick Google search on “Lonelygirl15” will give you over 2 million links suggesting that this is one project which has captured
the interest of many users online.

Speculation surrounding the ‘project’ suggests that the videos were created by a talent agent company as a ‘microdrama’ using Youtube as a new platform “giving birth to a new artform”. I work in petrol or slippers or pasta I hear you say.... what use is Lonelygirl15 to me? Well... hush a while... Judging by the incredibly high profi le and enormous popularity of the project(go on...do a search yourself) we can
see that an innovative approach to marketing (using a mini-drama narrative
to showcase talent) and an innovative distribution channel (free exposure on
Youtube) can provide more talkability and profile than your average television
spot ever could. And the nice thing about keeping abreast of new media
is that often it takes more guts and creativity than it does dollars. In the
case of Lonelygirl15, it took very few dollars indeed.