Honda ASIMO conductor May 29, 2008

It wasn’t until last year that I realised there was a skill in conducting; either I was very naive or very lucky in having only experienced great conductors. It was a musicianship workshop last year that changed my mind – an entire afternoon dedicated to conducting skills, as each nervous stick waver walked up it dawned on me that this is actually a craft. I’d only ever seen conductors who were easy to follow and who could add a bit of style to the music; to suddenly see someone in front of us who couldn’t give a clear beat or any pazzaz to a piece was unnerving. It was amazing to see just how quickly a piece of music can fall apart when you’ve an inexperienced conductor.

In steps Honda for the solution to all our problems:

OK, so it’s wooden as hell and I’m not entirely sure that the orchestra isn’t just ignoring the robot, but the idea is cute. Our conductor wiggles and grinds a lot more than this though, so I need to put in a request to Honda for a robot with more dance moves. And crazy hair, all conductors must have weird hair.

I’d like to know if it’s radio controlled or pre-programmed. Radio controlled would make more sense for conducting, I guess.

I’d love to see 100 orchestras playing the same piece, each with a pre-programmed robot conducting, so they’re all playing the same thing at exactly the same time.

**Update**

The robot is programmed from a real conductor doing the piece, using movement trackers. That’s a bit disappointing. It’d be amazing if the robot could read any score and conduct from that, not just repeating human movements.

Awww… lovely, lovely Fire Eagle people May 23, 2008

I have a huge smile on my face, I just went down to reception to pick up two parcels. One being a huge bunch of flowers from the lovely boyfriend. The other parcel was a little more mysterious, a FedEx package from America. Aside from my landlord I don’t think I know anyone in the States.

I opened it to find another anniversary message, this one from the folks at Fire Eagle! They’ve sent a handmade card, two shirts, stickers and some more invites! I’m so thrilled, it’s rather wonderful of them. The card is beautiful, they’ve even got everybody to sign it! I’m going to wear the t-shirt next week to work, then walk around our tech dept and watch them all turn green with envy.

Big thanks to the Fire Eagle folks, they’re wonderful people.

Fire Eagle invite update May 22, 2008

How wonderful. I sent an email to Yahoo, detailing my desperate need for a Fire Eagle invite. I explained how the future of my relationship depended on my getting hold of the Yahoo equivalent of a Willy Wonka Golden Ticket. I get to my desk this morning, wait 10 minutes for Outlook to fire up and lo and behold there sits the reply from Fire Eagle HQ, complete with two lovely invites. I’m so pleased. I am now the best girlfriend in the entire world. I’m so thrilled that they were kind enough to send out two invites, I will be naming our future children Fire and Eagle as a token of my love for those chaps.

Fire Eagle invite May 21, 2008

Very soon I will have been dating my lovely, nerdy boyfriend for about 928 years. He doesn’t want a proper present. Offers of fish, jaunty hats and bicycle baskets were refused. Instead he wants a Fire Eagle invite. Umm… where the hell am I going to get one of those from? If anyone could help out I’d be soooo sooo grateful.

Thanks

xx

Innovation Edge conference May 21, 2008

I’m used to going to conferences in pubs and basements; where Power Point rules the day and you’re lucky if there is a toilet, yet alone lunch. Yesterday I lived the high life, going along to Nesta’s Innovation Edge conference at the Royal Festival Hall. Oh it was posh. There were free croissants and a choice of organic teas! Not one single speaker used PowerPoint!

The whole day was about innovation in technology as an aid to communities. Not online communities mind, actual real life ones. That confused me a little. People told us about banking projects in Africa, new types of doorhandles that stop kids from getting their hands stuck (an injury that apparently costs the NHS £200 million in hospital visits each year), and even people who grow mint. I’m not sure who they were helping.

Bob Geldof spoke for half an hour – he’s more intelligent than he looks. He was shockingly eloquent. I’d spent an entire day with him as his escort when I worked at MTV, he spent the entire time taking the piss out of my choice of outfit. I liked him better yesterday.

Gordon Brown popped along for ten minutes. He apparently gave the exact same speech that he’d given to Google the day before. How nice of him.

Michael Birch from Bebo talked too, as did Sir Tim Berners-Lee – that man is really rather dishy. Though no one else seems to agree with me on that.

Lots of the conference was just motivational piffle, little more than cheerleading, but I did come out of it with a few ideas. I want to be working on more CSR projects – so I’m going to spend the next few months looking at the CSR work that our clients do and where we can help with them. This might be from a simple visibility and marketing angle (setting up blogs, flickr accounts etc) or from a hardware/software angle (what do we have that we can offer projects or communities?).

I sent an email round work about fifteen mins ago telling people about the conference and got a reply from Dare Labs two mins later saying they’re already working on exactly this kind of thing and asking I if wanted to get involved! Hurrah!

Paint an album May 19, 2008

On Sunday the flat needed tidying, there was washing up to do, there was no milk or bread and I had no clean clothes. I had plans to solve all these issues, they were good stong plans with great intentions and I woke with a smidge of motivation until I discovered a wonderful Facebook group – “Draw Album Covers In MS Paint and Guess What They Are“. Oh dear. It wasn’t until about 4pm that I managed to stop raiding my CD collection and get cracking with the tidying. Needless to say there is still some washing up to be done. Oops.

Here are my four attempts, I didn’t really realise that you were supposed to make them reasonably hard to guess, so my first three were rather too easy. Oh well.

John Malkovich’s Snow Angel – the finished film! May 15, 2008

A few weeks ago I posted those first images from the John Malkovich animation, well the final film has just been finished and oh my, it’s rather wonderful.

The project was for Sony Vaio, we asked the ever brilliant Malkovich to write the first scene to a script and then asked everyone else to collaborate on the following scenes. We got tonnes of submissions from some amazing people, everyone from hairdressers through to professional script writers. Malkovich chose his favourite each month, from which everyone then wrote the following scene. We carried on like this until we had the finished script. The whole thing together is rather surreal, as you’d expect, but I love how it’s worked out. The final film is so kooky, and a little bit creepy!

I’m dead pleased that we managed to get it made into a film, it’s so nice for all the winners of the project to get something like that back for all their hard work.

So, with a big trumpet fanfare, here is Snow Angel…

Social Media Measurement Camp May 15, 2008

There are a lot of misconceptions surrounding the world of social media, these are some of the questions I get asked nearly every day

• How much does it cost to get someone to blog about this?
• Can we go onto forums to talk about this?
• How much does it cost to upload a video to YouTube?
• Surely if we upload the ad to YouTube then millions of people will watch it straight away?
• What do you mean it’s not news anymore? Is 6 months all that long ago?
• You can’t measure social media, can you? Therefore we don’t want to do it…

That last one is the biggest problem, for some reason people don’t think you can measure social media. Of course, you can’t measure the value of a relationship with someone and so most of what I talk about when pitching in work to a client is the inherent value of simply having these relationships and communication platforms to use. But, in addition to that, we do also work on benchmarks and measurables for campaigns; a client needs to know what they’re paying for, they need to see tangible results and we need look at results to gain learnings from the campaign.

It’s tricky though, there are thousands of things you can measure (and of course, thousands of things you shouldn’t measure – page views = zzzz…) around a social media campaign. It seems that nearly every week there is a conference in London about measuring social media. Unlike direct marketing and traditional advertising, we’re still in a relatively new industry and we don’t yet have industry standards and benchmarks for results.

Cue the drum roll and in steps the lovely Will McInnes, a man with questionable taste in socks, but with a wonderful goal to set up some industry standards for measurement. He’s started the Social Media Measurement Camp – a group of clever people who meet up to discuss this sparkly minefield. The second camp happened yesterday, we all sat in a grimy Soho pub, drew graphs on flipcharts and compared stories. It was wonderful to be open and honest with fellow social media-ers about what we measure, as well as how and when. We’re collating everything in a shiny wiki, which will hopefully run and run and become a rather comprehensive guide to social media measurement.

Clearly (and hopefully) we’ll never come up with one simple equation, as per banner ad sales (e.g. 0.25% click through rate); because that would be utter nonsense. Imagine quantifying relationships like that, it’d be horrible. I think we all agreed that we should never put a number against the value of a relationship, but instead look at outcomes of these relationships. So for NPD (e.g. Dell Idea Storm) we could look at how many new products or product changes we ended up making or the shift in brand perceptions after that NPD campaign.

For me, any numbers at the end of a project should always run alongside the story and the examples of improved relationships. Oh and some nice pictures of toddlers using iPhones. Everyone loves photos like that.

Anyway, it’s all very exciting. Go and look at the wiki and do add/edit away like mad. Or indeed, come along to the next meet up!
xx

MSN messenger to offer content May 12, 2008

I can’t believe it has taken so long, but finally users of MSN Messenger will be able to share clips. They’ve struck a deal with C4, MTV and EMI so that we can all share clips of PImp My Ride and Britney to our heart’s content. How wonderful. It is amazing that it has been so long in coming about, Messenger is used by 38726 trillion people worldwide and probably my most used social platform on a day to day basis.

It’d be lovely if it could integrate all types of video content as playable media and be a bit more like the Facebook Share A Link offering, but I imagine there’s a whole world of rights and licensing that would drown that possibility.

Oh well, in the meantime I’m just happy that I can spend all day sending my colleagues clips of the often naked Skins cast

x

Eeek May 6, 2008

I’ve been searching for screengrabs of Rollercoaster Tycoon this afternoon, it makes me happy that somehow this is part of my job. Though it has brought back a whole load of RT3 cravings, I do miss it terribly.

On my hunt I found this marvellous photo of a guy who has built a rollercoaster in his back garden. Annoyingly the blog I found it on doesn’t say who this slightly crazy chap is.