It's time for virtual worlds to go to work

LindenLabs have smartly given Secondlife, well a secondlife with the SL grid. An OS that allows developers to close off SL and use it in applications however they wish.

One of the more interesting uses we've seen is ImmersiveWorkspaces by developer Rivers Run Red.
ImmersiveWorkspaces enable people in disparate physical locations to come together in one place for the purpose of collaboration and communication using a suite of web based tools.

Farm spoke to Justin Bovington, CEO of Rivers Run Red

'We're just about to enter a new era of immersive collaboration, the need to reduce travel costs, tap into collective intelligence and create a more open ideas environment. This gives organisations a tangible ROI.'

While we're sticking to iChat for now, maybe we'll hook up for a meeting and some virtual soggy sandwiches and cold coffee soon.

Agent Orange

Rowan Durrant steals up in the dead of night and fixes things that well, need fixing.
Archway is a pretty drab area of London, a place that completely fails as a public space.
Separating a council estate from a tube station the wind rattles past the precinct where kids play and mums look for somewhere to put the shopping down.
In the middle of the precinct was an officially neglected bench.
The support pillars of the bench had broke as had the middle section.
Durrant set to work donning a fluorescent jacket and hard had with angle grinder at the ready.
He calls it Superfixing.
In guerilla art secrecy is key...maybe that's why Durrant's next project involved the Queen, MI6, three police officers and a Lion.

viewzi.com

a nice new way to browse the web...

sm.art

Set up by London's Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design, The Design Laboratory is like an MIT labs for the arts world.

With alumni including Alexander McQueen, Stella McCartney and Galliano, the design laboratory offers graduates a space from which to commercialise their work.

Projects have included building new multi-sensory retail kits for adidas and branding for world famous culinary alchemist Heston Blumenthal, owner of last years best restaurant in the world - The Fat Duck.
As we increasingly seek ever diverse talent sets to help us develop products and services for clients, designlab provides a resource for the best in fresh new talent. Every agency struggles to get talent through the door - why force it when it's in the building next door?

thedesignlaboratory.co.uk

future mobile

getting busy around here... 

but over the past couple of days there has been a conversation worth posting...

basically after being asked by a client to prognosticate about mobile technology in the near and far future two things became very clear to us...

1. in the near (and far) future mobile is ultimately about never "not having it with you"

2. in this future the difference between people who "have" and people who "do not have" will be "permissions"

power of we

Kiva.org is a micro lending site that allows individuals to provide loans to the working poor via the internet. I have been a frequent visitor of Kiva over the last few years and one was always able to find a few hundred people or groups looking for a loan at any given time.

A few weeks ago Kiva created this idea of "lending teams." These teams which anyone could make allows you to "credit" your loan to a particular "team" or affinity group so you are now making loans to individuals from a particular "team." Since that change there are typically zero to only a handful of unfinanced loans at any given time because you can now loan as a connected group. The Power of We.