farm @ poptech - the gladwell edition

medium hair malcolm gladwell is talking about his new book outliers.

he's talking about potential...

how many people who have a the potential reach that potential?
how high are capitalization rates in america?
they are low... lower then you think...

medium hair gladwell using high school athletics as an example...
there is low capitalization on athletic college scholarships in intercity high schools...
1 in 6... so inner city high school capitalization is about 16%...

so basically if everyone who could play.. did play...
either the level of play would increase massively in the mlb, nba, nfl, etc...
or..
you would need larger leagues, with more teams for all the good players...

farm loves sports... so either way this sounds good to us...
great stuff...

live.poptech.com

farm @ pop!tech - saving the world

farm is at pop!tech taking in scarcity & abundance.

dr. saul griffith is going through his genius accounting of his personal energy consumption...
and has just lunched wattzon.com... it looks very cool..
sort of an open source, crowd sourcing platform built to benchmark personal energy consumption...
please have a look.

the question he just posed is not "what to do"...
"it's what temperature do we want the earth to be at?"

steaming now at live.poptech.com

what will you do with android?

as of today, android is not just a phone.
today with the launch of the android open source project, it's is an open software stack that enables machine to machine (m2m) communication.

we have to admit there's a small chance this might bring skynet sooner than anticipated...
but farm still thinks it is very cool and will prove to be a big deal in marketing and communications.

farm @ pop!tech

we will be there.
if you know us... say "hi"...
if you don't, just smile.

viral marketing gone wrong

obama iphone application

The Obama camp continues to push the envelope in how campaigns use digital to reach voters with a new down loadable iPhone application that is available through the iTunes store or through the App Store button on iPhones. There are some very cool and useful features and it is well populated with contextually dynamic information. This is one of the first applications I have seen that utilizes the address book in an interesting way: You can call friends from your address book to help get out the vote and it will tick them off to help you keep track of your calls.

Local Positioning System

Nokia are soon to test an indoor GPS system at a shopping mall in Helsinki using their Nokia Maps software and N-Series range of phones. The localised GPS system can guide you to specific stores and services within the centre.
As the technology advances we expect your phone to be able to tell you where to go in the mall based on how you're feeling, what your interests are and what you've been doing. - it'll know this of course, because it's your phone and it's always with you.
Your calendar knows you missed your check up at the dentist so proceed to the third floor to the walk in dental centre. Been taking a lot of pictures recently with your camera-phone? Why not get some of them printed out at the Kodak Centre on the fifth floor.
Nokia Local Positioning System is a direct marketers dream.

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"