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    • links for 2010-04-29

    • April 30, 2010
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    links for 2010-04-27

    • April 28, 2010
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    The Days the Air Stood Still and Started Buzzing Again

    itoworld.com has published this amazing visualisation of the Northern European airspace returning to use after being closed due to volcanic ash. Due to varying ash density across Europe, the first flights can be seen in some areas on the 18th and by the 20th everywhere is open. The data is a mashup from flightradar24.com, openstreetmap.org and contributors.

    I am still wondering why there were so few flights to accumulate data to confirm or falsify the data of the models that predicted the ash concentration over Europe and were the basis for the airspace lockdown. I only heard of one flight over Germany. Do we know the data was right?

    Airspace Rebooted from ItoWorld on Vimeo.

    Sometimes I like Direct Marketing

    Sometimes there are moments that make me realize why I started to work in direct marketing. A few days ago I went to an optician to have my glasses repaired.

    I handed them the glasses, they checked customer data and I was told to come back some days later to pick up the repaired item. Not even five minutes passed after leaving the store I received this short text message (translated and paraphrased):

    Exclusively for YOU in April!
    FREE spectacle frame (max. €99,90)
    with your purchase of new glasses
    at your XYZXY store until 04/30/2010.
    This short text message = voucher

    Clearly, turning in my spectacles for repair had triggered the text message. If my glasses hadn’t been a sad little backup set, I probably would have turned back checked out the glasses at their shop.

      links for 2010-04-18

      • April 19, 2010
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      links for 2010-04-16

      • April 17, 2010
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      The Clutter, Visualized

      Dutch Design studio STUDIO SMACK has created this video to demonstrate “the immense scale of the visual bombardment” we encounter every day. Sure, in theory we have all heard the numbers of the many thousands of messages we encounter everyday, but what does it mean? In the video, all texts, logos, ads competing for our attention are highlighted white, everything else is black.

      That’s quite some clutter to break through and to paraphrase PSFK, it makes you think how visible advertising really is. (btw, the video is Creative Commons licensed, very useful for presentations)

      KAPITAAL from STUDIO SMACK on Vimeo.

      Via PSFK.com

      links for 2010-04-13

      • April 14, 2010
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      The Crowdforce is Strong in This One.

      I am not too convinced of crowdsourcing, more precisely, most of the ways I observed crowdsourcing in practice. Most of the times you get the feeling companies use crowds to get cheap ideas and designs. You know what I mean, first three get a small price and the company then picks a random design from the pool of thousands of submissions they got for free and now own.

      But Casey Pugh’s StarWarsUncut is a whole new set of awesome and it shows the way to make exciting things happen together with the multitude of creative people on the web. For StarWarsUncut the original Star Wars: A New Hope was split up into 472 parts of 15 seconds each. People could claim segments and submit their interpretation of it. All clips will be stitched together to make up a whole new experience of the classic. As of April 9, the team of StarWarsUncut announced that the movie is finished and posted the first trailer.

      Star Wars: Uncut Trailer from Casey Pugh on Vimeo.

      I don’t know about you, but this looks amazing and exciting. So many brilliant ideas in so little time. I wonder what the full movie experience feels like, but I can’t wait to see the whole thing.

      There is also a five minute teaser available: Teaser here.

      links for 2010-04-02

      • April 3, 2010
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