Information is Beautiful - I love David McCandless' work

A visual guide to the way the world really works. Every day, every hour, every minute we are bombarded by information - from television, from newspapers, from the internet, we're steeped in it, maybe even lost in it. We need a new way to relate to it, to discover the beauty and the fun of information for information's sake. No dry facts, theories or statistics. Instead, Information is Beautiful contains visually stunning displays of information that blend the facts with their connections, their context and their relationships - making information meaningful, entertaining and beautiful. This is information like you have never seen it before - keeping text to a minimum and using unique visuals that offer a blueprint of modern life - a map of beautiful colour illustrations that are tactile to hold and easy to flick through but intriguing and engaging enough to study for hours.

About the Author

David McCandless is an award-winning writer and journalist. His work has appeared in over 30 magazines in the UK and the US and all over the web. He currently works as creative consultant for Orange and the BBC and writes about the Internet, underground culture and 'anything interesting' for Wired and The Guardian.

Inception: Viral Update - ahh the ARG campaign doesn't seem to be all sticky goodness

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When a viral campaign jumps out of the starting gate in a hurry, we get upset due to the high peak followed by a drop. Then, you have the complete opposite where a campaign just does nothing. So what happens when viral starts off leaving you guessing, followed by a continuous stream of confusing updates? Yes. We complain. That is exactly what seems to be happening with the marketing strategy for Inception. It’s doing everything right, yet at the same time, it’s starting to piss people off. Read more to find out why.

One can look at the viral for Inception as doing nothing wrong. How could it. It’s following the rules and doing what a viral campaign does. It has everything. It has games that make you think. It has viral videos. It has a “product”. It has the good guys. And now, thanks to our friends at FirstShowing, it has those that oppose. What more could you ask for? Well, for starters, how about explaining exactly what it is that we are even looking at....

what a great looking event-City Centered Festival - SF June 11 & 13

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About City Centered
A Festival of Locative Media and Urban Community
Projects and Symposium June 11 – 13, 2010
Hands-on community workshops June 19, 2010

City Centered is a free, three-day festival of locative media and urban community in San Francisco. The event includes demonstrations and installations in the Tenderloin district, a symposium in the Mission district and community training workshops.

Over two weekends, it will engage artists, educators, civic organizations and community members of all ages in exploring how how locative media can act as a platform and venue for community-led expression.

All events are free and open to the public. We do request that you register for the symposium here.

The festival is sponsored by KQED Public Media and Gray Area Foundation for the Arts and supported by partner organizations: Access Now, Center for Locative Media, KQED Public Media, Gray Area Foundation for the Arts, Conceptual Information Arts/SFSU and UC Berkeley Center for New Media.

Organizers: Elizabeth Goodman, Kari Gray, Molly Hanwitz, Paula Levine, Josette Melchor, Leslie Rule

Toronto Transmedia project Chicknoe crowdsourcing on IndieGoGo

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Chicknoe is the feature film component of a six platform Transmedia experience about the search for an identity, a sound, and a warm, dry place to pitch a tent for the night.

For the uninitiated – Transmedia is a new entertainment model that massages a larger, meta-narrative out of numerous, connected stories told on a number of platforms (tv, film, digital, online, books). Basically…yer watching this tv show and you like it. You find out that the characters you like so much…? Well there’s a book about one of them, an online documentary by the other, and they recorded a tribute album together. The viewer may continue to enjoy this story in a variety of ways and wees.

For it’s part….Chicknoe is about two 16 year old girls, Stella and R., who escape a potentially fatal situation in the middle of the night in a canoe. When they drift a couple miles off shore and meet a weird guy named David they decide to keep up the ruse – a community thinks them missing and assumed dead – and take a two week canoe trip through the semi-remote, certainly ferocious Georgian Bay Archipelago. They meet a bunch of people, watch one fella take a paddle in the melon, and ultimately make a decision or three that will play out in the long and short terms for both of them.

It is a lovely two-hander that will share the spirit of David Lynch’s ‘The Straight Story’ and Kelly Reichardt’s ‘Wendy and Lucy’.

To want to invest in the film is to understand the bigger Transmedia Project. For a in-depth look at that + an alright read please check out an interview I did with Jeff Watson of remotedevice.net

http://remotedevice.net/blog/trans-canada-trans...

This post was cross-posted on Workbook Project’s Culture Hacker as well.

My prizes are excellent. $250,000 gets you a piece of the film. I’ll go you 70/30 on the film with that…alright, 60/40 you/me. We’ll make up the rest in neat Canadian ways.

Below that number…everyone gets an FoTP credit, that just is. From there, depending on the investment, I will be sending out: hand-written thank you notes via snail mail; t-shirts-you-want-to-wear with lines of dialogue from the film pasted on them; a moderately high quality monograph (read iPhoto book) of the iPhone photos I’m taking during the writing of the film; and three lucky folk will be sent copies of the script so they can mark ‘em up in red pen and send ’em back to me. This is a cool prize if you are a fledgling story editor. I’ll give you a serious crack at it – I’ll listen carefully to your notes and write you a letter of reference if you’re any good at it. E Mail me. Still gotta dip into your wallet for the privilege though. Sorry. Doesn’t seem right but all I got at the moment is the conviction that this thing is worth people paying to work on it.

Okay so….there it is. If you wanna go full-balls and send me a quarter million just email me and I’ll call you back on my dime. Plus I’ll courier you the script (following the next round of notes of course.) Anyone else – questions, comments or concerns drop me a line.

Thanks,

Bolton

Great summary of Phone 4 deets with images from 2010 WWDC and iPhone 4

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Posted by ijustine in Blog on 06 7th, 2010 | 10 comments

 

It’s that time of year again.. 2010 WWDC (Apple’s world wide developer conference) where every Apple fan boy/girl is huddled around their computers obsessively refreshing websites (even though they all clearly tell you not to) while hanging on Steve Jobs’ every word.

I also want to note that I got all of these images from gdgtRyan Block did an amazing job covering the event live. Check out their entire thread for play by play updates of the keynote: gdgt Macworld 2010

Here are some of my favorite highlights from the Steve Jobs keynote.

iPHONE 4!!!!

• Available June 24th
• Comes in white and black models
• Pricing with 2 year contract $199 for 16GB and $299 for 32GB
• If your AT&T contact is up anytime in 2010 you are eligible for the upgrade pricing
• Made of custom glass and steel, 24% thinner than the current iPhone
• Front facing camera, micro-sim tray, camera with LED flash on back
• Integrated antennas built into the structure of the iPhone — One side is Bluetooth, WiFi, GPS, other is UMTS and GSM
• New Retina Display increases pixel density 4x, has 78% of the pixels of an iPad
• iPhone OS 4 powered by Apple A4 chip
• Battery life: 40% more talk time — 7 hours talk, 6 hours 3g browsing, 10 hours wifi browsing, 10 hours of video, 40 hours of music and 300 hours of standby.
• 32gb of storage
• Gyroscope to enhance gaming! Ted the gyro, accelerometer, and GPS for 6-axis motion sensing.
• Updated camera! 5 megapixel, backside illuminated sensor, 5x digital zoom built in to camera app with tap to focus LED flash.
• HD video! 720p at 30fps with built-in video editing. LED flash can stay on while recording.

APPLE iPHONE CASE
(photo from macrumors.com)

• Calling it “Bumper”
• Just goes around the outside of the phone leaving the front and back exposed.
• Available in multiple colors
• Only $29

VIDEO CALLING!!!! = FaceTime

• iPhone 4 to iPhone 4 calling over wifi
• No setup required
• Can use both back and front facing camera.
• Both portrait and landscape

iMOVIE FOR iPHONE!!

• Works almost just like the desktop version!
• Can record directly to the timeline or import from library.
• Titles, transitions, animations, music, etc
• Add geolocation to show where you are on a map
• Export 360, 520 and 720p
• Buy for $4.99

iPHONE OS = iOS 4

• 100 new features
• Multitasking, folders, Retina Display integration, unified inbox and threading in Mail!
• iBooks coming to the iPhone!
• PDF’s in mail will go directly into iBooks on to your PDF shelf.
• iOS4 upgrades available June 21st for iPhone 3GS, iPhone 3G and iPod touch (not all features supported) for free!

iADS!!!

• Enabled July 1st
• Created to help developers make money so they can create free and low cost apps.
• Keeps users in the app when ad is clicked
• 60% of revenue goes to developers paid through iTunes connect
• Apple sells and hosts ads
• Nissan is giving away a car and contest is entered using iAds
• Advertisers already signed up to use iAds: Nissan, Citi, Unilever, AT&T, Chanel, GE, Liberty Mutual, State Farm, Campbell’s Soup, Sears, JCPenny, Target, Best Buy, DirecTV, TBS, Disney and Geico

OTHER UPDATES:

• Over 2 million iPads sold — 1 every 3 seconds (too bad they didn’t make enough cases for them).
• iBooks update with in-line notes and bookmarks, ability to view and read PDFs.
• 5 million books have been downloaded which is 2.5 per iPad (I only have one)
• Netflix for iPhone coming in the summer. This is my most used app on my iPad :)
• Just crossed 5 billion app downloads with 1 billion dollars being paid to developers.
• iPhone as 38% of the US market.. Android is at 9%
• iBooks will automatically sync wireless your place, bookmarks and notes.
• Across 3 stores — iTunes, iBooks and App Store over 150 million accounts with credit cards associated to them.

• Zynga’s Farmville for iPhone with push notifications when yours crops are ready to harvest. Available at the end of June for their 1 year anniversary launch of Farmville (great, I had just quit playing this game on facebook).

Wow just wow! I’m extremely excited about the new iPhone. Post your comments below with what you like / dislike about the announcements!