Last Thursday we had a Excellent meal at Ciao to say Ciao to Toti.
We had a night of great fun with great food.. and drink! Toti… Have an awesome time on your travels around Central America on the Love4Globe project – you will be missed!
#Kittencamp – *Meme-Master-Meow* V *ROFL Rex* in the Battle of the Memes!
Lorna Moir - May 26th, 2011
Last night #Kittencamp returned to Goldbrick House, fueled with beers, a talk from Matt Golding, LOL cards, the latest memes, plenty of chat and music.
The meme battle between *Meme-Master-Meow* and *ROFL Rex* came to a tied ‘LOL card’ Vote by Kitten campers… leading into extra time for the deciding Meme-battle showdown!
Thanks to everyone for joining us and we hope to see you again!
More info and news available on our #KittenCamp Facebook page.
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- #Kittencamp crowd
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- *Meme-Master-Meow* took on *ROFL Rex* in the #Kittencamp meme-battle
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- Cat memes.. of course!
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- A tie between ROFL Rex and Meme-Master-Meow lead the Meme-battle into extra time!
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- Matt Golding gives a talk
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- Meme Magic
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- ROFL Rex
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- And the Meme-Battle Master is…… *ROFL REX* Grabbing for the Kitten camp trophy!
Design Demigod
Alex Pitkin - May 19th, 2011We are looking for a new digital designer with a passion for ideas and engaging visuals.
You will want to be part of a team who use passion and creativity to solve real human beings’ problems with killer ideas, and you will take responsibility for making them look good and function well for the user. We don’t really mind if you use Photoshop, Illustrator or some form of wizzardy or alchemy to do this, as long as it looks good, worships at the altar of usability, and you can make it work with the other folk you will work with. (In reality this probably means you will be able to drive Adobe Creative Suite with the same level of mind blowing poise with which Rod Hull drove Emu).
The most important person in your life will be a hybrid composite human being representing a member of your audience. You must love them (but please keep this dignified within office hours). You will probably cheat on them in the evenings by surfing design blogs and perving over interaction mechanics.
As we hope we’ve conveyed, we’re looking for someone with the right attitude and passion for engaging people through design rather than a specific design rank, but you would be working for some national and international clients like Paramount Pictures, the BBC, and sometimes the Government, so you would need to feel comfortable you could help us make them do a small sex wee.
(Salary negotiable depending on experience).
If you are interested, please send us your CV, cover letter (probably just an email with a nice hello), a lock of your hair, and a link to some amazing internets you’ve made.
How to Trap Birds #1
Corwin Bainbridge - May 16th, 2011We have what is surely a spy from a rival agency in our office. He likes to make a mess so will shortly be asked to leave.
BBC coverage of UK Maths Olympiad
Tim Wintle - April 9th, 2011I watched The BBC program “Kidult: Beautiful Young Minds” on BBC iPlayer tonight with strong personal emotions.
The show covered the final selection stages of the UK’s team for the international maths olympiad (2006) – an annual event where the best mathematically minded teenagers compete for medals on an international stage.
Although I chose to read Mathematics at university, I didn’t ever get through quite that far in the mathematical olympiad. My focus, right up until my 20s, was always on Physics – and I did get to the final selection stages for the UK physics olympiad team – the final group of 20 or so people being whittled down to the six that would be flown over the world to compete for their country.
All the elements that were captured in film for the BBC program brought back memories of my time there, and the intense emotions that were going on.
Why didn’t I get through? Well obviously I was up against some brilliant minds, but I really think it was because of myself that I didn’t stand a chance. By the time it came to the final selection process I had discovered more typical teenage activities – and I was under the impression that I could focus on Physics and maths during the day, party like a typical teenager, and still perform like the best. I was wrong – and it took me a good few years of my life to discover that fact.
What really brought tears to my eyes was when the candidates discovered who has made it through to the team. The pain of getting knocked back is intense when you’re not used to it – and that shows on film when people discovered they did not make the team. I still remember that pain.
Do I regret not focusing on physics entirely – sometimes, but just as often I’m as incredibly grateful for the choices I made and how they affected my confidence later in life. No matter how good you are, you’ll always get beaten by someone sometimes – and as the old adage says, the higher they climb the harder they fall – and getting used to recovering from setbacks is an important skill – especially in academia.
The full show is available here (inside the UK) until the 13th of April.
VAN and the Ice Cream powered ad network
Chris Quigley - March 29th, 2011At VAN HQ we LOVE ice cream. Fact. So at SXSW this year it was pretty darn cool to meet the overly awesome *Ice Cream Man* – someone who loves ice cream even more than us.
The Ice Cream Man has (aka Matt Allen) has decided to dedicate his life to ice cream, living the ice cream dream – or as he puts it “Slingin’ the cream. Livin’ the dream”. Now that’s awesome 
The genius thing about the Ice Cream Man is that he’s turned giving away ice cream into a business. What’s even cooler is that he’s created an *ice cream powered ad network* – a totally genius idea, turning ice cream into a form of media – as with each ice cream he also gives away flyers / posters for nice and friendly brands.
A key to the success of his ice cream powered network, is Ice Cream Man’s partnership with Ben and Jerry’s – who donate all the ice cream for free, and without whose ice cream I daresay Ice Cream Man would merely be *Man* (ice creamless).
So hats off to Ben and Jerry for supporting such an awesome concept, and here’s hoping The Ice Cream Man can navigate his way across the Atlantic and do a tour of the UK for the summer months . . .
Check out the Rubber + VAN team meeting Ice Cream Man:
And Ally and Alex loving the Ice Cream Man a little too much:
*Live like a Sprinter* – getting more done with less time (SXSW lesson #2)
Chris Quigley - March 22nd, 2011Tony Schwartz is a pretty inspiring speaker, giving sage advice on the right side of the *self-help hemisphere*. His main area of expertise is in the space of life enhancement, and his SXSW chat was entitled “The 90 minute solution: live like a Sprinter” where he discussed managing time vs energy, focusing in on a theory based around supercharging your productivity and satisfaction by living in 90 minute waves.
Tony’s main theorising is based around managing your energy levels better, and he pointed out initially that “time is limited but energy isn’t”, and therefore it’s up to a person to work out how to best use / manage their energy levels to get more done.
Apparently there’s 4 types of energy:
- Physical energy: this is the foundation of all energy, and is based around certain factors like fitness, nutrition, sleep and rest / renewal.
- Emotional energy: as how you feel influences how you perform
- Mental (focus): the best way to get things done efficiently, is to do one thing at a time for an absorbed time. Distractions are bad.
- The Human Spirit (purpose): when you have a clearly defined sense of purpose, especially when it’s based on a vision, is the human spirit enhanced.
The heart of the problem relating to energy management comes down to, according to Tony, how we perceive our mode of operation, with people assuming we operate in the same was as computers – i.e. that we can operate at high speeds contrinuously for long periods all the time.
But humans don’t operate in the same *continuous way* as computers, but instead are *rhythmic*, with our energy levels fluctuating during the day. This natural rhythm is the Ultradian Ryhthm, which is a 90 minute wave our bodies cycle through.
So what this means is that the best way to get more work done is to align our natural bodily rhythms and create a rhythmic relationship between spending energy and renewing energy.
In practice this means working in *90 minute sprints*, aligned with our bodily rhythms and taking out time to *renew* (re-engergise) before starting over again. And there’s no more important form of renewal than *sleep* – which Tony says we should really make the most of, pointing out that the best virtuosos violin players in the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra take on average 8.6 hours of sleep a day, which over a week adds up to 14 hours extra sleep a week compared to the average person.
In answering questions at the end of the session, Tony’s top tips to more productive life (which he lives himself) were:
- Work in 90 minute sprints
- Do most of your intense / creative work in the mornings, as you have more energy then
- Go to bed earlier
So there you go – according to Tony it’s not a case of “snooze you lose”, rather “snooze you win” . . .
How to Kill Birds #5
Corwin Bainbridge - March 21st, 2011
My first attempt at one of these. I think people overcomplicate things.
Sexy Dirty Data: Involving your audience in your storytelling
Matt Golding - March 15th, 2011I went to a fantastic panel today at SXSW in which Gaby Brink, Eric Doversberger and Ingrid Kopp discussed a new open source tool they have created called the IMPACT DASHBOARD.
Although not launched yet, the tool aims to allow anyone who wants to to monitor the outreach and effects of content they place online. The tool can track most of the stuff you’d want to (video platforms, facebook, twitter, and many more) but given its open source the community will be able to extend this as people work out exactly how they want to use this tool.
The concept of this is not wholly original, but the execution means it looks hopeful this is a major leap forward, especially for content creators and storytellers in general – for two reasons.
1: Ease of use. Its designed to be set up by anyone
2: Visual appeal. It has been designed to be easy to engage with by the non-technical.
It turns the outcome of things your content achieves online into something easy to engage with and active (you can link to direct action from the visualisations it delivers)
This is especially powerful for storytellers working in issues based or social change areas, where they can monitor (and show to their community and their funders) the results of their activity, and engage them with further action off the back of it.
Whether or not the tool lives up to its promises, it opened a whole can of interesting worms in my mind in showing how data around your action can be used very publicly to open, increase and deepen the conversation between storyteller and audience. It makes seeing what’s going on online because of things you’ve done, fun, shareable, and easy. And that’s a whole new layer of conversation right there.
WordPress 3.1 is released
Robin Greene - February 24th, 2011WordPress 3.1 has been released and is named Reinhardt after legendary jazz guitarist Django Reinhardt. Some of the notable new features include:
- New Site Admin bar – a new admin bar has been added to the logged in live view, enabling quick editing of posts / pages
- Post formats – now able to tag post format and subsequently display individual post formats eg. gallery post, aside, features
- Multi-taxonimy queries – essentially an improved searching mechanism, more power to developers
- Network Admin User – superseeds multi-site WordPress “Super Admin” user
- In-site post linking – adds the facility to search and add links for internal blog posts / pages – big UI win!
This update certainly moves WordPress on from a simple blogging engine to a fully fledged CMS. Go download the latest update NOW! In honour of the release here’s Django at his best:
