Friday 27 February 2009

Maps and Apps


Google maps are a really big idea. For the two people out there who have not looked at them, have a look now: They revolutionised the way we look at things. Satellite views used to be the thing of spy films and secret agencies. But now, you can have a look at the earth from the air and go very close up. They are getting more powerful by the day and you can now drag on the yellow man and get a street view of some of the maps. This is mainly in US cities, but it is spreading and I have seen the cars that g round capturing images, so it can’t be too long. The great thing about Google maps is that they let you create your own and build them into your website for free. So that they become your own applications. This lets people show where hotels, track trips they have taken, tag photographs and come up with all sorts of things. One of the most bizarre of these is Ground Zero where you can select a city and a nuclear weapon and show what effect it would have. Some people might have a little too much time on their hands…

Thursday 26 February 2009

They feel fine, I feel sensational







I have come across a glorious site that is beautiful and organic to look at an in some way makes you feel better. I feel fine by Jonathan Harris and Sep Kamvar http://www.wefeelfine.org/ is about exploring human emotions. The big idea is that they harvest sentences with emotions in them from Blogs and have done since 2005. So when I write: I feel sensational, it picks it up. And as hardly anyone uses the word sensational, hopefully I will come across it when looking at the map some time. You can search the feelings by the weather, age, sex, location and date. But most wonderful is the interface, where a colourful universe floats in front of your eyes and if you roll over a dot or square (squares have pictures as well as words), it shares someone’s emotions with you. What makes it so magical and frankly addictive is the way that on clicking it, the letters appear in a circle, swing round and form the words and then go to the top, it really has been beautifully done.
If you click on the selection of words at the bottom left, you can see the screen in different ways, madness: where the dots and squares float around, murmers, which is lines of text, montage which is images, mobs and metrics are visual representations of who is saying what. But my favourite is mounds. Here you have a graph, which reacts to your mouse over, turning the graph into mounds of jelly which bump and bend off each other.
These statistics are lovely to look at and are quite interesting. There are only three men and three women feeling sensational. They are feeling it when it is cloudy and are generally between 20 and 35. It is rare, 315768 times the normal level. Well now there is one more…

Monday 23 February 2009

Judge a book by its author



I love reading and when I find an author I like, I tend to read everything that they have written. But there comes the moment when there is nothing new to read, I have read their total output. So what do you do next? Well a guy called Marek Gibney has put together a literature map. Click here to give it a go. More specifically, it is a self adapting, community based system, which changes to reflect the views and likes of the community. The big idea is that you put in an author you like and it shows you other authors who are similar or who it thinks you will like. The closer they are, the more likely you are to like their work and if you see someone new between two you like, then you are onto a good thing. It is not totally accurate, but is pretty quirky and I would recommend giving it a go, who knows where it might lead you...
And if you are not into reading, dont worry, he has done it for music and films as well.

Tuesday 17 February 2009

If anyone has a big idea, its Seth




I have just come back from Seth Godin's London session. If anyone has a big idea, it must be Seth. He was riffing on Tribes (the subject of his latest book) and took an vast array of questions. He dispensed real help and came up with some great ideas for people and you could see them changing the way they felt about their business. Pretty much everything he believes in is a Big Idea. He even had time to post a blog today, see here:
the man does not stop...

Thursday 12 February 2009

So have you got a Big Idea?



If I had £10 for everyone who told me they had a great idea, but could not quite get it started, well I would have a wad of cash. So what is stopping you from making your millions and getting that big idea off the ground. Most people will say time and funding. Well Mark Cuban (an American entrepreneur) is offering to fund your idea. There are some pretty strict rules and he is going to want a slice of the pie, but the offer is out there and in this credit crunched world, funding is not easy to come by. For me the interesting thing is the rules and what they say. I have started a few business and made things to sell and I have never made money as quickly as he wants to see: Cash flow break even in 60 days and profitable in 90 days. Wow that is pretty fast! A lot of people say that the majority of business take three years to break even. The entrepreneur in me is then interested to see what ideas are being put on there, as if they can hit those figures I want to know about them. Also, if I have to get the whole thing working that fast, do I need the business angel? To me, the big idea here is go for it and if you can tick these boxes, you can probably do it yourself and you can do it fast: so give it a go. Mark may not be lending us out of a recession, but he is telling us how we can get ourselves out of it.

Have a look at it here:

Wednesday 11 February 2009

Make mine Moleskine




I am a huge fan of note books and am a great believer in writing things down and making little sketches. As Derrick Tuke-Hastings said: “There are those who forget and those who write things down”. I have used many notebooks and still use different styles dependant on presents and needs, but one of my favourites has to be the Moleskine. If ever a product has become a movement, then the Moleskine is it. The legendry notebook used by artists and intellectuals has long been a badge of honour. Many fascinating, beautiful and dangerous thoughts and images have been pressed between the simple black covers, held in with an elastic band. So what was the big idea? A notebook of 192 pages, with a plain black cover and an envelope for bits and bobs? The idea of a Molskine goes beyond paper, it is the statement that you want to write, you want to note, you are interacting and creating. It became a habit, the buying of a notebook, the setting up in your own customary fashion and then the interaction as you filled it with your innermost thoughts. The product remains basic, but the interaction with the user has elevated it to cult status. They are customised and ‘hacked’ to change and improve them. More importantly, the people who do this talk to each other and blog about it creating the global phenomenon. For more info, see: http://flickr.com/groups/36521985904@N01 http://www.moleskine.co.uk

Friday 6 February 2009

Draw anything for $2



This is a great idea from a graphic artist going by the name of: Yirmumah. Unfortunately it is so popular now that he has suspended it while he works through the back log. I saw it at the end of last summer and back then the dollar was nearly two to the pound, so it was even cheaper. I asked, not surprisingly for a picture of a Big Idea and here it is. But all of that aside, why is it a big idea? Well this guy is drawing anything you want for $2. He says it lets him practice and due to the random nature of the subjects he gets better at drawing lots of different things. He is doing some great marketing for himself as well. By giving away quality work for next to nothing, he is getting a lot of exposure. His work is really good, so it is a great way to reach a new market who might want some work done and to sell his existing work. By reaching out to people and giving them something for free, he suddenly becomes the place to go. So I wish him well and when he starts taking orders again (and hopefully the dollar weakens a bit), the place to go is: http://yirmumah.com/will-draw-anything/

Making hay while it snows



This year we have been hit by some pretty heavy snow and it has been treated as a bad news story. But the guys at Mind the Curb: http://www.mindthecurb.com/ had a big idea. They focus on ethical low impact advertising, which is often in the form of pressure hose cleaning logos and artwork on the streets. But with the forecast of heavy snow, they came up with a great idea of using blocks to imprint logos in the snow. This fitted in well with all their core values and allowed them to turn the weather into an asset. A good relationship with a client allowed them to turn this into a billing opportunity. Apparently they made 3,500 imprints, some of which might not have lasted very long. But the word of mouth and press of those which did got a much wider coverage. In an age when people preserve graffiti from such artists as Banksy by cutting walls down and dismantling shutters, you have to wonder whether someone has one of these in their freezer, waiting till Charlie Saatchi is ready to buy... This id a great example of using your assets and thinking clever, you have things out there that are assets that you probably dont treat as such, what are yours?

Tuesday 3 February 2009

Square can be cool


There is a big idea here and it is about making storage and distribution easier. Watermelons are big and heavy. They are hard to store and transport and when you get it home they roll off surfaces are take up great swathes of your fridge. A square one obviously does not roll anywhere. They are easier to store and stack, which helps with distribution and they are easier to cut and serve. However, there is a pretty big catch and that is the price. These Japanese melons are put in Perspex boxes when growing, to force them into the shape. This means added time, equipment and of course cost. So where washing liquid manufactures created cost and waste savings with concentrated products, the square watermelon ends up being a bit of a gimmick. Though who knows, if the idea spreads, the costs might fall.