I seem to have lost my lovely Crumpler bag somewhere in New York - anyone seen it?
I miss it.
I worry that its out there somewhere, lonely and confused, with nothing by fragments of my clothing to keep its insides warm.
Admittedly, it's a long shot - but wouldn't it be awesome if it found its way home thanks to the socialmediadistributedinterweb?
I can't wait until they come equipped with GPS trackers.
My mate Edd sent me to Sperm for Tickets - a new website that offers to trade festival tickets for the healthy swimmers of young men.
Apparently fertility clinics in Ireland are currently in crisis - donations have plummeted over recent years - and so they've developed a very new approach to soliciting semen, targeting younger men from all over Europe to expand their potential universe.
In terms of understanding your audience and what motivates them - it's inspired. The incentive is spot on and the courier service removes one of the key barriers to donation.
There's something very strange about the idea but it's a remarkable solution to a challenging problem.
UPDATE: Edd points out that this might be a hoax.
Dan the man Germain has been putting words in the mouth of Innocent all on his own up to now [apart from Buy One, Get One Tree - my mate Geoff did that] - but now he'd like some help:
We recently made a decision to have a go at running our own in-house agency, and we need someone who can come and write lots of classic innocent stuff. That means that this person will be writing everything from ads to pack copy to books to blog posts to everything else that we have to write.
It's an interesting idea - perhaps a troubling one for creative agencies - but for brands like Innocent, that are what they are through and through, perhaps no one knows their tone of voice as well as they do.
So if you are a London based writer with a taste for fruit, head over to Dan's post and check out the details.
So Microsoft are trying to buy Yahoo! again, this time publicly for $44bn and change, an attractive offer to shareholders as it's a significant premium on it's current trading stock price.
The strategy of large corporations, seemingly unable to foster true innovation internally, has long been "If you can't beat 'em, buy 'em". The problem Microsoft faced with Google is that they wouldn't sell - they tried to buy them at least as early as 2003 - $15bn would have been the bargain of the decade, making even Steve Jobs' purchase of Pixar from ILM pale in comparison.
So, basically admitting they can't compete with Google in the world of the web, whatever dot release we are on, they turned the war chest at Yahoo!
So what's this all about? What's the thinking here?
PSFK has a leaked memo which looks at the benefits of acquisition: in essence we are being trounced by Google and the usual economies of scale, efficiencies, synergies and related corporate blah.
But it seems pretty simple.
Microsoft have never made much money online. The beast is propped up by a functional monopoly over operating systems and office software, with some change from MSN and Xbox sales.
Yahoo! bet the wrong the way - they decided they should be a media company and hired a big media dog to help them get there. But the web hasn't evolved into a pureplay content platform - it's dynamic, participative, long tail, user generated and so on and so on.
And web 2.0 is shorthand for a more significant shift - from content to services.
So, on the face of it, the merger kind of makes sense [putting aside the fact that mergers almost always lead to the combined companies losing value overall, the complete clash of cultures, and the notorious difficulties inherent in this scale of union]: Microsoft make software, Yahoo! have the audience, between them they bring the web as service platform proposition to life.
Except that's not how it works anymore.
As I said before, consumers don't really pay for services online. The business model has changed. The reason Google makes so much money isn't directly via its services - they're all free to the consumer - it's because it has worked out how to monetise behaviour.
The business model underlying all web 2.0 companies is to use consumer input, interactions, tagging, tracks to build better data sets, better services and, most importantly, better models of behaviour.
They then sell them to advertisers - the more we know about you the more efficiently we can target you.
That's why Facebook is nominally worth so much money. And unless Yahoosoft works out how to play this game, the merger won't make any difference.
There is a grander vision, using the inputs of billions of human interactions to help build a new kind of web, a true anticipation machine.
But, for now, it's about advertising, the hated saviour of the web.
My mate Anne put me on to this soft drink that was launched in Singapore last year.
It's genius.
A "leading golf media" company took the "tough decision" to start making beverages when its managing director had one of those flashes of inspiration that change your life forever:
The concept was developed through the experience my friends and I kept having whenever we were out at a gathering, a coffee shop, or even at home. People kept telling us that they just wanted 'Anything' or 'Whatever' whenever we asked them what they wanted to drink.
My friends and I discussed this and found the concept really interesting. So with the support of my friends, I decided that 'anything' and 'whatever' would be a great idea for a unique Singapore beverage.
And so two new drinks were born. Each variety comes in 6 different flavours but you don't know which one you're getting until you taste it.
According to their website they sold 3.5 million cans in the first month.
It's just wonderful that a brand now exists for people who don't want to make a brand decision.
The counter intuitive insight - that people hate [too much] choice because it makes them makes decisions - lies at the heart of how brands operate: they function like cognitive heuristics - they allow us to not make hundreds of annoying decisions every time we go shopping by tapping into our basic association that anything known is familiar and therefore trusted.
But branding consumer apathy itself is legendary.
All has been quiet [on TIGS] over the holidays - with the frankly bizarre exceptions of comment spam promoting frog porn and the location of Osama Bin Laden - neither of which I'm going to link to.
Happy new year - ready, steady, GO!
But I heard him exclaim, ere he drove out of sight,
"Happy Christmas to all, and to all a good-night!"
See you next year.
My mate Fleur put me on to this awesome new shop called Unpackaged that opened yesterday.
I went down to have a look and met the lovely and charming Catherine and Annabel who set it up.
The idea is wonderfully simple: no packaging.
We believe that most packaging is unnecessary so we’re doing something about it.
The result is Unpackaged- the new way for you to shop safe in the knowledge that you’ve not created any waste that’s going to end up in a landfill.
We want you to bring your own containers for us to fill up with your favourite things and we’ll make it cheaper if you do. We know that it isn’t always easy to remember so we can also offer reusable containers that you can bring back next time.
Choose from our range of organic wholefoods (e.g. rice, cereals & grains) and eco-cleaners, where everything is as good for you as it is for the environment!
They even provide a service called Plastic Surgery - you can take your old plastic bags to them and they will recycle them.
Just a fantastic idea and the shop is too cute - it's just up from Exmouth Market in London so go and have a look if you're local.
If you go down tonight between 5 and 9pm they'll even give you a free glass of wine.
Blaise Pascal was a C17th mathematician and philosopher most famous for his application of decision theory to the belief in God.
What Pascal said was, it makes logical sense to believe in God, in the absence of certainty, because it's a better bet to do so.
If God doesn't exist and you don't believe in him, you saved yourself a bit of bother: if he doesn't exist and you do believe, you spend a lot of your Sundays in church and there are some rules you are needlessly following.
If God does exist and you don't believe in him, you incur infinite loss: eternal damnation and hellfire and whatnot. If you do you incur infinite gain: eternal salvation and heaven and that.
Since you don't know whether he exists, the logical option is to believe: minor down side if you wrong, infinite upside. Whereas the alternative has minor upside and infinite burning and pitchforks in the bottom.
The smart chap in the video above, sent to me by the lovely Ed, has applied Pascal's Wager to global warming, and it's remarkably compelling.
It also ends with a different statement of belief, one of the foundations of the information age: that spreading information is action.
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