Online television broadcast took another important step recently with the launching of A World of Conflict – an innovative documentary series in which veteran war correspondent Kevin Sites reports from major global conflict zones. Even though it is also included with Sites’ new book “In the Hot Zone: One Man. One Year. Twenty Wars.” with A World of Conflict there is no old fashioned TV version. The show is broadcasted exclusively on the Internet via Yahoo News. Other than the Intro chapter, previous episodes deal with Somalia, Congo, Uganda, Iraq, Lebanon, Israel and Iran. Chapter nine of the Hot Zone doco is focused on Chechnya.
SMS is part of our lives and has already become a medium, perhaps one of the most popular social mediums used by people. Advertising via SMS is a business. While many companies pay mobile phone subscribers to agree SMS advertisement will be landing in their mobile set, there are others, like James Robinson of Australian start-up HooHaa, who are confident users will sign up for no payment. SMS related Innovations follow each other every day: Wataniya Telecom, for example, a wireless voice and data networks operator, offer a new service named Allo since a few months ago allowing sending SMS with recorded voice message (see above sample from their ad campaign).
Yet, it was just 15 years ago this very week, when Airwide Solutions engineer Neil Papworth pressed the first “send” command and sent the world’s first SMS to a few of his friends at Vodafone. Even though it was carrying just the two simple ‘Merry Christmas’ words this massage opened the door to the multi-billion dollar industry of Short Message Service (SMS) allowing people sending short messages to and from mobile phones.
No one seems to know exactly how many SMS messages are sent each year. According to the International Harald Tribune, few experts could come up with a recent, reliable figure for the number of total texts sent in the course of a year but estimations puts the number at two trillion to three trillion while at England alone the number weekly SMS barometer just passed one billion – 25 percent higher than a year earlier. By the way, cool Papworth, shown in the above photo from iht, still seems to be working for Airwide Solutions – a dominant player in the next-generation mobile messaging industry. I guess some companies know how to keep their A class personal.
Cheers to Papworth and Airwide Solutions. Happy Birthday SMS!
Context hidden messages have always been of the most powerful journalistic weapons against most kinds of censorship. Israel has an active by-law military censorship since it was founded and Israeli journalists have been practicing this strategy since that very same day. Whether the nature of the restriction is political, military or commercial, the context in which a certain information item is delivered can have a tremendous impact or even change completely the way a message is interpreted by the recipient.
Of course the main problem with subtext messages, which is also their main source of strength, is that the better they are the less people actually manage to decode them. While some hidden context messages are exposed publicly most of them remain unknown. That is why the above frozen TV moment from Sky News caught my eye today on the DHD Multimedia gallery as, other than being very funny, it is also unclear if it was done deliberately or by mistake. What do you think? A poor editorial decision or a brilliant post-Hurricane-Katrina context satire on the account of the world’s most powerful politician?
“Need a good domain name, must be cheap, can’t be lame Something cool like Flickr, Meebo Wikiyou, Mahalo, Bebo Telephone without the T Diggg but with a triple G Make your elevator switch Code it up and hit the switch.”
Anyone who was part of the IT industry back in 1999 knows the word “bubble” can be quickly and easily translated into massive dismissal waves, lower salaries and dramatic changes of family budgets. Even though the 2000 dot com crisis had mainly positive impact on my life course I can still remember it very clearly as a no joke situation. Lets all hope web 2.0 is NOT bubble 2.0. Lets hope this hilariously funny takeoff on Billy Joel’s We Didn’t Start the Fire will remain just a great music video joke by Richter Scales that managed to take the lead on the Guardian Viral Video Chart earlier today.
Solo, video, arrangement and lyrics by Matt Hempey, Mixed by Bill Hare, Recorded by Jason Hunter & Charlie Forkish. As they say, Web 2.0 just had it coming. Laugh until you cry.
“The same old Sonnenblumen teaser, uploaded with a trick to bypass recompression by the YouTube encoder. It works with Flash video converted by Total Video Converter. Unless you stay below a certain files size and meet a few other criteria, videos with high resolution and high bitrates are accepted without change.”
By now, it’s clear that being environment friendly is not enough. Delivering the message properly is also a major requirement. It should therefore not be much of a surprise for anyone that Eurobest’s winning print campaign for the year of 2007 went to Contrapunto – a Spanish advertising agency from Madrid for their innovative Smart ForTwo campaign. Smart ForTwo is a micro compact car by DaimlerChrysler designed primarily for urban use in European cities. With 0.6L, 0.7L (petrol) and 0.8L (diesel) engines their are quite a few car models with lower carbon footprint but perhaps none with more creative advertising agents.
Forest
Field
Stones
Category: Cars
Title: FOREST
Advertiser/Client: DAIMLERCHRYSLER MERCEDES-BENZ
Product/Service: SMART FORTWO
Entrant Company, City: CONTRAPUNTO, Madrid
Country: SPAIN
Advertising Agency, City : CONTRAPUNTO, Madrid
Country: SPAIN
Executive Creative Director: Antonio Montero
Creative Director: José Mª Cornejo / Fernando Galindo
Copywriter: Fernando Galindo
Art Director: José Mª Cornejo
Account Supervisor: Eva Mª Alvarez
Advertiser’s Supervisor: Oscar Rubira/Marisol Vadillo/Jaime Olalquiaga
If you made a reactionary old fashioned stuck in the past bad guy angry you must have done some good. Thus, my congratulations go to Twitter this morning for joining the lauded halls of the sites banned for speaking too freely. As reported by mashable.com, the United Arab Emirates has just decided that its residents shall corrupt their souls no more and avoid tweeting with each other as much as they probably have until now. Anyone attempting to access Twitter’s website from the UAE gets the above message, translated as follows:
“We apologize, the site you are attempting to visit has been blocked due to its content being inconsistent with the religious, cultural, political and moral values of the United Arab Emirates. If you think this site should not be blocked, please visit the Feedback Form available on our website.”
Other than newly added Twitter, mashable also mentions some other members of this respected list including MySpace, Facebook and of course devilish YouTube that got himself banned from Beijing, Thailand, Morocco, Australia, and others. Should we be surprised? Not necessarily. Apparently there are even some American folks struggling to block MySpace in schools and libraries. I wonder if that’s due to their ability to spread ideas freely, having such a horrible interface or simply the number of female silicon body parts one must observe every time he opens his MySpace inbox.
For more information and a detailed list of other Internet destinations being “inconsistent with the religious, cultural, political and moral values” of additional bad guys check on Access Denied Map: Mapping Web 2.0 Censorship from globalvoicesonline.org, who also offer the following show your support badge.
It was just a while ago when I mentioned how there are many signs that logic puzzles are making their way to mainstream media. It was just until about three years ago that language independent logic puzzles where still an offstream hobby of a few westerns but today they seem to be a legitimate segment within the growing casual game industry. Take Jay is Games for example. Other than running their own IRC server at irc.jayisgames.com and channel at #casualgameplay(which show these folks are extremely cool) this website is also ranked within Technorati’s top 5000 destinations and is definitely one of the best casual game reviewers on the web. It might not be the NY Times, but if it’s the latest Flash and or casual game review you are after, user friendly walkthroughs, room escapes, point and clicks or anything else falling into the wide definition of casual games, this site has it.
With tones of puzzle game references and a respected pool of logic puzzle oriented material this bloglike function-rich website is good not just in keeping a hand on the pulse of casual gaming industry as well as very few others do, but in smartly supporting their way up to the crowded green area of public attention. A brilliant “add this game to your website” feature allowing easy embedding action of every game reviewed on the site is just one – actually my favorite – example.
This morning I was informed by an avid Conceptis member about this kindly phrased reference to Conceptis on jayisgames’ recent link dump post. Personally, I already knew there are very few websites out there doing both printable and online number and picture logic puzzles for free as we do them in conceptispuzzles.com but having this said by JohnB of jayisgames.com is a very nice achievement for anyone in the industry. Much obliged JohnB.
Of all the somewhat crazy kinda cute but still cool things I saw on shops this Hanuka this electronic soldering kit for 5 mm LED mini-menorahs is my winner for this year. Available for all-affordable $10 you might still have enough time to order one of those low carbonfootprint mini-menorah and save the planet. Available in evilmadscience.com with LED color choices of “Superbright blue” or “Superbright white”.
The Evilmad scientists say “assembly is easy with the included comic-book Menorah Instructions (400 kB PDF document, screenshot above). And just FYI: Miniature 3 mm LED sets have already sold out. I guess the cool Superbright yellows in the picture have also disappeared from the shelves.
