Category Archives: Intelligence

Five Steps for Consumer Brands to Earn Social Currency

What are you going to do with all your Facebook fans, Twitter followers, and YouTube audiences?  “We forget that these programs have to pay into something, a shared value or a social context where the product actually gets used” says Erich Joachimsthaler at Vivaldi Partners. Smug, stunt-driven apps, games, and videos generate buzz but little [...]
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How You Can Be Happy

Written by the unfortunately named Wrath and Hater (sorry, Rath and Harter), Wellbeing: The Five Essential Elements explores what it takes to make us happy. As Lord Layard, the Labour government’s one-time “Happiness Czar” launches the Movement for Happiness, Gallup pollsters Tom Rath and Jim Harter have released this new book outlining what it is [...]
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Ipad Magazine Reading

Mag+ live with Popular Science+ from Bonnier on Vimeo. Mag+ prototype has teamed up with Popular Science magazine to create a digital magazine app for the iPad. The video above demonstrates how the app works and talks through the thinking behind it. Shame about the lack of search function… that would be most useful. The [...]
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10 Branding Cliches

We All Need Words have a great number of articles, and training tips, and even paid-for consultancy, on branding. Very worth checking out if you’re working on strategy or branding, or just want to piss off a haughty creative planner! Here are 10 brand strategy cliches to avoid, and why, as a taste of what [...]
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LSN Global and The Future Laboratory

At the LSN Global trend briefing last week I noted down the following: The rise of the MAVIN nations (post BRICs, we’ll have Mexico, Australia, Vietnam, Indonesia and Nigeria as emerging global powerhouses) 42% of businesses see the recession as an opportunity not a hinderance, and that businesses will change for the better. They see [...]
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SXSWi

No, we didn’t get to go to SXSWi, but WK planner Graeme Douglas did, and here’s some stuff he chatted to me about: Dorkbot – He says they’re a collection of wonderful stories of pointless but fascinating experiments and toys that use electricity (in the broadest sense of the word). “People doing strange things with [...]
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Happiness

Invest in the process of something to get hapiness, rather than focussing on the outcome (which is likely to be disappointing in relation to your expectations). Seems  a very smart philosophy, from Srikumar Rao. John Wooden never got his UCLA basketball team to focus on the winning, but on playing as well as they could. [...]
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Augmented Reality Maps at TED

You need to a flashplayer enabled browser to view this YouTube video Hyper local blogs, stories, are overlaid onto the maps, which can easily flip from a birds’ eye view to 45 degree Sim City style landscape, and then flow into a full 3D environment with their equivalent of street view. Immense.
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Future of Magazines is Digital

Mag+ from Bonnier on Vimeo. Creative Review has an article looking at the future of magazines as a digital media. Clearly, the impact of the iPhone on touch screen technology in every day use, getting users comfortable with it etc, has been huge.
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Billion Pound-O-Gram

Information is Beautiful just came into the office to give a charming talk about, well, the beauty – and power – of data visualisation. Above is one of the thought provoking pieces that David McCandless put together for The Guardian, which puts the huge abstract numbers and costs that are bandied about by government into [...]
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