Thursday, August 14, 2008

Ralph Lauren brings QR codes to the U.S.

I was in NYC today for a few meetings and picked up a New York Magazine at the news stand in Grand Central and on the back page I found a Ralph Lauren Polo ad with a huge QR code in the corner.

For those who don't know QR stand for "Quick Response" and is a square shaped label that looks like a cross between a bar code and crossword puzzle. They have been around since 1994 and are used a lot in China and Japan for everything from advertising, c-commerce (cell commerce), train tickets and buying products in vending machines .

I was intrigued with the ad since I have been playing with QR codes for a while now and I did some research and found out that Ralph Lauren launched this new campaign and new store windows here in NYC today. So I had to head over to the store and check it out. The store windows have the usual set-ups with mannequins sporting different outfits but each one has it's own QR code. There is also a large explanation of what the codes are and how to get the software that will let you read them. Once you have the software installed and photograph one of the codes it will pull up the item on their mobile site and you can buy it on the spot f you want. You can see a sample of how the mobile site looks and works here.

This isn't the first time they have done something like this as about two years ago they did a large touch screen window in New York and London. Consumers could browse the clothes and if they liked an outfit they could enter their contact info and would be contacted by e-mail or phone the next day to securely enter their payment information and arrange shipping. This newer version obviously cuts out the day wait the middle step by letting you get the instant gratification of buying the outfit while standing on a street in New York. I applaud them for taking a proactive position to be the first brand to finally bring this technology to the U.S. even if it is years later than it should be. This is one of those pieces of marketing that isn't going to generate a sales spike but it does spike the aware of your brand, the perception of that brand as an innovator and it gets people to like me to go to their store.

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Monday, August 04, 2008

Ruby Tuesday's blows up their brand - literally


The restaurant chain Ruby Tuesday's has been working to renovate pretty much everything about their brand recently from the menu to the stores to the branding. To celebrate the conclusion of this work at 3pm tomorrow they are going to literally blow up the last Ruby Tuesday's with their old look and show it all live on their Web site. I think this is really smart because normally something like finishing a restaurant chain renovation doesn't get doesn't get much attention past the industry trade papers and doesn't get anyone to your Web site.It will be interesting to see if this is as much of a spectacle as they want you to believe but it is the first time I will be going to a restaurant chain Web site for anything but to the find the nearest location.

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Tuesday, July 22, 2008

Converse tries to tie 20 sites in to a big idea

Converse recently launched a new campaign called 'Connectivity' and online portion of the campaign features an Elf Yourself OfficeMax-esque 20 microsites to support the launch. For me the URL's of the sites may be the best part of the whole online experience as you start out at the appropriately name ThisIsTheIndexPage.com that features wallpaper of Converse wares in the background among other images, visitors can scroll down a menu of several URLs. These off shoot sites have names like OnaShoeStringFilms.com that features a short film of several talking shoelaces, KissingBackwithRoss.com that shows a kissing display of a bearded guy who's kissing a message on a glass surface with what could be icing or shaving cream. The most creative and interesting for me is ConverseSpellingBee.com where by spelling a word in Google, a paid search ad shows up at the top to take you to the next round. At any point you can go directly to Converse's official "Connectivity" destination. Where you can see all the Converse spokespeople and hear a song written by Pharrell Williams.

When taken as a whole it is an interesting experience but I'm not convinced of how well I think it really works. When you look at past examples like when Office Max launched a similar barrage of multiple sites a few holidays ago it was only Elf Yourself that caught on and everyone remembered. Maybe I have too narrow if a view of online advertising when I favor having one strong experience instead of a number of lesser experiences that may or may not add up to something more for consumers. It is that may or may not part that I struggle with since you are using a concept shotgun to throw a lot of content out there and hope that one of them catches on. I will keep an eye on it to see if one of them catches on and I would love to hear from anyone who use this strategy to hear how successful it was or wasn't.

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Monday, June 30, 2008

Hellboy 2 alternate reality gaming


Imaginative director Guillermo del Toro has his new movie Hellboy 2: the Golden Army debuting in the middle of July and as a teaser to that launch they have launched an in-depth alternate reality game (ARG). Typically ARG's get intense player involvement with a story that takes place in real-time and evolves according to participants' responses, and characters that are actively controlled by the game's designers, as opposed to being controlled by artificial intelligence like you would have in a video game. Players interact directly with characters in the game, solve plot-based challenges and puzzles, and often work together with a community to analyze the story and coordinate real-life and online activities.

In this case visitors find clues that have all been hidden through various blogs, YouTube videos and microsites to unclock the Secret Device that seems to be the centerpiece of the movie. The first mention of the Secret Device was in the campaign's initial site for HEFTET, an organization that's an acronym for Humans for the Ethical Treatment of Fairies, Elves, and Trolls and is also directly involved in the film's storyline. The bulk of this played throughout last month and had participants scour for several codes hidden in videos, news stories, photos, limericks, email, phone messages, and forums using YouTube, Facebook, Myspace, and Twitter to solve a series of interconnected puzzles. Like all ARG's the gaming process unfolded in real-time as more clues, codes, and supporting content gradually became available and was shared across the community. The final prize for those investigative players was access to the Secret Device that when solved launched the world premiere of an original animated Hellboy II prologue comic with the added bonus of winning a trip to an early screening of the film hosted by Guillermo Del Toro himself.

I love ARG's and wish they would be used more often since that last great execution I can think of was the I Love Bee's ARG for the launch of Halo 2. I think they they created more engaged and deeper interaction using the interactive medium than any ad unit ever could.

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Monday, June 23, 2008

UNIQLO wins Cyber and Titanium Grand Prix at Cannes


In case you didn't see UNIQLO's music dance clock called UNIQLOCK won the Cyber and Titanium Grand Prix at the 2008 Cannes International Advertising Festival. The clock was created by a several different Japanese artists including the time signal that was created by Fantastic Plastic Machine and the “UNIQLOCK” dancers are directed and choreographed by Yuichi Kodama and AIRMAN. It was initially built to create buzz among bloggers and it started slow before exploding into 60 million views in 209 countries.

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Sunday, June 08, 2008

Nike just does social change well with The Girl Effect

Nike going great and interesting interactive is nothing new but this is the first site from them I can remember that isn't about one of their peroducts. The 'The Girl Effect' is a new microsite created by Wieden + Kennedy in Portland is designed to show how adolescent girls in developing countries can bring unprecedented social and economic change to their families, communities and countries. The site starts with a two and a half minute intro that is the only one I have seen in the past 10 years that I actually enjoyed. It is a simple but extremely well designed and written introduction to the site and what it is trying accomplish.

The site is broken up into three sections - Learn, Change and Share. Learn explains the problem in more details and gives you access to four videos that details the lives of four women. Change links you over to their section on GlobalLiving.com where you can donate money to send a girl to school, help fund a legal case or give a microloan among other things. Share is one of the most comprehensive offline and online viral kits I have seen with the usual online social media including a YouTube channel as well as posters, stickers, logo, banners, etc.. This is one of the first social change sites I have seen from a major brand that goes beyond the lip service and minimal action that will get their press release picked up to something that is trying to effect real change. It will be interesting to watch how this grows and what other brands run to mimic it.

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Monday, June 02, 2008

Redefining words with The Big Word Project

Following the footsteps of the now dead MillionDollarHompage.com, The Big Word Project is one of those sites that when you see it you say "Damn it I wish I would have thought of that".

The site was created two Masters students from Northern Ireland who wanted to explore changing the definitions of words so they mean altogether different things and make some money doing it. The concept of the site is simple, when you go to the site you can purchase a word for $1 a letter from their list and associate it with any site you want. That way when you anyone goes to the site, searches for that work and clicks on they will go to the site you chose for it. In my case I bought 'GATES' so when you click on that it goes to my portfolio site. So far there have been 5,499 words that have been purchased and redefined.

I think the idea is a great one not only because it is a way for two college kids to make a lot of money but because it fun to click around and see hat people have done with the words and where they linked them to.

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Monday, April 07, 2008

BMW pulls back the curtain on The Ramp


I recently wrote about my friends down at GSD&M and their work on the new viral campaign for BMW called The Ramp. They have now pulled back the curtain to reveal the entire story through a 35 minute long documentary. No doubt it is ambitious and I will let you know what I think as soon as I can find 30 minutes of free time.

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Tuesday, March 25, 2008

BMW launches The Ramp

Some former co-workers of mine have found their way down to GSD&M in Austin and have created a cool new viral campaign for BMW called "Rampenfest" to launch the new 1 Series. The campaign centers around Jeff Schultz who traveled to Oberpfaffelbachen, Bavaria to film a documentary about a small village and their Rampenfest. What is Rampenfest? It’s just like Octoberfest except there is a a 454 meter-high ramp that will launch the 135i over the European landscape and across the Atlantic onto U.S. shores.

You can check out the trailer here, the filmmaker's blog here, become a fan on Facebook here and if you're 21, female and willing to email a picture of yourself to be voted Miss Ramp, you can enter here.

The full campaign and movie are coming soon so keep an eye on it because this looks to be very cool an one of the more effective viral launch campaigns out there.

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Sunday, March 16, 2008

SheratonWave.com is bringing the wave back

I am once again very excited to announce an innovative interactive experience for Sheraton hotels we create with Avenue A/Razorfish.

As a follow up to SheratonPlay.com and as part of our NCAA/March Madness sponsorship we have launched SheratonWave.com. The site lets you part part in the world's first virtual wave to celebrate March madness. Can can either upload a video clip or turn on your web cam and do the wave. Then tag it with your favorite school, city, or any keywords you can think of. Then you can search those keywords to create your own personal wave that you can embed into your personal blog or social media pages (facebook, myspace, etc.). To add the sense of competition we have also created a leaderboard to see which schools upload the most videos.

You can also see the online advertising cmapaign that will be running with the NCAA online partners; CSTV.com, CBSsportsline.com and NCAA.com, notably, on the streaming live feed of the tournament games and as a sponsor of the CSTV downloadable widget.

Visit SheratonWave.com, upload your video and join in the wave today!

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Thursday, February 28, 2008

Sprout could grow into something great



I have been waiting all year from some to design something that would get me excited and today it showed up. Sprout is a very cool and very easy tool for building your own microsites, widgets and mash-ups. Their tool will be instantly familiar to anyone who has ever used any Adobe products with a very robust interface that will you work with images, audio, video and data sources from sites like Google and Yahoo. You assemble the pieces you want on different pages, hook it all up to your data, make a nav and you have your own widget from scratch in under an hour. Plus when you make any enhancements they will automatically be pushed put to everyone using it when you re-publish it. I have only scratched the surface and intend on continuing to work on my widget for this blog (which you can see and grab here) but have other idea of things I want to try as well.

I love to see this kind of innovation in digital tools. They are simple yet powerful and I would love to see Blogger and WordPress evolve to a model more like this so we could finally bring more and better design to the "ProSumer" digital space.

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Thursday, February 07, 2008

My Talking Stain

One of the favorite commercials from the Super Bowl was for Tide and the Talking Stain which featured an unsightly, chatty shirt stain on a guys shirt during an interview.

The microsite that was tagged at the end of the spot and supports the campaign does a good job of recognizing how a commercial like this can take off in different ways online and gives consumers the tools to encourage this movement. First, you can "be the stain" by uploading a photo of you or a friend to be the face of the stain and dialing an 800 number to voice the stain yourself. The site also is the first I have seen that gives you the tools to create and upload your own spoof to Tide's YouTube channel. They will then pick the best one at the end of the contest. I think it is really smart to embrace and encourage this behavior because it gets consumers in invest something person into your brand and has them creating viral content for you. It is a really nice change to see a smart, integrated campaign like this that is so smart about how is it using digital to support and extend the offline campaign.

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Monday, January 28, 2008

Teens flock to create a Dewmocracy

In an attempt to revitalize and reinvent the Mountain Dew brand, PepsiCo did a unique creative partnership with Oscar-winning actor Forest Whitaker to build Dewmocracy which is a virtual community built around a story-based short film and role-play in game that ultimately will let the users of the site create a next Mountain Dew.

The site opens with a 4-minute short film that explains the Dewmocracy back story, which revolves around "a chosen one" whose mission is to defeat the iron-fisted corporate forces controlling the world and return freedom of choice to the people. It has the look of the combination of a Sci-Fi channel version of Blade Runner and Ridley Scott's 1984 Apple commercial. According to the creators, this opening movie and a lot of the experience was created by Whitaker who rather than sit back as a celebrity name plate he took on the majority of creative aspects for the experience by hiring his own team of illustrators, designers, writers and producers.

The game has seven "chambers" where you can earn points by doing various games like answering questions, meeting mythical characters, etc..
Get enough points and you can ultimately select the flavor, color, name, logo, label, and tag line for the next Mountain Dew. This selection process isn't completely open ended as each choice is made from a pre-set list so there are a limited number of combinations that could win.

The winning drink will be unveiled in July. For me, the whole thing is interesting but I don't really find it that compelling since I don't drink Mountain Dew or have the free time required to get very far in the game. But then again I am not the demographic for this and it is resonating with their target since the site has had 700,000 unique visitors, including 200,000 registered members who have played the game with an average time spent per gaming session is 28 minutes. It is hard to argue with numbers like that so it will be interesting to track the rest of the campaign and the final reveal to see how it all works out.

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Wednesday, January 23, 2008

Blurb publishing

Being able to create and publish your own book isn't anything new since iPhoto has been doing it for years. I did come across a new entry into the category that I thought was really interesting this week in Blurb.com. You download their BookSmart software and can create a book much like you have in other programs but what makes it different is the addition of several new features like the ability to automatically suck in blog content, you can collaborate with other people to create your book and when it is done you can set a price and sell it in their bookstore.

First, the ability to suck in blog content works with all major blogging engines and all you have to do is put in your log-in, click which entries you want in the book and it sucks down all the content and puts it into your selected book size and layout. There are a lot more page layout options that I expected though since I am a designer I was hoping for a few more but that will always be the case. I tried it with this blog and it was really easy to get the content in but you quickly realize the problem is that you have to go back and replace all the photos because since it is a blog I am not using an image size or quality that is anywhere near good enough for print.

I like that they have also included the ability to collaborate on book with other people as it adds the community element to the process. It is set-up so even though it is a collaboration one person serves as the editor who pulls in and controls the content from the contributors. This seems like it could have a lot of potential for writers, designers and potentially for it to be re-skinned and used advertisers who have a consumer base that would like to do something like this.

Finally when the book it done you can set your options and price and put the book up for sale in their bookstore. The content has to be original since it is for sale but the amount of content here is growing quickly and includes some really good work that is worth checking out.

I think it will be interesting to see how Blurb build on their model but I think it has a lot of potential and should really appeal to the 'pro-sumers' who want more control, integration and a place to sell their work than what they get in basic applications like iPhoto.

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Monday, December 17, 2007

Ecards grow up at SomeEcards.com

With the holidays fast approaching some of you may not have had time to send out your holiday greetings and SomeEcards.com is a great solution. Hallmark and American Greetings haven't been able to make it old age and past fart jokes for their cards but this site has a range of humor for everyone from pretty mild to raunchy. The site was the brainchild by Brook Lundy who is a friend of mine and fellow creative director working over at Razorfish and he was the twisted mind behind last years smash hit ShaveEverywhere.com. You can see the same great sense of humor in all the cards so check them out and give your friends a laugh.

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Friday, October 12, 2007

Right Brain vs. Left Brain

Last week a friend of mine sent me this Right Brain vs Left Brain test where you are supposed to look at an animation of a dancer turning clockwise or counter-clockwise. The direction you see her turning is supposed to tell you what side of the brain is your dominant one. If you see it turning clockwise then you use more of the right side of the brain and vice versa. They also say that if you try to focus you can change the direction.

I have tried this test by myself and with a number of other people and I have never been able to two people to see different things. If the dancer changes direction then everyone in group saw it change at the same time. What do you see? Can you get two people to see something different? Is this just a hoax we are all wasting time on?

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Wednesday, October 03, 2007

Sony Bravia 'Play-Doh' launches tomorrow

I got an email from Sony today saying that the third installment in the Son Bravia advert series that I recently wrote about will be launching tomorrow. There is a sneak preview that is live on the site now on the site and shows the process for creating the video that's worth checking out.

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Wednesday, September 26, 2007

Internet brands Bonds

Fashion designer Mark Ecko recently bought Barry Bonds' 756th home run ball at a Sotheby's auction or just over $752,000. Ecko then did something wonderful and fascinating by letting the public decide the fate of the ball. The options were banishing the ball into outer space, giving it to the Baseball Hall of Fame or branding it with an asterisk to represent the popular thought that Bonds used steriods to accomplish the feat. Over 10 million people voted and yesterday Ecko revealed the landslide decision yesterday on the NBC's Today Show where 47 percent voted to brand it and 34 percent voted to give it to the Hall of Fame. So the ball will be branded with an asterisk and the Hall of Fame has decided to accept it. It is a fascinating series of events where an online has been able to let the people have their voice and mark a piece of history forever with their opinion.

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Thursday, September 20, 2007

Video game advertising grows up

Most night you can find me winding down the day on my PS3 blasting away in Resistance Fall of Man. Being 34 and a gamer does make me feel old at times when all the advertising you see is fast cut montages geared to excite the fast twitch brain muscles of the younger Mountain Dew soaked gaming audience.

Yesterday I saw the first video game commercial that was mature and thoughtful entry into this advertising category. The spot is a teaser for the upcoming release of Halo 3 and looks and sounds very much like something taken directly from HBO's Band of Brothers. I personally don't have any connection to that material since I have never owned an Xbox or played Halo my friend and piers who are my age were really effected by it as I passed the link around. My friend who first sent me the link had the best comment when he said "The only real concern I have is that I feel awkward feeling more moved and inspired by the Halo war museum than the Bush wars.".

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Tuesday, September 18, 2007

Sony Bravia V3 with Playdoh

SONY Bravia adverts which I have highlighted before are back for round 3 and this time it is here in New York. This latest installment hasn't been released yet but from what I can tell and have seen this latest version will large scale claymation of rabbits using about 2.5 tons of clay, 3 weeks and about 40 animators to create. No claymation of this scale with this many animators working at once has even been attempted so it will be intersting to see the results though no release date has been given.

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Monday, September 10, 2007

Neiman Marcus on YouTube?


Having lived in Dallas for years I was able to see first hand how many people are true devotees of this temple of high-end retail. It made me too twice today when I saw that Neiman's has taken over the YouTube home page to promote its 100th anniversary with designers, former associates and Neiman Marcus executives talking about the company and what its legacy means for fashion. It does seem like a very strange pairing since most of Neiman's core audience is the ladies-who-lunch crowd but I have seen where other high-end luxury brands have found success on YouTube. The numbers say they may have made a smart move since ComScore data says that YouTube.com indexes higher both in people ages 35 to 54 and in high-income households than the general Internet population.

But like everything the research doesn't ensure success and though it is still early the numbers look pretty weak since the video only has around 130,000 views and a two star rating. I think that the mediocre results are going to change because even thought this is a small experiment Neiman's has a few things working against them. First, that the brand has been so old school for so long makes it hard to make a channel shift like this. Second, that this content will only resonate with people who have been to a store and had a reaction like the people in the video. If you don't have that experience to ground the content then it just seems overly pretentious.

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Saturday, August 18, 2007

Paper Critters


Anyone who has seen my office knows it looks like a showroom extension for the Kidrobot store in SoHo so I love a new site I came across tonight called Paper Critters which was created by Ruperto Fabito Jr. as his MFA thesis. The site lets your view, create, collect and share your critters which are a simple 3D toy figures. The Toy Creator combines simple drawing tools with stencils and the ability to upload your own art. The tools are simple but combination of all of this gives you a lot to work with and you can create most anything style you want. Once you get it the way you want you can add it the colony with the rest of the world's creations. You can organize, view and comment on the colony to find the one's that you like. I only wish you could print out and assemble your Critter so it would stay true to it's name but the site and experience are incredibly addictive and fun so check it out and create a Critter of your own.

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Monday, August 13, 2007

My iTunes

A friend sent me a link yesterday to a new widget from Apple called My iTunes which I hadn't heard of before. That fact alone was suprising given how the Apple PR machine is able to make everyone aware of every small update and advance on anything. My iTunes is a simple widget that is self-updating add-on to your web page, social-networking profile, or blog. It lets you share your top reviews, favorite artists, new music, movies, and TV shows from the iTunes Store with anyone who visits your site. One of the nicest things is that you can customized the size and style to create a look you like. The customization is limited to 5 color schemes and 3 layouts but it is more than I have seen out of most any other widget. The last thing worth noting is that you can also use the My iTunes feed with any standard RSS or ATOM feed reader which opens it up to a lot of other uses as well.

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Friday, August 10, 2007

Unicel Bubbles Up

I got an email this morning from a designer over at Kelliher Samets Volk that they had launched a new micro site for the wireless company Unicel to support their new "What's Bubbling Up" campaign. A any company doing the millionth tired iteration of a user generated micro site usually get me about as excited as fighting the tourists in Times Square but this site has an interesting spin I haven't really seen before.

The visual design and interface is as simple as all the content being displayed in stylized thought bubbles you can roll around to explore. Newly posted bubbles glow white for the first 24 hours and then become part of the crowd. All bubbles have a nice touch where they teases to the content inside by only displaying the first few words of the post so it makes you want to explore around more than usual.

It is disappointing that there isn't any functionality or a cookie that would let you find your bubble after it is posted because it almost instantly gets lost in the crowd and finding it again from the beginning is almost impossible. Some kind of simple search functionality to help you comb through all the content and let you find the things that would resonate with you would have been a nice addition. Over all the simple visual experience makes it surprisingly engaging and breathes some life back into a very tired concept.

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Friday, July 27, 2007

User generated lingerie?

Last year we saw Doritos, Chevy and others turn to their consumers to help create their advertising and content got a variety of mediums. The UGC content trend has taken a semi-bizarre new twist as beginning next month Frederick's of Hollywood will run a six-week online promotion for users to submit designs for a corset that Frederick's will produce. Contestants can download a Frederick's created corset template, then either print it out to design by hand or use their own design software. Once uploaded, they can then post a link to their design on their blog or social networking page, or e-mail it to friends.

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Sunday, July 08, 2007

Burger King's Pet Moustache

Burger King is at it again with a new site called Pet Moustache. The site brings to interactive life that cheap childhood toy that would let you drag magnetic shavings around like hair. It is straight forward enough and it a fun but short diversion.

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Ethan Haas Was Right

An intriguing new puzzle site recently popped on the scene without much known about what it is or who is behind it. Ethan Haas Was Right is a mysterious Flash-based website that presents a series of 5 unique puzzles, some original and some rehashed versions of classic puzzle games. Between the puzzles are video segments containing clues as to the origin and meaning of it all.

Each puzzle is played with a puzzle orb that has faded hieroglyphics and looks like a set piece from Myst. When you solve all the puzzles you will be rewarded with a video of a man inside of a dark room who lets you in on who caused the "end" to come, and it'll also give you advice and clues on how to avoid these people and the solution to the new puzzles.

A few other blogs have latched onto the game and have pieced together the theory that this game is part of a marketing campaign for something called "Cloverfield" and it may (or may not be) part of a larger alternate reality game. If you want to solve the game for yourself without the hours of work check out this walkthrough that will get you through.

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Wednesday, June 27, 2007

Papervision3D and Carlos Ulloa

Papervision 3D has been around for a little while and has been demoed at Flash Forward and other events. You may have seen the underwater example that has been running around the net for the past few months. This week designer Carlos Ulloa unveiled what I think is the most stunning use of the technology thus far with a 3D controllable race car which races around his home page. For me it isn't that fact that you can control the 3D car which is as impressive as the little touch he added to bring it to life. The fact that the car ramps up to speed, has weight when it moves and the steering centers itself when you aren't turning make it a really wonderful and fun experience.

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Tuesday, June 26, 2007

She Has Your Eyes

If you have a dark sense of humor and have a friend who's a lady's man you will love this. Go to SheHasYourEyes.com and send your friend a video message featuring a young lady claiming she had a daughter from him. The site was created by Happiness in Brussels for Condoms.com and obviously the point is to promote the use and the purchase of condoms. The viral aspect works since the message is unexpected and the experience is memorable but I am not convinced that it will move the sales needle.

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Wednesday, June 20, 2007

Wet Paint Please Touch

So the Wiki, which lets users create written content that can be shared and edited by multiple people, has been around for a while now but I saw a site today that put a really interesting twist on the concept called Wet Paint Please Touch. Like any Wiki the site lets you browse, contribute and create to the content on the site but in this case the content is not written but visual.

Would-be virtual artists start with a blank canvas and have a variety of tools and colors to create their mural. Once their masterpiece is complete the canvas can be forwarded to friends so that they can contribute their own creative vision to the piece. Once all of that is finished the painting is exhibited in the online gallery where visitors can explore and rate the work. Not forgetting the social media aspects you can also downloaded your work to post on you MySpace pages, Facebook profiles or get your own domain like http://bobsmith.wetpaint.com. So the simple interface and social group art concept make it one of the more unique and interesting sites I have seen in a long time.

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Monday, June 04, 2007

The Border Film Project

I came across an interesting site today called the Border Film Project which is trying to shed light one of our country's most heated issues - immigration. The project is run by three people including Weiden + Kennedy Rudy Adler who are trying to convey perspectives from both sides of the literal fence by handing out 73 disposable cameras to undocumented migrants and the Minutemen guards trying to prevent them from crossing our borders.

The project recently finished and the nearly 2,000 photos have been posted to the site with statistics, and other information. The project also comes in book form and that is being sold in several places including Amazon.com and American Apparel worldwide. The artists have also been taking the show on the road with exhibitions around the country.

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Wednesday, May 16, 2007

Mindfreak your friends - THIS IS AWESOME!

If you want to freak out your friends check out FreakYourMind.com because this is the coolest viral site I have seen in YEARS! It was created by my friends over at EVB and all you have to do is enter your friends name and phone number and the site will create a YouTube style