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Monday, January 29, 2007

Is the PerplexCity Cube about to be found?

Will someone claim the £100,000 reward which has been offered?
The final clue of the Perplexcity season one is about to be issued.
According to the Independent who ran a double spread article on the phenomenon that is Perplexcity, ARGs and Mind Candy.
Sales of over £1m have been made of the puzzle cards which Mind Candy so brilliantly devised and enthusiasts will be looking forward to the second season and any new puzzles that come out of the Mind Candy imagineers.
If you're looking for some back issue cards, they are actively traded on eBay

Personally I am hoping the puzzles in the new season are going to be a little easier to crack. Give us a break Michael, some of us have day jobs!

Thursday, January 25, 2007

Beboers get to Moo


The tens of millions of members of Bebo can now make Moo Minicards using their own uploaded imagery on Bebo.
I can quite see the many thousands of bands who create home pages and upload music finding the cards a really cool way of creating their 'business cards' for distribution at gigs and elsewhere.

The superb print interface which Moo have created is attracting a number of content and community sites to want to partner with them. ....and users absolutely love them.

The mini cards are a superb example of a high quality, personalised product created on the web ........watch out for some new Moo products before too long.




Wednesday, January 24, 2007

Astley Clarke named by Harpers as second most stylish website!


Calling it the "Net -a -Porter of the Jewellery world with a brilliantly edited collection of gems from contemporary designers", Harpers Bazaar has put Astley Clarke in great company.
Hard on the heels of TomFord.com and ahead of Handbag and Net-a-porter, this is a great accolade for an embryonic business.
Bec Clarke is steadily building Astley Clarke into a web brand with real character.
Congratulations, Becca.
BTW: You could do worse than visit the site before Valentines Day!! Great stuff for Men and Women.

Monday, January 22, 2007

Imagini sees the world in pictures

I have been working with Alex Willcock and his team for over a year now. Alex has invented what looks like a simple and obvious idea. [The best ones often are].
Imagini profiles consumers using something they call their visualDNA.
Demographics of all kinds - geo, psycho and lifestyle have been used extensively to segment and understand consumers. Behavioural, attitudinal and transactional analysis produce interesting results and refine targeting significantly.
Now, after more than a year of developement, Imagini has demonstrated that understanding consumers' emotional preferences can be done very effectively using imagery and a set of tools they have developed.
The applications for the technology are very exciting indeed. Visual content can be served which matches consumers, new insights can be delivered. Advertisers and marketers will no longer need to constructing mood boards and tear sheets using their instincts as to how particular cutural and age demographics are going to respond. They can now add empirical data to back up assumptions.
The consumer applications which Imagini is working on are engaging and fun. Take a look at the Beta site and my widget below to get a flavour.
I'd be surprised if they haven't built up a global database of millions of VisualDNA'a within the next 12 months.
The Wall Street Journal have picked up on Imagini in a major piece featured on 19th January.
MSN and Nectar have both run trials which have been very illuminating.
Great start guys.

Friday, January 05, 2007

Daylife is live!

Upendra and team have lifted some more covers off Daylife. They set out to build the world's best news analyser and aggregator complete with an awesome API enabling great applications to be built.
From a commercial point of view, Daylife seeks to be a page inventory machine for its partners. Generating thousands of news pages automatically with no need for human editors it is a no-cost means for sites of all shapes and sizes to extend their service and inventory by adding Daylife modules, pages, or using its API on their pages.
The first partner site, the Huffingtonpost.com, went live just before Xmas. Go to the front page of their site, and see the Newsranker module, powered by Daylife which contains a customisable, embeddable widget like this:


If you click on any bar, it takes you to full topic pages powered by Daylife.
Google Ad Network can give a publisher ADS, they cannot give a publisher INVENTORY – and that is where Daylife come in.

More features and more partners to come ...soon. Set an alert for Daylife.

Tuesday, January 02, 2007

Moo's expanding ...


MOO has grown rapidly since September launch. Now, with customers in over 100 countries and clients including Skype and Flickr (with many more on the horizon), the little team needs backup, so Moo's hiring a number of key positions.
If you're looking for something a bit different, or know someone who might be then please check out the job specs at http://www.moo.com/jobs/ or forward on to anyone who you think would be interested.

All positions include stock options, liberal use of the office cappuccino machine and the chance to change the world;)

MORE ABOUT MOO

MOO is a new kind of printing business that creates products and services to help some of the biggest and most vibrant communities on the web take their virtual lives offline. Founded in April 2006, with investment from Index Ventures and Atlas Venture, MOO is headquartered in London, with partners in the UK, USA and Europe.

MOO’s first product: MiniCards, a reinvention of Victorian calling cards, are designed to help people share their virtual identities offline. MiniCards have already proven to be a global phenomenon, with orders for more than a million cards from people in over 100 countries in the first 3 months.

MOO’s partners currently include Flickr and Skype and have plans to launch new products with these and several new partners in 2007.

Find out more ... click: MOO

And check out how people are using their MiniCards in MOO's group page on Flickr

http://www.flickr.com/groups/moo

A shooting Star!


Stardoll continues to make rapid progress. The latest Alexa rankings show Stardoll is ranked 483 on the Alexa traffic rankings - up 269 places in 3 months.
With 4.5m members globally, Stardoll has captured the imaginations of young girls in dozens of countries.
Some of the outfits that the girls are putting together show great flair and smart fashion brands will be looking to see what millions of teenagers are voting for.
A popular facility on the site is the ability to put together an album with your favourite celebrities dressed the way you'd like to see them. These albums are voted on each week and the winner is featured in the stardoll magazine.