Boom Boom Pow in an Apple Store

This is one way to shoot a video. Gotta give him credit! Use the tools you have available—even better when they're free.

via Boing Boing

"YouTube user nicholifavs is using the Apple Store as his own, personal A/V studio and audition space. So far, the little dude's shot dozens of lip sync videos including this one of the Black Eyed Peas' 'Boom Boom Pow.'"

We Think

Peter just passed this on to me. It's a video/trailer for a book by Charles Leadbeater that puts into perspective the potential of the Web and how it continues to bring like minds together and spread ideas so effectively. That's definitely one of the primary goals of Creative Juices. It begins "Welcome to the world of We Think"...and continues "The Web gets really interesting when people pool their ideas...then they start to be really creative." It proclaims that where the 20th century was about Mass Production, the 21st century will be about Mass Innovation. Also, instead of you are what you own, it becomes you are what you share.

...an interesting way of communicating the message in its own right, too.

Here's a link to We-think where you can download and read the first 3 chapters.

Good Things Should Never End

--> Good Things Should Never End

If you liked Crappy Cat, you'll be sure to like this website. It won a Webby Award, and claims to be "the world's first never ending website." I haven't seen it end, yet...so their claim appears to be true. Ooodles and oodles of fun things to interact with, on a continuous rainbow of FUN!

Brad Bird on Fostering Innovation

via Gigaom:

We were just talking about Brad Bird today (and his work on The Incredibles). Read this article about why he was hired to Pixar, and some ideas he has on fostering innovation. Here's specifically what Steve Jobs told him:

"The only thing we’re afraid of is complacency—feeling like we have it all figured out,” Bird quotes his boss as saying “…We want you to come shake things up." Bird explains to McKinsey how he did it — and why, for “imagination-based companies to succeed in the long run, making money can’t be the focus.”

He offers 9 key lessons (detailed in the article)

Herd Your Black Sheep
Perfect is the Enemy of Innovation
Look for Intensity
Innovation Doesn’t happen in a Vacuum
High Morale Makes Creativity Cheap
Dont Try To “Protect your success”
Steve Jobs Says ‘Interaction = Innovation’
Encourage Inter-disciplinary Learning
Get Rid of Weak Links
Making $$ Can’t Be Your Focus

--Thanks, Matt!

Play-Doh-Mation

Has anyone seen this commercial yet? It's an incredible technical feat, and simply beautiful to watch—blobs of Play-Doh that multiply into rabbits as they happily hop all over New York City. Watch the clip and then head on over to the Sony website, where they have it in hi-res and behind the scenes footage of how they pulled it off. The Sony website also has a pretty innovative interface. This should get your juices flowing! A victory for stop-motion in a world of CG animation.

(Thanks Cartoon Brew)

Business to the Googleth Degree

So, I was reading something on Slashdot, and I saw someone saying that Google encourages their employees to spend 10-20% of their time working on their own pet projects. WOW! That's one day a week! Have you ever wondered how things work over at the Googleplex? I did a little sleuthing and dug up this article. I pulled out a couple of the bullets.

• Innovation is not about instant perfection: New products and ideas are launched early and often, rather than spending time and money perfecting ideas before they are released to the public. Popularity determines which will be the most successful.


• Failure is good: Figuring out why a project failed offers something to apply to the next project. But fail fast to minimise the investment in shoddy ideas and damage to the brand.


• Give employees the time to pursue their dreams: Employees are encouraged to spend 10-20% of their time working on their own pet projects. This gives employees a creative outlet and gives them ownership of their ideas.


• Focus on users, not money: Anything that consumers find useful will inevitably make money, so focus on the user rather than something you can sell.

It's a wonder anything gets done over there. FYI, if you go to the article they mention something about not needing managers, but if you go to their corporate site, you'll see a list of 50 some odd managers. So I'd take that with a grain of salt. I'm not sure what the sources of the article are. There is also this bit on their company philosophy. Anyway, I thought some people might find this interesting. Have we parsed our company culture out anywhere? I feel like there were some cool things in the company handbook that might be worth sharing with the rest of the world.