"Let them sing it for you" constitutes an alternative to the way you can get computers to sing or read a written text, but with a much richer and more unpredictable result. Send your friend a love declaration, Christmas wish or poem sung by Judy Garland, Lou Reed and Christina Aguilera. Authorities can replace their streamlined phone answering voices with an unruly mix of mythological and sexually inviting voices belonging to the pop world's greatest icons.

 
Efficiency is doing the right things well, while effectiveness is knowing the right things to do.

 
World Beard and Moustache Championships. I'll let the gallery images speak for themselves.

 
If awareness about AIDS still being prevalent and deadly is a growing problem then advertising campaigns like this one by the Quebec government do a pretty arresting job at changing that. Very provocative and impossible to skip past. Created by Marketel in Montreal this three-page series presents a clever and controversial combination of sex and cemetary (yes, that's right, produced by a government agency). This is a new spin on a campaign that first ran about a year ago, with similarly strong imagery (razor blades with silhouettes in the middle of a heterosexual couple / gay couple / needle).

 
The clips on his website aren't nearly long enough to satisfy my appetite for this really cool idea by video artist Sam Easterson. Animal, Vegetable, Video endeavors to create the world's largest collection of video footage that has been captured from the perspective of animals, plants and the environments they inhabit. Try, for example, seeing the world as an armadillo does. Or a timber wolf. Or pitcher plant. Or even a desert.

(And you'll be glad to know that no animals are harmed in the production of these videos. However, the gear does look a bit cumbersome.)

 
The advantages of structure complementing creativity, or in other words: How to Get a Really Fat Cow Through a Really Thin Straw.

Rollo May calls them river banks. I have a different way of looking at it. I’ve always thought of creating advertising as working inside a straw. This narrow tube of possibility. Outside the straw is an infinite number of other possibilities that literally stretch on forever, but which, for whatever reasons, are pretty much closed to me. Sometimes the straw is really narrow. Sometimes it’s wider. But it’s always there and I always feel comfortable inside it, once I know where the walls of the straw are.

(via Cup of Java)

 
Speaking at a US Patent and Trademark Office conference in Philadelphia last week, inventor, entrepreneur and author (on the topic of artificial intelligence) Ray Kurweil unveiled his latest patent for a "cybernetic poet" as well as these words of advice on how to invent:

Mr. Kurzweil roams from the philosophical to the practical. During his talk in Philadelphia, he offered practical tips on how inventors can harness their ideas. He advocates what he calls lucid dreaming - harnessing the unconscious to work on problems while sleeping.

"When I go to sleep I assign myself a problem, without trying to solve the problem," he said. Then during his waking moments, between consciousness and slumber, he revisits the problem. "It is a great time for creative thinking," he said. "You can think of new connections, new approaches that you wouldn't otherwise think of."

 
A problem crying out for a solution. The Dirty Little Secret About Spam

The most fervent antispam activists now predict that the world's email system will seize up within six months. Some organizations just won't have the server capacity to handle the onslaught, and our inboxes will be so packed as to be useless. Even more circumspect forecasters agree that small ISPs and businesses may soon be overwhelmed. ...

The economics of email are just too seductive: It's relatively easy and incredibly cheap for anyone to send out millions of messages to anyone with an email account. Unlike any other form of marketing in history, most of the delivery costs are borne by the recipients: by the Internet-service providers (ISPs) and corporations that maintain our mail servers and by us. Anyone who has had to delete dozens of spams on a dial-up connection understands this. It's as if companies were sending us reams of postal junk mail, COD.

That's why the flood of offers for low mortgage rates, printer toner cartridges, penile implants, money-laundering deals with wives of deposed African dictators, and much, much more is swelling by 20% each month, according to some ISPs. In the United States and Europe, spam accounts for between 40% and 70% of all email traffic, depending on whom you ask. In January, America Online said it was blocking 1 billion emails a day from members' accounts; by May, that number had doubled.

 
Is this taking innovation too far?

Jones Soda Co.announces today that due to the incredible response to the Turkey & Gravy flavored beverage, and the requests from across the country, Jones Soda will sell its Turkey & Gravy flavored beverage online with all proceeds going to Toys for Tots, a national charity for children.

(via Cup of Java)

 
"Intellectuals solve problems; geniuses prevent them." --Albert Einstein, physicist, Nobel laureate (1879-1955)

 
Looking for some good reading material? Check out the numerous nominees for the 2003 Utne Independent Press Awards. Tons of interesting and obscure magazines to choose from. For example: Modern Dog, Kitchen Sink, and Gastronomica.

 
A meandering essay that visits semantics, Darwinism and aesthetics, professor at the Oslo School of Architecture Jan Michl argues for a perspective on design that is less solitary and myopic and more cooperative and historical. In other words, redesign.

The concept of redesign has the advantage that it actually contains the word design, i.e. the concept retains the individual creator dimension of the word design while at the same time, through the prefix re-, emphasising that the individual creative process has the character of step-by-step changes in, improvements on, and new combinations of solutions that already exist. In this way, the concept reminds us that every complex product that is improved embraces a large number of clever solutions that earlier designers have contributed, and which the latest designer freely adopts, makes into her own, and builds on. In other words, the concept of redesign underlines the fact that – both as process and product – design always contains a collective, cooperative and cumulative dimension.

(via designfeast.com)

 
It's often overlooked that innovation is little more than looking at something that already exists, only from a different perspective. Doing so creates the "disruption" that many business folks - particularly marketers - strive for. This is the central premise Clayton M. Christensen and Michael E. Raynor take in the follow-up to The Innovators Dilemma, The Innovator's Solution (excerpted here in USA Today).

Interestingly, 1981 signaled the end of Sony's disruptive odyssey, and for the next eighteen years the company did not launch a single new disruptive growth business. The company continued to be innovative, but its innovations were sustaining in character-they were better products targeted at existing markets. Sony's PlayStation, for example, is a great product, but it was a late entrant into a well-established market. Likewise, its Vaio notebook computers are great products, but they too were late entrants into a well-established market.

What caused this abrupt shift in Sony's innovation strategy? In the early 1980s Morita began to withdraw from active management of the company in order to involve himself in Japanese politics.10 To take his place, Sony began to employ marketers with MBA's to help identify new-growth opportunities. The MBA's brought with them sophisticated, quantitative, attribute-based techniques for segmenting markets and assessing market potential. Although these methods uncovered some underserved opportunities on trajectories of sustaining improvement in established markets, they were weak at synthesizing insights from intuitive observation. In searching for an initial product foothold in new-market disruption, observation and questioning to determine what customers are trying to do, coupled with strategies of rapid development and fast feedback, can greatly improve the probability that a company's products will converge quickly upon a job that people are trying to get done.

 
Bono spoke passionately at a Canadian political convention last night about Third World debt relief and the African AIDs epidemic. News story and video of the speech here.

 
Here's a unique archive of old and very intriguing (in a tacky way) album covers. These aren't just music albums, but also self-help LPs and other various oddities. Maybe there's something here... or maybe there isn't. Bizarre Records.

(Thanks Ask & Dave)

 
WTF! End of the world nuclear armageddon in humourous Flash style.

 
Freecell, a New York based design studio, researches architecture and objects to question notions of aesthetics, craft and production. "We examine fabrication trades, from awning construction to skylight glazing, and utilize them in nontraditional ways to achieve new relationships." The idea is apparent in the conceptual drawings presented on their website. Their stuff for the new NY bookstore Shortwave is worth checking out. Clever stuff.

 
Operating on the premise that confessions are as we see ourselves -- not always pretty but often illuminating -- NotProud.com has collected an impressive volume (15,000!) of bizarre/clever/repulsive/amusing/pointless and anonymous thoughts. Designed to gather and showcase the confessions of the world, it is an unpredictable whirlwind of human emotion unencumbered by responses, judgements or complaints.

 
Urbanphoto's Chris Dewolf takes on the utility and silliness of jaywalking laws.

Jaywalking, after all, is a necessarily interactive process. It forces drivers and pedestrians to acknowledge each other, making them more conscious of the other's presence. It's probably pretty safe to say that drivers on streets like Ste-Catherine in Montreal become more cautious when they know there's a high possibility of someone wading out into traffic. On streets with few pedestrians, on the other hand, or one-way roads engineered for maximum traffic flow, drivers speed up and become lazy, making the few who dare to jaywalk far more vulnerable. Jaywalkers, basically, put drivers in their place, reminding them that the city isn't their own personal speedway.

 
Failure is Glorious. A concept lost on so many companies and illustrated here in a nicely aged Fast Company article by housewares manufacturing businessman Alberto Alessi.

The borderline: The area of the "possible" is the area in which we develop products that the customer will love and buy. The area of the "not possible" is represented by the new projects that people are not yet ready to understand or accept.

Working close to the borderline is very risky, because you cannot see it with your eyes. It is not clearly drawn or marked. You can only feel it by using sensibility and intuition -- two characteristics rare in industrial organizations that are led by technology rather than design. One step more, and you risk falling into the not-possible area. So most car producers, for example, work as far away as possible from the borderline. And step by step, they all end up producing the same car.

At Alessi, we work as close as we can to the borderline and accept the risk of falling into the other area. Why? Because when we succeed, we give birth to a new product that surprises people and manages to touch their hearts. And because it is completely unknown, it doesn't have any competition -- which means we can enjoy big margins.

 
Open Source Everywhere - a superb Wired article by Thomas Goetz about the much deeper and farther reaching applications for open source collaboration and innovation.

While the assembly line accelerated the pace of production, it also embedded workers more deeply into the corporate manufacturing machine. Indeed, that was the big innovation of the 20th-century factory: The machines, rather than the workers, drove production. With open source, the people are back in charge. Through distributed collaboration, a multitude of workers can tackle a problem, all at once. The speed is even greater - but so is the freedom. It's a cottage industry on Internet time. ...

But software is just the beginning. Open source has spread to other disciplines, from the hard sciences to the liberal arts. Biologists have embraced open source methods in genomics and informatics, building massive databases to genetically sequence E. coli, yeast, and other workhorses of lab research. NASA has adopted open source principles as part of its Mars mission, calling on volunteer "clickworkers" to identify millions of craters and help draw a map of the Red Planet. There is open source publishing: With Bruce Perens, who helped define open source software in the '90s, Prentice Hall is publishing a series of computer books open to any use, modification, or redistribution, with readers' improvements considered for succeeding editions. There are library efforts like Project Gutenberg, which has already digitized more than 6,000 books, with hundreds of volunteers typing in, page by page, classics from Shakespeare to Stendhal; at the same time, a related project, Distributed Proofreading, deploys legions of copy editors to make sure the Gutenberg texts are correct. There are open source projects in law and religion. There's even an open source cookbook.

 
Silent Silos

Creative business is still in the throes of piecing together fragments within their own industries -- marketing communications disciplines; architecture with interior design; web and multimedia and broadcast. Specialization of once big, catch-all industries has led to fragmentation. This fragmentation is progress of an unpredictable nature and it will continue to make it harder and harder for traditionalists to make the pieces whole again in the same way that they once were. The best that can be done -- and it really is an attractive alternative -- is to informally merge these disciplines as they evolve and as they are needed. The connections are no longer mechanical but rather organic.

Beyond the relatively simple act of harmonizing an industry with its own disparate functions, however, there is the much more difficult but exhilarating opportunity to mix whole industries together too. As the creative industries themselves become more specialized a need will emerge to get them interacting as well. The problem with this, however, is that the walls guarding the industries from one another are even taller and thicker than the ones slowly isolating industry disciplines or fragments. As it is now, the communication that happens between such creative industries as industrial design, fashion, advertising, graphic design, architecture, and so on is pitiful. Brand, product and strategy ideas are hampered because of this because brand, product and strategy ideas rely on all of these industries, not just one. There is so much too be discovered here!

The walls between industries are pronounced because of legitimacy. Legitimacy is essentially the level of institutional standards and professional protocol built in to an industry; things such as accreditation, regulations and even unions. Only accredited accountants, for example, can do accounting. This accreditation is a very common form of standardization (specialism) that is created primarily to keep people out; people who are, supposedly, not capable of doing accounting. On the flip side, it also tends to lock people in. Many people go through life classified by their job description and believing that they are only able to do one particular thing. Change threatens such legitimacy devices and so it follows that the more legitimate an industry is the more averse it is to change -- and by extension ideas from "the outside". _S

 
Digital Singles Close to Eclipsing Hard Copies

Digital tracks are outselling physical singles by a growing margin, a sign that consumers increasingly are embracing the brave new world of Internet downloading. Digital download sales outpaced physical singles 857,000 to 170,000, according to Nielsen SoundScan figures for the week ending Oct. 26. That's slightly more than a 5-to-1 ratio.

 
As search engines go, in other words, Google has clearly been a runaway success. Not only is its own site the most popular for search on the web, but it also powers the search engines of major portals, such as Yahoo! and AOL. All told, 75% of referrals to websites now originate from Google's algorithms. That is power.

Part of Google's charm was that it grew so successfully and yet stayed a private company. Well, not for too much longer.