Goodies

I've just received the first Matter Box, it's all very exciting! It's like Christmas here! I think it's a great idea and judging by the reaction of my nearby colleagues, there will be a lot more matter boxes going to iris next time round. Someone has already snatched up the Nintendo Wii wristband; the Sony Bravia Play-Doh will go to my Friend Alex who has some kind of addiction to plasticine and who's coming over for dinner this evening; there's the SonyEricsson Music Monster that we did at iris last year; and a few other things I have yet to go through...

Feeding myself

Geeky news for a change: I'm just trying out Netvibes and it's absolutely awesome so far! A friend had told me last month that it was a better aggregator than Google Reader, and he was right.
There are loads more possibilities and it also links to all the major sites used these days (email, FB, Flickr, Twitter, Del.icio.us, etc), I'm going to subscribe to plenty more blog feeds now - I'll never be able to follow everything, but now I'll have a easy visual way of checking out what interests me or not!

Have a break

I'm trying this new look on my blog for a little while, we'll see how it works out. I haven't had too much time to read blogs yet this week, so it might be all over the place already, but check check out the site for the latest Kit Kat campaign in France, it's really cool!!

Kit Kat: La Quête du Break Ultime (The Kit Kat Quest for the Ultimate Break)

The intro 3D animation is pretty good, but what I find amazing is definitely the prize! The principle is for users to upload a video of what "the ultimate break" would be and then visitors can vote for their favourite one. A great incentive and I think a good online use of the brand's image (well in France at least; it stayed "Have a break. Have a Kit Kat" ever since the pandas in 1989).

And let's have the pandas, I loved this ad as a kid:

Messy

I was just checking out Michelle's blog and the her latest post is about groups of people apparently fascinated with messy desks. I guess I get fascinated with people in general and their strange interests in particular (mine included!). This is my desk at home, so maybe It'll only appeal to a minority amongst messy desk aficionados, though even then I never would have thought anyone would be interested in ever seeing it on the internet. But I also love being surprised and thought I'd join in the fun:



Ah marvels of technology! A mere 40 minutes later (I'm still learning how to use a MacBook, hadn't opened iPhoto yet...) and voila! The relatively uninteresting desk I see everyday is now available online for all to admire!

I got a bit excited and thought there might be an interest in my messy table... And all right, I admit I dressed one thing up for the picture, can you guess what?



This is becoming like a complete anthropology class! Studying the Willem (Willemus Curiosos) in his natural habitat... If anyone has the courage and time for more fun online activities, I'd be interested in finding out what kind amazing piece of wisdom one could gather from the scattered items on these pictures...

Flex user group meeting

I went to the London Flex User Group Meeting last Thursday, it was really interesting. It was a special meeting, 2 Adobe Evangelists, James Ward and Serge Jespers (wouldn't you like such a job title? Sounds just a bit weird at the same time, though) came over to talk about the lates Adobe are working on as well as some of the new possibilities available with Flex Builder 3. About 250 people turned up in Shoreditch Town Hall, and Adobe gave out a lot of free beer, which is always good.

I was particularly impressed with a new product they're developing called Thermo, the intention of which is to bridge the gap between design and development. Looks really cool, check the demo video here.

They also showed some impressive functionalities with Flex, from optimising the size of applications to embedding HD videos in Flash Player. I'm no developer, so I didn't understand everything when they started talking about code, but it was simple enough for me to follow what the results are and get some insight into the next possible things in Rich Media Applications, which is cool. Oh, and did I mention there was free beer, too? It's the first time I go to a conference where the speaker stops in the middle and encourages everyone to go get themselves another beer! You could say I was slightly drunk by the end of the evening...

Thanks to Chester at Emak Mafu, and to all the other Mafus for organising the event!

Giant Spider Gone

I'm really enjoying working right by the Tate Modern! Yesterday, they started taking Louise Bourgeois' giant spider away:



Today there's only a few legs left, gently wrapped up, like some kid pulled them all off an actual spider... (hopefully kids don't wrap up those, that would be a bit worrying after all)



Maybe I'll manage to be there when they start repairing the big crack in the Hall in April, that should be interesting!

Weekend links and blog surfing

A pretty cool branding concept recently showed up in Singapore (from Faris' blog): Link

Essential tools for the discerning designer, The Design Police.

A series of waterfalls due to be set up as an art project in New-York, including one under the Brooklyn Bridge, it's going to be pretty amazing.

Apparently some people in Rome hadn't had enough of the Sony Bravia Balls ad and decided to do it all over again: Link

For the Marvel and comics fans, a series of Stan Lee tribute artwork. Some of it is really cool!

And finally, let's not forget the Beijing Olympics are coming up this summer. Adidas reminds us that there are a lot of people in China as well. Pretty impressive ad in any case:



That's all for now folks!

Knicker Picker

George pointed me out to this absolutely fascinating website and its very cool rich media features: Knicker Picker. Check it out!

Digital for Dummies

Photo by Clairity

I'm absolutely loving my new job!
Above any other responsibilities I've taken on, I'm going to create and lead a seminar to train some people at iris in the basics of all things digital.

Here is the premise I very quickly wrote to get the ball rolling:

“Digital for Dummies” - This new and exciting seminar could be for you if:

• You truly don’t get what the whole Facebook fuss is all about.
• You think del.icio.us is a website for food and gastronomy lovers.
• You know that Blogging is a bit like Curling, but played in the Summer Olympics.
• You heard that “Rich Media” was the new nickname for Time Warner.

I'd love to have all and any kind of suggestions from the blogosphere! (I still hate that word...)
What do you think are the most important things to cover for basics? (Imagine talking to a traditional agency suit wanting to get into digital, for example. I'm sure it happened to you!)

Looking forward to hearing from you!

New Job and Happy New Year

Looking at the date of my last post, I'm simply going to declare that blog writing is not going to happen daily here, at least for now. I might change that if ever I receive too many complaints from my faithful readers (my father and my flatmate, mainly), we'll see.

Anyways I started my new job today! I'm working at Iris, with the digital team. I'm starting as a digital recruiter, the plan being that I'm going to do that and start being trained in digital strategy after a few months. I've already met with some great people, they do really cool work and I'm looking forward to gigantic heaps of information and just plain stuff to take on board! (I get really excited when given loads of work and new things to learn, I'm a bit weird like that...)

So the next thing (even though this is my personal blog and doesn't necessarily reflect Iris' views and bla bla bla) is to anyone out there who might read this and be interested in finding out more about Iris, I would be more than happy to tell you about the agency.

I'll finish on the holidays (which happened already ages ago): Happy New Year!

I stayed in London and had a great Christmas with my little sister and plenty of good friends, and was at a really cool Rave party in London for NYE. It had been ages I hadn't been to one, and it had some really good sound systems (7 of them in total!). A whole group came from France with some friends, you can check out their music on MySpace:
My friend Ben [9mm] and Les Oiseaux de Nuit (that's a link to a video from a party they were at in 2006), from Tours. I had a really great night (and day, considering I left at 2pm on the first), danced a lot and met some great people!