Interactive wine bar

Great article in the NYT about ‘Reinventing Interaction‘ -
If you’re wondering what to order at Adour, the wine bar at the St. Regis Hotel in New York, you can scan hundreds of wines on an interactive menu projected on to the bar. If a wine appeals, you tap on its name to summon more information.

Interactive wine bar designed by Potion for the Clo Wine Bar in New York.

Adour’s virtual sommelier forms part of Potion’s efforts to liberate computing from the confines of the computer by reinventing it as an interactive experience that can come in different physical forms and be shared with other people. Working from a studio above a bustling street in New York’s Chinatown, they have already transformed floors, walls and furniture, as well as the bars at Azour and another New York wine bar, Clo, into communal “screens” that are controlled by human gestures or movement, rather than with a keyboard and mouse. From NYT

Anyone tried this out yet?

Social media stars face-off

Twitter King Shaq tweets challenge to Youtube Cult star Bruce Manley to a game of Horse for $1000.
He accepts. Location & Time tbd, game to take place sometime in July.

The_Real_SHAQ

vs Youtube_BRUCE

Stamen – Innovation Talk

San Francisco/Oakland design house Stamen, came in to talk with us Friday, and if you missed it, you missed out.

Essentially the people of Stamen like big, detailed data sets. They take data sets, just excel documents with hundreds of pages of numbers, and run it through a custom Python setup, to create dynamic XML data that they can use to create graphical values. For example, they took all the information for the crimes committed in Oakland on any given day (taken with cooperation from the Oakland police)  and create their own maps (completely open source, unlike Google Maps, yahoo, or MSN) and plugged some graphical data in to create Crimespotting, a fully interactive map used to see all types of crimes, where they occurred and at what time.

They have worked with Digg, Flickr (Yahoo), SFMOMA, Trulia (real estate) and a bunch of others. They do something unique, which in our business can be hard to come by. If you like information presented in new and smart ways, do yourself a favor, and check out Stamen.

I especially like the Flickr video clock. Very cool.

The Walkman…the iPod of it’s day

From the BBC magazine…
When the Sony Walkman was launched, 30 years ago this week, it started a revolution in portable music. But how does it compare with its digital successors? The Magazine invited 13-year-old Scott Campbell to swap his iPod for a Walkman for a week.

“My dad had told me it was the iPod of its day. He had told me it was big, but I hadn’t realised he meant THAT big. It was the size of a small book.”

Lily Allen’s Augmented reality

Lily Allen’s Augmented Reality Music video ‘Fuck you’. Produced by Frenzy and directors Arnaud & Clement.

Pardon my french…

Beck’s new online Record Club

Just discovered Beck’s awesome new online music experiment.
Beck & Friends pick an album and spend one day recording a cover of it, then post it to the internet, one song at a time.

Beck started the project off with his version of the Velvet Underground’s The Velvet Underground and Nico, and today he posted the first song from the project, perennial mixtape staple “Sunday Morning”.
Other artists he’ll be collaborating with include Devendra Banhart, MGMT, Jamie Lidell, and producer Nigel Godrich.

via Pitchfork Media

Fox Bat Strategy

Slightly self-indulgent post, but I know there are quite a few David Lynch fans out there so this is my Lynch link of the day…

For well over a decade now, Fox Bat Strategy has existed unreleased and unheard, slowly marinating in the ether of time, all the while retaining a uniquely modern sensibility.

A musical pet project of film director David Lynch, Fox Bat features a cast of musicians who began collectively collaborating with Lynch surrounding the production of Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me, appearing on the film’s two roadhouse instrumentals: “The Pink Room” and “Blue Frank” (as well as making cameos in the film itself). Of these players: Stephen Hodges (Drums), Don Falzone (Bass), Andy Armer (Keyboards) and Dave Jaurequi (Guitar), it was Jaurequi who was brought on last to contribute to the October, 1991 “Pink Room” session…unknowingly branding the word “group” on what was until then just another experiment.  (From: Fox Bat Strategy)

Enjoy!

Buy it on Amazon

Twitter 101

From Mashable:  http://mashable.com/guidebook/twitter/

Learn the Twitter lingo (like hashtags), what to do with it (eg. how to find people), how to do it (instructions and best practices), and how one might use it for business.  

Heart Rate Gaming

Nintendo is developing something they’re calling the ‘Wii Vitality Sensor’ for the Wii platform, that will have the ability to measure your pulse while you play.

Nintendo president Satoru Iwata, believes a sensor like this could be used in a game that helps the player monitor or control their heart rate, like a wii sports or a relaxation game.

Personally, the idea of being hooked up to one of these sensors doesn’t feel ‘relaxing’ to me, but the heart rate feature could be an interesting addition to wii fitness type games. Anyone want to do a Wii Spin class with me?

More NYT’s R&D – RFID tagging content

Here’s another look at some other advertising innovations the New York Times’s R&D lab is exploring.

Some of the R&D group’s advertising innovations include: RFID chips that connect print ads to more dynamic content on the web, ads that can shift from one screen to another, ads that are linked to what friends are chatting about online, and targeted advertising of all sorts.

via Neimanlab