What's Your Crazy Green Idea

Two students, Kyle Good and Bryan Le, have won $25,000 for their YouTube video about clean energy storage. The "What's your crazy green idea" competition by the X Prize Foundation asked people to submit a challenge that would form the basis for a potential future X Prize as a video. The pair's winning video was selected from 133 entries by more than 4,200 votes, and challenged developers to create an "ultracapacitor" that could be used to power consumer electronics.

The students' challenge asks for the production of an ultracapacitor to exceed the energy density of today's average lead-acid batteries while costing less than twice their price. The ultracapacitor should be capable of recharging in under one minute with a minimum life of half a million charges. It would also need to be completely recyclable and only use non-toxic materials. The test that the two students have put in place is that the winning ultracapacitor needs to provide enough energy for an electric vehicle to travel for 100 miles, recharge and then drive back again.

"A battery technology that allows a cellphone to go for a month without recharging or a laptop to go for weeks, those things have a personal value to people, and can transform things a lot faster than traditional technology," said Mark Bernstein, managing director of the University of Southern California Energy Institute, at the event where the prize winners were announced.

Advertising Software Evolution

An advertising creative’s career progression, with the design software used at each stage.

Red Dwarf is Back!

This weekend Red Dwarf is coming back to TV on Dave with the backing of a kickass digital marketing campaign. Red Bee Media have created an online treasure hunt inviting fans to find the crews landing location on Google Earth. The game started with an email sent to 55,000 fans, which contained codes and hidden links. The game also utilised a number of ARG style elements; including a personal ad for ‘The Cat' on Gumtree, an ad for two of the crew to rent a flat in Mayfair, and two websites: Lister's Coming Home and Scanning Jupiter.

Along side this, there were also a series of 'subliminal messages' featured on Dave and its website. Flashes of an image of the Red Dwarf spacecraft with the logo ‘Red Dwarf has landed' were run at several key times during the last couple of weeks, resulting in 438,492 site visitors in just four days.

Unexpected Star Trek World Premiere

A cinema full of Star Trek fans were in for quite a surprise when 10 minutes into the showing of "The Wrath of Khan" the film mysteriously "broke". Suddenly out walked Leonard Nimoy and suggested that the cinema show the new Star Trek film. As it turned out, the hard core fans were the there for an unexpected world premier. Pretty cool.

Visual Complexity

I've posted several times about data visualisation, but you can't possibly imagine how excited I was to find VisualComplexity. I know, I know; I sound like such a geek, but it is so ool to see the different ways that people interprit information, and visualise it.

I think it's an art form. No question. To take some sterile and analytical, and transform it into a visual representation that tells you everything in a single glance, what took pages of words and numbers to do the same.

VisualComplexity describes itself as "a unified resource space for anyone interested in the visualization of complex networks. The project's main goal is to leverage a critical understanding of different visualization methods, across a series of disciplines, as diverse as Biology, Social Networks or the World Wide Web. I truly hope this space can inspire, motivate and enlighten any person doing research on this field".

If you ever have to report on statistical data, be it marketing reports or something else, go take a look at the site. Really impressive stuff.