Playhouse at Liberty Hall

This Wednesday is the launch event for something really special taking place in Dublin next month. As part of the Ulster Bank Dublin Theatre Festival, Daft.ie present Playhouse at Liberty Hall. Playhouse will transform Dublin’s tallest building into a giant digital canvas for all of us to play with and animate our thoughts across the city skyline.

From the 24th of September until the 11th of October 2009, Dublin's Liberty Hall will become a 50 metre, low-res, digital screen powered by 100,000 low-energy LED lights that operate in full 24-bit colour. The LEDs have been installed across the 330 windows of the south and west faces of the building effectively turning each window into a pixel for the giant display. From Wednesday (26th August), members of the public will be able to download a special bit of software that allows you to create animations (with sound and music) and submit them to be broadcast on Liberty Hall.

The 100,000 LEDS in use are super-efficient, and the whole project has a tiny power consumption. During the project each floor of the installation will use less energy than a standard kettle. The narrow strip of LEDs are installed along each window frame with a small control box. These control boxes then connect to a central computer through the existing CAT5 network in the building, therefore avoiding any additional wiring.

Ahead of the project the folks over at The Bubble have produced a behind the scenes look at exactly how all of this will work. This exclusive footage from last Wednesday (19th August) shows the LED system being tested for the first time. John Callaghan and Julien Clancy can be thanked for this great footage. The music they have used is from Solen.

Social Media Addicts Association

Are you one of the millions of web users who just don't know when to stop poking, to quit Tweeting or to take a break from Facebook. Then the Social Media Addicts Association is just what you need. Run by former social media addicts who have had the strength and courage to admit to their problem, the SMAA will help you leave alone all those people you haven’t seen since college, and possibly never really got on with anyway!

To start with you will need to follow the 5 steps to kicking the habit:

1. Admit you have a problem but don't tweet about it.
2. Accept that you don't need upvotes to feel validated.
3. Understand the risks of poking strangers.
4. Repeat after me: "Twitter and alcohol don't mix".
5. Don't go cold turkey! Just delete one friend a day.

The SMAA is the latest viral campaign from Sony VAIO.

The Walking Dead

Checked my emails this afternoon and was seriously happy to find out that I am the lucky winner of a signed copy of 'The Walking Dead' from Venntertainment.

Rob Cumiskey, the man behind Ventertainment and a regular at Culch.ie, did a ‘Fantasy Bazaar – The Walking Dead Week’ last week to celebrate the release of the latest volume of The Walking Dead, by Robert Kirkman and Charlie Adlard. As part of his zombie week, Rob was given a signed copy of the release by Sub City Comics (@SubCityComics).

A massive thanks to Rob for the great week of posts, and the brilliant competition. Cheers dude!

A Truely Ice Cold Beer!

Budweiser has launched what may be the coldest beer in the world, and we in Ireland are the first people in Europe to enjoy it. Budweiser's new Ice Cold Bottle is a new innovative aluminium bottle that keeps your Budweiser colder for 17 minutes longer then any other beer bottle. Chilled in special fridges, called "chillchambers", Budweiser's Ice Cold Bottle is dropped to a very chilly -5°C without the beer actually freezing.

The eye-catching striking red bottles can be found through out the country in all your favourite bars and clubs, and have enjoyed a great summer start with at a host of cool gigs including both the U2 and Take That concerts.

Budweiser Brand Manager, Sarah Spain said “ Budweiser Ice Cold bottle is a completely new way to experience the ultimate in cold beer. We know beer drinkers love their beer served really chilled so we wanted to offer them the coldest beer possible, in a slick new aluminium bottle”.

Social Media Round Up

I was doing a some research today, updating a Social Media presentation, and I came across a great post by Jake Hird over on eConsultancy.com. Jake scoured the web and collect 20 brilliant Social Media stats:

• Social networks and blogs are the 4th most popular online activities online, including beating personal email. 67% of global users visit member communities and 10% of all time spent on the internet is on social media sites.
• If Facebook were a country, it would be the fourth most populated place in the world. This means it easily beats the likes of Brazil, Russia and Japan in terms of size.
• 80% of companies use, (or are planning to use), LinkedIn as their primary tool to find employees during the course of this year. The site has just celebrated reaching its 45-millionth membership.
• Around 64% of marketers are using social media for 5 hours or more each week during campaigns, with 39% using it for 10 or more hours per week.
• It took radio 38 years to reach 50 million listeners. Terrestrial TV took 13 years to reach 50 million users. The internet took four years to reach 50 million people... In less than nine months, Facebook added 100 million users.
• Wikipedia currently has more than 13 million articles in more than 260 different languages. The site attracts over 60 million unique users a month and it’s often hotly debated that the information it contains is more reliable than any printed Encyclopaedia.
• The most recent figure of blogs being indexed by Technorati currently stands at 133 million. The same report into the Blogosphere also revealed that on average, 900,000 blog posts are created within a single 24-hour period.
• It’s been suggested that YouTube is likely to serve over 75 billion video streams to around 375 million unique visitors during this year.
• The top three people on Twitter (Ashton Kutcher, Ellen DeGeneres and Britney Spears) have more combined followers than the entire population of Austria.
• According to Socialnomics, if you were paid $1 for every time an article was posted on Wikipedia, you would earn $156.23 per hour.
• The online bookmarking service, Delicious, has more than five million users and over 150 million unique bookmarked URLs.
• Since April this year, Twitter has been receiving around 20 million unique visitors to the site each month, according to some analytical sources.
• Formed in 2004, Flickr now hosts more than 3.6 billion user images.
• Universal McCann reports that 77% of all active internet users regularly read blogs.

As Jake points out, these stats are extremely impressive but the simple fact is that in the time it's taken to collect them and report on them, they are probably already out of date.