'The' Social Media Blog

David Griner,a writer and social-media analyst, and his agency, Luckie & Company, have just launched 'The' Social Media Blog - The Social Path. This is a simple down to earth blog that strips away the mystery and bewilderment behind today's social media digital landscape. As a big fan of Adweek's blog, AdFreak.com, which David contributes to, I was very excited when I heard about this.

This blog does exactly what it says it will, and the tone is that of a colleague not a tutor. In short, I wasn't dissappointed. Do check this out if you have any sort of interest in social media.

Hancock whale toss game

I'm not sure if it's one of those things you keep to yourself, but I'll admit I'm a bit of a Will Smith fan. Fresh Prince - excellent. iRobot - really enjoyed it. Legend of Bagger Vance - well that I should probably be embaressed to admit I liked. Seriously though, he's had some great movies, and I think Hancock looks like it could be fairly watchable.

I digress, what I wanted to say was, check out this is a pretty cool example of an in-banner game:

Worst lip-syncing ever?

I think so......

eBay pay up €40m

Ebay has finally paid the price for the countless counterfeit goods that populate the website. A French court has ordered eBay to pay Louis Vuitton €40m. This is a landmark in both online sales and counterfeit goods actions. The LVMH (Moet Hennessey Louis Vuitton) claim was based on eBay not taking proper measures to prevent the sale of counterfeit goods and to continually allow genuine products to be sold outside their proper retail channels.

The case has been with the Paris Tribunal de Commerce for over two years. The actual payment will be split between Louis Vuitton and Christian Dior Couture. The company's fragrance brands were awarded around €3.75m.

Although Ebay will appeal the ruling, and have made a counter claim that LVMH is attempting to "protect uncompetitive commercial practices at the expense of consumer choice and the livelihood of law-abiding sellers that eBay empowers every day", it is doubtful they will receive any leniency.

Simon Says

"Simon's a computer, Simon has a brain, you either do what Simon says or else go down the drain." That was Simon, the addictive stupidly simple toy thay every child had to have. I remember having one and I loved it. Check out the cool digital version I've added to the right nav, with many thanks to Paul Neave.

Watch out, it's a Tie Fighter!

ICT Graphics Lab at USC has announced the creation of a low-cost volumetric 3-D display. Ex-squeeze me I hear ou say! Essentially they're able to creat 3D static images similar to that seen in Star Wars (R2D2's message to Leia, the schematics of the Death Star).


It all works using rotating mirrors, DLP Projections, and some top end super geek maths that calculates "the correct axial perspective needed for a 360-degree image construct by linear perspective to an observer's positioning. I said it was super geek maths!

Various companies have been trying to create a viable 3-D technology for years, but it has proved to be a constant difficulty. The main road blocks have been: small viewing areas and high costs. With the USC technology renders individual projections at different heights on the rotating mirror and traces each projected beam back to the display area to find the correct position of the viewer. This allows simultaneous viewing from multiple angles/distances. The system also updates itself in real time (at 200Hz).

Twitter from Mars

Last Thursday (19th June) Nasa announced the discovery of Water Ice on Mars.

Seriously, Water Ice!

Next to actually encountering an alien, this stuff is the Holy Grail of space exploration. This is pretty much the biggest news they've had since Neil Armstrong uttered those famous words. So how do you let the world know about this historic event?

Twitter.

Honestly, NASA announced to the world that water-based ice had been discovered on another planet Via this tweet:


NASA are using Twitter to feed constant information about the Mars Phoenix Rover to over 20,000 followers!