- Blog
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Google hacksI blogged Tara Calishain and Rael Dornfest’s Google Hacks at the weekend and decided it was important enough to write up properly for ‘Bowbrick at Large‘ at Guardian Unlimited.
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Innovation in weird snacks
The ingenuity of British manufacturing industry continues to impress, even if its timing doesn’t. The FT reports on an upmarket extension to the defiantly trashy Pot Noodle range from Unilever – and I mean upmarket. We’re talking Wild Scottish Salmon, Kobe Beef, Caspian Caviar and Tuscan truffles. Apart from being a bit weird, this is…
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Shelter brands?
Leica offers hope for stick-in-the-mud analogue brands. The gorgeous MP rangefinder camera is packaged explicitly as a device for digital refuseniks – ‘100% mechanical’ boasts the brochure. Jean-Jacques Viau, marketing manager for the MP says in the FT (I think you’ll need a subscription or a free trial) “We could be the shelter for people…
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False alarm
Friday we spent some time at the lovely Watford General Hospital mentally preparing ourselves to meet our (third) baby about six weeks early. In the end we were sent home, baby unborn, following a check up and lots of reassurance that it’s “better to be safe than sorry”. Click the picture for an MPEG4 –…
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refrigeration figures
From a feature about low-tech refrigeration for rural Africa in The Ecologist I learn that “refrigerators and freezers account for 25% of the UK’s average household electricity bill” and that “US refrigerators use about 7% of all US electricity; that’s 25 large power plants’ worth”. Can these numbers possibly be right? They look to me…
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Tangled web
Andy Rowell and Jonathan Matthews in The Ecologist have done some forensic Googling to uncover an unsavoury and potentially deceptive (but not surprising) pact between the former Living Marxism entryists at Spiked, the three hundred and fifty year-old Royal Society and the agri-business lobby to promote GM agriculture. The unlikely co-conspirators have set up a…
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Sarcastic link title of the month award
Via demented (in a nice way) Snackpot and branding newsletter LucJam I learn from Food Navigator that targeting kids is getting more difficult. The article is interesting (lifestage vs. demographic segmentation and so on) but LucJam’s link is much more entertaining than anything in the target article: ‘Generation Y not sure what they want to…
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Hacking networked reality
I think Google Hacks is an important book. It’s important because our lives are increasingly dependent on the Internet and because the fabric of our networked lives – from the web to wi-fi to mobile phones – is getting richer, more meaningful and more tightly woven. Content, applications and communities are more interconnected than ever…