Archive : September 2010

On Tuesday, I spoke at Ignite London 3 on transmedia film experiences. It’s a topic that really interests me. I decided to restrict it to film, though there are brilliant examples in TV – Lost and Dexter to name just two – because of the format of the evening: 20 slides that auto-forward every 15 seconds, with 15 seconds per slide. There’s only so much you can cover in that time (15 seconds is almost the equivalent of a long breath, if you think about it). A lot like Pecha-Kucha, actually.

I started with a clip that everyone is familiar with from watching Warner Brothers’ movies. The experience of sitting in a darkened theatre is amazing for any true movie-lover, but it’s not just about box-office receipts anymore. With the advent of transmedia storytelling, the story now often starts way before the movie releases, and continues long after. For transmedia newbies, I explained that the phrase was made popular (not invented, mind!) by Henry Jenkins, and refers to the telling of a story through multiple platforms, allowing the viewer to enter the story ‘through dispersed entry points, providing a comprehensive and co-ordinated experience’, as Jenkins says.

This week is a big one for Made by Many. 

In three days we move from BBH to our new home at Diespeker Wharf, where we'll have five times as much space as we do now, and a real 'maker-space'. BBH London has been an amazing base for us for three years and we will miss the many good friends we've made there. As a place to start a business, I don't think it could have been better. The agency is full of awesome, clever people. But being three years old is like being a teenager in internet years and we needed to get our own space. More on all that in another post.

Timed to coincide with the move, we have been working on an exciting new website (err, yes, it's this one if you're looking at the dot com site). 

A few of us were at Playful on Friday.

It is an invariable principle of all play, finite and infinite, that whoever plays, plays freely. Whoever *must* play, *cannot* play.

On Monday, I went to TEDxLondon, the London sibling of  TEDxChange New York, an independently organised TED event convened by The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. The aim of the event was to mark the 10th anniversary of the 8 Millennium Development Goals. Entitled ‘the future we make’, the tone was firmly celebratory and optimistic…perhaps a little too optimistic for those of us for whom a question mark hangs over the common interpretation of aid and development.

No explanation necessary! We thought we’d give everyone their Tuesday laughs, that’s all.

So, ‘all this is well and good‘, I can hear you say, ‘but there isn’t much there that I didn’t know before’. Well, hopefully this will be interesting then:

For the health enthusiasts:

Cyclemeter ‘turns your iPhone into a powerful GPS stopwatch, giving you feedback and motivation to go farther, become faster, be healthier, and live longer’. Simon I’Anson at Made by Many is a keen user of this one.

Last week, we asked the people in our Twitter and Facebook networks for their top iPhone apps. The driving force behind this query was our observation that the majority of people we know own an iPhone, and yet a lot of people wind up asking their friends for recommendations of interesting or useful apps. Of course, the Top Apps section in the iTunes store is always there for reference, but the problem there is one of curation. At the end of the day, would you trust Apple or people you know who have similar interests to you, when you’re looking for cool apps? I don’t think it’s much of a contest really – the power of the network is much stronger than most of us realise: I’m sure more than one of us has seen our friends ask for recommendations from their network on Facebook, whether they are experienced users of social media (read Foursquare and Twitter addicts) or not.

One of the more interesting quotes I picked up from last week’s PSFK Conference London 2010, mentioned by Matt Jones from BERG during his talk, is the one pictured above.

UPDATE: This position has been filled

We’re looking for a junior to mid-weight designer, a creative geek type obsessed with the coming web and fiendish about making new things. This could be your first job or you could have a bit of experience behind you – either way, your attitude is more important than your work history.

We want someone brave, bold, talented and ready to roll with the punches. We’re *not* interested in people who want to design banner ads and out-of-the-box microsites. If you want to punch the clock and fade into the background, this job isn’t for you.

We’re looking for a designer who’s excited to be involved at any and every stage of the project, from workshops and idea creation to prototyping and high-fidelity designs. Designing at Made by Many means thinking, talking, collaborating and learning. Whilst some of your time will be spent behind a computer using Photoshop and Illustrator, a lot of it will be spent with pen and paper in hand, visualising your ideas and the services we make.

Is anyone visiting times.co.uk?* Never mind that, is anyone still buying the newspaper? Media Week reports today that in August The Times newspaper circulation fell by 1.7%, going below 500,000 for the first time and confounding News International executives’ expectations that by putting thetimes.co.uk behind a paywall they would protect print circulation.

The Times management view seems to fly in the face of common sense. Different channels promote each other and, whatever the reason for the circulation fall (The Guardian fell too, by 1.85%), making times.co.uk subscription-only won’t have helped print sales.

It’s hard to call the paywall a failure when charging for something that others give away free resembles nothing so much as suicide. So how close to death is thetimes.co.uk?