David Lidsky's Blog, page 3247
June 3, 2014
This Summer Bud Light Is Going To Take Over An Entire Town
The beer brand is auditioning for citizens who are up for whatever in this civic extension of its Super Bowl campaign.
For the big game this year, Bud Light took over an entire cruise ship and created an epic night in New York City for one unsuspecting dude. Now the brand is combining the two under its "The Perfect Beer for Whatever Happens" campaign, to stock an entire town with people who are--you guessed it--up for whatever.
A Six-Hour Workday? Sweden Will Start Experimenting With Shorter Hours This Summer
The year-long experiment is designed to test whether or not less work means increased productivity.
Some government workers in the city of Gothenburg, Sweden, are about to embark on an interesting experiment this summer--a six-hour workday, with full pay.
Newcastle Brown Ale Will Pay You For A Twitter Follow
The beer brand continues its "No Bollocks" campaign with the ultimate in social marketing transparency.
The rise of social media marketing has forced brands to not only compete on the store shelves but have pitted them against each other in any number of the ongoing digital popularity contests happening right now online. That's why you're Facebook friends with a burger chain.
Facetime With Your Plants? Welcome To The Future Of Microfarming
SproutsIO, a simple system from students at the MIT Media Lab, lets you grow food indoors using your smartphone. You can water your plants (or Facetime with them) from 3,000 miles away.
What if you could grow your own strawberries indoors, year-round, even in the tiniest of urban apartments?
With NoiseTube, Citizens Can Now Map Noise Pollution In Their Cities
With a smartphone in hand, urban residents can document a dangerous kind of pollution that doesn't get enough attention--even though it's around us all the time.
Street noise isn't generally a category-one issue for city governments, and they don't put a lot of resources into measuring it. The most they'll do is a set up temporary sound-level meters at certain locations, then generalize the readings over wider areas.
Wil Wheaton On Why It's The Best Time Ever To Be A Geek
The creator of SyFy's new series The Wil Wheaton Project talks to Co.Create about the unprecedented opportunities for people to enjoy what they love in increasingly nerdy ways, and how to put their fandom to creative use.
Before he starred in films like Stand By Me and brought polarizing youth appeal to Star Trek: The Next Generation, Wil Wheaton was already entrenched in nerddom. He grew up loving sci-fi, comic books, and gaming, and he self-identified as awkward. "I was not good at the things that elementary school kids care about," Wheaton says. "I was not athletic. I was super uncoordinated. To this day, dexterity is my dump stat." Cut to 2014, however, and the situation has radically changed. Not only has the adult Wheaton found a platform where what he once feared was weakness is definitely a strength, but the entire culture has shifted too.
Stanford Scientists Are Studying Altruism In The Free Pizza Subreddit
You can request a pizza on Reddit, and a kind soul might decide to buy you one. But what kind of requests motivates such a random act of cheesy kindness?
You can't always get what you want. But if you try sometimes, you can get free pizza on Reddit. And there, in the Random Acts of Pizza subreddit (tagline: "Restoring Faith in Humanity, One Slice at a Time"), Stanford computer scientists say they've found the perfect conditions for a natural experiment in human altruism.
June 2, 2014
Six Things We Learned From Our iBeacon Prototype
We learned the potential (and limits) of iBeacon building something called Social Jukebox.
To help us better understand and appreciate the opportunities and constraints of the iBeacon profile we decided to create a small prototype using iBeacons. We called it Social Jukebox, an autonomous jukebox that automatically adapts the playlist based on audience preferences. Here we briefly describe how Social Jukebox works and what we learned from the prototype.
Apple Introduces Health App, A Centralized Hub For Biometric Data
New features in iOS 8 point to a new era focused on health tracking.
Ever since Tim Cook took over at Apple, analysts have been calling for the Next Big Thing, a category redefining product like the iPhone or iPad. Today onstage at the Worldwide Developer Conference (which we're liveblogging!), Apple unveiled new software for iOS 8 that gives us some rather prescient breadcrumbs concerning where the Tim Cook era is headed.
Apple Changes OS X's Main Font For The First Time Ever
Following the lead of iOS, Apple's desktop operating system says goodbye to Lucida Grande, and hello to Helvetica Neue.
Since the introduction of OS X in 2001, Lucida Grande has served as its main system font. But after taking the wraps off OS X 10.10, aka Yosemite at today's Worldwide Developers Conference, it looks like the operating system's new system font is going to be Helvetica Neue.
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