Technically speaking, a chicken is an ancient and highly efficient 3D-printer. That’s one of the fun facts of the “Bulambuli Valley” video to raise funds for Uganda through an Indiegogo crowdfunding campaign.
Find this hilarious video and 9 other links, most of which relate to user experience and design management, in the July digest.
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Photograph: Hague Museum for Communication (via TheGuardian.com)
The year 2015 is over, and after WordPress sent me my 2015 annual blogging report, I start by thanking the readers of this blog, who mainly arrived here through Facebook, eYeka’s blog and Twitter. The 64,000 viewers of the blog came from 179 countries in 2015, most of them from France (about 20,000) and the United States (about 15,000). But enough of the numbers, just a warm and heartfelt THANK YOU for your interest!
In this December recap, I share some of my favorite links that inspired, interested or entertained me – and maybe you’ll like them too? Below are some CMO interviews, articles about (social) media, cycling or memorabilia, and more stuff that I enjoyed looking at in December.
“The Creative Apocalypse That Wasn’t” (via nytimes.com, illustration by Andrew Rae)
August, the month of holidays, sunshine, nature and sports… right? To me it was all of the above, but I also read a couple of very interesting articles, watched debates and opinion pieces. In this month’s favorites you will find a single article about cycling (!) and many more about creativity and innovation, marketing challenges and tolerance.
Yes, tolerance. I translated the short position piece of a German TV anchor, published it on this blog and on YouTube, and was stunned by all the hate comments that it received. After the surprise, and thinking about it, I see it as a sad manifestation of trolls’ and racists’ hopelessness. I prefer them to just comment under a video than to represent me in our parliaments and institutions. Anyway, here are some much more interesting things to read and watch. I hope you’ll like them too.
Image via “Office of Ben Barry”
Here are 10 tweets from the month of May, which I found worthwhile sharing again. Two of them are about architects and their attitude towards competition(s), one is about corporate branding and design (see the image on the left), others just share some nice advertising. I also enjoyed reading this AdAge article about Google’s battle against click fraud, which costs online advertisers its customers $6.3 billion a year, according to a study by White Ops and the ANA. It nicely reminds us that every internet service has a cost – in this case it’s combatting abuse – which impacts both the bottom line of the company and that of its users. Gaining trust in online environments is crucial, which is why Google went “public” with this article, a nice PR effort to position itself as an industry leader.
Image via AirFrance.fr
It’s been 2 weeks since Air France’s latest spot, France Is In The Air, is running internationally. The 45-second advertisement is part of the brand’s new global campaign, which started on April 2nd with print, radio and web ads in 12 countries (including Brazil, China, the USA, Russia, Senegal or Switzerland). What I like about it is that it has an Evian Babies feel to it: a stylish and simplified background, people swinging (instead of swimming) through the screen in a gracious manner, a focus on music rather than words. A very nice creative, mixing retro and glamor, like the print ads. But have you noticed the cyclists?
“There’s nothing that looks more like a plane than another plane,” Tiphaine du Plessis, associate director at BETC, the agency behind the campaign, told l’ADN. The strength of the company lies in “its roots, the French state of mind: when you put one foot in an Air France plane, you are already somewhat in France,” she says. The campaign plays on the globally recognized “positive values” like its traditions, history, gastronomy, architecture or music.
Here are a dozen of links, stories and videos that I liked in February. From Parker Higgins’ viral tweet about Samsung’s Smart TV to the Google Cardboard virtual reality gadget and a magnificent video about Dubai, I hope you’ll find some stimulating things here. I’ve also inserted two cycling-related links where great champions, Sir Bradley Wiggins and François Pervis, tell us a little bit about their life experiences and cycling in different cultures – each in their own ways. I hope you like it, share it, and you have a great day! Continue reading →
Image via @HistoricalPics
Here are 10 tweets from July, which are my preferred articles and readings of the month. You’ll notice that cycling is more present than usually – July is the month of the Tour de France – but innovation, academia and creativity are also featured in this month’s favourite links.
I also had the chance to attend the 12th Open & User Innovation Conference at Harvard Business School, which was a great event to meet fellow researchers and stay up to date with trends around crowdsourcing. Now I’m back in Paris and look forward to a couple of easy summer weeks in the city, which is much more quiet when everyone is away for holidays on the beach.
Enjoy the links.
Yannig Roth / This is my personal blog 