Tag Archives: street wisdom

Ten Stories We Have Enjoyed The Week

9th May 2015

1) Are you over 33? A new study shows that you have stopped listening to new music.

2) The Future of Marketing. A very stimulating report from The Economist Intelligence Unit – featuring Seth Godin, John Hagel and Marc Matthieu among others.

3) What Hollywood can teach us about the World of Work –Project rather than Business focused. ‘A project is identified; a team is assembled; it works together for precisely as long as is needed to complete the task; then the team disbands’.

4) What is Luxury ? A recently opened exhibition at the V&A provides an interesting and fresh perspective. This particular quote relates to the World Of Travel – ‘Luxury is best defined not by the presence of positives, but by the absence of negatives. People travel first class on planes not for “free” champagne, but for peace and quiet. Thus, counter-culture hero Henry David Thoreau had his greatest thoughts while living alone in a cabin in the forest. If luxury is to do with privilege, then, in a busy, crowded world, real privilege is to indulge in silence, cleanliness, appropriateness, tact and good manners’.

5) Are you planning to go to the What is Luxury Hay Festival? We have teamed up with the fabulous people at @street_wisdom to run a Street Wisdom Adventure. It is at 2pm on the 27th May and you can sign up for free here.

6) How Starcom trained 1,200 employees to speak programmatic. ‘The big problem with programmatic is that everyone needs a common understanding of the language’.

7) The Science of why you should spend money on Experiences and not Things.

‘Our experiences are a bigger part of ourselves than our material goods,’ … ‘You can really like your material stuff. You can even think that part of your identity is connected to those things, but nonetheless they remain separate from you. In contrast, your experiences really are part of you. We are the sum total of our experiences’.

8) Google and Facebook – The Publishing Giants of The Future.

‘The growing pact between large publishers of news and large platforms for social media is an alliance born out of desperation on the part of publishers and opportunity on the part of technology companies. Ultimately, there is little doubt that the largest news and information companies in the world will be formed out of a hybrid of these current entities’.

9) Makes sense. How a quick glimpse of nature can make you more productive.

10) From The Backyard Scientist – What you get when you pour molten aluminium into a watermelon. You’ve always wanted to know.

Ten Stories We’ve Enjoyed This Week

24th Jan 2015

1) Great Fun(?) at Rupert Murdoch’s News UK this week, as The Times reported that The Sun was dropping topless models on Page 3 and then for The Sun to do no such thing. Looks like it was a deliberate stunt after all.

In any event, this wonderful Yes Prime Minister sketch (video) seems to explain the Page 3 rumpus perfectly.

2) The fab people at Street Wisdom (a friend of the Filter) have released a new 60″ promo video  – take a look here.

For those unaware of Street Wisdom, this is what it is all about – ‘It’s a place we usually hurry though on our way from here to there, dodging other pedestrians and those charity collectors, screening out the noise, lost in thought and grabbing food on the go. Street Wisdom sees it differently. The street is an amazing place to learn – an invisible university – if you know how to look.’

3) Nicholas Carr on  The Hierarchy of Innovation (great chart here). An interesting perspective on the debate around whether the human race is becoming less innovative. He doesn’t think so –

“Let me float an alternative explanation: There has been no decline in innovation; there has just been a shift in its focus. We’re as creative as ever, but we’ve funneled our creativity into areas that produce smaller-scale, less far-reaching, less visible breakthroughs”.

and this is worth pondering…..

“If you could choose only one of the following two inventions, indoor plumbing or the Internet, which would you choose?” -Robert J. Gordon

4) The very smart @corydoctorow points out why David Cameron’s digital security initiative is bad news for web users and very bad news for the IT industry.

‘For David Cameron’s proposal to work, he will need to stop Britons from installing software that comes from software creators who are out of his jurisdiction. The very best in secure communications are already free/open source projects, maintained by thousands of independent programmers around the world’.

..and whilst we are on the same subject, the big news at Davos (apart from Prince Andrew) is…..Security Cyber attacks worry Davos elites.

5) Because they don’t like Amazon? Why Publishers are lining up behind ‘Netflix for Books’ services.

And here – my recent related piece on Amazon’s win at The Golden Globes and the proposed link up with Woody Allen The Content River.

6) Expletive Alert !!! – Ripe language here, but very entertaining. From Mark Manson  The Subtle Art of not giving a Fu….

7) So …. The Superbowl is coming up and once the New England Patriots have surmounted the ‘deflategate’ controversy, they will take on the Seattle Seahawks. As I normally do, I will look at the ads that are running in the Superbowl, as this always provides an interesting barometer for the state of advertising and more broadly – American culture. In the meantime, here is The History Of The American Economy, Told Through Super Bowl Ads.

8) Lots of talk this week about the global division of wealth and that 80 people are as rich as the rest of us combined. Well here they are.

9) Different views on a young person’s consumption of Social Media, from a young person and from an old fogey.

10) A good reason to get off it ? – Facebook now crops up in a third of divorce cases.

Ten Stories We’ve Enjoyed This Week

30th May 1) Mary Meeker’s Internet Trends for 2014. 

If you are short of time, here is an overview of the mobile elements of Meeker’s address – Mobile Is Eating Global Attention: 10 Graphs on the State of the Internet. 

And from JWT : 10 Mobile Trends for 2014 and beyond. 

2) I had a wonderfully inspiring day last Friday. I went on a Street Wisdom Adventure.

This is what it says on the website about ‘The Street’ : ‘It’s a place we usually hurry through on our way from here to there, dodging other pedestrians and those charity collectors, screening out the noise, lost in thought and grabbing food on the go. Street Wisdom sees it differently. The Street is an amazing place to learn – an invisible university – if you know how to look’. 

3) From The Creators Project : An artist blends humans with nature in a beautifully-surreal portrait series. 

4) What the World’s Biggest Websites Looked Like at Launch. 

5) Love this from Oliver Burkeman : Everyone is totally just winging it, all the time. Every time a public figure behaves with less-than-stellar competence, we’re incredulous. We probably shouldn’t be. 

6) Tom Chatfield, British author, technology theorist and commentator, discusses to the role of games in the workplace and reflects on the value of people at play. 

7) From The Guardian : How Twitter reacted to the shootings in California #YesAllWomen 

8) Snapchat CEO Evan Spiegel gets into trouble for some emails sent in college. Some pretty explicit and offensive language was used. There is however a broader cultural trend to consider here. Are we all ready to be judged by our “private conversations” – that are all being stored in perpetuity?

9) North Koreans are allowed access to Google Maps for the first time. But not for all journeys – you can’t get to Seoul but you can locate the Hoeryong Concentration Camp. 

10) 50 Cent throws out the first pitch at a baseball match between the Pittsburgh Pirates and the New York Mets . Is this the Worst Pitch Ever?