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A friend of mine gave me a small package wrapped in newspaper the other day, my Christmas present about a month late. I didn’t care because I wasn’t expecting anything, and was super-excited to unwrap two 16-oz. cans of Brawndo, “The Thirst Mutilator.”

If you know anything about Mike Judge’s film “Idiocracy” you can appreciate how amazing it is that this product exists in real life. One of the ongoing jokes in the movie is about a product called Brawndo, an electrolyte-laden energy drink that flows out of drinking fountains and has completely replaced water, even for watering plants. To quote the movie and the back of the can, “Brawndo’s got what plants crave! Brawndo’s got electrolytes. And that’s what plants crave. They crave elecrolytes. And that’s why plants crave Brawndo. Not water, like from the toilet.”

“Idiocracy” itself is somewhat of an underdog movie (having been snubbed by 20th Century Fox, the studio that created it) but it has since seen some success on DVD, at least in the circles I run in. The film follows a time-traveling Luke Wilson 500 years into the future, where humanity has devolved to a point that Wilson is the smartest man alive. Television shows have names like “Ow, my balls!”, courtrooms are basically run like episodes of Jerry Springer and corporations like Carl’s Jr.’s have slogans like “F*** you! I’m eating!” It is likely that the heavy parody of corporate culture is responsible for 20th Century Fox pulling all advertisements, movie trailers and press kits from the film and releasing it in only 125 theaters instead of the typical 2500-3000.

It was a movie that Internet nerds had been following and it just dropped off, eventually showing up on DVD about a year later. It is by no means a great movie, it’s awesomeness is also off-set by some heavy handed-narrative and weak acting. Nonetheless, it is a feel-good movie, full of small moments and details that will only continue to grow it’s cult status.

So how did this fictional product from a failed movie become a real product? Redux Beverages, the California beverage maker behind the scandalously named “Cocaine” energy drink that local newscasters were scaring grandmothers with when it was released, saw an opportunity to cash in on the cult following of the movie. In a press release for Brawndo, Redux explains the precedent set by Mike Judge’s earlier film “Office Space,” whereby Milton’s fixation on a red Swingline Stapler created such a demand for the product that Swingline actually started producing them.

Time magazine ran an article about the red stapler in August 2003: “Once the film was released, buyers began asking for the red stapler. But Swingline didn’t make it. ‘We concluded we really needed to put a red stapler on the market,’ says Bruce Neapole, Swingline’s president. He says Swingline continues to sell thousands each month of what it calls the Rio Red Stapler.”

In the same way that Swingline created a viable product with the red stapler, Redux has released Brawndo, hoping that it will appeal to fanatical consumers. It’s a weird case of reverse product placement where the products don’t exist at the time they become characters in a movie. This doesn’t happen very often and is a hard thing to predict, but it may be a trend to keep an eye on. It is especially impressive that Mike Judge has accomplished this twice in his last two films.

After Brawndo became a reality, viral marketing was the natural next step. Having recruited the voice of Mark Little, a writer for the Canadian sketch comedy group Picnicface, Brawndo’s advertisements essentially mimic the same style of Picnicface’s commercial for a fictional energy drink called Powerthirst.

The advertisement captures the ridiculousness of Judge’s future world, and quite frankly wins at being successful on the Internet, racking up about 300,000 YouTube views so far. Having downed a can of Brawndo in the course of writing this blog entry (see image above), I have to say it is an above-average tasting energy drink, though that isn’t saying much because most energy drinks are disgusting. At this point the appeal of Brawndo is mostly to people who have seen the film, and it’s unlikely that you’ll see a can unless you know someone who’s ordered it online. Redux is seeking distributors, however, so if you own a business do everyone a favor and order a couple of cases.

I recently read a column stating that people who use terms like “thinking outside of the box” and “seeing the big picture” really have no clue what being a creative is. The column goes on to allude that the speaker wouldn’t know “out of the box” thinking if it hit them in their talentless backside, and that all they really know is how to cram 18 lbs. of “crap” into a 10-lb. “box.”

Do I share those views? Yes and no, because while I firmly believe that creativity and “outside the box” thinking comes from anywhere and anyone, I also know that the skill of doing it on a routine basis must be cultivated.

While an idea or innovation may take its roots from anyone and anywhere, we must trust those who are refined and trained to bring it to fruition. Otherwise, all creatives become are skilled button-pushers with no talent or opinion—their sole purpose to do what they’re told and not actually be creative or “think outside of the box” at all.  Oh sweet, sweet irony.

Regardless, the reason I bring all of this up is because of a 10-year-old boy named Forest Pearson out of West Linn, Ore. Forest knows nothing of “thinking outside of the box” or “big picture thinking”—what he knows is that he loves snow and hates waiting.

So, did Forest except his fate that he would need to travel to the mountain or wait until every other winters snow? No, he saved over $500 and built his own backyard snow making machine. His thoughts and dreams not inhibited by cubicles or deadlines, but set free through inspiration and drive. Check out the newscast over at Gizmodo.com.

My last post called for innovation in the Web world, the world I work in—Forest Pearson trail-blazed innovation in the snow paradise he now plays in.Here’s to Forest Pearson, may his love for snow never falter and his innovative dreams never perish. Cheers!

This weekend the Wi-Fi connection in my apartment vanished. I spent 48 solid, uninterrupted hours without e-mail, YouTube, Wordpress or even so much as a weather update. Productivity skyrocketed. I actually read a newspaper, mopped the floors, cooked a balanced dinner and organized my closet. Who knew that I spent so much valuable time wandering aimlessly all over the Internet, stopping to spend half an hour on celebrity gossip sites and wasting endless moments jumping between recipe sites and bookmarking meals that I never actually get around to cooking. It was a refreshing mini-vacation—but it couldn’t last.

Yesterday I broke down and walked over to the local coffee shop that serves bland, watered-down coffee in exchange for free Wi-Fi. As I waded through a mass of e-mails, caught up on the latest Internet gossip and chatted with friends on Instant Messenger I realized how good it felt to be connected again.

Back at my Wi-Fi-less apartment, I pondered the future of Wi-Fi. Is it only a matter of time before every city offers some basic Wi-Fi service to its citizens, like Portland, Paris and Albuquerque, with varying degrees of success? Or will it follow Dublin’s lead and abandon a public Wi-Fi system because it proved too large for the city to manage. Or will we see more small business attracting users by offering free Wi-Fi to paying customers? I imagine it will be a mix and match of services. No matter what the result I can only hope that it will end in lower, more budget-friendly wireless packages from the Telecom giants that keeps even the humble blogger constantly connected.

I’m usually dumbfounded when it comes time to find a website deemed as cool or innovative. Why? Because it is estimated that there are 15 - 30 billion pages on the Web. That puts me in a pickle, how can one person with two eyes and 10 fingers possibly find the coolest ‘best of?’ So this week I decided to blog about the best future—here’s a video of Blaise Aquera y Arcas, an architect at Microsoft Live Labs at TED2007.

When we find ourselves completely in awe of the newest Web trends (like Flickr and Youtube), think back to this video and imagine the possibilities. If there were a way to implement this cross-syncing technology for information data mining into one conclusive article of relevance when doing research—instead of having to sift for hours through Google pages—how great would that be? This thought may sound ridiculous, but with the ability to visually search photos and congregate them into a large photo, text/information congregation shouldn’t be a problem. And that’s just a thought I had while writing this, the rest is only a matter of time, thought and sweat.

For anyone who doesn’t know what TED is, it’s a conference/community for forward-thinking and exploration. Their topics typically stray into technology, entertainment and design—though with a slogan of “Ideas worth spreading,” I’m certain they’ll listen to anything.A few blog postings ago I gave kudos to Philips for their ShaveEverywhere.com campaign. Well, seems like the folks over at TED already unearthed this hysterical site months ago. Their aim is a little higher, aiming not at humor but at the health of bloggers everywhere. This is a danger to us all, so please take a few moments and be enlightened.

The past couple of years have seen boundless development in the world of user interactivity. The Nintendo Wii and Apple’s iPhone are two wonderful examples of user interfaces that, while not unprecedented, surprised a lot of people with their elegance and near-perfect execution. With an increasing faith in the fact that such magical things can happen, there seems to be a growing community of creatives who are using devices enabled with motion and touch sensitivity (as well as other physical inputs like light and sound) toward unexpected ends. Many of these projects are purely for experimentation and entertainment, but they are without a doubt pushing the next generation of interface designers to create new applications in everyday life. Applications like MAX/MSP and the Open Source application Processing are a key intermediary between real-world, physical inputs and actions either on-screen or in some other real-world output. Here are three exciting projects in that vein; stimulating and unpolished.

The mad scientists at Grafitti Research Lab Vienna use a projector, lasers, Processing and a Processing plug-in called “laser marker” (which is free on the GRLV website) to create gigantic, impermanent graffiti. GRLV was recently featured in a Make Magazine Blog entry.

This fellow uses a Wii-mote as a MIDI controller in Ableton Live.

This demo uses the free application WMIDI which allows you to use a Wacom Tablet as a MIDI controller.

 

I started my relationship with Facebook back in 2004 when the site was barely discovered. Similar to the feelings when you first start dating that special someone, I was curious. Questions rushed through my head—“What is this new form of e-mail?”; “Why would anyone want their comments to their friends broad casted throughout the world?”; “Will this just be another Website that becomes popular but ends up fading in time?”—I was apprehensive at first, so I had to seek my friends approval. They all showed me the highlights in having your own “interactive tree house that you can build,” so I was willing to give ‘F-book” a chance.

Months after I started the relationship began I got bored and almost broke up with the site. Then I began to notice pictures of myself automatically appearing on my profile.

It made picture sharing so easy. I didn’t need my friend’s e-mails anymore, all I needed was them to be my friend on Facebook and any pictures they uploaded would appear on the site. I always hated that I never had pictures, now I did and life was great! What an incredible service. I was in love. I heart F-book.

After the honeymoon phase was over the drama started. My friends were using the site to seek revenge on each other by posting inappropriate pictures and nasty comments. Still, even with the drama I loved how much the relationship was giving back. I was reconnecting with long lost friends, had over 200 pictures on my profile, and could advertise my personal brand—I was determined to make this bond last.

In the past six months some strange things on Facebook have been occurring, and I am annoyed at all the added features. Facebook use to stand for simplicity and a way to reconnect with friends and socialize. Now I think the site is juvenile as ever, I mean does anyone really need an interactive beer with a side of cyber nachos? I now cringe when I enter the site. This is not healthy for any type of relationship. So after three faithful years I am breaking up with the “book.”

I am going to keep contact with the site; however, I have been flirting with some other hot sites like the mature and sophisticated Linkedin, and the spunky and artistic Photobucket. In the end maybe I am getting old and do not have that college edge I once had. Maybe it’s me, Facebook.

At what point should your Internet provider be allowed to control, or even influence, your Web practices? The answer–there’s no time, nor place, when it’s acceptable for your Internet provider to regulate how one uses the Internet. For example, if I Google something in Portland from my Comcast high-speed connection, I should get the same results as if I Googled the same exact thing from a Time Warner cable connection in Ohio, right? You’d think so; after all, net neutrality is just as important as freedom of speech, food and water, etc., right? I believe so, but–unfortunately–some big Tel Coms don’t agree. Why? Put simply, it’s about money… ahhh, yes, of course…

See, you’re not necessarily your Internet provider’s only revenue source, as it’s possible for money to be made in their Internet users’ experience too. Comcast in particular is making news with allegations of regulating use of BitTorrent, a legal and legitimate file transfer protocol. The $1.77 trillion in fines Comcast is facing, in my opinion, isn’t the biggest issue. Rather, I’m concerned about my freedom to surf—net neutrality to me more precise.

Fortunately, there are groups of organized radicals trying to save the Internet, and a number or resources, online of course, dedicated to proactive net neutrality education and awareness. Now, in video:

My apologies for the 3-week lull between entries. The holidays were here and I was busy being merry! I did, however, recently add a post about what makes a good blog entry that has to do with the content of your blog, rather than the structure and functionality. Anyways, back to business. Here’s tip #11 through 15 for marketing your blog.

For 1-5, click here.

For 6-10, click here.

11. Submit your blog to directories—This will provide more channels for new readers as well as build your credibility.

12. Submit to paid directories—Yahoo, BOTW, bCentral, WOW and JoeAnt are sites with high traffic and are great venues for attracting new readers. Submit to their paid directories with categories for blogs.

13. Build links—You can do this any number of ways, including finding suitable sites to link to you, adding a guest book or newsgroup, requesting links from other sites, etc.

14. Write a press release—Announce your blog to online and offline news sources to raise awareness. Optimize the content of online press releases for search engines to direct traffic to your blog via applicable search terms.

15. Request feedback and reviews—Ask people to talk about you. The best way to do this is to ask for their honest opinion. Reviews will provide links and expand the reach of an old-fashioned marking tool: word-of-mouth.

In the spirit of open source technology, Jona Bechtolt, aka YACHT, an electronic musician here in Portland has decided to give away instrumental versions of his music for free. This is his explanation:

“I download music. I download a lot of music. I don’t purchase music often, so I completely and totally understand when kids come up to me at shows and look me straight in the eye and tell me they’re not going to buy my record tonight because they’ve already, or are going to go home and, download it. There just isn’t any reason to show animosity towards this new-ish way of communicating; to me, this feels like a natural way of weeding out assholes and the people that aren’t smart enough to make interesting work.I want to give back. Here are three ZIP files of instrumentals. Download them, use them for karaoke, perform as YACHT or The Blow, chop them up and make your own remixes, make your own new songs.”

It’s a cool idea that I imagine will lead to some free publicity, and most likely some new collaborations. It reminds me of a Mirah album that came out last year called “Joyride: Remixes” where a bunch of different artists remixed versions of Mirah songs for a 2-CD set. YACHT was one of the collaborators, coincidentally. That CD wasn’t free, and I could imagine this YACHT venture turning into some sort of similar compilation, a physical CD for example, potentially for some profit.

This gets back to my previous claim about this being an open source style of behavior. A common misconception is that because open source technology is free, there is no money to be made in it. To the contrary, think of all of the designers, developers and system admins who have jobs because of their intellectual investment in technologies like Apache, Linux, PHP, Subversion MySQL, Wordpress, Drupal and on and on and on. While a certain aspect of all open source technology is free, what is not is the time and skill needed to implement it, the people that ARE smart enough to make interesting work.

As a Web developer himself, I imagine Jona is aware of these similarities. I’m excited to see what comes of his decision to release his music in this fashion. Hopefully “Freedom Music: Remixes” is on the way.

Australia is famous for many things, not the least of them being Vegemite, dingos and Nicole Kidman. But were you also aware that Australia has been a hot bed for some amazing beer commercials in the past decade?

TV ads are tricky beasts. Most of them are so banal and un-entertaining that viewers forget them as soon as he or she has returned to the scheduled programming. When a good ad does appear it can do amazing things. It can cut through the clutter, get circulated on YouTube and, in the best of situations, re-invigorate a brand, if not an entire industry. That is exactly what happened in Australia.

Back in 2005 there was Carlton’s “Big Ad”:

Then there was Toohey’s Xtra Dry:

And then Carlton retaliated with this:

And then Toohey answered with this:

I could list about about 10 other great Australian beer ads. I think these spots have three important elements that help distinguish themselves from the thousands of other TV commercials we see every day.

1. These ads tell a story. They aren’t your typical bikini-clad women frolicking in the snow. They draw viewers in with an interesting premise. They pique your curiosity.

2. The writers for these spots rewarded those who paid attention with a great ending and smart punchline.

3. You can almost feel how much fun these ads were to make. You can almost imagine the brainstorming sessions where writers and creative directors were (gasp!) having a great time coming up with these stories.

In summary:

1. Australian beer commercials rock.

2. People pay attention to a well-written story.

3. Advertising should be fun.