In an age where everything is mass produced, it’s nice to see a master craftsmen performing his art:

Cleartones make stylish ring tones for your iPhone. Obviously they want you to buy their tones but you
can get four free tones if you pay with a ‘tweet’ or a ‘like’ on facebook. A fantastic way to not only get people
talking about your product but also to reward them with a free sample. Very cool.

Say what you want about Justin Bieber and his song U Smile – most people won’t say much – but slow it down 800% and you get some ambient magic. That’s what Shamantis has done and I think he’s about to unleash a new trend in music:
J. BIEBZ – U SMILE 800% SLOWER by Shamantis

I’m not sure if this is part of the iPhone OS4 but I’ve been trying for ages to get my various calendars from google apps – or gmail calendar for that matter – to sync with the ipod. I’ve tried playing with the custom settings and managed to get my main google calendar synced but you have to create a new account for each calendar – how tedious. Which got me thinking- I recently added a small php script that created .ics files to allow customers to add events from our cooking school program to their personal calendar. I then wondered if the iPhone would know what to do with an .ics file and lo and behold I stumbled on an easy way to get google calendars in to your iPhone- Here’s how:

In gmail or your google apps account, click on Calendar Settings then click on Calendars in the new Page. Simply click on the Calendar Name that you want to add to your iPhone – now comes the easy bit – towards the bottom of that page is Calendar Address and a green button called iCal – click on that and you get a URL for your calendar. Simply copy that URL and paste it into an email that you can access from the iPhone. I simply created an email which I sent to my Gmail account. Open up Mail on your iPhone and click on the URL that you posted in the body of the email.

After a few seconds, your iPhone will ask you if you want to subscribe to this calendar and you simply click YES – your calendar now shows in your iPhone calendar. I was going to make screen shots but it’s pretty straight forward. The only downside at the moment is I don’t think you can add new events to the subscribed calendar – I haven’t tested that thoroughly but at least I can get my shared calendars onto the iPhone Calendar.

I was writing an email to comosper David Norland who did the amazing sountrack to a great documentary – Anvil, the story of Anvil which you can hear on the audio link on his site. I was thinking about marketing music and how a composer could make a name for himself and that got me thinking about this amazing video by another ver talented musician called John Boswell.

What if scientists could sing?

What you’re about to see is amazingly poetic and beautiful – thanks to the wonders of Autotune (the technology that most popstars use to shift their voice when they sing out of key) you’re about to see boring physics lectures turned into something amazingly poetic.

John Boswell of Symphony of Science made this song featuring Carl Sagan, Richard Feynman, Neil deGrasse Tyson, and Bill Nye.

Popstars should be banned from using autotune leaving autotune to the people who really do have something to say:

I was so impressed with this video that I donated to John via his website – he sent a charming email reply telling me that it takes about a week to make the magic happen once he has all the video clips he needs to make a song.

So let’s say you’re a singer – you could audition for *insert your country* Idol and become part of a media circus and possibly, just possibly win or at best end up with more friends on your facebook account – OR – you could so something clever. Real clever, like Sam Tsui did with his buddy, Kurt Schneider.

Sam and Kurt arranged a medley of Michael Jackson songs a capella style and Sam sung all the parts – that’s pretty cool. Then they shot a video of Sam singing all the parts at the same time:

This has only just hit YouTube and has already been seen 540,000 TIMES. It will be interesting to see the stats in a few weeks once this video has truly gone viral.

But my point is that for singers, or anyone else really, walking the path of the masses generally means you still become part of the mass – do something to stand out. Make it different, unique and amazing!

A short time ago, this great wedding entrance video hit YouTube and became one of the most watched clips of all time :

Now if you worked for the ad agency I wrote about a few minutes ago and you represented Chris Brown you’d fire up the lawyers and get the video taken down because these fun lovin’ wedding folks are using the song ‘Forever’ without permission. A clear case of copyright violation if ever there was one.

But something neat pops up in the video – a small link to buy the song from iTunes. So with 10 million people watching that clip in its peak week you don’t have to be a genius to realise that people are going to buy the song. Here’s what the YouTube folks at Google had to say:

Despite compelling data and studies around consumer purchasing habits, many still question the promotional and bottom-line business value sites like YouTube provide artists. But in the last week, over a year after its release, Chris Brown’s “Forever” has again rocketed up the charts, reaching as high as #4 on the iTunes singles chart and #3 on Amazon’s best selling MP3 list.

Chris Brown was smart – he shut up and let YouTube make him some money – he didn’t even have to get out of bed to do it.

Robert Carlyle is a great actor and just did a fantastic ad for Johnny Walker – it has the internet a buzz – this is a 6 minute clip and was filmed in ONE TAKE, no cuts or edits. So Robert has to walk along doing this whole soliloquy and synchronise up with the props on the side of the road and he gets one chance to do it:

Brilliant stuff right – now one of two things might have happened when you went to watch that video, you saw it or you saw a message that looked like this:

This video is no longer available due to a copyright claim by Bartle Bogle Hegarty Limited

Like this:

So here’s the deal, the ad agency doesn’t want you to watch it on YouTube, they want you to go to the Johnny Walker website in UK to watch it. But here’s the thing, YouTube has a much larger population than the UK so why make it hard for people to see the ad ?

I would have loved to be in the boardroom when this conversation went down: “Hey, our ad is on YouTube and millions of people are watching it and commenting about it, hell these people even want to find out how we made it. We need to send a cease and desist to YouTube – they can’t show our ad that sells our client’s product to their millions of viewers.”

And that conversation made SENSE to some manager and sure enough they start removing it from YouTube.

If I was the manager of BBH, the agency who did the ad, I’d be happy for any site or media outlet to show my ad – I mean, how much would it cost to run a 6 minute ad on TV? These guys would know, last year their total billings came to $1.5 billion. And if you’re an ad agency making percentages on your client’s media spend then YouTube is a dead fish to them because YouTube is FREE.

YouTube gives them the exposure for their brand to millions of people for free but an agency can’t make money out of that unless, of course, they worked out a way to charge for VIEWS – YouTube shows you how many people viewed a video so instead of an agency charging 5% of the media spend (or whatever their traditional rate is) maybe a truly creative agency could charge a few cents for every view their campaign gets on YouTube. We’re entering new territory here but surely it’s better than removing what are effectively ADs from sites like YouTube.

I should point out BBH’s motto is: Our objective is effectiveness. Our strategy is creativity.

What this guy doesn’t know about soda isn’t worth knowing. The best bit is he owns a store that sells nothing but sodas – 500 different types of sodas no less. I’m not saying his store is a recipe for millionairedom but it is sure interesting and when you watch this video you can tell he’s passionate about soda – I like the cucumber soda and the fresh pressed rose petal soda from Romania. His insights into business are equally as fascinating as his knowledge of soda:

Visit the Galco’s Soda website. Oh yes, I’m BACK!

Josh Hader makes bikes… but not just any old bike. His ‘Art Bikes’ are works of… well, ART, would be the easiest way to describe them. Each bike will set you back about 5 figures. If I had a bike shop I’d have one of these on display… the WOW factor would generate a huge amount of interest.

These bikes even sport small motors, an ideal way to get to work.

The real lesson here is if you’re going to do anything do something that is really cool… that applies to hotels, restaurants… your job?

Josh used to work for a film studio… now he makes bikes… how cool.

Read and see more at New York Daily Photo