The competition was set up celebrate the launch of a ‘creative sandbox’ which sees Converse teaming up with Google+ to encourage imaginative individuals to come together and collaborate on new ideas, inspired by the Chuck Taylor blank canvas.

This experiment will eventually be open to anyone and everyone with a creative notion, but to start they invited members of Creative Social to bring their most resourceful, clever, absurd ideas to life through a pair (or two) of Chuck Taylor All Star hi-tops.

We had a fantastic response from the socials with over 20 agencies from around the globe taking part. The sheer variety of ideas and inspirational concepts developed has been brilliant and a testament to the wide creativity of the collective. Everyone has had an enormous amount of fun from start to finish of the creative journey.

The entries will be judged at Cannes 2013 by a combination of judges from Google & Converse, there will also be a Fans’ Choice Winner. We will keep you posted on who gets though to the final, announced later today and the winner announced Wednesday 19^th June at the annual Creative Social Cannes lunch.

““Converse fans use their Chuck Taylor All Star sneakers as a blank canvas for self expression every day. Partnering with Creative Social as part of a fun competition at Cannes Lions we challenged creative minds around the world to imagine what could be done, opening up our Chucks to be played with in exciting new ways.”.

Kris Crockett, Digital Manager, Converse

Check out all the entries here…

This entry from BBDO allows you to program lights in motion on the side of your Chuck.

Moonwalk All Star – a second hack from BBDO – connects your Chuck Taylors with an app that teaches & critiques your dance moves. In this instance, it’s the Moonwalk

BBDO’s third entry in New York took their Chuck to the barber shop for a cut. The call it “What the Chuck!

Team BBDO also hacked a pair of Chucks to be shared and followed all over the world. It’s a Chuck World Tour

Guitarists rejoice. Team Agency Republic have remade the wah wah peddle – building it into a Chuck.

Our friends at PLAN.NET in Germany have built a clever little pay-back device. They call it the Kick Ass Machine

Laura Jorden Bambach will be wearing a radio on her feet next week thanks to help from her Dare team. You can listen in at cannt.org

Team Ogilvy in China went LED light crazy with their Chuck hack. Use the mobile app and create your own designs! They call it Charged Up Chuck

The creative group at adam&eveDDB decided to make communicating easier while they are in Cannes next week. They’ve hacked together the first ever Chuck Taylor phone.

The team at Geneva Film Co. have dreamt up an idea of hacking the bottom of your Chucks – customizing them with a message you can leave behind for all to see. What would your Chucks say?

Flo Heiss & James Cooper literally hacked their Chucks to pieces. And they recorded each step!

The Reactive guys teamed up with their friends Toby & Pete in Australia to ‘shoot’ their vision for a Chuck Hack – it’s called Chuck a Chuck. And it gets messy.

The crazy guys at SuperHeros in Amsterdam hacked a Chuck Taylor to create the first ever sneaker with drone support: the Chuck T9000.

Becky Power and her team at Lowe Open took a very SNEAKER twist on the shoe horn for their hack.

“GOOD VIBRATIONS” is what Lean Mean Fighting Machine called it when they hacked our Chuck Taylor to create a pair of sneakers that help you discover a cool new world. Check it out.

The Weapon 7 team put together this very funny demonstration for hacking a Chuck. They call it the “Twitter-powered distressed Chuck”

Street Art fan Seb Royce and friends took a pair of chucks and built a fully automated, retractable robotic arm – allowing artists to reach new heights.

How about checking in wherever you go with your Chucks? That’s the nice idea from the LBi guys.

Rehab Studio are thinking up a way to turn your dance moves into custom Chucks. What would your moves be?

The Cheil team in London love skate. So they’ve devised a Chuck hack that allows you to check out a board and track where you go. It’s called Chuck Stop.

The Good Chuck uses hidden technology to help you do good while doing nothing more than walking in your Chucks… Thanks to Natalie Lam and McCann in New York!

The people at Shotopop took a classic Chuck Tailor All Star Sneaker and hacked it to make this: “SHIP JUST GOT REAL”.

Thanks to the guys at BBH in London. They’ve hacked a Chuck that creates digital art from your feet.

I just love it! Another rollercoaster adrenaline filled night bought to you by Creative Social and Microsoft. I’m that excited about the experience that I am finding it hard to write it down – my brain is going faster than I can type, so I think I might have to keep it short!

I am such a curious person and I really get a kick out of meeting new people and exploring new places. I was slightly unsure what to expect when invited to Westminster Abbey in the Cheyneygates room for a dinner hosted by Microsoft, but with a topic like wearable technology it was a must.

I am a great fan of Neurowear, Electric Foxy, MIT Media Labs & Disney Research Labs and have been following this trend for a while so I was eager to see where it was going next and certain that Asta Roseway, Sr. Research Designer at Microsoft Labs was about to reveal some unseen treasures.

Unsure about whether I was in the right place as I turned the corner up the stairs, my face lit up and well, HELLO! It was like I was stood at the scene of the last supper – a long, grand table overflowing with fruit, wine and (most importantly) interesting and inspiring people, inventors and, of course, fellow Socials. And as the heavens lit up behind Daniele as if some kind of sign, he introduced the miraculous Asta and her vision on Awareables.

My ears really pricked up for The Printing Dress, in collaboration with Sheridan Martin Small from Xbox – a dress made up of your expressions through tweets. And why not? You can just imagine the impact this could have on our lives. Not just from a fashion sense, but also for people who find it hard to say things. I am sure famous people would love it (I can think of a few things you could say to the press as you walk past them) but then that leads me to thinking before you tweet. You would certainly read a message back at least 3 times before broadcasting it on your body – or maybe not! It could be a great dating tool too, or perhaps even to add subtitles right onto the actors in plays?

Next up, fitness. Wearable tech for sport has been with us in different ways for years, and the next most interesting push for this category is when it helps you with your wellbeing and health. Asta shared devices that can tell me when I am not getting enough sleep or when I need to chill out, or that can send me some great tunes to help me nod off when they know I should be resting. If we can detect stress levels we can counteract health problems. Who could argue with that?

Affecting Computing, a group at MIT Media Labs, aim to bridge the gap between human emotions and computational technology. Asta showed us the Mood Butterfly experiment – the butterflies wings tell us when we are stressed. I love the thought of being made to feel uplifted just before the red zone of stress hits. Technology and science, we owe you one.

The last thing I’ll touch on from the night is expressive social responses – wearing something that responds to your emotions. We met Vesty – a vest that flutters when you are happy and hackles when you are stressed or scared, not a far cry from the Neurowear brain-wave controlled tail & ears that I’ve been having so much fun with around the office. Soon we’ll be able to have a full conversation through our clothing, and even send flutters to other people to cheer them up. What if  we used them as another dimension for film, so you can feel the emotions of the actors? The future potential for this stuff is huge, but one thing is certain – if I was wearing Vesty right now, I think I would have taken off.

Thanks again for a great night CS & Microsoft. See you again sometime.

Madlizzie aka Liz Sivell from StartJG

——————————————————————————————————————————

As always a big thanks to our partner Microsoft.
Here are a few words from Michael Dwan, Director Creative Partnerships, Microsoft

“The potential of wearable technology has been growing excitement amongst creatives – as more applications emerge and consumer acceptance goes more mainstream.  Microsoft was delighted to contribute to the discussion by introducing our Senior Researcher in this arena – Asta Roseway – to the Creative Social. Asta shared research insights, showed her ‘wearables’ prototype designs and applied usage experiments. It was really tremendous to be part of this energetic vision session. “

Creative Social is gearing up for their annual get together at Cannes. Once a year we spend time catching up with fellow Socials and friends over lunch in the French Riviera. It’s a great opportunity to touch base with other members of the collective from all around the globe, we discuss great work and put the world to right!

We would like to say a big thanks to our partners for this event, The Talent Business, a great bunch of folk who will be chewing the fat with us. Look forward to seeing you all next week!

How did it all start, and how have you got to where you are today?

My parents went away on holiday when my friends and I were sixteen; their final words before they left were “no house parties”. We can’t remember who it was that suggested it, but someone in the room whispered, “well let’s have a festival, because if we have a festival and it’s in the garden, then it’s not a party.” So technically we found a loophole, we weren’t officially breaking the rules and we thought we were all geniuses.

Over the course of the next week we gathered in my front room, made phone calls and booked some bands. Rich booked the bands and he’s still booking the bands for us now, but on a much bigger scale. We borrowed a stage and sound system from our school, and gave the caretaker a crate of ale in return for him letting us dismantle the stage. We had to pack it into shopping trolleys and cart it a mile up my road with a stream of cars behind us. It was proper DIY, and we found some 18 year olds who were willing to buy us some booze which we then sold on the bar. It was amazing, a great all-consuming project for a group of sixteen year olds to get stuck in with. It was the first time we’d really taken control of organising something ourselves, and it took over everything for a week, we had the best time in the world.

The whole thing went really well, I think there were 150 people there; we were charging £3 entry, and all of the money went to the Teenage Cancer Trust. Luckily it wasn’t one of those teenage house parties where thousands of people turn up and everything gets trashed, everyone behaved themselves in my garden and chipped in afterwards to help us clear up the beer cans and get the garden back to normal. We had a real sense of achievement that we’d done something special and constructive, as well as having an amazing time.

Since then the journey has changed so much. The second year the big challenge was to convince my parents to let us do it again. Now the big challenge is to book the right headliners for tens of thousands of pounds, sell thousands of tickets and organise seven different stages on time to make sure it’s an amazing experience for everyone that comes. The scale has jumped up hugely over seven years, which is really such a short space of time. We’ve been learning constantly, had we in year two tried to do what we are doing now there is no way we could have achieved it, we would have completely messed it up. Looking back, even though those challenges can seem mundane and boring, they’ve been important. It’s been really nice growing organically because it’s let us learn those things along the way and get over one hurdle at a time, perfecting things as we go.

Leefest 2007

Leefest 2010

Leefest 2012

So are you a big festival guy? Do you enjoy going to other festivals too?

Before LeeFest started when I was sixteen I’d only really been to Reading festival.  I arrived really late on Friday night and my friends had been there since earlier. I remember walking into the campsite and because it was night and after the arena had closed there was thick smoke and fires everywhere, it was completely rowdy. I remember thinking that this was another world and getting so excited – and the idea of festivals being another world is still the thing that excites me; only these days we get to do our own, create, design and build it the way that we believe the world should be.

Since Reading I’ve been to almost everything I think UK-wise, or tried to. One of my favorites last year was Shambala, it’s a really nice size, I think about ten thousand people – it was the perfect mix of being big enough to have everything on that they wanted on, but not so big that it ruined the experience.

You recently set up a Kickstarter project. How did that come about, and what does it mean now that you’ve achieved your goal?

Yes, we’ve achieved our Kickstarter goal of £50,000, which is fantastic and will allow us to really develop Leefest in 2014 and beyond. One of the rewards, which was open to anybody who pledged £35, was to become a member of the Campfire Cabinet.

We wanted to find a way for people have input into the festival and really drive it in directions that they think it should go in. We’ve opened it up so that it’s more than just the eight of us working on it here. More ideas and different angles and opinions on what should be happening, what feels right, and how the future looks.

The Campfire Cabinet will be involved in how that Kickstarter money is being used. We have plans around potential new venues that we might want to look at moving to, that will allow us to get a bit bigger, do different things, and have different natural features.  The funding will also help us out with things like licensing etc. There’s nothing definite but we’ve got a lot of ideas and we want to put those to the Campfire Cabinet and get their input and feedback.

What are the biggest challenges you’re faced with at the moment?

A changing festival market. Things are getting harder for the big major festivals so they’re flexing their money power and their sway in the industry. That in turn makes it harder for smaller independent festivals like us to book artists and fill line ups amongst other things. It’s a huge challenge because there is nothing that we as individuals can do about it. We’ve joined a group with a number of other independent festivals called The Association of Independent Festivals and we’re trying to look at how we can make a change collectively, but I think it’s something that we will have to find our own path with. The other difficulty is that the average festival goer will never see any of this situation, only the effect that it has, so there is an education job to be done as well.

A more positive challenge is making sure the festival reaches its potential. There have been so many people involved with getting it to where we are that it feels like a big responsibility to make sure we achieve everything that we think is possible with Leefest.

What’s been your biggest learning while working on this project?

The amazing things you can achieve with great people, essentially that is all festivals are. If you look at the business model it’s completely mad – you’ve got 250k going into something that exists for 3 days. The only real asset you have is a name and the group of people surrounding that name. If you have an amazing team which we do, you can make those 3 days magical.

What’s the most interesting thing you’ve seen recently?

There’s a really good theatre group called Dancing Brick that I would definitely recommend checking out. I went to see Public Service Broadcast do an amazing life show recently with loads of old TV screens, they’ll be doing something similar at the festival this year.

Where do you do your best thinking?

When I’m in meetings about completely unrelated things. I’m very reliant on having people around be to bounce ideas around with.

If you could travel in time, where would you go and what would you do?

I’d go to the renaissance period when arts and science were not separated. It’s something I’m really interested in exploring with the festival. I did a physics and maths degree and people are always asking me how I find working in music with that background. In that era there was far less separation between logic and creativity, you had people like Da Vinci sketching out helicopters.

If you could work with anyone on a project, who would it be and what would do?

I’d love to do something with Jack White. He’s someone that does interesting things just because they interest him. He’s not contained by finances or failure and I think that’s really important.

Who would be on your ultimate festival line up?

Queen with Freddy Mercury. The videos of him at Live Aid are incredible; I would have loved to have seen him live. I have a pretty eclectic taste in music so I’d love to go to a festival that was so varied it could have a bit of everything. That’s one of my favorite things about festivals, the potential to mix and blend so many different types of music and allow people to explore it for themselves.

If you had an unlimited budget for Leefest, what would you do?

Daft Punk playing in a small underground cavern with an old rusty elevator that you have to go down in. Unlimited budget is fantasy land.

Tell us something about yourself not many people know

What’s next?

We really don’t know, and that’s great. When we started this journey we had absolutely no idea it would go this far. We’re just enjoying the ride and seeing where it takes us. As long as people are interested in what we are doing we’ll carry on doing it.

http://leefest.org.uk/

@leefest

Monorex are about to have their ninth birthday. To celebrate they’ve brought together more than 500 creative influencers over the course of a long weekend this June at the Hoxton Arches. The event will showcase the company’s growing family of brands and projects, whilst hosting an ongoing feed of exclusive urban art exhibitions, live art battles and screen printing, creative talks, debates, DJs and drinks.

Definitely one not to miss, grab a ticket while you still can.

More info - http://monorex.com/monorex-turns-9/

Tickets - http://www.eventbrite.co.uk/org/2723026686

As manufacturers roll out these televisions, look for 4K media players that allow you to view 4K-formatted films. Web connectivity allows an expanded range of options, so long as you are willing to pay for them. Sony plans to release a PlayStation 4, compatible with 4K technology, to further entice viewers. According to http://www.Cable-TV.com, satellite TV has a quarter of the market share and is poised to grow in popularity. Might this integrate with 4K TV for a cable-free, media-rich television experience? Early adopters of 4K TV are hopeful that it will.

If all this sounds like it will come at a cost, it will. The first so-called budget 4K television, released by Seiki, has a 50-inch monitor and costs $1,500. While this is significantly less than premium 4K televisions, it may be more than you want to spend. Nonetheless, the budget model does indicate that manufacturers are pushing this product. Off-brand or third-tier electronics companies are getting into 4K tech much earlier in the game than they did for 3D tech.

Where one budget exists, others will arise. Electronics companies, both premium and off-brand, clearly see this as a good place to put their resources. Over time, this may lead to consumer price drops that make 4K TV a really good value.

CNET tested out the latest 4K offerings and here’s what they had to say about this cutting edge technology:

Pros and Cons

At the moment, expect to spend several thousand dollars on a 4K TV with a decent screen size. If you’d prefer to spend $700 rather than $7,000 on your next television, 4K TV might not be for you. At least, not for right now. While prices are expected to fall, there’s no firm guarantee.

If you prefer a large screen size, at or above 76 inches, you’re better served in 4K. On a large television, HD pixels are bigger. As a result, the image can be grainier and less sharp than on a smaller HDTV screen. Scaling up in tech restores image clarity. The current HD TV resolution, 1080 pixels, looks pretty great to most viewers. This begs the question, does the average watcher really need more from their television? It depends on how much television you watch, what your gaming needs are and how important clarity is to you, according to Forbes. If you can get by just fine with your existing HD TV, you may not need to be an early adopter.

The best way to decide if this new tech trend is right for you is to visit an electronics store and check out life in 4K. Whether you decide it’s a must-have or something to pass up for the time being, 4K’s clarity is certainly worth testing out.

Author: Sean Norris

]]> http://creativesocialblog.com/news/4k-in-a-nutshell/feed 0 http://creativesocialblog.com/news/4k-in-a-nutshell http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/creativesocialblog-thefeed/~3/WMhiVBCOoZc/innovation-stories-hamish-nicklin http://creativesocialblog.com/events/innovation-stories-hamish-nicklin#comments Mon, 27 May 2013 13:07:42 +0000 Anna Morley http://creativesocialblog.com/?p=8494

I can never really remember his last name. He’s always just ‘Hamish from Google’ to me, nuff said. Yes, he works at Google, and that’s pretty frickin awesome. Is he kinda living our dream? Maybe. Because as we wax lyrical why innovation is so important and how we can convince our clients to embrace risk and innovative approaches, Hamish is already there. Google are well known for their 80/20 approach and how successfully they roll with it. And sometimes it feels like all the coolest, most innovative things you find on the web turn out to be Google’s work. It’s pretty infuriating actually.

So here comes Hamish (all stubble-chinned and amicable-looking) to tell us all about how the heck this is possible. Basically, there are five key principles:

1. Focus on the user and worry about the money later

Money tends to be a problem. Clients come to us with a certain budget, and that’s that. They want to get everything they want, but for that budget. But that’s not really the right approach is it? The truth is: it is ALL about the user, about your audience. If you don’t reach them, you might as well have thrown all that money out the window in the first place.

In 1998, giving the user what they wanted was pretty easy for Google. Most people didn’t even know what a search engine was, let alone that they existed. Expectations were low and easy to exceed. Today, people are spoilt. Like, really spoilt. They expect the world, and have grown ever more cynical with an increasing knowledge of what’s possible and how things work. They want search engines to know exactly what they want.

So, Hamish muses, the ideal search engine is the Start Trek Enterprise – you talk to it, it knows what you want and gives you it. But who knows: maybe Google will be like that someday too.

2. Open will win

Being open is important in a variety of contexts. For one thing, Google are open about their code and technology. They released the source code for Android because they knew that would make it better. “A lot of good engineers work for us. But we don’t employ all the great engineers in the world, that would be impossible.” So by making Android available to the world, other people were able to work on it and made it a more sophisticated product.

Openness is also important for working environments: open and airy offices are fantastic to work in. But Google also made a surprising discovery: a cramped canteen space is much better for business. Serendipitous eavesdropping stimulates conversation, and sitting closely together makes people talk to each other. Talking to each other is at the base of brilliant ideas. Bloody genius approach if you ask me.

3. Think big, start small

Thinking little enables you to think big. You could have a tiny little idea that has the potential to explode into something huge, but it’ll never get there if you discard it as too small in the first place. Similarly, if you think big straight away, you run the risk of having no substance. It’s like building houses: you need to lay the foundations before you build a skyscraper.

4. Never fail to fail

Fail hard and fail fast. Take risks. I tend to think this point plays a very large part in Google’s success. A lot of people wax lyrical about the need to fail, but how many will actually put themselves out there with a really risky idea? And put money behind it? Relatively few. Far too often we let ourselves be talked down by naysayers and ‘what-if-ers, thinking that it’s better to be safe than be sorry. Unfortunately there is no way to grandness without failure. And while many people seem to acknowledge the truth of this, few will actually live it.

We never remember Google’s failures because the successes are so resounding. But Hamish reminds us that a whole range of products preceded Google+ that were far from popular! First there was opensocial, then wave, then buzz (which was so bad they actually got sued), and only then did Google+ emerge.

5. Make it matter

To succeed, you need to fundamentally believe in your organisation, and give a shit. We all know what it’s like to talk to someone who is truly passionate about something. The glow in their eyes, the excitement in their voice, the urgency in their stance. It’s so strong you get all excited too. But if you don’t have that, then you’re probably not going to get to the top. Hard work and following the rules will only get you so far, but then you need that extra sparkle. You need to really believe in what you’re doing.

BOOM. There we go. Sounds deceptively simple, but of course we all know it’s not that at all. But it’s something to strive for. And maybe if we take a little slice of Google’s innovation wisdom, we can soon feel a little less jealous and more empowered to take some risks ourselves.

A whopping THANKS to our partners

and the newly launched Innovation Social.

Media Partner

At last week’s first ever Innovation Social we had the pleasure of meeting powerhouse Charmaine Eggberry – who not only has fantastic hair, but also told us the incredible story of Wayra, Telefonica’s hugely successful Business Accelerator.

She starts off her talk by emphasising that “in the age of scarcity, innovation should go up exponentially”, making support for budding start-ups and innovative new business models ever more important. The Credit Crunch and economically tough times shouldn’t make us shrink back in fear of anything remotely risky, but rather lead us to look for new and exciting ways to boost the economy.

Wayra translates as ‘wind of change’, which is exactly what the organisation is bringing to the world. With 13 Wayra Academies globally helping start-ups find their feet financially as well as strategically, Wayra is the single largest incubator in the world. Every 3 days, a new start-up is added to their roster, which is as impressive as it’s hard work for all involved. Because the team is by no means indiscriminate in who they pick! Wayra applicants have to go through a gruelling series of interviews, pitches, presentations, and are grilled with questions at every step.

This year, Wayra UK received a staggering 17192 applications, of which only 17 got lucky start-ups got picked. The winning teams can look forward to financial support and new connections to other investors – but that’s not what Wyra is about at all. “Yes we new talent money on the table, but most importantly we put the fun into start-ups.”

This means the start-up teams get a beautiful space to work in, a network of professional mentors to advise them, and a sense of family within the whole Wayra team. Because when it comes down to it, money is not the thing that’ll make a start-up succeed. No, it’s making the right decision, having a fool-proof strategy, confidence in your product, and the right people backing you up – both emotionally and professionally.

And the numbers are pretty convincing. Start-ups are often associated with likely failure, but this is not the case with Wayra start-ups: 90% of them have launched, 70% are already selling to customers. Only 1 start-up in the history of Wayra has ever failed. Pretty impressive.

The good news is that it’s not just the game of wet twens anymore either. While the ideal age to found a start-up is said to be 24, 50% of all Wayra start-up members are in fact over 30 and 10% over 40. Unsurprisingly ,a bit more life experience with other businesses helps people realise what works, and know what they really want from their company.

A brilliant example of a Wayra start-up is Munch, a delivery services that brings any of your favourite restaurant or café foods to your doorstep. Fancy a Starbucks coffee but can’t get away from your desk? Munch will bring it to you. The ingenious thing about it is that the customer does not pay any extra – the retailer swallows up Munch’s charge!

Another is TankTopTV, an online service that collects various online streaming services’ films and series, and gives you a choice of the ones that are actually good. That way you don’t have to decide which service you sign up for, plus you avoid sifting through pages and pages of rubbish films that you’ll never watch anyway.

Charmaine’s talk was hugely inspiring and made me think that really, anything is possible. You’ve just got to put yourself out there.

A whopping THANKS to our partners

and the newly launched Innovation Social.

Media Partner

Tom started off with a quote from William Gibson, “The future is already here – it’s just not evenly distributed.” He touched on the principles of anarconomy and what this could mean for brands in the future. To be truly sustainable they need to ensure that innovation is part of their fabric, not just in what they produce but also the way they work.