blog.martincrockett.com

The famous sign…found by accident.

The Londonist maps free Wi-Fi in London up to July 2009.
The comments add more locations.

Interesting reading from the team at Secret Cities. How they ‘crowdsourced’ the migration of their Facebook group:
blog.secretcities.com

Someone get this girl a piano chair!

In the underground, integrity lies within
In the underground, image doesn’t mean a thing
When the substance lacks it’s plain for all to see
If the deal is right then respect is where it should be

Summary of the strategy of building low-burn-rate startups, i.e. capital efficient and generally frugal. By taking advantage of open source, agile software, and iterative development, lean startups can operate with much less waste.

The big agencies only pay lip service to digital. They hire and knight smart digital thinkers who ultimately have no authority, no real work, and contempt directed at them from the rest of the organization. It’s no surprise why they don’t stick around. The big boys also farm out to small digital shops that undervalue themselves and lose credit for the work. By the by, almost no superbowl ad last night drove to a URL (GoDaddy has been doing this for years and no one else has caught on) and no brand I saw used their Adwords in an interesting way (even though people were sure to hit search).

[Links]
what consumes me, bud caddell
Tim Malbon at Made By Many thinks we should be asking what an agile advertising agency looks like
The Future of Agencies: What Do You Think?
BBH Labs

“How do Web startups release three or four new versions of a product in the time it takes publishers to launch just one new feature on their online platforms?”

[Links]
O’Reilly Agile Software Development in Publishing – Tools of Change for Publishing
Bill Taylor – Harvard Business Review

Google engineers are encouraged to take 20 percent of their time to work on something company-related that interests them personally. This means that if you have a great idea, you always have time to run with it.

[Links]
The New York Times
Scott Berkun

Bored with his ad agency gig and the uninspiring work he was producing, Ji Lee – now Creative Director of Google Creative Lab – decided to take matters into his own hands in 2002. The result was the ad-spoofing Bubble Project, in which Lee placed blank speech bubbles on ads around New York City. The masses responded and the project went viral, gaining Lee recognition and ultimately forwarding his professional career. Here, Lee talks about how he created, financed, and marketed the project single-handedly.

[Links]
www.thebubbleproject.com
pleaseenjoy.com