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Showing posts with label GIF. Show all posts
Showing posts with label GIF. Show all posts

Sunday, May 19, 2013

10 Films from the 80s and 90s illuminate today's tech glossary

1. Start-ups
Ghostbusters - four guys with varying skillsets develop a unique hardware solution in order to improve city life. A distinct tag line helps them go viral.



2. Sheryl Sandberg's "lean in" culture
Working Girl - With "a head for business and a bod for sin", Tess discovers what she's capable of when she's "not afraid".



3. Crowd-funding
Empire Records - A group of music store employees offer perks of badges and booze to the general public in a bid to raise enough cash to "Damn the man" and "Save the Empire".



4. VC Funding
Wall Street - a bright young whipper snapper gets the investment he needs, but discovers only too late that the provision of lunch was not included in the small print.



5. Beta Testing
Jurassic Park - A potentially game-changing new experiential start-up selects a small group for Beta testing. They don't make it to SXSW



6. Google Glass
They Live - A drifter discovers that the ruling class are in fact aliens managing human social affairs through the use of a signal on top of the TV broadcast, concealing their appearance and subliminal messages in mass media. #ifihadglass



7. Rapid Prototyping
Home Alone - a child genius creates a self-inflicted bootcamp and uses iterative development techniques to innovate simple solutions to petty crime.



8. User Experience
Weird Science - two cyberneticists build a humanoid robot with a focus on user needs.



9. Quantified Self
Groundhog Day - By tracking himself over a length of time and assessing the data, Phil is able to improve relationships and lead a better lifestyle.



10. Aquihiring
ET - A foreign entrepreneur recruits an entire team of American specialists to help overcome serious logistical and communication issues.


Sunday, September 11, 2011

GIFS are so hot right now

Sometimes nothing makes me happier - or more of a geek - than to see something bubble up and go mainstream. Working with a load of hipsters in Shoreditch obviously makes the challenge of spotting trends a little like shooting fish in a barrel - odds are that eventually one of their unique foibles will catch on. So, it is not with too much self-congratulation that I see the animated GIF style appear in Kanye West's new video "Marvin and Chardonnay".



Nevertheless, the GIF tag on my bookmarks has been steadily growing in examples since November 2010. Running almost concurrently with our ever decreasing attention spans, animated GIFs have been circulating via email and on Twitter more and more this year. In August, Fast Company even went so far as to call Animated GIFs an "art form" having featured Jamie Beck and Kevin Burg's fashionista "cinemagraphs" several months previously.



Photographs are too static, two-minute YouTube videos are too time consuming; somehow these bite-sized pieces of entertainment consisting sometimes of no more than a few frames, now represent just about all the visual stimulation we can handle. And now there's even an App for that.