“Swede have an excellent way of merging creativity with business logic. They walked us through the creation of a high level visual representation of the market prior to BaseKit – helping us to understand the key problems and pains that need to be addressed. We then projected an ideal solution forward into the future, creating a visual of a new better market with BaseKit as a central point. Swede helped us to see our business from refreshing angles, have helped us to gain a deeper understanding of our customers – and have helped us start to shape our ideas regarding the delivery of an exceptional user experience. Thank you Swede!”
Richard Best, BaseKit

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We hooked up with the Mobclix team via Skype chat and Adobe ConnectNow last week to see how a virtual version of the Rapid Innovation framework would pan out. These guys have had a great few months, first becoming finalists at TechCrunch50 and later winning Seedcamp. There is little doubt as to why - they have what appears to be a great team and a very timely product.

Check this article for a short summary of the workshop.

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Two weeks after Seedcamp and the Financial Times have just launched three videos with some good interviews and conclusions of the event.

Day Three - 17 Sep
Day Four - 18 Sep
Day Five - 19 Sep

As an update, the Seedcamp winners have now booked their places at the Swedecamp workshops we donated, all of them will take place in central London during October.

First up is UberVU this Friday - we’ll be asking each team for permission to publish the results here so watch this space!

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The winners of Seedcamp 08 have just been announced (uberVU, Kyko, Basekit, Soup.io, Toksta, Mobclix, StupeFlix). Amazing job - this is when the fun bit starts!

This year we will be giving all the 7 winners a series of rapid innovation workshops around their brand, user experience and design. To quote Ryan Carson at the Techcrunch party last night: “that’s awesome!” - we agree Ryan, this will be most wonderful…or ‘grymt’ as we say in Sweden.

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So we’re half way through the second Seedcamp in London. The finalists should be awake for most of tonight prepping for the big presentation tomorrow after which the winners will be picked.

It really cannot be said enough just how important this event is and what an amazing opportunity is represents for entrepreneurs all over Europe.

To all the finalists - I’ve spent many years on your side of the table (and still often do!) and hats off to you for the graceful way you have listen to the absolute insane amount of advice given over the last few days. It is hard when you have 200 individuals all wanting to add their piece of wisdom to your project and I feel especially for those of your who are on your own.

Good luck in the finals everyone - we’re on standby to do some kick-ass creative work with the winners during the coming months.

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Shopping online is a solitary task. Much unlike the social experience we get when walking into a store where we constantly allow other people to inspire (or annoy) us and affect our purchase decisions. Are there many people in the shop? What areas are most frequented? Is there a queue to the tills? The latter may be annoying but a sure sign of a popular store.

In this article are some thoughts on how, through visual stimuli we can convey the more social aspects of shopping.

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Some things have changed in the last year or so - the introduction of truly commoditised IT like Ning and a market full of ideas but short on cash - and the professionals in charge of designing products, services, PR and marketing must change accordingly.

This article outlines some thoughts on how rapid idea development must be in todays market.

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At it’s core WoW is not about flying an admittedly, awesome looking Nether Ray, but about a sense of constant progression with moments of generosity. Couple that with the strong community and great game mechanics and you have a recipe for high level addiction.

This post from the World of Warcraft universe is the first of many looking at the game mechanics behind the worlds most succesfull online world.

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Most remotes are crap - however they will prevail for quite some time yet so thinking of better ways to navigate ITV content using these clunky remotes makes sense. I was playing around with the remote for a project of ours and this, while a neat interface, was not directly applicable to what we were doing.

The thought here is to mimic the button faces on the remote allowing us to cycle through four categories of content using the directional button as well as having four quick-links from the color buttons.

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A couple of years back we tackled this looking at a concept for when the journey is more important than the goal. What if 1000’s of videos are mixed with products, personalities, articles and advertising? Can we send people on a journey of discovery through a 3-dimensional space? Is being pleasurably lost an appealing state of mind?

In this article I moan a bit, remember the 90’s and show some nice work we did on video interfaces.

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