emconsteroids

Today, I was helping my sister to sell her Recycled Magic Wallets at Brick Lane Market (Back Yard Market).

On one of the stalls, an Italian fellow was selling cheap chinese imported sun glasses for £5 a pair. He was the “odd man out” in the market as everyone else was selling hand made stuff. Yet it seems that his stall seemed to be one of the most popular ones. It was the perfect prove that the price was what makes people buy stuff. Everyone liked the idea of my sister’s Recycled Magic Wallets, yet hardly anyone appreciated the work which was needed to produce them. Let alone pay for it. It’s sad but a hard fact. Cheap stuff from China still sells better quantities than good hand made local craftsmanship. And better quantities gives more profit. And more profit gives more incentive.

You can see more pictures of Recycled Magic Wallets on Flickr.

NOTE: My sister still sold a couple of wallets. Not everyone was just looking at the price. There are people who appreciate ideas, innovation and hard work.

Ever wanted fantastically accurate weather information on your iPhone? I have developed an application which works for London based weather information. It can be requested by sending a text message with the contents “iweather” to 84188. (50p to order.).

It basically shows you an animation of the current rainfall around London UK in a range of 1 hour including its movement. The radar information is retrieved from a local Doppler Radar.

Have a try!

Tourists are notoriously hard to please. They spend vast amounts of money and expect to be treated and satisfied accordingly. In a sense, I believe London has one of the most unique tourism propositions in the world. In fact it’s also one of the most clever ones. If this was intentionally or not can be left open, but it certainly works.

It’s all about one of the mightiest forces of nature which is outside human control: the weather.

London’s proposition to tourists is the experience of authentic London rainy and dark weather. Bring your brolly and Mackintosh.

But if you look at the statistics, London has even less rainfall than New York!

As a consequence, tourists will not be disappointed about the weather at all. If it rains, tourists are happy to experience authentic London weather and if the sun shines, they are even more happy, because they think they got one of those very few days of dry weather.

Probably the only disappointed tourists you can find in London are standing in front of London Bridge. Why? Because they were expecting Tower Bridge.

At first, I was slightly disappointed with the newly presented London 2012 Olympics logo. It really looked too random and not very dynamic to me. But the promotion video actually showed me how the concept could fit as a whole.

I assume it’s quite different to create a unique design that is supposed to reflect the zeitgeist in over 4 years time in the future. The designers of the brand did a bold move and only time will tell if they hit the target.

Judge yourself:

I actually quite like the edgy jigsaw shapes of the logo and can see them emerging and fitting into the London cityscape over time. Of course, we need to get familiar with the broader picture of the communication strategy as the logo is just the tip of the iceberg of the whole branding. It’s the most visible though.

This is how busy our air space is …

I recently stumbled across this great mashup of Google Maps called MAPfrappe by Kelvin Thompson that allows you to compare sizes.

Check below how London’s Zone 1 spans across most of the City of Zurich:

1. You say “the City” and expect everyone to know which part of town you are talking about.
2. You have never been to The Tower or Madame Tussauds but love Brighton.
3. You can get into a four-hour argument about how to get from Shepherds Bush to Elephant & Castle at 3:30 on the Friday before a long weekend, but can’t find Dorset on a map.
4. Hookers and the homeless are invisible.
5. You step over people who collapse on the Tube.
6. You believe that being able to swear at people in their own language makes you multilingual.
7. You’ve considered stabbing someone.
8. Your door has more than three locks.
9. You consider eye contact an act of overt aggression.
10. You call an 8′ x 10′ plot of patchy grass a garden.
11. You consider Essex the “countryside”.
12. You think Hyde Park is “nature”.
13. You’re paying 1,200 a month for a studio the size of a walk-in wardrobe and you think it’s a “bargain”.
14. Shopping in suburban supermarkets and shopping malls gives you a severe attack of agoraphobia.
15. You pay more each month to park your car than most people in the UK pay in rent.
16. You pay 3 pounds without blinking for a beer that cost the bar 28p.
17. You actually take fashion seriously.
18. You have 27 different menus next to your telephone.
19. The UK west of Heathrow is still theoretical to you.
20. You’re suspicious of strangers who are actually nice to you.
21. Your idea of personal space is no one actually physically standing on you.
22. £50 worth of groceries fit in one plastic bag.
23. You have a minimum of five “worst cab ride ever” stories.
24. You don’t hear sirens anymore.
25. You’ve mentally blocked out all thoughts of the city’s air/water Quality and what it’s doing to your insides.
26. You live in a building with a larger population than most towns.
27. Your cleaner is Portuguese, your grocer is Somali, your butcher is halal, your deli man is Israeli, your landlord is Italian, your laundry guy is Philippino, your bartender is Australian, your favourite diner owner is Greek, the watch seller on your corner is Senegalese, your last cabbie was African, your newsagent is Indian and your local English chippie owner is Turkish.
28. You wouldn’t want to live anywhere else until you get married.
29. You roll your eyes and say ‘tsk’ at the news that someone has thrown himself under a tube train.
30. Your day is ruined if you don’t get a copy of Metro on the way to work.

(via e-mail)

Did you know that the London based graffiti artist Banksy has most of his artworks collected on Flickr and quite a few of them are also geo tagged. Check loc.alize.us to see where the stencils are.

Have a look at this great 18Megapixel picture from London in the late 1940ies!

Can you see the pickpocker in the brown suit of stealing the wallet of the gentleman just over the hood of the car to the left? The clue about the year 1949 came from the “Treasure Hunt” that seems to be playing in the “Apollo Theatre”. This play was only on for a couple of months during 1949.

Via digg.com

Have you ever wondered, what the real London Tube Map would look like? Usually, you get this very popular and aesthetically highly sophisticated abstract map of the London Underground. However, this never really gave an overview of how far apart the actual tube stations really are. Check out this fantastic London Tube Map built on the Google Maps API - you can also use it as a journey planner.

Via Google Maps Mania