July 27, 2006
Welcome to Idealog Weekly, the free email newsletter for New Zealand commercial creatives, entrepreneurs and anyone rich with ideas. In this week’s issue: big iron, opinionated, do I have your attention?, disclaimer-free drugs and the quote of the week. Big iron  Movies like King Kong require some serious computing power but what do you do with your supercomputer once the movie is made? The ‘big iron’ used to make Weta’s blockbusters is literally rented out to researchers who need to do quickly crunch numbers, render graphics or model data. Scott Houston of the New Zealand Supercomputer Centre says he can’t talk about the work many of his customers do on the supercomputers but he singles out oil and gas exploration as the current hottest project.
It’s an amazing resource for New Zealand and Houston is keen for local companies to make use of it. One customer who can talk about his project is Russell Gray, who leads a University of Auckland team that is tracking human migration by analysing DNA and Pacific languages. “The kind of things we do run for months on fast computers,” he says. “If you didn’t have those you’d be waiting for the rest of your life.” Read more about the supercomputer and why the migration project could change the story of human history on our website. Opinionated All our columns from Idealog #4 are now online. Read Hamish Coney on the difference between craft and object art, Vincent Heeringa on what Steinlager did right, Liz Donnelly on our earliest adopters, David MacGregor on brand madness, Daniel Batten on adopting the customer’s perspective and James Hurman on corporate psychoanalysis. Have something to add? Don’t agree? Leave a comment! Do I have your attention now? You may have read about the billboard an angry ’Emily’ placed opposite her cheating husband’s workplace this week. Emily was using the joint bank account to pay for her billboards and even blogging about her no-good spouse. These days, though, the public is alert to viral marketing and it took just hours for the stunt to be outed as a creation of Court TV. So has it rebounded on the channel? It’s too early to say, but viral marketing needs to be done well to be effective. Too many lame efforts and we’ll all be sick of the whole thing.  Doctor, I’m tired all the time …
Benzedrine, Butibel, Thorazine … just the stuff to get through everyday life. Check out these old ads from the days when drug disclaimers were definitely optional.
Quote of the week “The supercomputer makes possible asking questions we just wouldn’t have been able to ask before.”
—Russell Gray of the University of Auckland More at Idealog online Read more on our website: Web exclusives, opinion, Idealog IP and the Idealog blogs. See you at idealog.co.nz. Matt Cooney
Editor
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