Free and easy

Welcome to Idealog Weekly, the free email newsletter for New Zealand commercial creatives, entrepreneurs and anyone rich with ideas.

Free & easy

For we cosseted journalists and publishers, these are interesting times. The action is online, but the money is in print. Readers always have alternative sources of news and, rather than hunting out news and information, many people are trying to cut down on the amount of information they’re subjected to each day. So the message from readers to big media is make it free, make it better, make it briefer, make it faster—but don’t even think of trying to make a buck. Publishers’ plans to charge for content have been met with scepticism, derision and some very colourful insults (just ask Barry Colman).

Okay, so Big Media deserves much of the abuse, but those who plan on gleefully watching the mighty finally tumble should be watching their backs. A few years ago it was the music biz, now it’s the Fourth Estate, but almost everyone is going to find their core business hit by technological and social disruption. (Yeah, that’s right, we’ll take you down with us.)

So when everything is supposed to be free, what can you actually charge for? Find out in the latest issue of Idealog, in print and on our website.

The freeze-framed Mr Fox

Is it just me, or are the most interesting films these days inspired from childrens’ books? Last month we posted a trailer for the upcoming Where The Wild Things Are, Spike Jonze’s version of Maurice Sendak’s famous book.

Now Wes Anderson is weighing in with his own version of Roald Dahl’s The Fantastic Mr Fox, and it’s getting rave reviews.

Interestingly, neither of these films are using traditional animation: Jonze decided to shoot a live action version of Wild Things, and Anderson has chosen an even more unlikely method to bring Fox to screen: stop motion.

It’s hard to imagine a more awkward way of shooting a feature-length film, but it certainly looks like a winner. And both these films look like they’ll match Pixar’s huge feat: movies that appeal to kids and adults alike.

Check out the making-of featurette at YouTube, too.

Wild Wellingtonians

Congratulations to Ponoko’s Pokomen for their starring role in the current issue of Inc magazine, inventing “the wild, abstract future”, no less! Ponoko deserves the plaudits; check out the feature at the Inc website and remind yourself of the back story in our feature from March last year, or earlier story in 2007 when Ponoko was just getting started.

Literary science

Get your bookmark ready: over two dozen scientists and science writers are collaborating to bring us Sciblogs.co.nz, a fantastic insight into the science community and scientific thinking in New Zealand today. Congratulations to the team at the Science Media Centre and to Marker Studio for producing a blog that manages to be busy, inviting and readable all at the same time.

Surely other sectors could consider doing something similar? I’d love to know what our teachers are doing. How about the police? Journalists? Entrepreneurs? The trick is to find an independent third party, like the Science Media Centre, to provide the forum. Let’s hear your ideas.

Pretty soon you’re talking real money

You can tell a lot about yourself just by looking at this chart at the endlessly-fascinating Information is Beautiful blog. What do you see? A world of possibility, with educated, healthy kids, bootprints on Mars, a truly sustainable economy and Africa’s debts wiped? Or a miserable indictment of our mixed-up priorities, carelessness and selfishness?

Me, I see a third possibility: redemption. If the porn industry decides tomorrow that it will feed every child in the world for a year—would that change your opinion of porn? What if corrupt Russian officials decided to save the Amazon and match the money that Americans give to charity? What if the world’s drug dealers agreed to bankroll a manned mission to Mars?

An idea whose time should never come

We’ve all had them: business ideas that are batshit crazy and will never work, but we like them anyway. So let’s hand it to the proprietors of Kashiwa’s Ogori Cafe: giving each customer’s order to the next guy is going to upset as many people as it pleases, but how fantastic that someone would give it a spin anyway. And that logo!

In the fast lane

There are still a few places open in The Icehouse’s FAST Pitch 2009 series. Get your entry in now and get free coaching and the opportunity to pitch your ideas to a gallery of prominent angel investors, venture capitalists, business people and journalists. The first coaching session is next Thursday so don’t delay. Sign up now at The Icehouse website. It’s just $85 and if your pitch wows the judges you could win cash, software and services worth over $5,000. There are great prizes for category winners too.

Do da Da Vinci

If you’ll be in Auckland some time over the next two months, make sure you plan a trip to catch the Da Vinci Machines Exhibition, which opens tomorrow at 75 Customs St (next to the Rose & Crown). It is what it sounds like: reproductions of Da Vinci’s brilliant designs and inventions, bringing his ideas to life. There are over 60 machines in the exhibition, many are life-size and some are interactive. Da Vinci-sized genius doesn’t come to town too often so catch it while you can.

Quote of the week

“While I can get as excited as the next man about a new stretch of tarseal or a sympathetically-placed sewage treatment plant, I’m sure that these are not quite the bait that the Minister of Tourism has in mind when he dreams of New Zealand being the number-one destination of the South Pacific.”

–Hamish Coney reckons there’s more to super cities than roads and rubbish collection

More at Idealog online

Read more on our website: web exclusives, opinion, creative directory, Idealog TV, the Idealog blogs and the Idealog podcast. See you at idealog.co.nz.

  Matt Cooney
   Editor