Pavlova principles

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

Pavlova principles

What industry teaches you “discipline, collaborative skills and determination”, “the importance of expression and its place in society“ and ”how to run a very tight ship, with no room for waste”. Dance, of course, in the words of Shona McCullagh. It’s a tough industry and it produces tough people.

In the current Idealog, Tara Jahn-Werner looks at four very entrepreneurial Kiwi women who have used the skills they learned in dance to create their own businesses, and explains why Anna Pavlova was considered such a bitch—and such a role model. Check it out in Idealog #24 and on our website.

The way we wore

Archives NZ is posting some genius material on YouTube, like this reminder of the total awesomeness of 1970s New Zealand. What a time to be alive.

There’s more too, like a busbound tour of Enzed for our oldies and a 1957 look at rollerskating in Napier (where snow is never seen). (Thanks, Dan News!)

Fast finalists

The Icehouse whittled down its Fast Pitch finalists from 53 to 10 last night in a marathon pitch fest. With 60 seconds to sell their ideas, the wannabe Sam Morgans had to convince 20-odd judges including Idealog’s own Vincent Heeringa.

And the finalists? Check them out. The chosen ten will pitch in a Dragon’s Den style event on Thursday 27 at Auckland University.

Tickets to the event, which includes a guest talk by Orion’s Ian McRae, are on sale now. We imagine they’ll be gone in, oh, 60 seconds.

Magical mystery search

Remember the Ogori cafe, the Japanese business that would take your order and give it to the next guy, while handing you whatever the last customer asked for? Well, we can report that it’s also a wonderful idea for web searches and equally harebrained. Meet Mystery Google, where you get what the person before you searched for. (Keep those searches seemly!)

Wilco’s way

We’re huge fans of Chicago’s reformed alt-rockers, Wilco, but we didn’t realise quite how cool their posters are. Beautiful! Check them out at the Grids design blog.

Ana in aggregate

Nearly three years ago, Ana Samways told us her big-picture plans for Spare Room, the website and publishing empire-in-the-making she created with Steven Shaw. She’s kept up her other gig, writing the New Zealand Herald’s Sideswipe column for nearly seven years now, and this week she announced a book collecting the very best. It’ll be for sale on Friday next week only at the Warehouse and online. Congratulations, Ana—we hope we won’t have to wait seven years for the second volume.

Feeling FX

There are three big conferences for the movie and gaming FX industries: one in LA, one in Germany and one in Wellington. The latest installment of that event, AnimfxNZ 2009, kicks off in November at Te Papa and the Museum Hotel. It’s a key event for everyone involved or interested in FX and animation and features a typically top-notch list of workshops and speakers (you can expect many of the event attendees to be just as clever and well-connected too). We’ll have a story about AnimfxNZ in our next issue, but in the meantime it would be wise to get registered now at the website.

And while we’re on the topic, let me update you, dear readers, on two of my fascinations of the moment: forthcoming features with a healthy dose of visual effects, Where the Wild Things Are (opening today in the US) and The Fantastic Mr Fox. The San Francisco Chronicle comes up with this endearing headline, ‘Maurice Sendak tells parents to go to hell’ on Wild Things, which is a fair indication that Spike Jonze’s film will be no saccharin Hollywood remake of Sendak’s beloved book. And the Los Angeles Times chimes in with a from-the-trenches report on the obstinate directorial style of Wes Anderson, who apparently wasn’t on set for most of the shooting of Mr Fox. In fact, he was chilling out in a different country, and his demands caused his underlings a great deal of pain. Quote from Anderson’s director of aimation: “Honestly? Yeah. He has made our lives miserable.”

Stock take

Webstock, the addictive annual Kiwi web conference, is confirmed for February 15-19 in Wellington. On Monday the Webstockers announced the list of 2010 speakers, and it’s a doozie. We thought they’d already pretty much brought all the best web speakers to New Zealand in previous years but the 2010 lineup is fresh-faced, including Kevin Rose, founder of Digg; Jessica Jackley, co-founder of Kiva; John Resig, creator of the jQuery library and Jeff Atwood of codinghorror.com.

Even better: after delaying the Onya awards this year to avoid clashing with the NZ Internet Industry Awards, the first Onyas awards dinner will be held on the (tradionally riotous) final night of Webstock. So if you’re a New Zealander doing brilliant work online, get your entries in. You have till November 9.

Our chanteuse in Singapore

Last week, our woman in Asia stumbled across none other than our favourite songstress/covergirl, Hollie Smith, in Singapore. Miss Hollie, who was invited to perform at the Singapore Sun Festival, treated the locals to the first public outing of songs from her new album. The 12-track, yet-to-be-named disc features her trademark soul/funk vibe, but with a couple of up-tempo numbers thrown in. Her inspiration? “The last three years, really,” says Smith. Since we last spoke, Hollie has travelled worldwide (including a recording spot with Blue Note, who she’d previously turned down) and has been asked to open for Coldplay and Simply Red. The new album won’t be released until March, but in the meantime she might treat you to a track or two at one of her upcoming gigs.

Quote of the week

“In retrospect, Dragon’s Den wasn’t a symbol of something new—reality TV—so much as a leftover from the days when every idea needed a patron.”

– Allison O’Neill says we no longer need money to go to market