Who said Amy Winehouse was no oil painting?

The troubled singer has been 'painted' as a lady in French artist Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres' Princess Albert de Broglie.

The picture was one of a selection of celebrity portraits composed by readers of website Worth1000 in an online art contest.

Joining Amy on canvas was actress Jennifer Aniston, who was recreated as Jacques-Louis David's 1780 oil painting Young Woman With A Turban. Her ex-husband Brad Pitt and his wife Angelina Jolie also got the Old Master treatment, together with Tom Cruise, Snoop Dog and Nicole Kidman.

One day in type

What would your day be without type? Dima Boulad, a Paris-based multimedia designer, documented every encounter with a typographic element in the course of one day.

Apple hands Palm a problem and gets slapped by Microsoft

Great article from today's MediaGuardian

It's a dog-eat-dog world in the technology jungle. For the best part of two years, Apple's iPhone has had the top end of the smartphone market to itself. But then along came the Palm Pre, which has had a very favourable reception from the geek crowd, and is a much more polished product than early versions of the Android (aka Google) phones. Personally I thought it unlikely that the Pre would seriously challenge the Apple product, but it seems that Steve Jobs & Co are taking no chances.

How do we know this? Well, the Palm phone had an intriguing feature: it could sync (techspeak for synchronise) with Apple's iTunes software, thereby enabling Pre owners to take their music with them, just as iPhone owners can. Quite how this was possible is an interesting question. Was it a happy accident that the Pre could exploit a loophole in the iTunes system? Or was it a clever wheeze dreamed up by Palm engineers? Either way, Apple was not amused.

So last week Apple released an update to iTunes that closed the loophole and effectively screwed Palm, whose share price immediately declined. How did Apple describe its tactic? Merely by saying that the upgrade "addresses an issue with verification of Apple devices", which upon translation reads "Yay dudes! You're stuffed."

Meanwhile, in another part of the jungle, Apple itself was getting grief from Microsoft. Of course, with only 7.6% of the PC market, Mr Jobs's outfit is a flea compared to the Redmond-based giant. But this particular flea has infuriated the elephant over the past two years with its "I'm a Mac, I'm a PC" ads, which went viral and successfully implanted in the public mind the idea that Macs were chic and efficient whereas PCs were worthy but dull, and distinctly uncool. It took Microsoft a while to find out how to hit back: an advertising series with the message that consumers were paying a pretty steep premium for Apple coolness. In other words, while Macs might be OK for trendy folks with lots of money to fritter away on fashionable kit, real people on a budget would always find Windows-based machines a better buy.

Last week, Microsoft's CEO, Steve Ballmer, claimed that this campaign has rattled Apple. "All of our research shows that our 'I'm a PC' ads, [which] talk dramatically about the price of Macintoshes, work quite effectively," he said. "We've gained market share quite effectively against Apple over the past six to nine months."

Well, he would say that, wouldn't he? But his colleague Kevin Turner reported that "two weeks ago we got a call from the Apple legal department saying, 'Hey, you need to stop running those ads, we lowered our prices.' They took like $100 off or something. It was the greatest single phone call that I've ever taken in business." So, Turner went on, "we're just going to keep running them and running them and running them."

Microsoft's next offensive suggests that the company still has a thing or two to learn about strategy, though. It announced that it's planning to attack on another front - by opening Microsoft retail stores next to Apple stores.

This looks like a bold move. After all, Apple has managed to transform tech retailing by creating stores that customers appear to enjoy visiting (and which are still thronged, despite the recession). What could be better than to prove that the elephant can go head-to-head with the flea on the high street? And to show that it's serious, Microsoft has recruited a senior Wal-Mart executive to lead its assault on the world's shopping malls.

The prospect of Microsoft and Apple stores side by side is rich in comic possibilities. For one thing, what will the Microsoft store sell? It's a software company: its hardware range consists of the Xbox games console, some keyboards and mice, and the Zune music player - which, compared with the iPod, looks like something produced by the Soviet Union in its heyday. But a retail store needs exciting hardware to attract people in off the street and create a buzz.

Stand by, then, for a new range of viral ads from Apple. A Tale of Two Stores, perhaps. One establishment is crowded with teenagers browsing Facebook and trying to get off with one another, watched by benevolently smiling, T-shirted geeks. The other is a deserted cavern, rather like one of those Sony outlets, in which dispirited chaps in ties try to interest passing tramps in the new features of Office 2009. YouTube here we come!

By John Naughton

Credit Crunch Spotlights Fast Food Brands

The 12th annual Top 500 Superbrands survey, which identifies the UK’s strongest consumer brands by polling the British public, launches today and reaffirms the success of the fast food chains and multiple supermarkets in the economic downturn.

Some of the brands showing the strongest year-on-year improvement in the survey include McDonald’s, which rises 227 places, Burger King, up 189, KFC rising by 164 places and Domino’s Pizza, which moves up the table by 144 places. The highest new entry into this year’s list was Krispy Kreme, further indicating the nation’s demand for relatively low cost treats as the downturn bites.

Recovering from last year’s plummet in the survey are the supermarkets. The ‘Big-Four’ make up for the ground they lost with ASDA leading the way with an impressive increase of 213 places to sit in 226th place. Tesco is the next biggest supermarket riser, gaining 185 places to reach position 116, whilst Waitrose climbs 60 places to fall just three places short of Tesco at 119 – only Sainsbury’s breaks into the top 100, placed at 92. A threat might come in the future from Morrisons and The Co-operative both of whom enter the top 500 for the first time. As well as the supermarkets winning favour, traditional high street retailers are also regaining ground, with brands such as HMV jumping 118 places, B&Q up 168, Boots climbing 117 and Argos storming up the rankings by 230 places - making it the eighth biggest riser overall in the top 500.

With supermarkets increasingly gaining share of the overall fashion market, the specialist ‘Clothing and Footwear’ category has struggled with only two of the 23 brands in this sector, namely DKNY and Paul Smith, improving their positions from last year. That said, fashion retailers Karen Millen (480), Pringle (418), Ben Sherman (327) and Hush Puppies (258) all entered the top 500 for the first time.

In the top 10, Microsoft® regains its number one position, which it lost last year to internet giant, Google. Google itself slips two places to third, whilst four other brands keep their top 10 placing. These include the embattled BBC and British Airways, as well as Mercedes-Benz. New entries to the top 10 in 2009/10 include LEGO® and Cola-Cola, both re-entering after a one year absence. Rolex and Apple also join the top ten alongside this year’s surprise entry Encyclopædia Britannica, which was 29th last year.

Stephen Cheliotis, Chief Executive of The Centre for Brand Analysis, which administered the research on behalf of Superbrands UK, said: “This year’s survey reaffirms some of the downturn’s winners and losers, with the fast food chains and supermarkets doing particularly well. The results, as always, return some surprises with this year’s notable high achiever being Encyclopædia Britannica. Bearing in mind that thousands of brands are initially considered, actually making the top 500 itself is an achievement: the competition amongst brands for consumer attention and share of wallet is intense and growing fiercer.”

Evian’s Dancing Babies Ad Makes a Splash

That’s at least part of the thinking behind Evian’s new advertising campaign, which has taken off on YouTube, thanks to a troupe of infants breakdancing and roller-skating across the screen. The campaign, called “Live Young,” broke last week and has received more than 2.8 million views on YouTube in the U.S., and another 2.3 million internationally.

Babies breakdance and roller-skate with some CGI assistance in this innovative new campaign.

This isn’t the first time Evian has used babies to get the point across. In 1998, it ran a campaign featuring babies doing a synchronized-swimming routine.

Evian’s ad is getting plenty of adoring responses, mixed with the occasional “creepy” and “Soooooo fake.” What do you think of it?

Great Branding / Packaging: Cider

After launch, Cider immediately took second and fourth place on the Swedish cider sales list, and has been top five ever since.

Design group, Amore has won numerous awards for the design of Cider, and with zero other marketing efforts, Cider has achieved sales and distribution in Norway, Italy and Germany.

Amazing doodles

10 Golden Rules for Freelancers

Thanks to Mark Ramshaw for this excellent article:

Mark interviewed leading freelancers from the fields of 3D illustration, animation, visual effects, games and architectural visualisation to uncover their strategies for success. These were his key findings...

1. Test the market first
Make sure there is interest in your work before you begin. Freelancing part-time first will also enable you to experiment with standard assets and settings, optimizing them for quick, high-quality renders. And make sure you invest in a back-up computer!

2. Use online networking tools
While establishing a reputation, keep yourself in the public eye by maintaining an up-to-date presence on your own website, online communities such as CGSociety and CGarchitect.com, networking sites like LinkedIn and, if appropriate, IMDb.

3. Tap your network for leads
A network of fellow freelancers is one of your best resources for finding clients - and those that you do will be trustworthy. No one wants to recommend a bad client; and clients won't want to let down the freelancer who made the recommendation.

4. Meet in person where possible
Your work may be digital, but when contacting new clients, try to arrange a face-to-face meeting. This enables you to sell yourself and your services most effectively. Mail and email shots are almost useless unless you know exactly who to contact.

5. Research the client in detail
Find out the style the client likes to see work done in by researching their past projects. These can also help you to assess the level of quality they seek. A brief exchange of phone calls or emails will help you get a feel for the clients as people.

6. Always confirm the deadline!
Find out the deadline before you accept the work, particularly if you work in print or broadcast advertising. Advertising agencies are notorious for spending months planning a campaign, then leaving the illustration itself until the final week.

7. Calculate a minimum hourly rate
A blunt but effective formula for working out your hourly rate is to take what you think you should be getting as a yearly salary and dividing by a thousand. Tools like AllNetic Working Time Tracker (www.allnetic.com) help keep track of little jobs.

8. Refine the fee through discussion
Once you have calculated your minimum rate, assess whether a higher fee is reasonable. Talk to friends and trusted colleagues about salaries. Should a client ask you to reduce your rate, look for ways to offer services that cost you less time instead.

9. Always use a contract
Freelancers are in a relatively strong position when it comes to copyright: without a contract, the default position is that they own the work they produce, not the client. However, standard terms and conditions ensure there is no uncertainty about the job.

10. Use the contract to ensure prompt payment
Whether you use your own contract or the client's, use the wording to your advantage by linking transfer of work or intellectual property ownership to payments. Such clauses provide a simple, effective incentive for the client to pay promptly.

A new tool that automatically checks the spelling errors on your website

Spellr.us is a handy new tool that automatically checks the spelling errors on your website. Check yours now!

Here's One I Made Earlier

Ever fancied making your own Damien Hirst from a plastic skull and 8,601 crystal beads or using a Banksy stencil and spray paint kit to give your walls a million dollar makeover?

Well you can with a DIY contemporary art set from iArtist.

You could even go for a blood bag (and plasters) with which to make your own sensational Marc Quinn-esque frozen head or get all the materials to recreate Tracey Emin’s Everyone I Have Ever Slept with 1963-1995.

All available by e-mail order from shop@iartistlondon.com. To see styles, go to iartistlondon.com.

Pretty Loaded

Pretty Cool is an archive of preloaders that preload other preloaders:

www.prettyloaded.com

Twitterature

Is there no end to Twittermania? Last week we saw the social networking tool Twitter deployed on the streets of Tehran. This week, moving seamlessly from the sublime to the ridiculous, it is being used to aid the digestion of the world's greatest literature.

Fans of the classics will either be delighted or appalled to learn that the New York-branch of Penguin books has commissioned a new volume that will put great works through the Twitter mangle. The volume has a working title that will make the nerve ends of purists jangle: Twitterature.

In it, the authors will squish the jewels of world literature - they mention Dante, Shakespeare, Stendhal, Joyce and JK Rowling - into 20 tweets or less - that is 20 sentences each with fewer than 140 characters.

The book is the brainchild of two 19-year-old first-year students at the University of Chicago who claim to be starting a cultural revolution from their college dormitory. Bashing their heads together one evening in their university digs, Emmett Rensin and Alex Aciman asked themselves what defined the grandest ventures of their generation, and best expressed the souls of 21st century Americans?

Pretentious, maybe. Precocious, certainly. The answer they came up with was double-headed. They identified high literature as a crucial pillar for any generation.

But they also latched on to Twitter, the website where users compress all of human experience into 140 characters. Twitter, they thought to themselves, epitomised the short attention span and info-deluge that defined the contemporary age.

So what if you put the two together? If great literature and Twitter were combined into one new form - Twitterature. "We have embarked on an attempt to bring the two pillars of our generation together, once and for all," the students said.

In the blurb for the new book the authors give a clue to their incentives for writing it, which are not entirely ethereal. Aciman and Rensin, from New York and Los Angeles respectively, both harbour ambitions to become writers and both clearly also hanker after cash.

They say they are aiming for a book that has the literary merit to wow the blogosphere, as well as the "pure-money genius to take the market by storm".

Whether they are right and fulfil their dreams depends on the appetite for reading Dante's Divine Comedy reduced from its 512 pages in Penguin's own Classics edition to 20 short sentences. Or Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, the last in the JK Rowling series, rendered in 2,800 characters down from 784 pages.

All should become clear in the autumn, when Twitterature is scheduled for publication.

From Media Guardian

iPhone 3G S launch day

Post-It stop motion

What a fabulous animation from Savannah College of Art student Bang-yao Liu

American family's web photo ends up as Czech advertisement

When the Smiths of Missouri – an all-American family with the regulation two blond children – posed for their Christmas photo, little did they know they would end up on a billboard thousands of miles away in the Czech Republic.

Just under a fortnight ago, a family friend of Jeff and Danielle Smith was travelling in Prague when he spotted some familiar faces beaming out of a poster advertising a grocery store's home delivery service.

He took a photograph and emailed it to his friends in St Louis – kindly translating the caption that promises "we will prepare and deliver your requests in two business days".

The picture was indeed of the admirably white-toothed Smiths and their two smiling children. Danielle had been so proud of the image taken by a photographer friend, Gina Kelly, that she had not only sent it out as a Christmas card to family and friends, but also posted it on her blog and other social networking sites, including Momlogic where she identifies her children as "sweet and sassy Delaney" and "loveable and crazy Cooper".

Danielle has expressed her surprise at the news of their international fame: "Interesting. Bizarre. Flattering, I suppose. But quite creepy."

The shop owner was equally shocked. Mario Bertuccio, who runs the Grazie store in Prague, said he found the image on the internet and thought it was computer-generated. He has promised to remove it and email an apology to the Smiths – and said if they lived nearer he would send them "a bottle of good wine".

In her blog on the Extraordinary Mommy site, Smith reflects: "So this is the price we pay for indulging in social media, I guess."

She had no idea the image could be used, she said, and would not have given her permission, but admits she was naive in putting up a high-resolution version on the website. She won't be doing that again – but said she would continue to post images of her family.

The smiley Smiths have now gone global. The site has registered 180,000 hits but Danielle writes that she is blocking the small percentage "who are commenting only to say that a member of my family (or all of us) are ugly".

From MediaGuardian

Harvey Nichols 'gordon brownie'

This cute campaign, by Mr H has been engineered to boost awareness of Harvey Nichol's food markets at stores nationwide using witty and relevant images.

The full line-up is below.

Cards of Change - a novel idea

Here's a great idea: www.cardsofchange.com .

This website's mission is to collect as many business cards and stories of positive change of people who have recently been made redundant and connect them with new opportunities from potential employers, business partners and people who make the effort to look on the bright side of life.

Recycle and rethink those old cards!

So exclusive, even you can have one

Here's an ad for the super-exclusive new Visa black card. "It's not just another piece of plastic. Made with carbon, it's the ultimate buying tool."

Amazingly, it's limited to just 3,000,000 people and advertised with full page ads.

When mass marketers try to market exclusivity, the paradox always catches up with them...

Google 'falling behind Twitter'

Google's co-founder, Larry Page, admitted today that the company has been losing out to Twitter in the race to meet web user's demand for real-time information.

Instead, the search engine's chairman and chief executive, Eric Schmidt, hinted that it could become a partner of the micro-blogging site. Twitter has come from nowhere to become the third most visited social networking site in the US in just three years by allowing its users to broadcast their thoughts, actions and news instantly.

Google's search engine, in contrast, can take hours or even days to update. While this is usually not a problem as accuracy of results is more important than speed of updating, as the internet community comes to demand ever faster information Twitter has left Google in its wake.

"People really want to do stuff real time and I think they [Twitter] have done a great job about it," Page said in a closing address at Google's Zeitgeist conference . "I think we have done a relatively poor job of creating things that work on a per-second basis."

He told the audience about the impact of technology on the world and that he has been asking his research teams to get faster. "Now I think they understand that," he said. "I think we will do a better job of some of those things."

But he admitted that there is a trade-off between making information instantly available and ensuring its accuracy.

The rise of Twitter has sparked speculation that the cash-rich Google could buy the business. Speaking after the event, Schmidt refused to comment on that speculation but admitted "they have done a very good job of 'what am I doing right now' – their tagline – it is very impressive."

He stressed that because of the way that Twitter is built, which allows any developer to take its stream of real-time messages, or tweets, and build applications around them, Google does not need to buy the business to get involved in the indexing of real-time information generated by Twitterers.

"There is a presumption that somehow you cannot have multiple solutions that co-exist," he said. "We can talk to them ... there is all sorts of stuff we can do. We do not have to buy everybody to work with them, the whole principle of the web is people can talk to each other."

Earlier in the day, Page was forced to defend Google's Street View service. "Putting someone's house on Street View is not the same as putting it in a newspaper," he said. "It's radically different."

From Media Guardian

Secure website authentication questions

By Joel Gunz

- What is your mother's maiden name?

- What is your older sister's favorite Monopoly game piece?

- Who did your paternal grandfather vote for in the 1956 presidential election?

- Why did you choose a liberal-arts degree when your entire family urged you to go into finance?

- In what year did you begin working on your novel?

- How many weeks away was graduation when you dropped out of college?

- What was your score on the civil-service employment exam?

- Where were you sitting when your girlfriend told you she was pregnant?

- Where did you never end up going for your honeymoon?

- In what year did you begin working for the post office?

- What is the name of the hedge-fund manager your ex-wife married?

- How many hours did it take you to drink that bottle of Jack Daniel's yesterday?

- What time was it when, in a drunken rage, you threw your novel into the fire?

- If you could do it all over again, what would you do differently?

Scrabble-tastic

A blog post specially for Marie over at Woman Who Talked Too Much... I came across these fantastic designs for a set of interactive beer mats and posters to promote the World Scrabble Championship. The beer mats are perforated so each printed Scrabble piece can be ripped off individually and played with.

I like. I want!

The Evening Standard says sorry, or perhaps it's Sony?

In anticipation of its relaunch next week, The Evening Standard has launched this surprising new campaign (by McCann Erickson), which aims to firmly distance itself from the newspaper’s previous incarnation.

The London newspaper, which was bought by Alexander Lebedev from the Daily Mail earlier this year, has had a reputation for having a somewhat negative take on life in the UK capital. This poster campaign seeks to signal the changes on the way by apologising for various perceived sins, including complacency, predictability and the afore-mentioned negativity. None of the posters mention the newspaper by name, but simply carry its Eros logo.

In my opinion the typography's not great. No power. The Economist would have handled the campaign much more intelligently, and if the Daily Mail were to do something similar, how could it possibly apologise enough?....

Breathtaking real time Earth simulation

Watch population and greenhouse gas emissions grow on this fascinating website that provides CO2 emissions, birth and death rates by country, simulated real time. Worth checking out:

www.breathingearth.net

Balls and Bottoms give way to Wangs in the Surname Game

The number of people in Britain with surnames like Cockshott, Balls, Death and Shufflebottom has declined by up to 75 percent in the last century.

A study found the number of people with the name Cock shrank to 785 last year from 3,211 in 1881, those called Balls fell to 1,299 from 2,904 and the number of Deaths were reduced to 605 from 1,133.

People named Smellie decreased by 70 percent, Dafts by 51 percent, Gotobeds by 42 percent, Shufflebottoms by 40 percent, and Cockshotts by 34 percent, said Richard Webber, visiting professor of geography at King's College, London.

"If you find the (absolute) number goes down, it's either because they changed their names or they emigrated," Webber, author of the study, told Reuters on Wednesday.

He said that in many cases, people probably changed their surnames as they came to be regarded as in bad taste. "It's because the meaning of words can change. Take the name Daft -- that as a term for a stupid is a relatively recent innovation."

According to the Oxford English Dictionary, Daft meant "mild" or "meek" in Old English, whereas it means "foolish" today.

Webber also discovered that the most popular names in Britain have not changed over the past 127 years. Last year, Smith, Jones, Williams, Brown, Taylor and Davies held the top five spots, in exactly the same order as they did a century ago.

Webber also found that between 1996 and 2008, the names Zhang, Wang, and Yang and experienced the fastest growth. Zhang rose by 4719 percent, while Wang grew by 2225 percent.

Faceless Watch - nice design

Remember when technology was this simple?

Career evolution: Advertising

Jesus appears in Kit Kat bar

First it was images of the Virgin Mary appearing in a grilled cheese sandwich. Now Jesus Christ himself has apparently turned up in a Kit Kat bar.

Dutch website NU.nl has published a picture of the Christlike confectionary submitted by a reader, saying it welcomed Jesus apparitions on Good Friday.

The reader reported: "I took a bite of a chocolate bar and then I saw a face in the bar."

While he found religious apparitions of recent years "all rather far-fetched", the reader said two work colleagues also could see the iconic image.

However another reader of NU.nl suggested the face looked more like Star Wars character Darth Vader.

Joel Bauer’s American Psycho-style analysis of the intricacies of the business card left me intrigued.... and somewhat scared.

Joel Bauer, ‘Author, Mentor and Infotainer’, tells us why his business card, which took 25 years to design, is oh so much better than yours.

Ginger kid girating

This small ginger child - and another I assume to be his sister - are cutting shapes, shimmying hips and pulling dance moves which would really be more appropriate if they were ten years older. I can only wonder: where were the parents? Behind the camera?

It *is* funny as hell though...

Button injured in horrific F1 accident

Juice boxes

Enticing, eh?

Microsoft attack ad criticised by Apple Mac bloggers

Microsoft has launched another US ad attacking Apple Macs, featuring a student trying to find the best value computer for $1,500.

The TV spot shows the "technically savvy" student, Giampaolo, handed the cash with the promise that he can keep whatever he buys.

Surveying computers in a large store, he rejects a Mac because he thinks they are "more about aesthetics than computing power".

Outrageous!

In the end, he plumps for a HP PC (poor guy).

The ads have struck a nerve on the internet, with pro-Mac bloggers outraged by the new ad.

Tom Reestman, writing on the Apple Blog, said: "The star of the new ad, Giampaolo, claims to be technically savvy, and then spends the rest of ad proving he’s not."

Prince McLean, writing on Apple Insider, said: "The strangest point of this ad is that Giampaolo didn't get the portability, battery life, and power he was looking for, he just ended up with a cheap-appearing machine that obscured its real technical limitations under a flashy layer of misleading, specification-oriented marketing, the very thing he thought he was avoiding with HP: buying a brand rather than a computer."

The ad is the second in the "laptop hunter" series by Crispin Porter & Bogusky.

Blast from the past: Levi's 'laundrette' by Bartle Bogle Hegarty

The year is 1985, and the Levi's brand is perceived as old fashioned and, at a time of much anti-American feeling, uncool.

The launderette commercial, promoting Levi’s classic 501s, was the breakthrough.

John Hegarty and the writer Barbara Nokes recreated an image of 50s Americana that presented 501s as alternative to punk’s scruffiness.

The spot wasn’t only beautifully shot but had humour and sex appeal in the form of teen idol Nick Kamen.

It was also an early example of successful integrated marketing. Marvin Gaye’s I Heard It Through The Grapevine soundtrack was re-released with the Levi’s logo on the record sleeve and shot into the charts.

As for Levi’s sales, they had soared by 800 per cent within a year of the 501s re-launch.

Cruising with Andrew Bush

By attaching a camera to the passenger side window of his car, LA photographer Andrew Bush took photos of his subjects whilst driving (often travelling at 60mph) beside them in and around LA, a city famous for it's car culture. He named the series Vector portraits and from this published a book entitiled Andrew Bush - Drive . For more of this and some of his other work visit www.andrewbush.net

Swedish ad students use Twitter and blog to 'pitch' for global Adidas brief

The Swedish ad agency Volontaire has challenged three of its interns to achieve the impossible: win the Adidas worldwide creative account within three weeks.

The agency has challenged the three students to develop ideas for a pitch presentation to Adidas and to blog progress of their ideas at www.theimpossiblepitch.com.

Volontaire is asking the students to adopt the Adidas approach of "impossible is nothing" in a bid to illustrate some of the agency's core beliefs, including that great ideas can come from anywhere and that companies no longer have the power to control their brands.

The students, who all attend Berghs School of Communication in Sweden, will reveal their full presentation on the website on Friday.

They have also been posting their thoughts and ideas on Twitter, Tumblr and YouTube.

Apple shows off iPhone improvements – including cut, copy and paste + MMS messaging

It might not sound much, but to the 17 million owners of Apple iPhones worldwide, it's a big thing: the next version of its software, to be released this summer, will allow users to cut, copy and paste content between pages.

As well as cut and paste, the next version of the software – which will be free to iPhone owners, but cost iPod Touch owners $9.95 – will let them do system-wide searching, record voice memos, play games or interact wirelessly with nearby iPhone or iPod Touches, subscribe to online calendars, and possibly – depending on the mobile networks' agreement – use their phones as wireless broadband modems.

Owners of the 3G iPhone, released last July, will be able to send picture messages – a standard phone function that has been missing previously. Owners of the older version, first sold in June 2007, will not benefit because it does not contain the necessary radio hardware, Apple said.

Other additions include "push" notification, so that instant messaging programs can in effect run in the background and alert the user when a new message arrives.

Not everyone will be satisfied. Video recording has not been enabled via the iPhone's camera; nor have video calls. Apple's executives were evasive too about the possibility of being able to type onto the iPhone's screen via full-sized keyboards connected via the Bluetooth wireless system. That would enable truly mobile working - but it might not be allowed by the new system.

"Apple chose to implement well rather than do a lot," commented Ian Fogg of Jupiter Research about the update. "Right choice in my opinion. If we'd had all this earlier [it] would be less well executed."

Photo Manipulations: Erik Johansson

Erik Johansson, a young talented artist from Sweden, creates remarkable images by digitally modifying photographs that he takes himself. Here's a selection of his very impressive photo manipulations.

Kaleidoscope your site.

Turn your site (or anyone else’s for that matter) into a kaleidoscope by entering the URL and sitting back to watch all the JPG images from that page 'kaleidoscop-ed' for your viewing pleasure.

Here are some stills from this page of the Cinnamon Creative site. Try it for your site - you'll love the results!

Thanks to Holster for this excellent find.

The future of advertising

Click to enlarge.

99% Conference

The 99% conference looks great.

Confirmed speakers include Google Creative Director, Ji Lee, plus Michael Bierut, partner at the multi-disciplinary design studio Pentagram, and the guys that started Threadless, as well as marketing guru, Seth Godin.

Great line-up!