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Google gets deeper into the media business.

Official Google Blog: Read news fast with Google Fast Flip

For a demo:

Google Fast Flip

The Google Workflow

Um, everything just got 100 times more better. Pardon my poor grammar. Google will fix it in their next release. Watch the video below and you'll get a preview of how Google is developing tools to enhance the way we work. 

The Googlefluence

Google's influence on how we interpret visual information is moving deeper into the art and education arena. This Flickr project was created by Stamen Design, a small San Francisco design studio that has been behind some of the most impressive work in the infographic space. Stamen has created the SFMOMA ArtScope project which is a completely interactive and visual browsing tool that leverages some of the UI principals from Google Maps. It makes browsing the 3,500 objects from the museum both immersive and entertaining. 

The firm also created Oakland Crimespotting, a service that elegantly and frighteningly maps crimes occurring across the city and enables users to sort through the data on a personally level by taking the search to a block by block level.

9 Premonitions For '09

Now that I have a blog it will be much easier to see if any of these come through. Happy New Year everyone. 

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9) Barack Obama will continue to innovate government communications with integrated branding and new media ideas, but will fail to appoint me to his cabinet as Secretary of Branding after several of my repeated requests.

8) Sometime after Spring Break '09, the brand managers at Pepsi will stop mixing whiskey in their drinks and realize what they've done to their identity. It's going to be a hell of a hangover.  

7) wii and twitter form a partnership titled twiittiiwt.

6) Blagojevich will declare Illinois' independence from the union. 

5) Brand managers will finally recognize the print campaign they developed in '08 didn't shift their customers beliefs. 

4) The Blackhawks event at Wrigley will be the largest single sporting event uploaded to flickr in '09. 

3) Ideas will become bigger as teams get smaller. 

2) I will tweet early and often.

1) Google will evolve their brand identity. 

Are You Walking in the Rain?

When I arrived at the name Updside-Down-Umbrella for this blog I thought it was a unique enough to standout on the web. I was wrong. It seems as if it's getting harder and harder to come up with an original title for just about anything these days. All you have to do is Google a name or an idea and chances are someone else has thought of it or is using it already. In the case of Upside Down Umbrella there's a UK band who go by the same name. The good news is they have some very cool electronic tracks thick of ambient rhythms and textures. It's great music to blog to.

You can listen to their tracks here:
http://www.myspace.com/upsidedownumbrella

Push or Pull? Not Quality over Quantity.

After flipping through a recent issue of MedAd News these two ads struck me on several levels. At first I was going to do an entry just on the similarity of the design. You almost can't get more parody than this from (what appears to be on the surface) a similar offering and design look and feel. The Google ad did a much better job of executing a story around the information, pulling the reader in with a relevant bit of data and speaks with a lot of confidence. Poor WebMD fell into an worn out advertising idea and follows through with a little chest beating that they probably felt they could get away with because the layout has that ever popular "clean, white space look".  

When I took another look at these you can start to see the future battle of marketing starting to take shape. Are brands like WebMD going to be destinations or are companies like Google going to be able to push information and entertainment to users so efficiently that destinations become obsolete?