The User Advocate

Every year, the IKEA Catalog inspires people around the world to create homes they love. Now, IKEA is taking the inspiration one step further. This year, the IKEA Catalog is alive with smart ideas, fun stories and beautiful products. Download the IKEA Catalog App for your smartphone or tablet, and scan select pages to unlock films, interactive experiences, photo galleries and more home furnishing inspiration.

1,216 Computationally Controlled Bronze Raindrops at Changi Airport in Singapore

1,216 Computationally Controlled Bronze Raindrops at Changi Airport in Singapore

1,216 Computationally Controlled Bronze Raindrops at Changi Airport in Singapore

Pepsico Social Vending

There has been a lot of talk about Pepsi’s use of social media, with millions of Facebook fans and Twitter followers generated out of big budget campaigns. But this is just a little bit different, introducing the new Pepsi Social Vending Maching.

    Rugbeer: tackle the vending machine

Here’s a great installation from Argentinean beer brand ‘Cerveza Salta’. Argentina is a country renowned for having the most football fans in the world, but in the Northern Salta province, the New Zealand equivalent of Argentina, people love rugby. Salta Beer wanted to create a campaign that targeted this rugby loving region and what better way to engage them than creating a tackle machine and placing it in bars!

    Adaptive vending inTokyo

  Also check out this earlier post

The world's first peer-reviewed video journal gives scientists a better way to show others how to replicate experiments.

If a photo is worth a thousand words, imagine the understanding that can be captured from 10 minutes at 30 frames per second. A scientific journal dedicated to video—a medium seldom seen in peer-reviewed publications—is finding out.

Increasingly, scientists include short video clips when they submit their manuscripts to a journal. But the Journal of Visualized Experiments—JoVE for short—is an online journal where video is the main medium rather than a supplement.

  www.jove.com

source: technology review

The friendship Machine

What if you can climb up a huge Coke machine and get 2 coke bottles for the price of one?

  The Hug Machine

Color Forecast shows you in real time what colors people are wearing in the fashion capitals Paris & Milan & Antwerp...

  Does the internet actually inhibit, not encourage democracy? In this new RSA Animate adapted from a talk given in 2009, Evgeny Morozov presents an alternative take on 'cyber-utopianism' - the seductive idea that the internet plays a largely emancipatory role in global politics.

Exposing some idealistic myths about freedom and technology (during Iran's 'twitter revolution' fewer than 20,000 Twitter users actually took part), Evgeny argues for some realism about the actual uses and abuses of the internet.

Ikea is entering a brave new world: home entertainment systems. The company unveiled its UPPLEVA line today with a smart YouTube ad (embedded after the jump). The video spot quickly explains that the UPPLEVA line is the savior to living rooms everywhere with hidden cable tracks, integrated wireless components and a customizable cabinet design.

Argue all you want, but a HDTV is a glorified monitor. It should not be the primary point of focus when designing a home theater system. The new UPPLEVA line completely disrupts the big box store’s HDTV buying process with a high-dose injection of Ikea genius.

  Like with everything else Ikea sells, the UPPLEVA system is completely customizable with a range of TV sizes and cabinet designs. 

Ikea now even can provide you with the house that goes along with the entertainment system. IKEA is now also in real estate development.

Buyers probably still have to piece them together using those dumb keys, though.