We turned the clocks back to 1960 to have a Mad Men styled day at Poke. Lots of whiskey, lots of sexist emails, and lots of smart attire. Click here for a nice big hi-res version.
Santa’s Lap has pretty successful with nearly 100 served so far, it’s even made it onto the Poke blog. Here’s an update on some of the fallout:
Last week we had a Hack Day at Poke. We were split into teams of about 6 or 7 and given 24 hours to come up with a ‘working thing with a URL’ that’s something to do with the theme: FOOD. The team I was in came up with That’s a Cappuccino! – A campaign to put an end to people ordering a Cappuccino but receiving a Latte. There’s lots of ways to get a cappuccino wrong, but we narrowed it down to the basic ‘golden ratio’ of what it should be made of:
1 part espresso, 1 part steamed milk, 1 part foam.
With this in mind we’ve built a map, that anybody can contribute to, that simply labels places as “That’s a cappuccino!” or “That’s not a cappuccino!”. We also wrote an open letter to some major cappuccino venders (including Starbucks, Costa and, naturally, The Wild Bean Cafe) asking them how the ensure their cappuccinos are of the correct stanrd and if they’d like to get involved in the campaign and where. Here’s the letter.
Our film unit ran about all over over London interviewing baristas about what they think makes the perfect cappuccino, and they even got to meet Gwilym Davies, the UK and world champion barista who is a jolly nice champ and has officially backed our project:
It turned out to be a pretty massive project for 24 hours but we devided and conquered and… didn’t win in the end (The Holy Sandwich won, well done you lot), but there’s still a chance we can get a prize for the most traffic on our site, as well as improving your next cappuccino – so go check out our site, and get adding to that map.
Our team (the Golden Ratio) are: Me!, Chris Meachin, Iain Tait, Chris Reeves (the other one), Aina Ørebech, Kate Ducham and Nicky Gibson.
This year, for Christmas, Stuff Club made a Naughty or Nice detector. It works by re-creating the special magical sensors Santa has in his lap which tells him if the children in his groto deserve a lovely gift or a piece of coal. In our version we’ve stripped it down to just a massive over-sized lap (to help create that terror you felt as a child), which deals out a reward or a punishment and sends that result, plus a photo, to naughtyornice.tumblr.com for all to see.
This is all made possible by some back-end cleverness by Mattias Gunnerås, some Arduino tinkering by Tracy Tsang, and some wood cutting/screwing and painting by me, Jas, Badger and Martin Rose. It was a bit of a mammoth task as we had to get the whole thing done from scratch over the weekend so we could keep it a surprise from the rest of Poke, but we managed it – well done gang!
Here’s some construction photos (have you ever wanted to see under Santa’s trousers?).
For some reason the gods of the Internet smiled on me and allowed me to stumble over this. Somebody in China has ripped our Beach Cops video (of us on Segways in Santa Monica being awesome) and repurposed it as an ad for Segways in China. AWESOME-R!
As usual I’ve taken something silly way too far. Where is Chris anyway?
We didn’t have much time this year for anything too elaborate to decorate the house with for the local Trick or Treaters, so we bunged up a screen and projected Mark Gervais’ excellent Hallowindow animation, put some speakers in the window, stapled up some torn up black sheets around the door and set the smoke machine to ‘auto’. Job Done. Apparently we got over 100 of the little sods turning up, and none of them tried to kill us or burn the house down, which is a sign of gratitude I guess.
Another year, another scary toilet instalation at Poke. This year we decieded to hit every toilet at once so there was no where to hide. Each loo is themed on a famous horror movie. Some are more subtle than others, but all are enough to make you mess your slacks. Lucky you’re already in the toilet. Guess the themes! (or just look at the files names)
Poke recently released The Sound of Orange Rockcorps into the world (I did a little promo video for it a while ago). I used it to make this beautiful rendition of MGMT’s Kids using the voices of me and any of my Facebook friends who have used the site to record some notes.
I didn’t actually work on the site at all but I do sit on a desk where most of the development and design happened – you know that scene in Apollo 13 when they realised everything is knackered on the space ship and the geeks back on earth have to panic about trying to work out how fix it? It was basically like that, everyday, for weeks on end, I don’t think any of them slept. It really didn’t look like an easy thing to make. Well done lads.
After a wet week in Devon, I’ve watched more TV ads than normal, and I’ve come to the decision: nothing is as good as Brian May’s love letter to Ford. Come on, find me a better telly ad than this, I dare you.