Giant Phone Replica Celebrates 100 Years

A giant, fully-functional replica of an old L.M. Ericsson table top phone celebrates 100 years this week. It was built as a marketing ploy, and reinvented several times during its lifetime.

In 1923 the replica was the centerpiece of the company’s stand at the Gothenburg Exhibition. As described in Ericsson Review, it was “an attraction towards which visitors could not help turning their eyes.”

The telephone housed a complete, fully automatic Ericsson system for 500 lines, to which a few telephones were actually connected. Visitors could experiment, make calls and watch the switching process through the plate-glass windows. The Ericsson Review reports that the demonstrations attracted long lines of visitors every day.

Mobile Marketing a 1960

I found an interesting picture while surfing that Internet thing today. It is two old, Ericsson labeled busses on what seems to be the Island in Toronto, circa 1970. Since my girlfriend is Canadian, and used to live in Toronto, the CN Tower is a very easily recognizable landmark to me. The added bonus of the Swedish vehicles sparked my interest and I decided to do some digging into this picture and its origins.

Ericsson opened its first Canadian office in Montreal in 1953, selling telephones and intercoms systems to telephone companies and to private businesses. As the Canadian market and business continued to flourish, in 1976 Ericsson came up with an innovative way of meeting its customers – on wheels. So in 1976, Ericsson in Canada introduced the Eribus, a customized motorhome developed and designed for visiting clients for on-site product presentations and meetings.

The Eribus was a fully equipped mobile meeting space with a conference table, projector, various product demonstrations and a small kitchen to host customers who were unable to visit the Ericsson showrooms. In a country as large, and scarcely populated as Canada, the Eribus proved to be an excellent take on an early virtual office.

Today this idea seems rather stone age, virtual meeting rooms are a given at any modern office, but it is a interesting idea that it all started with a pair of busses.

SwedFont

Sweden just got its own font! The typeface Sweden Sans was created by the advertising agency Söderhavet, along with Stefan Hatt Bach, as part of efforts to create a common visual identity abroad. The typeface is a pure sans serif with some details that make the font unique.

The font is to be used for official purposes to represent Sweden abroad. It is also to be used in official statements and gathering at home in Sweden, as well as in Sweden's official website launched in early November. Söderhavet was recently interview for Swedish online magazine Cap & Design.

"We wanted to make your own font when it comes to Sweden's visual identity, and to avoid the rights and ownerships of others, and partly because many countries have long worked with custom fonts and been strong in the market, and we have not been there in Sweden yet" says Jesper Robinell , design director at Söderhavet.

"Scandinavia 's known for its simple design when it comes to, for example furniture, and we took inspiration from that." Stefan fills in.

During the creation of the font there was much discussion about the specifics of the work. Stefan and Jesper had long email conversations about the font shape, such as discussed lowercase r, but after emailing back and forth the r was cut short with each email, and consequently changed.

It is not until recently that companies and organizations have begun to create their own fonts, but according to Jesper this is becoming a major trend. This is possibly an explosion of new fonts on the market, however if it beats out the traditional Absolut Vodka font remains to see.

Cant be Googled = unGoogleable?

A few weeks ago a global controversy arose in the northern outskirts of the world. A small language was challenging the entire existence of one of the worlds largest corporations - and they where not having any of it!

Many search engine users are currently googling "ungoogleable" following a lexical skirmish between Google and Swedish wordsmiths – a spat sparked by the proposed word ogooglebar - Swedish for "unGoogleable".

The Language Council of Sweden was considering the word, defined as something that cannot be found with any search engine, among their annual list of new entries to the Swedish language. But Google contested, arguing that the definition should be narrowed to refer only to information that cannot be found on the wildly popular Google search engine. What's more, they argued, the dictionary entry should come with a disclaimer that notes Google is a trademarked word.

The council promptly pulled the word from its list of contenders, but news of the disagreement nevertheless created what the Swedish call a Bloggbävning – in English: a "blogquake", or "the process by which a topic explodes in the blogosphere and is then picked up by more mainstream media outlets," according to The Atlantic. 

How this will end is not yet settled. The initial chock has now subsided, however there will surly be after chocks and trembles. However, it seems clear to me that no one, not even the company itself, can decided upon how to use the search language, nor what truly is unGoogleable!