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.

Are you popular? Do you think?

You're the least popular among your gang on friends. You are, its true, it has even been proven.

Don’t believe it? Consider this: the average Facebook user has 245 friends, but the average friend on Facebook has 359 friends. That’s right. The average person on Facebook has fewer friends than their friends do, a phenomenon commonly known as the “Friendship Paradox”. It may be seem to odd to be true, but it is - for nearly everyone.

The friendship paradox as a phenomenon was first observed by the sociologist Scott L. Feld in 1991. One way to think about this is to remember when you first joined Facebook. When you first created a profile, you started out with 0 friends. The quickest way to get friends was to add people who were already on Facebook. And since these people were already using Facebook, they already had a huge lead in friend count. And each time you added a friend, those people got to increase their friend count too! So clearly, it’s not that hard to see why your friends would have more friends than you when you first joined.

Of course, as you invite more friends and make contacts you can certainly overtake people in the friend count. The friendship paradox is not about the time you joined. It’s about this: on average, you will tend to add friends of people who are popular because it’s a social game. This is not a complete explanation but it should give you the idea of why this happens. And in the end, the average Facebook user ends up having fewer friends than their friends do.

Now lets do a practical example: Imagine that A and B are friends, B is friends with everyone, C is friends with B and D, and D is friends with B and C. A has just 1 friend, B has 3 friends, C and D each has 2 friends. Now we will count the friends of friends. A is friends with B who has 3 friends. B is friends with everyone, which makes for 5 friends of friends. Similarly we will find C and D each has 5 friends of friends. If we do some quick calculations we find that the average person A has 2 friends but the average friend of A has 2.25 friends. This is the friendship paradox!

A good example of this is Twitter; users on Twitter in general follow more people than they have followers them selves. This is because people are more likely to follow those who are popular than those who are not.

Thus, over 98% of Twitter users are subject to the friendship paradox. Or are just not popular. Either or. 

Auction House closed by Gamers

Some time back i wrote about the troubles Blizzard were having with their virtual auction house tied in to their hit game Diablo 3. Back then the issue they were having was with prices sky-rocketing, players paying real-world money only to be drastically disappointing by the exchange rate in virtual gold, and suspicions brewing about evil, gold controlling oligopolies controlling the entire auction house (read the entire post here).

Now it seems the last straw finally broke the camels backs, and the auction house is being shut down. In a official statement, released on Blizzards Diablo 3 blog John Hight had this to say:

When we initially designed and implemented the auction houses, the driving goal was to provide a convenient and secure system for trades. But as we've mentioned on different occasions, it became increasingly clear that despite the benefits of the AH system and the fact that many players around the world use it, it ultimately undermines Diablo's core game play: kill monsters to get cool loot.

Everything is going to be shut down by March 18, 2014. While I think it is true that the auction house has taken away a lot from the core mechanic of the game, it cannot be understated that it was also a test product for Blizzard. With this I don't in any way mean that it wasn't finished, rather that Blizzard had an idea and wanted to test it out. 

The auction house has not broken in its system, but perhaps in the way it was implemented. It was way to easy for the market run amok, and a real hyper-inflation was created, something that naturally caused a huge backlash against the auction house and against Blizzard. I think Blizzard knows this, and will take this information back and reflect upon it for further releases down the line. However, I am confident this is not the last time we see the auction house. 

The main point of this story however is that Blizzard truly listened to the outcries of the community and corrected what many Diablo-players apparently saw as a fault in the game. Blizzard implemented something, the users tested it an didn't want it, and Blizzard subsequently rolled it back. Not many companies have the willingness to admit fault in this way, and Blizzard should have a great deal of credit for really listening to its gamers!

Geotag Your Favorite Novel's Locations

Location is one of the foundations of every great story. Some authors, like Stephen King's town of Derry, chose to set their stories in places that don't exist. Others draw on the rich history and visuals of real world locations to the point where you feel like you're really there. A smaller but even greater group uses the location so well that it feels like a character all its own. That's why this website "Placing Literature" is cool. Visitors can map the places from their favorite novels, so you can actually visit them in the real world. Here's a quote from Indiereader.com:

Using the website, detective novel fans can see where Sam Spade of the Maltese Falcon lived and worked in San Francisco. Book lovers in Duluth, Minnesota, can track the literary scenes that take place around the shore of Lake Superior. Amy Tan fans can track the Woo, Hsu, Jong and St. Claire families through their journeys from China to the Bay Area.

Most of my favorite books are set in outer space, anyway, so I don't have much I can do with this website. But it's still pretty cool. Someone needs to make an intergalactic version.

Where does your favorite novel take place? Comment below!

Dr Who Google Easter Egg

One minute you're walking down a London street, minding your own business, when you accidentally step into a police call box and all of a sudden you're inside the TARDIS and the Doctor has enlisted your help fighting aliens.

Google are famous for their pranks and plays with its users. We have all once been Rick Roll'd and the trend seems continuing. I cant do anything but laugh and look forward to the next one.

You Go Google!

Here is the address to the famous phone booth:

https://maps.google.com/maps?hl=en&ll=51.492159,-0.19092&spn=0.005291,0.013937&sll=51.492140,-0.193028&layer=c&cid=12502927659667388442&panoid=c9UMhWP_MWm9U0L48xEjYw&cbp=13,291.8,,0,18.86&gl=US&t=m&cbll=51.492132,-0.192862&z=17

Living like a LODDER

I recently went on a vacation with a few close friends of mine to northern Sri Lanka. My friends are avid kite surfers, and I have long since wanted to try this new fad, but residing in artic Sweden limits my options for most any water-sport quite drastically. For this reason, and with the added opportunity to spend some good time with excellent company, I packed my bags and left for Sri Lanka.

Before we go deeper into the social media nature of this post, there is a few things that needs to be said about kite surfing first. The sport combines elements from wakeboarding, surfing, paragliding and acrobatics to form a very addictive extreme-pastime. Once you have mastered the arts of controlling the kite, and you are able to surf back and forth, the next thing is to start practicing on your tricks. A kite is not a transport vessel, nor is there any credit given to the fastest kite surfer. Rather than that onlookers will gasp at the one who jumps the highest, or pulls of the most daring stunts. Kite-looping seems to be the main focal point. 

Adding to this, the untouched part of the Sri Lankan nature, the jungles, and its people, makes for a lot of very good and beautiful photo opportunities. Needless to say; we took a ton of pictures during our trip, most of which ended up on our shared DropBox folder (amassing some 3 GB in total), but some of them also found their way out on the social scene.

Now, after the mandatory heavy retouching, obligatory #nofilter, as well as comrade-tagging, the photo was posted on Instragram and/or Facebook, instantly followed by offline haggling, bartering, and finally complying.

As you all surely already know, a post’s popularity on any social network is determined in part by how many “likes” it gets. If a post gets a high number of likes, it will reach a larger scale of the entire network, and the poster will become more influential. This is core, old news.

Consequently, nights in our hut, in the remote wildernesses of Sri Lanka, consisted of getting the rest of the group to like your photo, while at the same time making sure no other photo got more likes than your own. This is a tricky business, especially in a closed group of friends, and immediately triggers back-stabbing, connivance, and deception. Often a person fishing for likes would formulate set rules for how the other would get liked back; effectively making the other person “Like on Demand” or LOD, for short.

Quickly the word LOD, and the affiliated person the “LODDER”, became regular practice for the trip. “Don’t be such a damn LODDER Erik. Just like what you truly like!” was a standard façade statement, often utilized by con-artist Jesper, covering the heavy LODDING taking place behind the scenes. 

LOD carried on all through the Sri Lanka trip, and got more and more intense by each passing day. LODs could be traded for small favors; borrowing sunblock, fetching the next rounds, even throwing the occasional game of Settlers of Catan - just to name a few examples. Paying for LODDING was not far away. Obviously you didn't want to be caught as a LODDER, LOD was synonym with swindling, not something you wanted to be public with. This also carried over the Sweden as we got home; we would send PMs on Facebook, encouraging the other to comment or like certain pictures to raise it to the top of the feed, again with a re-comment or re-like not far away.

This whole social experiment does not come without some reflections. I know there must be professional LODDERs out there, I just cannot see any social media campaign run today that does not employ some fact catalysts to get posts flying, even though no one would ever admit to doing so. What our Sri Lankan LODDER Experiment also have shown us is that as soon as you know the post has traded likes - a LOD post - you lose all respect for it. And the higher the percentage of known LOD the less likely I am to actually fall for it. If I knew that the status update of a company with 1000 likes got 500 of those like directly from LOD, all my respect and trust for that company would go out the window.

The question here is naturally; is LOD and the employed LODDER already an Internet norm, and if so is this to be expected as the next evolution of online marketing? Word of mouth marketing has long since proven itself as a powerful tool; social media likes is a marginalized, but still influential version of that. Would you trust companies, political campaigns, or think tanks that had a LODDER on its staff? 

In the words of Jesper: “Don’t be such a damn LODDER. Just like what you truly like!”

Welcome to Geek Week

For those of you that might have missed this historical event, we are now in the midst of Geek Week! After the successful experiment with Comedy Week, YouTube decided to try something similar but yet very different.

This time, however, it is not comedy that will be front and center, it is instead geeky content. YouTube features a wide variety of videos related to those shows that help us all get our geek on.

Content from over 100 YouTube channels will be promoted, out of which 7 carefully chosen users hosting their own specific days. As the week progresses there will be a wide variety of content including comic books, SciFi, Cosplay and even geek cooking shows. Today is Super Wednesday, featuring all you ever needed to know about everything super! 

Check out these 10 forgotten but very real superheros!

It is felt that YouTube itself is a huge part of geek culture so this week dedicated to all things geeky seems like the perfect fit. Much of the content will be fresh and new so fans of all things geeky will have what all geeks require, the inside scoop. So check in with YouTube for some really interesting clips and shows that anyone will love - geek or no!

Social Trends 2013

Social media networks were a novelty 5 years ago and today they are no longer debated around the dinner party table. Its old news, the conversation has moved on. Social media is not new, its the norm.

And with that norm comes expectations, development, and new trends. The Global Web Index recently compiled a study concerning the Social Stream of Q1 2013. Here are two key factors driving the social web in 2013:

• Mobile – with the number of people accessing the internet via a mobile phone increasing by 60.3% to 818.4 million in the last 2 years. 
• Older users adoption – On Twitter the 55-64 year age bracket is the fastest growing demographic with 79% growth rate since 2012. The fastest growing demographic on Facebook’s and Google+’s networks are the 45 to 54 year age bracket at 46% and 56% respectively.

It is clear that both the social platforms and the marketers that use them to engage consumers will need to adopt a mobile first strategy in future.

This brings with it significant opportunities for brands to leverage social, mobile, in-store, TV, outdoor, and print using creative, integrated campaigns and engagement strategies.

Sentinal WarFare

I recently came across a very interesting thread on a forum for gamers. The story involves the extremely popular game Quake III Arena, along with a massive bit of unexpected sentinel awareness.

A few years back, a gamer set up a bot-vs-bot match on his Quake III Arena server, and let the match run to see how the bots would adapt over a long period of time. The bot AI (artificial intelligence) in Quake III Arena is designed to adapt to new scenarios and situations, all to work out player strategies and combat these exact strategies. This results in a ramping difficulty for the players since the AI actively learns the moves and tactics of the player.

However, something came up (most likely lunch or dinner) and the gamer forgets all about the server he set up, until four years later when he decides to login and see what’s happening.

What he discovers is seriously puzzling: the bots on both teams are simply standing still, not doing anything. The server is running fine and the game isn’t frozen. The bots are simply standing there, not killing one another. The gamer reports his findings to his Quake community forum, and they all unanimous encourage him to logon and see what happens. Said and done, our anonymous gamer opens the server and logs on to the tranquil battle field.

Here things just keep getting stranger. When he enters, the bots don’t fire on him—instead, they rotate to turn and look at him, and continue to look at him as he walks around the map.

Encourage again by his community friends the gamer decides to “frag” (gamer for kill) one of the bots, again just to see how the rest would react. In one swift blow all the bots undivided retaliate, instantly sending the gamer out of the battle. Sadly this is also where the story ends, because before the gamer could log back on again, the server crashes. Presumably the bots returned to their calm non-aggressive state.

There is no way to tell if this story is true or not; there is no video evidence to accompany the strange phenomenon, and therefore nothing to directly validate the occurrence. However, the truth of the story isn’t as important to me as the questions it raises:

Is it possible that video game bots, designed to provide human players with some non-human competition, could evolve over four years to “learn” that the best way to stay alive is to not kill? Did artificial intelligence discover the secret to world peace in a forgotten video game server?

Some of you may already have bridged the obvious WarGames parallel; yet another fact sadly pushing this story closer to the feigned area of story-telling. In WarGames (a movie from 1983 starring Matthew Broderick) a hacker uploads a tic-tac-toe game to an army super computer. What is pivotal to note here is that in a game of tic-tac-toe you cannot win unless your opponent makes a mistake. The computer then simulates a nuclear war and, using the knowledge gained from tic-tac-toeing, realizes that the only way to win is not to play.

A computer trained and aimed at killing and defeating all opponents, discovering that non-violence was a better logical approach to survival, would be a pretty spectacular thing. To answer this question we would however need to know what the bots were thinking in that vital moment, the second after the gamer was fragged and the servers terminated. Did they in fact go back to a submissive non-violent stage, or would the introduction of a new, unknown element be the spark that ignited the carnage all over again?

Luckily we may have the answer to this. One crucial piece of evidence was saved before the server crashed; the bots’ log files. These logs track the decisions previously made by the AI, guiding them to come up with new tactics and strategies; essentially the core of the logic behind ramping up the difficulty for the players. Apparently also the logic behind the submissive peaceful end-state.

The log files are however massive; 512 MB per bot with 16 bots – that makes 8 GB of unstructured information. As a comparison, this article, written in Word, and saved as a .docx takes up just about 14KB. To go through the log files would be equivalent of reading this article just under 600 000 times.

Is there sentinel life within those log files? Perhaps - as of right now, no one really knows. Reading the entire log file is an huge task itself, analyzing and finding the right line of code that supports sentinel presence; now that is an whole other story. Fortunately for us, the combat-hardened, destruction-driven AI we have created, for all intents and purposes, seems logically peaceful.

Fans Unlock Pink Floyd

Last Thursday night as an unexpected appeal emerged from Pink Floyd's twitter account:

"Help stream Wish You Were Here 1 million times to unlock Pink Floyd's catalogue on Spotify,"

Consequently, on Friday, June 14th Spotify launched a global campaign to engage Pink Floyd fans around their iconic song “Wish You Were Here” - the deal was once we hit 1 million streams, then the full catalogue would go live. Help was not long in coming. On Monday the target was passed, and the magic and rock legends honored their promises

Pink Floyd are otherwise not known to like the digital age. According to Rolling Stone the band sued their label EMI last year because the label where allowing individual songs to be sold on iTunes, instead of the whole album.

"It's a great day for fans of prog rock, but it's also a great day for younger fans who have yet to be really turned on to the magic of Pink Floyd," said Ken Parks, Spotify's chief content officer. "That's a lot of what this is about: bringing a new generation of fans to one of the biggest and most iconic bands in the world."

It's also a great day for crowdsourcing, since this is one major example of the power behind the digital masses!

Check it out now: http://spoti.fi/pinkFloyd

Appolution

When the iPhone was launched in June of 2007 it was an immediate improvement over previous smartphones and palm pilots. Many a Treos and Nokia 7110s cried out in terror as they were retired that day. While the original iPhone was a noticeable improvement over previous mobile devices, it was still very limited. After all, it had only half a screen of applications and lacked basic tools like a task manager.

Fast forward to 2013 and the iPhone has become a much more integrated device for managing productivity. More recently, a new breed of iPhone apps have begun to hit the App Store that have more intuitive and sleek interfaces. Here are my top pick that may have slipped under your radars.

Evernote

Evernote is my go-to app for organizing the big-data of life. I keep everything in it; meeting notes, audio notes, quotes, blog ideas and drafts, important documentation, articles that I've saved and a great deal more. Evernote is the last notebook you'll ever need. The true power of Evernote resides in its unique search capabilities that allow users to filter notes and documents quickly to access the information they need.

Dropbox

On the surface, Dropbox is another app that allows users to sync, store, share and access files across all their devices. Because Dropbox supports Apple, Microsoft and Android platforms, it is by far the best app for collaborating, storing files and backing devices up.

1Password

Unfortunately, humans are generally not very good at creating or remembering strong passwords that don't include our pet's names or the last 4-digits of our social security numbers. 1Password encrypts and stores all that info, so that user need only remember 1 password. It has a built in Internet browser that will automatically log users in to websites and auto fill account information as they browse on their iOS device.

Interval Run

Finally I thought I’d end this list with a tip for all you runners out there. Want a virtual coach in your ear buds? Then try out this app that tells users when to start running and when to (finally) take a breather. I searched high and low to find an app that would let me customize my intervals any which way I wanted. Noticing that most apps only would let you program one set at a time (5*20 sec) I felt like the hunt was lost. Then I found Interval Run which solves all my interval problems. In addition to Tabata workouts, the app let’s users customize longer running workouts, from 5K plans to hour-long runs. Cost: $1.99 – worth every penny!

Change 2013

The only constant is change, and that’s all the more evident in the social media landscape.

Only recently, all that chatter was about Pinterest and Instagram; today it’s moved on to WeChat and Vine. Tomorrow it will probably be something we yet haven´t heard about (it is tomorrow's news after all).

We Are Social recently summarized new trends for 2013. Have a look and see if you are up to speed with the changes forthcoming. I have summarized the key trends below, but please take your to read the entire deck.

Simultaneous Social Transmedia Experiences

Ability to multitask across devices simultaneously present an opportunity for brands to create interconnected experiences, where a brand’s story is told across various mediums.

Communities vs. Platforms

They came, they left, and they’re trickling in again. Brands should create communities around their audiences’ shared passions, not around platforms.

Mobile Life vs. Mobile Phone

Our cellphones are no longer just a device, its life. Your are expected to always stay connected, and you expect the same from brands around you.

Content Tapas

Creating ‘content snacks’ – bite-sized, easily digestible, unknowingly addictive – this will make your costumers return for more!

Commitments, not Campaigns

Like with any relationship, it could have started off with a pick up line, and sweetened with one-off celebrations throughout the year, but there is also the everyday conversations that allow you to understand each other better.

Socially Interactive Customer Service

People demand for and expect customer service whenever they want it. Brands need to adjust to account for this.

Social Buying

Social recommendations will become the key driver of referrals that brands have to facilitate, in order to leverage word-of-mouth, and peer-to-peer recommendations.

Social Sharing as Currency

Through social sharing, the brand gets a social stamp of approval from the consumers, which is a more credible form of endorsement.

Social Inside

Rather than just being a brand that does social, be a brand that IS social.

Crisis and Opportunity Management

Events and news spread like wildfire through social media. This is a great way for brands to spread awareness and help reinforce the brand’s mission or association.

We Are Social - Future Factors 2013 from We Are Social Singapore

How prudence encouraged drinking

Systembolaget is a government owned chain of liquor stores in Sweden. It is the one and only retail location allowed to sell alcoholic beverages, other than bars and restaurants. With this great power comes great responsibility, and as such, one of the main focuses of Systembolaget's advertisements is the side effects of drinking, and the encouragement of drinking moderately.

Therefor Systembolaget developed an app to help casual consumers keep their bending under control. The app encourage its users to track their consumption by entering his/her age and weight, and then type and amount of alcohol, and the app would return a calculated blood-alcohol level.

The app went viral, was downloaded by the thousands, and was an instant hit - just not the type of hit that Systembolaget wanted. Turned out Systembolaget had missed their core target audience - young men. In an instant young men ages 20 - 30 could compete with each other on who was the drunkest. Actually compete. With quite accurate results. And how did you win? As with any game; by having the highest score.

No one was reported dead as a result of this, but over consumption with hospitalization as a result did increase dramatically within the "target audience".

Where did Systembolaget go wrong? The answer is quite simple; they had not accounted for the power of gamification. It turns out, even unwanted gamification will occur if there is an opportunity for it to occur. A quick user workshop would probably have revealed this flaw in the design, but this was probably never conducted.

Writing this the app is still live and available for your iPhone or Android.