This weekend saw the last tour date of the hugely successful Orange Monkey Holograms Gigs, celebrating the launch of our music sharing and text package.
To sign it off in true UK style (and a bit of mayhem), recent Mobo award winners N-Dubz and critically acclaimed Pixie Lott came down to introduce and watch their hologram selves.
Crowds screamed, danced and scrambled to get an autograph, and Pixie and N-Dubz seemed to be very impressed with themselves (as holograms).
Watch our videos below to get a lowdown on what happened, including interviews with N-Dubz and Pixie.
Some more coverage of the event by Manchester News.
If you're a fan of fright films you really don't want to miss this. Prepared to be scared sockless...
We're screening a horror classic in a super-spooky outdoor location. We can't tell you where (yet) but it's somewhere in central London. The screening is on October 30th, the Friday night before Halloween.
Every day this week we're releasing a micro-chapter of an original work of creepy fiction on our Facebook Film Club page. Solve the clues in the story to reveal the screening location and where you can collect your free tickets this Saturday.
There are 130 pairs of tickets up for grabs. Totally free. All they'll cost you is a little bit of skill, ingenuity and fearlessness.
In honour of a little entertainment on a Friday, here’s our favourite stories from the week…
Pepsi and Entertainment Weekly made history this week, but there seem to be plenty of moans about it. Copies of the magazine contained the first video advert inside a print title. Like something out of a futuristic film, it’s activated when you turn the page. It may not be the most groundbreaking of ideas but the amount of criticism is astonishing. Gripes include not being able to fold it and the loading delay. Hmmm, folding video. One for digital origami experts perhaps?
Thoroughly in disgrace is Kanye West for his ill-advised outburst at the VMA Awards Show. He’s even had a ticking off from President Obama. But for us it’s not so much what he said, but the fact his slack-jaw has spawned an internet meme craze. Photoshoppers of the world have been splicing the disgraced rapper into increasingly bizarre situations. Our favourite is Kanye telling Dumbledore he ain’t a patch on Gandalf. Perhaps such design dexterity will make him think twice before he hijacks the stage.
Finally, if you’re attracted to zombies and harbour a penchant for snacking on aluminium (and you’re still single, can’t think why), then get yourself onto OKCupid. The dating website has compiled a list of keywords that elicit the best responses. An interest in zombies or metal scored high (erm, naturally), while complimenting another’s physical appearance constituted a turn off.
Welcome. It's Friday. Thought you'd never make it? Ha! Look see, you did. Here is what's been going on this week...
On Wednesday a hoard of greedy real estate tycoons carved up the world for purchase and you did nothing to stop them. Okay, it was only in the virtual world of Monopoly City Streets, but the exchange of a board for Google maps is a nice touch. Expect a virtual flurry of tyrannical tycoons to steal your street from underneath you, very soon.
We were a bit gobsmacked after reading about two Australian teenagers who Facebooked their plea for rescue, after becoming trapped in a storm drain. We know updating your status via mobile can be addictive, but come on... dialling the emergency services is infinitely more sensible. Thanks to a friend who saw the update, the duo were saved by a very bemused fire brigade crew.
But onto more fruitful and inventive ways to use technology: IBM employee Andy Stanford-Clark has hooked his house up to send Tweets. Cue bizarre new term ‘tweetject’ and a whole host of Tweeting appliances. Thumbs up for this creative and quirky way of using Twitter.
We’ve fallen in love with Winston, a South African pigeon who valiantly flew 60 miles to deliver 4GB of data on a USB stick, and beat the broadband in the process. The Feed is definitely in favour of the reintroduction of animals into the work place and we expect to see memos being exchanged via goat very soon ;-)
To round off, if you’re at a loose end this weekend, the onedotzero adventures in motion festival is back in London. Head down to the BFI Southbank for the best in digital and motion arts. Interactive installations include Squidsoup's portable pixel playground, where you get to play god with a sandpit of virtual bugs.
Enjoy, whatever you get up to, have a goodun.
Special thanks to Sam, our Feed Intern, for her most excellent research and wordsmithery in this article.
Hip hop god Nas and triple Grammy Award-winning Nelly, will hit the Orange RockCorps stage to wow the volunteers on September 25th, at the Royal Albert Hall.
They'll be joining Razorlight, David Guetta, Kelly Rowland, Daniel Merriweather and Chase & Status.
And you know what this all means? Ria will be interviewing this galaxy of musical stars especially for The Feed.
Sight. Sound. Smell. Touch. Taste. The five senses. As integral to us as the very air we breathe. They are at the heart of how we perceive the world, how we make decisions and communicate. But human kind has also amassed reams of knowledge, now stored on the internet, that we regularly access using our mobile phones and computers.
The remarkable SixthSense prototype joins up all that 'found' data, with the more intangible information gained from our five senses, so we can interact with it in a natural, intuitive way using hand gestures. So how does it do this?
SixthSense has a mini projector, a camera and a mirror worn around your neck. These connect up to a mobile computer that sits in your pocket. Any surface from a wall to your hand, can be projected onto, to be your 'computer screen'. The camera recognises and tracks your hand gestures and other objects around you.
On your fingers you wear coloured markers (red, green, blue and yellow on your thumb and index fingers), so the camera can track and stream the movement of your fingers. It looks like this...
Just some of the things it can do are projecting live news reports onto a newspaper...
Resizing and sorting photos using a framing gesture on a wall...
Or using your hand as a mobile phone interface...
We must admit, SixthSense has blown our minds a little bit. You see, when we use a laptop or mobile phone, we are physically adapting our own movements to the machine so we can get to the information we need. But with SixthSense we can use natural movements and gestures to do the same thing, all the while combining it with the constant blips and whirrs we're receiving from our eyes, ears, tongues, nostrils and skin.
We admit, there's a touch of the Hollywoods here with allusions to the film Minority Report, but using our bodies in such an expressive way in relation to what is essentially dry old meta data, is a huge leap forward in the way we communicate with each other and perceive the world around us.
We love it. And if you do too, then trust us, you'll be hooked by the video above, unveiling SixthSense and what it can do, from TED.com.
Last Wednesday we posted behind-the-scenes photos from a TV studio in Battersea. Well, the reason behind our sneaky camera work was the filming of the first of 12 Orange Monkey adverts.
For the uninitiated, Orange have teamed up with the folks at 4Music to create Monkey, the pay as you go package that gives customers free music and texts if they top up with £10 or more a month.
The adverts are musical weather forecasts and they look scorching to us.
So have a watch and tell us what you think. It's certainly a melodious outlook...
Inquisitive shoppers wonder what on earth a giant holographic box is doing in their shopping centre ;-)
Monopoly City Streets: great for meglomaniacs
