via Laughing Squid
I don’t want this new feature to be all about the ‘fun stuff’ I’ve seen on Twitter, but that’s not to say I’m getting serious with you on a Friday!
I want to focus on some of the young talented entrepreneurs out there who are creating exciting projects at the moment, as well as the cool companies who are starting up and hoping for great things! On top of that I want to draw your attention to the stuff that is blowing my mind! So expect a fine mix of fun, fact and wow…for guilty pleasure viewing you should try Tom’s third instalment of Make Me Smile Monday from this week.
Twitter Tweekly
1. Lets kick this off with what I consider a double wow. Now, the Sun is something we all have in common as human beings, we need it live, so I figured this would be good place to start. The BBC informed me on Twitter this week that the Earth has been lashed with the strongest solar storms since 2005! A solar storm is caused by solar flares – ‘the sudden release of magnetic energy stored in the Sun’s atmosphere’.
via NASA/STEREO
Without getting too scientific and bogged down in the details, one of the greatest by-products of this occurrence is amazingly intense auroras, something else that National Geographic highlighted to me via Twitter.
via JuniVaara
2. This next Tweekly comes from Bits, the tech news arm of The New York Times. The start-up ‘Square’, manages more than $2 billion a year in credit card transactions made via mobile phones, but the structure and design of their offices really grabbed my attention.
‘If Willy Wonka built a financial institution, instead of a chocolate factory, it would look something like Square’.
via Office Snapshots
There are no offices at Square, all of the conference rooms are surrounded by clear glass and all the execs sit in open cubicles. The founder Jack Dorsey (also co-founder of Twitter) believes that the design creates transparency between employees at the company and this will transfer to the end product. He said, “if we can’t provide a clean, simple, well-designed experience in here then it’s not going to be reflected in our identity…it’s in our DNA”.
3. Here is a young artist by the name of Scott Garner who is making his artwork interactive. I saw this Tweeted by Wired yesterday and it finally made me understand how interesting art can be! Sorry to all those talented artists out there, but I have a short attention span…this would definitely make an art gallery more interesting.
via Scott Garner
4. A friend told me about the company ‘Clear Karma’ the other day, a social start-up enterprise based in Austria for food safety.
‘Our solution makes it easy to change your eating habits. We plan to build a food curation community with a search based on personal profiles and recommendations to help people with special diets due to diabetes, obesity, etc. to easily find products they can eat at local stores. People with special dietary needs/allergies can immediately see, based on personal filters, the impact of their buying decisions on their personal health.’
He thought it would be nice for me to stay on top of my nut allergy by finding local stores that help me avoid buying products with nuts in. Little did he know that I can ACTUALLY read the back of food packaging, but I still think the work they do is excellent for people with more serious dietary needs/allergies than myself! I’m only slightly allergic to nuts…..
Anyway, whilst I was checking out their twitter I noticed they were reporting from the Digital-Life-Design 2012 event in Munich. They wrote an informative blog post about digital trends to follow in 2012 from the event so I recommend you check it out. Here is the essence of the post:
* Watch out for India and Turkey as big players on the digital scene especially in e-commerce
* Back to a customer-centric experience: smooth and “glocal” processes from payment to service delivery
* More women-led start-ups through crucial empowerment and support of women entrepreneurs
5. Last but not least, I wanted to talk to you about Oscar nominations ahead of the 84th Academy Awards. At the start of this week you could watch the nominations live via The Academy and they quickly released the favourite film, leading actor and leading actress nominations:
Now, I’m going to ask you the obvious/inevitable/pressing question. Who is going to win in each of the main categories? Let us know below or @Nokia_Connects!