Iridesco Watercooler
We are Iridesco, and this is our blog. We are the guys behind Harvest and Co-op. Iridesco was born in 2003, and we now operate in downtown New York City. People who speak here: Danny Wen, Shawn Liu, Dee Zsombor, and Barry Hess.Below you will find the things that have caught our attention in design, business, art and culture.
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“ Used to be that when you would visit someone for the first time, you would scan their CD collection — ok, I started to write “record collection” because that’s where it started for me — and their bookshelf. You would get an idea of the personality of your host their experiences and interests. These personal identifiers were conversation starters or at least access points to each other. Today, you almost never see a CD rack. Everything is ripped to the computer. And that’s a good thing. People have their collections shared, they have them streamed through Express networks throughout the house, they can shuffle endlessly and create a soundtrack of everything they like. But it is one less way I get to know you when I walk through your door.
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“ I think in careers you need two things. You need a long-run dream and a short-term plan. The short-term plan is between 12 and 24 months, and is not longer. The stuff in between is a big waste of time at best, and completely anxiety producing and counterproductive at worst.
“… If you want to be a physicist, don’t work at McKinsey. You want a long-run dream that’s aligned with what you are doing. And then you need to plan for what am I doing this year or the next year or two, where I’m learning and growing, and building not my resume (because that’s silly), but my skills. My ability to get things done, my ability to scale, my ability to motivate people.” - Sheryl Sandberg on Stanford’s Entrepreneurial Thought Leadership Podcast
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Fantastic video by Andy and Carolyn London of London Squared Productions (based in NYC). |
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The time savvy hackers over at Evil Mad Scientist published these brilliant photos and a detailed how-to for making The Bulbdial Clock. It’s no secret we love clocks here at Iridesco, but this is one of the most unique I’ve seen. It uses different color LED’s to tell the time, so it’s useful and beautiful. One of my favorite combinations. Kudos for a job very well done. |
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Our friends, Language in Common, recently launched a project that tracks what brands people are talking about on Twitter. The project is called TweetBuzzer, and I asked Josh Kamler a couple of questions about it: What is TweetBuzzer and why did you guys build it? TweetBuzzer lets you track the buzz around brands on Twitter. What’s most useful about it isn’t the home page. that’s just kind of cool candy. What’s interesting is that you can sort of gauge which brands dominate the conversation on Twitter by looking at the “top 100 tweeted brands” link. You can also see the percentage change in conversation around a particular brand over any given day, week, or month period (tho, the site hasn’t been live for a month so we haven’t captured that data yet). You can also see the number of impressions (that’s every time a brand appears in a user’s Twitter feed, so were actually capturing roughly how many users are seeing an instance of any given brand name) for any tweeted brand. We think that stuff’s pretty useful.
If you were a brand manager at one of these big companies you’d probably want to know what people are saying about you. Mostly, big companies require a ton of momentum to learn how to harness new technologies for their benefit. TweetBuzzer offers a free and easy way to find out what people are saying about your brand. And, since the launch last week, the number of brands we’re tracking has more than tripled. There’s some really small brands, and of course the giant obvious ones. We’ll be adding functionality shortly that lets people tracking a specific brand to actually see the conversation thread as well as the number of mentions and impressions. What’s next for Language in Common? We just started a new project. It’s a new company actually. It’s called Mustache LaRue and it makes iPhone games for non-gamers. We’ll be launching this summer. |
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It’s trying times for newspapers in today’s evolving media landscape. Just Friday, The Boston Globe was threatened to be shut down by its parent company, The New York Times Co, which makes this TED video so timely. Polish designer, Jacek Utko, asks “Can design save the newspaper?“ See what he has learned through his design efforts for major Eastern European publications and enjoy some beautiful print and information design in the process. |
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We’ve all been there, it’s the curse of the technologically savvy. Tangles of wires and cables running everywhere, and there just seems to be no good way to keep them organized. Have you ever wonderered what the tangle of cables that keeps our tangles of cables running must look like? Look no further! Royal Pingdom has a wonderful, yet scary, gallery of tangled power lines from around the world. (Photo above by Augapfel). |
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A couple years ago, we launched a side project called the World Clock Project. The idea was to create a gallery of public clocks from around the world, and use the photos from the gallery to power a timepiece where each minute is represented by a different photo (showing, of course, the correct time). Since our flagship product is all about time tracking, we saw the project as a perfect mix of art, community involvement, and relatedness to our business. Recently, New York Times writer Zahra Sethna came across our project and reached out to us to do a shopping column for wall clocks. Here’s that resulting story: Shopping With Shawn Liu and Danny Wen - Springing Forward With a Fresh Batch of Clocks - NYTimes.com |
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Teleport me back to the early 1900s because I’m quite fond of the brandmarks of those early days. |
