An absolutely adorable short titled, “When ‘Toy Story’ met Search Stories” by a Google partnership with Pixar’s Toy Story 3 by BBH. Buzz Lightyear googles “to infinity and beyond” and learns the true reality in the form of search engine results page. Toy Story 3 in theaters this Friday.

via Less, But Better

The State of The Internet by JESS3

An insightful film comparing social media and internet activity around the world. Social media activity has proliferated with 126 million blogs on the web. Facebook has 350 million users and logs in at 260 billion page views per month. Plus, there are 84% more women than men on social networks. The best part (at 2:51) shows the Launch Dates of Social Media Networks, showing an evolution of what we’ve adopted (and abandoned) from 1995 to 2010.

With the recent news that Facebook has overtaken Google as the entry point to the web, there is no doubt that Facebook is a valuable platform to reach billions of people and future customers. Product searches are great, but often leads to Google generated web ads.

Today people experience brands in multiple ways, including built networks that allow for a closer interaction with the brand. It’s how users are trusting peer to peer recommendations or an active brand profile as opposed to a one-click search that is important. The marketing needs to be brand led, and have the capacity to take on different forms in order for the brand to be best brought to life.

[via Paul Worthington]

Have you ever wondered where the readers of The New York Times’s Web site come from, and what kind of devices they use to read our content? In a past life, not too long ago, when I worked in The Times’s research and development labs, we started a research visualization project to explore this very topic.

Just watching these maps glow can be a mesmerizing experience, but there’s another fascinating piece of data within this particular day. At about 1 minute and 10 seconds into the video, at 5:20 p.m., you can see a huge pulse of readers coming to the Web site, both from mobile devices and personal computers. This huge traffic bump happened after TMZ.com broke the newsof Mr. Jackson’s death. As the news started to filter across the Internet, traffic continued to ebb and flow throughout the evening.

The New York Times site traffic, US, June 25, 2009 from Nick Bilton on Vimeo.
[via nytimes.com]

Twitter’s translation project has been making its way to Europe. Earlier this month it launched in Spain, and today it officially launched in France with a blog and a post penned in French.  Imagine learning and studying the language while abroad in France, Canada, and various French territories. It’s one leap forward in globalizing communications.

This appeared in my junk box over the weekend, and the minimalist, yet romantic typeface intrigued me enough to take a second glance.  It looks like Anthropologie has created a website, The Anthropologist, that celebrates their vision of the namesake. Here’s a brief description:

“The Anthropologist an online space for inspiring works and inspiring individuals. It is a testament to the idea that revealing the passions of one person can result in the progress of many.”

I’m very curious with what this special project could culminate into. Perhaps a social platform where creative types can upload work and socialize? There are a couple characters described on the page.

Anthropology appeals to the free-spirited type of girl, who’s not afraid of fine, tailored, and whimsical things. Unlike its sister company, Urban Outfitters which is oozing with sexy Lower East Side girls recently, the Anthropologie girl is a bit grown up,  and has nothing to prove, but to be herself. Where would an Anthropologie girl hang out? Cobble Hill or Park Slope in Brooklyn comes to mind.

It’s interesting to see  a luxury cosmetic company finally break into a more tech-savvy audience and create a digital strategy behind the brand. This might be a reaction to the efforts of the self-made make-up artist, Lauren Luke, who has Youtube channel of online make-up tutorials with an average of 56 million viewers and 260,000 subscribers.

In early 2009–with the IP expertise of Anomaly–Sephora partnered with Luke to create By Lauren Luke, a proprietary signature line of cosmetics. Since the launch, she has become an online sensation with loyal fans and shoppers. Luke doesn’t offer marketed luxury cosmetics, but she does offer candid makeup advice from all the natural skill or imperfections of a real woman.

Lancôme has recently launched a mobile application for the iPhone, The Declaring Indigo collection with a tribute to its Parisian-style heritage. It is the first of its kind among global cosmetic companies where Lancôme hopes to make choosing cosmetics more “‘intuitive and truly personalized.‘”

According to Marketing Magazine, the app will enable users to create custom looks on their phone by choosing different colors and combination. Once created, these new looks can be saved for your next visit to the makeup counter. To further its interactive strategy, Lancôme also launched its own beauty blog devoted to make-up tips from Lancôme makeup professionals as well as access to artists, backstage photos and videos, and video make-up how-to’s.

This post was previously published on MobileBehavior’s Next Great Thing.

LAIKA from Michael Flückiger on Vimeo.

Michael Lebovitz pointed me to this cool dynamic typography tool where you manually stretch and contort the typeface. There’s a dial that controls the LAIKA typeface to elongate or widen the font. On Sputnik, the typeface is influenced by people’s swaying motions against the wall. The project is part of Michael Flückiger’s bachelor thesis and he explains his idea behind the concept:

Since not much work has been done in this field, we devised a system in which a typeface would not be defined static font styles anymore but would be able to change it‘s shape and appearance at any moment reacting to a broad spectrum of inputs.

Here are more of his typography experiments:

Details Pandoras Box from Michael Flückiger on Vimeo.

Typocraphic Spiderweb from Michael Flückiger on Vimeo.

Levi’s, a brand enriched with history from the California’s Gold Rush, is sponsoring a game centered on the fictional nephew of Levi Strauss according to Media Decoder. The treasure hunt is a part of the “Go Forth” campaign and launched this week by Wieden & Kennedy in Portland, Oregon.

The game is structured like a scavenger hunt where the $100,000 prize is “buried somewhere in America.” The clues are dictated by Grayson Ozias IV who creates online and real-world references, puzzles, tall tales, and even a quote from Walt Whitman. Details of the game can be found on Levi’s Go Forth site.

I’ve collaborated on live sponsorships and promotions by Levi’s. The concept is there, but I’m interested to see how this game unfolds in real life.

Trendsmap is a new service that features real-time mapping of Twitter trends across the world. Trend topics are the most popular keywords on Twitter and are marked with a hashtag. Users can scan trend topics across areas and see what people are talking about in a specific geographic location.

Created by Retail Me Not, Trendsmap incorporates the power of Twitter, Google Maps, and What The Trend. Clicking on any of the trends brings up information on the volume of tweets for the word, a description of the trend, a list of users, and relevant links.

I’m seeing trend topics like lobster in Nova Scotia, Kennedy in Boston, freezing in Colorado, tablet in San Francisco, Britney Spears in Los Angeles, Yankees and NYC in New York, and a nationwide of good mornings.

Mashable points to a screencast explaining its features:

[via Mashable]

Related Topics

• Google Maps Typography
• Visually Mapping Web Trends