July 22, 2011 • 2:34 pm • POSTED BY jtondera
Did you know that every time you fill out a two-word CAPTCHA, you’re helping to digitize books?
A CAPTCHA is a program that can tell whether its user is a human or a computer. We all encounter these on the web, and spend about 10 seconds filling out a CAPTCHA each time. Worldwide, that’s 500,000+ hours daily! A few years ago, Carnegie Mellon University professor Luis von Ahn figured out a way to direct these hours towards a larger effort.
“reCAPTCHA improves the process of digitizing books by sending words that cannot be read by computers to the Web in the form of CAPTCHAs for humans to decipher.”
Many projects for digitizing physical books currently exist — the process involves scanning the book pages and turning them into text using OCR (Optical Character Recognition). However, OCR isn’t perfect and requires additional attention to decipher hard-to-read words. reCAPTCHA has revolutionized the process of digitizing books by sending an image that can’t be read by OCR to be deciphered by people through the CAPTCHA process.
reCAPTCHA began as a project of the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University, and was bought by Google in 2009. The project is currently digitizing old editions of The New York Times as well as books from Google Books. Check out this podcast for an additional overview on the reCAPTCHA process as well as this 2006 Google TechTalk with Luis von Ahn, the founder of reCAPTCHA.
The next time you fill out a CAPTCHA, think about the book you just helped digitize!
July 20, 2011 • 2:52 pm • POSTED BY Kyle Arango
Keeping the rumor mill cranking, Park Hilton is spreading the latest news, gossip, tweets and things randomly shouted out. Here’s what’s currently going around at 160over90:
According to copywriting intern Thomas O’Brien, “[Executive Creative Director] Jim Walls was once a member of the early ‘90s rock band Blues Traveler. Or maybe it was Hootie and the Blowfish. Wait, which one sang ‘Mambo No. 5’?”
Doubts are still swirling about the existence of Designer and Canadian Justin LaFontaine’s Canadian girlfriend.
Still no word on the reason why recent Notre Dame grad and Designer Bobby McKenna only uses the stall.
Due to the recent heat wave, some are describing that Sansom Street’s scent is changing from wizz and whiz to dead raccoon stuffed with ricotta cheese.
The heat wave is also causing some to speculate that the 100º+ temperatures will finally reveal that New York Festivals winner and Creative Director Tammo Walter (AKA: The T-1000) is actually made of liquid metal.
Designer Daniel Blackman’s “beachbody” being described as more like “a large body of water.”
Working on a project for Miele vacuums, ECD Jim Walls and Account Supervisor Dan Giroux spent yesterday afternoon visiting different appliance retailers, to which they responded, “What? There is nothing weird about two guys vacuum shopping.”
July 14, 2011 • 6:14 pm • POSTED BY David Burden
As of 2008, there were 1,457,000 registered female youth soccer players in the country. Estimates put the number at over 1.6 million this year. I am a father to one and a coach to eleven. I’ve been to tournaments where 9-year-old girls are playing in $200 footwear and $150 Dri-Fit embroidered uniforms and with $120 World Cup replica ball (plucked from the trunk of a Range Rover Sport). They love and live soccer and it dominates their active wardrobe. And its hard to believe that at least half of these girls wouldn’t be running around in an Abby Wambach or Hope Solo t-shirt by now. If they could buy one.
I’m simply stunned by the complete lack of merchandise supporting the US Women’s National Soccer Team, now heading (literally) to their third World Cup final on Sunday. After visiting Dicks, Modells and Sports Authority in the futile hope of finding something “of the moment” for my 9-year old daughter to wear to support the team after they safely advanced past the bracket stage, I then went online to sites like Eurosport (soccer.com) and soccerpost.com and sportsauthority.com and found no special sections or collections, no homepage Flash homages, no special make-up merchandise…nothing but adult replica shirts priced at $110 that I could have bought 3 months ago. For $110.
During my tenure at ecommerce startup GSI Commerce back in 1999-2000, some of our biggest business days hedged on our sites being the first to post celebratory product for major events. Back in 2000 we had “St. Louis Rams Super Bowl XXXIV Champions” T-shirts and hats online alongside Marshall Faulk replica jerseys within seconds of Kevin Dyson being tackled on the one yard line.
This team is a marketers dream. There is “The Hopeful”: Abby Wambach, America’s most recognized and prolific striker since the iconic Mia Hamm, who has never won a World Cup despite two previous appearances. “The Comeback Kid”: Ali Krieger, who netted the final penalty kick in our win against archrival Brazil after recovering from bloodclots that led to multiple heart attacks in 2005. “The Ultimate Team Player”: Megan Rapinhoe, who was shocked to be benched in the first game yet emerged butterfly-like as virtual super sub… she passes like Mr. Beckham and her platinum pixie cut will likely inspire a summer fad a la Mrs. Beckham. And then there is “The Lighting Rod”: Hope Solo. Controversial. Beautiful. Serendipitously named. Led the 2007 team to the World Cup Final against Brazil and was unceremoniously benched, only to watch her replacement (in goal in the 1999 Cup Final against China) get demolished. Needless to say she did not remain quiet on this matter. Some called her a traiter. Others called her spirited. Her two penalty kick saves versus Brazil this past Sunday were the purest redemption. Granted none of the above were really household names three weeks ago, but based on our FIFA number one world ranking, the experience, looks, skill and charisma of the stars and supporting cast, and the television coverage it was worth taking a shot to move some hot product, right?
Nike developed a really nice campaign zooming in on Solo, Wambach and Raphinoe called “Pressure Makes Us”, which has proven prophetic given the team’s gut wrenching last minute wins of late. But where is the product?
Maybe our friends at the Swoosh are a bit gun shy after the 2010 Men’s World Cup left them rooting from the stands alongside Rooney, Drogba and Ronaldo for the beautiful but tragically flawed Dutch team, with boxes of beautiful but poorly prognosticated World Cup product headed to Forman Mills and third world countries (I think its safe to assume that when Nike proclaimed “Write the Future” they really didn’t think it would be written in Dutch). But you’d think they would have learned a lesson in 1999, after Brandi Chastain tore off he jersey to celebrate her Cup winning penalty kick revealing a Nike sports bra; a half a million sports bras were sold within days along with a handful of Mia Hamm jerseys. Nike was caught flatfooted – Chastain’s bra was a prototype and they had delivery problems with their existing stock. It looks like they are scrambling now with a female sportswear campaign entitled “Make Yourself” that includes Solo. But I’m not quite ready to put my 9-year-old in a sports bra, even if its the one Hope Solo endorses.
So if they had asked me as a marketer and a soccer dad if they should have hedged on this event and this team, I would have decisively stated three words.
June 29, 2011 • 4:46 pm • POSTED BY mpark
What an exciting week it has been! Last Friday was the culmination of two years of planning and setting up of the AIGA Philadelphia Design Awards organized by the very talented people on the AIGA Design Competition Committee. Then over the weekend and into Monday, I attended the HOW Design Conference in Chicago. Fortunately, 160over90 won International Design – Best in Show 2011 which scored us the free trip! The prize was awarded to the first of four search pieces created for Loyola University Maryland. Congrats to Kelly Dorsey and Anna Hartley for designing and writing the beautiful pieces, Dan Shepelavy and Jim Walls for the great creative direction, and to Dan Giroux for his awesome account management and keeping the client happy!
And finally, thanks to HOW Magazine for the honor!
June 28, 2011 • 4:31 pm • POSTED BY mprescott
On Friday, the AIGA Philly Design Competition hosted their closing reception at the University of the Arts Rosenwald-Wolf Gallery and 160over90 was there to support our local chapter. The bi-annual competition selected 100 entries to receive awards and we were honored and pretty stoked to win awards for 23 of our pieces. Thanks to all of the judges and a special shout out to Andrew Blauvelt of the Walker Art Center who chose the University of Dayton Viewbook to receive one of the five Judges’ Selection awards.
AIGA Philadelphia and the entire Design Competition Committee did a great job. All of the 100 award winning pieces will be on display in the gallery until June 30th. Congrats to our 160over90 crew and to all awards winners.
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AIGA PDA Catalog design by Michele Cooper
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AIGA PDA Reception, June 24th, 2011
June 20, 2011 • 4:48 pm • POSTED BY anna hartley
A year ago at this time, Kelly Dorsey and I had just completed the first and second Loyola University Maryland search pieces—a two-part direct mail campaign targeted at sophomores and juniors in high school. They hit the mailboxes, and they were successful, and that was great, and we were happy.
But when we were asked to expand the two-part mailer into a four-part series, we were honestly a little worried. Visions of Rocky 3 & 4 (and every other half-baked sequel/ made for TV movie) began to haunt us. Even though the four pieces would be tied together by identical format and materials, we wanted to create something new and unexpected—and to give the reader a glimpse into the school from a completely original angle.
We started Piece Three from a bird’s eye view: deciding that we would focus on campus life, and bring to light the fact that every student has enough activities, tasks, and experiences to keep them busy all four years. At the heart of this idea is the notion that no two people can possibly experience Loyola in the same way—and that’s a good thing.
What resulted was a piece that transitioned from the conversational “Loyola voice” straight into three first-person narratives, written from the point of view of students with vastly different Loyola experiences. Our inspirations were wide: the writing style from those Papercuts ads, the kinetic energy of the Euro trip montage from The Rules of Attraction (minus all the sex and illicit drug use), David Foster Wallace’s use of simultaneous stories and footnotes, and Maira Kalman’s hand-drawn typography.
The manuscript was long and full of blocks of text—but that was the point. We wanted each story to be something that you had to dive into to experience. Something that was so subjective that you couldn’t help but imagine the type of student who would embody this voice and engage in all these activities on campus. Each story was then paired with its own hand-drawn typeface (many hand cramps and late nights later).
Check out some of the pictures of what we came up with, below. Of course, while this was happening, we were also concepting Piece Four…but we’ll leave that one for another blog post.
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