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Walking man

Welcome to Idealog Weekly, the free email newsletter for New Zealand commercial creatives, entrepreneurs and anyone rich with ideas.

Walking man

Did the Walkman destroy Britain? If you were foolish enough to read the Daily Mail, you might think so. If you’re clever enough to read /Idealog/, though, you’ll know that the Walkman introduced a whole new way of gathering ideas and inspiration. As the Walkman celebates its 30th year, Matt Suddain tracks the evolution of portable music and suggests what it really means for the creative economy. Read the story in the latest Idealog and on our website.

Time for some truthiness

Idealog is now four years old. Since launching we’ve won many awards and people have said some very nice things but, like everyone, we produce some rubbish too. Sometimes we can’t even tell the difference. So help us out: we’ve put together an easy five-minute survey to let us know what you like about Idealog, the things you can’t abide, and what your reckon we could do better. We know your time is precious so we’ll make it worth your while: every completed response we receive will be entered into a prize draw with the opportunity to win a THERMAGENIUS heat pump water-heating system worth $4,500, plus $500 towards installation from Leap. So tell us what you think, and don’t spare the poison!

You can complete the survey online in just five minutes; there’s also a print version of the survey included with newsstand and subscriber copies of the current Idealog.

Tricks of the trade

Visual effects: 100 years of inspiration. Now that the wow factor of the latest FX fades so quickly, it’s fascinating to see the creativity of the vintage effects. Love that traffic shot.

Short sell

Great ideas are usually simple. That’s good, because if you’re going to enter your great idea in the Icehouse 2009 Fast Pitch—as you should—then you’ll need to explain it in just 60 seconds. The Icehouse calls it a real-life Dragon’s Den, run in Auckland over three weeks in October.

You won’t be thrown cold to the dragons, however. The first step is to join Icehouse CEO Andrew Hamilton and Ken Erskine, director of the ICE Accelerator and ICE Angels investors, for a content-crammed seminar session on October 8: ‘The three keys to successful pitches’. Learn what information investors and big customers are really looking for; find out how to tailor your language to the critical questions they will ask; and hear how pitching well has helped other businesses take leaps into high growth.

The grand prize is valued at over $15,000 and includes three months in The ICEHOUSE’s ICE Accelerator incubator and the opportunity to pitch directly to any of the participating investors. The total prize pool is valued at over $45,000 and is supported by ICEHOUSE founder The University of Auckland Business School and corporate partners BNZ, BCG, Ernst & Young, HP, Gen-i, Microsoft, Minter Ellison Rudd Watts and Telecom.

All that for just an $85 entry free. Read more and register at www.theicehouse.co.nz.

Homeward bound

We had a great time this week reading the responses to our Navman competition. We asked for your most embarrassing stories of misnavigation. Competition was tough, but the eventual winner was Adland creative director Will Roffé, who writes:

“This continues to haunt me to this day (many years later).

“I started life in the film industry as a production assistant and runner. God knows why I was made runner on a really important film shoot with a really important film director, as I had absolutely no clue about driving around Sydney. I knew where Kings Cross was (what Kiwi doesn’t?) and George Street, but that was the extent of my geographical knowledge of Sydney.

“Prior to shooting one early morning, a very stressed-out production manager threw me the keys to her car and sent me off on an urgent errand. I didn’t have a map with me and had no idea where I was going, but figured I’d stop and ask directions. The first four places I stopped to ask directions had staff where English was their second language. FRIG! The fifth person sent me on a wild goose chase. I think they figured I was a Kiwi. The sixth person was laughing so hard at my misadventures and how I was so obviously stressed out at the whole ordeal, that I only just managed to understand where I needed to go, which was literally 2.5kms from the shoot location!

“I couldn’t call my production manager as my cellphone was left on set and the longer my journey took the closer I felt I would be to finding my destination. Muppet. I finally got back to the shoot location (85 minutes later) only to see the entire 33-person crew waiting for me. The production manager was the colour of beetroot, and she was storming towards me screaming every profanity under the sun for all and sundry to hear (I have never had strips torn off me like that before or since). She walked to the boot of the car I was driving, popped it open and proceeded to hurl film cans at me while still screaming.

“Yes, I was driving around Sydney with all the film for the shoot in the boot of the car. It was the production manager’s car and she didn’t remove the film first, but I still accepted my scapegoat status for costing the production so much time and for being a typical male thinking I’d find where I needed to go. Double-Muppet.

“Finding my way around is still a bit of a drama, so I could REALLY USE THIS Navman GPS.”

Your shiny new Navman MY55 is on its way, Will. It has a 4.7-inch screen, Bluetooth, live weather updates, a food or petrol finding function and a petrol-saving mode. It won’t check what’s in the boot though—you’ll have to do that yourself.

Now they are one

Design Assembly is about to turn one. On the evening of September 30, the not-yet-venerable but definitely inspirational event will reconvene at AUT University’s Art & Design building for a typically eclectic event, including Meena Kadri on hand-lettered typography from the streets of India, David Gardener and Andrea Wilkinson on alternative urban landscapes in New Zealand, and Alt Group’s Toby Curnow on grids and tessellations in art and design. RSVP on the Design Assembly website.

Quote of the week

“This is what Walkpeople are missing: the genteel interplay between the soulful music of a city, a street-corner bagpiper merging with a builder’s boom-box mixed with strains of chain-store muzak peppered with stray profanities from the brown-toothed maw of a passing meth addict.”

– Matt Suddain finds refuge inside his earphones.

More at Idealog online

Read more on our website: web exclusives, opinion, creative directory, Idealog TV, the Idealog blogs and the Idealog podcast. See you at idealog.co.nz.

  Matt Cooney
  Editor

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