Razorfish is doing a lot of interesting and sophisticated stuff. Here are some prototype videos of their experience project, if you want to watch more go to their vimeo channel. And if you haven’t done it already, check out their digital outlook report 2009.

DaVinci (Microsoft Surface Physics Illustrator) from Razorfish – Emerging Experiences on Vimeo.

DaVinci is a prototype/experiment that blurs the lines between the physical and virtual world by combining object recognition, real-world physics simulation and gestural interface design on Microsoft Surface.

Microsoft Surface Financial Services Application – Razorfish Demo from Razorfish – Emerging Experiences on Vimeo.

Microsoft Surface Financial Services application is a joint development between Microsoft and Razorfish. It is an innovative and engaging solution to present banking products to customers within a rich multi-touch experience.

Again I really like how they are also using info graphics to create an even better customer experience especially for complicated financial products.

Amnesia Razorfish – Staff Directory on Surface from Razorfish – Emerging Experiences on Vimeo.

The Staff Directory application uses Surface tags printed on all Amnesia Razorfish business cards to show extra information about employees such as blog posts, tweets and flickr photos.

Razorfish reinvented the business card, nice application that enriches the experience of meeting new people.

Tim Keil & I are trying to organize a crowd sourcing get together for strategic planners and other people that are interesting in strategy, digital and social media around the re:publica in Berlin. We don’t have any plan what it’s going to be but we will find it out together with you. Join your Planner Stammtisch re:publica 09 group on Facebook and spread the word.

I found this great video about the creativity juice on Paul Isakson’s blog.

And it started to make me think about creativity and it’s origin and purpose. Who are the people that can help us to solve problems in a way that we haven’t thought of before. The purpose of creativity should be to help us to overcome barriers no matter what kind they are. For me it’s more an intellectual process than an executional (I think this is especially in advertising usually the other way around). So where can you find this talents and thinkers? And even more important how can you make sure that you know that you found them? The creativity juice shows in a great way that it’s impossible to produce this kind of talent on purpose, either you have it or not. And the even bigger problem is that you need to find people and measurements to judge if somebody is creative or not. What’s the criteria? Imagination? Knowledge? Education? Awards? (which seems to be the common thing in advertising)

At Breitenbach und Brown (I can’t link to the actual post, only the page. So the post might be somewhere completely different when you click on it) I found a great post about Misfits and a link to Malcolm Gladwell’s speech about the mismatch problem. This might be one of the biggest barriers that keeps our society back because I believe in every industry you need creativity to overcome barriers. If we don’t know what it takes to judge creativity, we can’t ensure that we have the right talents at the right place. Years ago one of my professor told us:

“The only reason why you (students) are here is to learn things that you will need in the future to solve problems where you don’t even know right now that they exist and what they are about.”

To judge people and there abilities to solve problems that we don’t know yet is one of these things.

This Businessweek article at I found at GarethK shows on the one side how desperately Martin Sorrell & WPP are trying to understand the digital world and on the other side it’s sad they they just started 2 months ago. At least they understood that only digital can save the future of their holding but I’m not sure if this is enough. Because more important is that they know what kind of talent/creativity they need to overcome the problem. Up till now Martin only identified the problem and the playground but not how to solve it, which is the critical part. Luckily for him he has not the only major network that’s struggling with this.

To understand what people we need to take fully advantage of the digital world, we first need to understand what kind of mindset, talent and creativity this kind of people need have. Facebook and Twitter are not the key to this but the people behind it. We rather study Mark Zuckerberg and Evan Williams than how to run a viral campaign on Facebook or how to use fake Twitter accounts to promote XYZ.