Instagram is announcing new features on a weekly basis at the moment. This one is about setting reminders for product launches, so the hordes can buy your products as soon as they are available on Instagram. What will happen is that the product launch sticker in IG Stories and product launch tag in the IG feed will allow people to set up such a lau...

Our climate is fucked, and we're not going to spend time either reminding you of the present and future fragility that our planet is in, or arguing that it isn't. We have done it through emitting far too much CO2. That's it. There is a rally this afternoon in Trafalgar Square, London, to lobby Arts Council England to adopt a much more pro-acti...

​We’re back with Facebook developments again, with these coming off the company’s annual event, Oculus Connect. The big announcement is that the company wants social interactions to “feel physical”, through the use of ultra-realistic avatars. Here’s how the company describes it... We call this "social presence." It's the 3D-enabled feeling tha...

Across FB, Instagram, and WhatsApp, Facebook is extending interactivity in areas such as video gaming and advertising. As mentioned in a recent post to the Facebook Blog , the company is taking the interactive video poll idea from Instagram and applying it to Facebook. It means that users would be able to conduct simple reactive tasks such as vote,...

New from Rob Manuel is a place where you can tell the Internet, anonymously, what you haven't told anyone before. The beautifully-named Fesshole allows anyone to add their confessions to a Google Form which in turn are individually published to a Twitter account of the same name . We assume that the Google Form and underlying Google Sheet does...

The Zuckopticon is on a charm offensive at the moment, with ad campaigns running across Europe and the US In both print and TV to remind people both how Facebook’s settings work and that it is, as a business, ​very ​ concerned about privacy. Yes, really. Such is the company’s commitment to privacy that it is continuing to launch new devices in...

Another day, another opportunity by way of the lovely folks from Linz. Ars Electronica has launched a new residency programme for artists working with new technologies. The programme is called EMAP, which British readers might remember as the name of a once-mighty publisher. In this case, however, it stands for European Media Art Platform, and...

​Popular... no, HIGHLY popular advertising archive Adland has been taken offline through a DMCA takedown notice issued to the site's host, Vultr, by lawyers representing tyre manufacturer Bridgestone. The background is this. Holland & Hart LLP, a law firm representing Bridgestone, issued Adland with a takedown notice for an ad from BBDO. Called...

​Where one might have spent their earlier years in a fug listening to The Orb or Future Sound of London, where do these more-grown-up music tastes go now? Ambient has certainly moved on but so has classical. ​The Guardian ​ lists a set of classical tracks that might not have serenaded your earlobes before. They range from composers that you might h...

​There is clearly no doubt that Greta Thunberg is a brave, courageous, and strong young woman. If you haven't seen her speech to world leaders at this year's UN Climate Change conference yet, then you should absolutely do so. One can only imagine how many leaders looked down at the carpet in faux shame when she was in full flow. Just look at the st...

R World, the strangely-named app for key Burberry customers, now offers a way for big spenders of the label to talk with store assistants directly. Basically, if you spend enough money with Burberry, you're invited into being an R World user. From there, if your thirst for the yellow-and-red-check still needs quenching, you can use the R Messa...

We can't think of any garden-based games, except for a somewhat esoteric memory of Ned's Garden , released in 1983 for the Sinclair ZX Spectrum . Fast-forward 36 (!!!) years and there's a new garden with a new owner.  ​Lily's Garden ​ is a mobile game which combines RPG-style plot with a  ​Tetris ​-esque puzzle game. However, the she...

The first time I ever discussed the idea of NOT NOT was on Imperica in 2015 saying When Magritte wrote, "This is not a pipe" under his painting of a pipe he was playing with the relationship between an object and its representation...This liminal state is more easily understood in terms of performance. Consider an actor playing Hamlet. We acknowled...

Facebook has announced that it will stop pushing ads about slimming and diet products across its eponymous platform and subsidiary Instagram to users under 18. Of course, while this is absolutely right and The Proper Thing To Do, it assumes that you have filled in the age field honestly in the first place. For 10 points, try to remem...

Austrian digital art behemoth Ars Electronica has opened a new scheme for artists working in AI to gain a residency in Edinburgh. The winner will receive  €10,000 comprising of a €3k artist fee, a €5k production budget, €2k extra costs budget, and €5k for travel - including to Ars in Linz for 4-6 weeks, and the University of Edi...

Many UK grown-ups will remember  ​Byker Grove ​, the BBC's Newcastle-based teen drama which launched the careers of Ant & Dec (now famous TV presenters in their own right); Jill Halfpenny (a highly successful actor); and Donna Air (er... us neither). If you're in your 40s, then you probably remember the first few series or so. In fact...

Friend of Imperica  ​Alex May ​ is releasing a new ambient album,  ​Innocuous Sporran Fury ​​, of which the title track is charmingly entitled E very puppy has a gun and will own you in the end. As ambient fans ourselves (the new Max Würden is AWESOME by the way), Alex is a composer in the style that we could probably call Modern Cla...

In a recent Web Curios ( 24 May ), we included a link to an ongoing project from Bow Arts which looks at the history of the Lea Valley - the area surrounding the River Lea in east London from the River Thames up to Hertford. Peter Marshall has been capturing London life for more than 40 years, and has published his archive across a variet...

Comms planner and author of  ​Planning Dirty ​, Julian Cole, has launched a suite of courses and materials called  ​Planning Dirty Academy ​. Offered as a paid service, PDA will contain materials, resources, and plenty of other stuff for comms planners - including monthly webinars with some of the best senior planners from around the worl...

​Media analysis company Commetric has posted a piece on how public attitudes to Palm Oil have been shifted by specific interventions - with some brands acting much more quickly than others. The author, Dimitar Ganev, singles out Iceland as being a winner in this debate. Its ad with Rang-Tan the chimpanzee, lifted from an earlier ad for Greenpeace a...