TGI Friday’s was right

I bring my lunch to work 3-4 days a week, typically soups or frozen meals. So I’m no stranger to the disconnect between the highly stylized picture on the package and the less appealing food that gets presented to me from the microwave. To really drive the point home, this website highlights the images from a German study of packaging images with the real-life food contained therein.

Interestingly, one place that really understands how this difference can have an effect on the eater is TGI Friday’s. When I worked there about 5 years ago we were told time and time again that part of the reason we had to slice strawberries and present hamburgers a certain way is that customers expect it to look like the food in the picture. It’s true. If the strawberry margarita came out without the strawberry garnish and the sugar rim, you can bet we would hear about it. “But that’s not how it looks in the picture!” they’d say. And so we’d have to take it back and make it look like the picture.

I recall how laborious it seemed that the parsley had to be sprinkled just so on the bruschetta pasta, but damn if it didn’t come out of the kitchen looking the exact same every time. At the time I found it incredibly annoying, but now I think Friday’s might have gained a bit of competitive advantage by paying attention to details like that.

Pop culture on the web

With millions of pages of information being added to the information superhighway everyday, it’s amazing that two people, or three or even a million have all seen the same thing. And yet it happens. Maybe we hear about these memes on Best Week Ever or The Soup, maybe our friend passes along a link, or maybe we somehow stumbled upon it ourselves. Whatever the case, it’s amazing that amid all the noise and garbage online, I can still mention Diet Coke and Mentos or Rickrolling and people know what I’m talking about.

Here is the video I can’t get enough of right now. I started watching one week ago and I still laugh every time I see it. As a testament to the weird stickiness of random things on the web, over the weekend the video got over 1.5 million hits (I swear it wasn’t all me).

Admittedly, I’m not the hippest when it comes to memes, which is why I found this list helpful if not exhaustive: Greg Rutter’s Definitive List of the 99 Things You Should Have Already Experienced On The Internet Unless You’re a Loser or Old or Something.

Once again, Facebook is a petri dish of social behavior

Everyone who uses Facebook (ok, maybe everyone under the age of 30) is familiar with “Facebook Facts” – something you discover about a Facebook friend based on a status update or post. The most commonly exploited of these Facebook facts revolves around relationship status. When someone deletes the status from their profile, the feed on Facebook lists that as “Friend X is no longer single.” Typically that starts an avalanche of assumptions and doubts from people who may not be intimately familiar with Friend X’s actual dating successes or failures. And then along the way, it’s accepted as Facebook Fact.

Facebook has recently proven to be the litmus test for another of social psychology’s great wonders – the chain letter. I’m talking about the millions of people who were tagged in the recent “25 Things” craze. This involved a friend posting 25 random (but hopefully interesting and/or bizarre) facts about themself and then tagging 25 friends to do the same, thereby creating a pyramid scheme of useless personal trivia. In just a few days, dozens of my friends were caught up in the opportunity to list 25 random things about themselves that could, for once, really be considered Facebook facts.

This led me to discover several eye-opening details about some real good friends and some real good Facebook friends, including  “My favorite words are ‘Suave’ and ‘Myrmidon’” and “I once went 52 hours without sleeping or sitting” and “I day dream of playing capture the flag in the woods with a hundred people.”

Slate assistant editor Chris Wilson was also intrigued by the 25 Things and wrote this initial article and this follow-up, the latter of which compares the 25 Things contagion to the outbreak of infectious disease. Although not surprising, given the constant connectivity of people these days, it’s still interesting to see how quickly virtual information gets spread to such large numbers of people.

Microsoft surfaces in Vegas

Now that touch screens have hit the masses via cell phones, it looks like touch tables may be next. There has been buzz about the Microsoft Surface Tables for awhile, but it still seemed like something only tech geeks would talk about. Until now.

With Vegas hot spots like Mandalay Bay, the Palms and the Wynn stealing most of the spotlight, the Rio hotel and casino rarely makes it onto the buzz meter. But the Harrah’s owned property is making some smart decisions to earn cool points with hot new technology. According to this report on bub.blicio.us, Rio’s iBar features six of Microsoft’s Surface Tables that allow customers to use touch screen technology to do everything from watch YouTube videos, order drinks, play games alone or with friends, and even send pick-up lines and drinks to people at other tables.

Aside from custom content for Rio, several of the applications include branded content, like the bowling game using a lime to knock down empty Patron bottles.

This is a smart move for both Rio and Microsoft. Rio has a chance to gain some popularity by being a leader with this new technology and Microsoft has a much better chance of making waves in popular culture by allowing people to play with the product (why do you think Apple stores are always so crowded?).  The surface table interface clicks at the casino by delivering two critical benefits – interaction and customization:

1. Interaction – It encourages people to further engage in an already social environment
2. Customization – It offers highly personalized content through an entertaining and easy-to-use interface

Visualizing information

I’m analytical by nature but I have a hard time really processing information unless it’s represented visually. That’s why the graphics-heavy layout of USA Today and books like Edward Tufte’s The Visual Display of Quantitative Information are so fascinating.

One of my new favorite websites is FlowingData, which focuses exclusively on data visualization. At the end of the year they compiled the top 5 best visualization projects of 2008. In addition to being incredibly impressive projects, these projects are a good reminder that data can be both informative and really great to look at.

Not surprisingly, Radiohead made the shortlist with their “House of Cards” music video that used no cameras, only scanners and lasers. The video was just one of the band’s list of breakthrough, clutter-busting efforts over the past couple of years,  including offering a pay-what-you-want digital version of album “In Rainbows” that went on to top the charts in CD sales and a fan contest to create a music video.

Life in raw data

These days, there seems to be no limit to what the internet can do. We can learn about new inventions, find out the weather 3,000 miles away, book a vacation and catch up with friends. But the internet is best at amplifying the one thing we are most interested in: ourselves. In an inspiring article in Good magazine, Boing Boing‘s David Pescovitz talks about how technology is enabling us to not only learn more about ourselves but keep a record of who we are -  everything from exercise and diet habits to sleep cycles and number of phone calls made.

3-D Mania

What’s old is new again. So too with 3-D technology, the relic from the early 50s. Not just sequestered in science museums and IMAX theaters, 3-D is making a huge comeback, and it’s been a long time coming. The New York Times predicted a return of 3-D back in 2002. Last month, NYT revisited the topic after it got a lot of attention at the CES Show.

Last weekend’s SuperBowl highlighted just a few examples of today’s resurgence of 3-D technology. Here is a sample of the latest offerings from TV, movies and advertising:

Movies:

• My Bloody Valentine 3D (out now)
• Coraline (opens Friday)
• Under the Sea 3D (Feb. 11)

Check out MarketSaw for a complete list of upcoming 3D movies.

TV:

• Chuck episode in 3-D (NBC, aired Feb. 2)
• A post on Craigslist in NY claims to be producing North America’s first 3-D show
• Panasonic announced they would like to begin making 3-D TVs in 2010

Advertising:

• A new website for Crest in 3-D
• SoBe Lifewater
• Monsters vs. Aliens movie trailer

Video games + music = jackpot

Often talk of a recession leads to how people are restructuring not just their finances, but their time. Many people start spending more time in the home – cooking, renting movies and reading books. Increasingly, both children and adults are spending some of that time playing video games. Despite the economic downturn with many industries struggling to stay afloat, video games raked in a record-breaking $11.7 billion in 2008, a 23% increase over 2007. That’s according to Mediaweek who cites numbers from NPD Group.

Interestingly, sales indicate that people are especially interested in top titles with a strong music tie-in.

• “Madden NFL 09″ sold over 5.25 million units and includes a 26-song soundtrack.
• “Grand Theft Auto IV” (5.22 million units) features 214 songs on 16 stations in the game’s car radios – from Latin to hard rock to hip-hop.
• “Guitar Hero World Tour” (3.4 million units) debuted in October and includes songs from major artists like Jimi Hendrix and Metallic, who included their new album “Death Magnetic” as downloadable content on the game.
• “Rock Band 2″ (1.7 million units) features over 80 tracks including exclusives from AC/DC, Guns ‘N Roses, and Bob Dylan. The game release coincided with a 29-city “Rock Band Live” tour headlined by Panic at the Disco and Dashboard Confessional.

When’s the last time you remembered a cab ride?

It’s easy to assume that your next experience in a cab will be like every other, no matter where you are. You tell the driver your destination and sit silently looking out the window or reviewing news and/or emails on your Blackberry or iPhone. Maybe you attempt some idle chit-chat with the driver. Whatever your protocol, chances are you forgot about the ride the moment you stepped out of the car. That’s why cabs are such an easy space to make memorable.

As Arturo Trovato writes, his recent experience in a Chicago taxi got him thinking about the simple things that can make the experience so much more enjoyable and even worth talking about.

“A few minutes into the ride I asked my cabbie what gives. Why are you messing with me? Turns out he had this idea one day that people need a cab ride to be something more than a way to get from point A to point B. A cab ride should be about peace of mind and tranquility; a client should feel happier after experiencing the ride. The cabbie also told me that a cab should be a place where people can share their thoughts with those who ride after them.”

Sweet Coraline

Everything about Coraline is a delight, from the story to the movie adaptation to its promotion.

Coraline is a spooky tale about a girl who finds a doorway into an alternative universe inhabited by strange and sometimes terrifying creatures, like a man made of rats and a couple who look just like her parents but who have shiny black buttons for eyes. Although the content seems a bit gruesome, the book is targeted to 9-12 year old readers. I read the story when it was first published in 2002 and was delighted by the imaginative creepiness of it, on par with Nightmare Before Christmas or Lemony Snicket’s Series of Unfortunate Events books.

Now the story of Coraline has been made into a “stop-motion horror fantasy” movie from the director of Nightmare Before Christmas and starring the voices of Dakota Fanning as Coraline and Teri Hatcher as Coraline’s mom and Other Mother. The promotion of the movie includes the standard fare: TV commercials, an interactive website, and a collection of accompanying merchandise on Amazon.com.

But the best promotion elements are less mainstream and celebrate the enigma and intrigue of the story:  50 mysterious boxes that were sent to bloggers and Coraline keys that have been placed in public areas in New York and Chicago (the keys have gotten attention on Craigslist and listings on eBay). You can follow the posts made by the bloggers who received boxes here.