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What a beautiful way to recycle and reuse. From Dutch Design Week: designer Anke Weiss has created a series of lights from used food and drink packaging.

Weiss traces the patterns and text on the packaging with hundreds of pin-pricks, which allow the light to shine through.

The lights were exhibited at Eat Drink Design in Eindhoven during Dutch Design Week last month.

The One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) initiative is so very cool and I’m glad to be a part. I bought one and donated one on day one of the special “Give One, Get One” promotion. Tonight I got the following email:

Thank you for being one of the first to participate in Give One Get One.
All of us at One Laptop per Child were inspired by the number of people who joined our Give One Get One program on its very first day! Your participation makes you part of the growing community of people working to give children all over the world new opportunities to grow, explore, learn and express themselves.

Your XO laptop is on the way.
Your donated XO laptop will soon be delivered into the hands of a child in Afghanistan, Cambodia, Haiti, Mongolia or Rwanda. In one of our recipient children’s own words, “I want to thank you people because you had given us the laptop and I love it so much.” Your generosity will make a world of difference in these children’s lives, and in the future of their respective countries.

Thanks to your early action, your XO laptop is scheduled to be delivered between December 14 and December 24. Our “first day” donors are our highest priority and we are making every effort to deliver your XO laptop(s) as soon as possible. We will send you an update upon shipment.

—

What a great cause. What a great project. If you don’t know much about it, you can watch this video where Nicholas Negroponte (MIT media lab founder) and founder of the One Laptop Per Child project explains the project vision and goals.

The One Laptop per Child project’s “Give One, Get One” program has been extended through Dec. 31. According to reports, donations averaged about $2 million a day. On that pace, the OLPC should move about 490,000 units by the end of the year.

The big question many are asking is whether 490,000 units will be enough to rate the non-profit OLPC project a success.

That’s an issue that was raised in this Wall Street Journal article on Saturday. The basis of the WSJ story was this: Negroponte created a great idea but hasn’t hit his $100 mark for the price of the XO (yet) and after three years only 2,000 students in a pilot program have laptops. Some big orders may be on the way. However, Negroponte did rile up the for-profit biggies like Intel and Microsoft enough to bring down the costs of laptops in the developing world. If Negroponte’s project didn’t exist rest assured that Intel’s Classmate PC wouldn’t either.

My take is that Negroponte’s project is a huge success (regardless of the number of laptops he sells) merely because it forced a very important issue (education) to the forefront and got tech giants on board and created positive change.

According to reports from Shoppertrak, the 4am opening times that many retailers advertised last Friday must have worked…racking up $10.3 billion in sales. Up 8% over last year. But 4am! That’s crazy. I hate to shop. Hate it. Hate it. Hate it. Yet I went shopping Friday to pick up a few gifts. At a much more civilized 10am. I may have missed a few of the uber bargains, but also avoided the crazy, walkie-talkie-armed, reindeer antler-headband-wearing mobs who throw punches and elbow their way to their purchase target. There is nothing I want bad enough to risk that insane early morning mob scene.

Hyped nearly as much as Black Friday, Cyber Monday is a media darling. According to ComScore, it racked up $733 million for e-tailers Monday, up 21% from last year. Setting a record for the largest-ever day of online shopping. Interestingly enough, 60% of dollars spent online on Cyber Monday came from work computers, with the balance coming from home and university computers. Probably not a stat that makes employers happy.

BTW:  Shop.org put together a site called CyberMonday to aggregate information on special offers from hundreds of e-tailers. All of Shop.org’s proceeds from items purchased through CyberMonday.com help support a scholarship fund established to provide financial support to students pursuing careers in the e-commerce industry

Yesterday I wrote about my take on the strange sexy anthropomorphic animals TV spot for Orangina. Today a smart-ass friend — who I think is a fury wanna-be (wink) — forwarded this furies effort for Virgin Trains. Somehow coming from a brand like Virgin, this seems fairly tame and left me much less surprised than the Orangina spot.

Of course the spot they actually include on their website is much tamer than this viral effort found on YouTube.

It’s kind of disturbing. Yet you can’t turn away. Who knew the furries market was large enough to warrant their own campaign. Pole dancing flamingos, ass-slapping zebras, bouncing furry beasts straddling exploding bottles. Even a scene with a doe, reminiscent of the famous Flash Dance one with the chair and the water. Yet somehow all the sexy anthropomorphic animals in this mind-bending French ad works for Orangina and is actually way cool.

Definitely not a typical stroll through the woods. Sainte merde!

Client: Orangina
Agency: FFL, Paris

More excellent work from Michael Wesch, Asst Professor of Cultural Anthroplogy at Kansas State University. Created in collaboration with the 200 students enrolled in Introduction to Cultural Anthropology at KSU, “it began as a brainstorming exercise, thinking about how students learn, what they need to learn for their future, and how our current educational system fits in.”

Wesch also created the video, Web 2.0 … The Machine is Us/ing Us which was released on YouTube in January 2007 and quickly became one of the most popular videos in the blogosphere.

Read more about the project and other explorations by Digital Enthnography, a working group of Kansas State University students and faculty dedicated to exploring and extending the possibilities of digital ethnography.

Word has it there were 6,000+ dominoes and hundreds of villagers in Argentina involved in this massive production. Looks to me like an exercise to see just how much money you can spend in producing a commercial.

Reports are the cost was £10m (almost $15 million). OK so it may have fire and beer, but it’s not exactly an original concept. The Honda Cog spot was done in 2003. And I’d bet the budget was a lot less than $15 million.

Very, very hard to watch. Check out this powerful effort by Canadian workplace safety group Prevent-it.ca.

There are two spots on the site, but two more on YouTube from last year that are just as powerful. Watch this and this.

Everything is easier to sell online. Everyone is easier to sell online. The Net has turned nearly every business into a global business and every customer into a global consumer writes Michael Maiello in this recent Forbes article.

Here’s the Forbes list of industries transformed:

• Accounting and Taxes — IRS loves it because tax returns don’t get lost in the mail or trampled in warehouses.
• Collectibles — You can find anything on Ebay.
• Fine Arts — Take your time and have it shipped.
• Media — Google, Yahoo!, MSN and Doubleclick have changed advertising forever.
• Political Donations — The Net has brought the small contributor into the fold.
• Real Estate — A home buyer can verify every broker’s claims.
• Retail — Comparison shopping no longer means trips to multiple stores.
• Software — No longer requires installation.
• Stocks — The stock market has been democratized by the Internet.
• Travel — Prospective travelers have the same information that previously, only travel agents had.

I think I would add music and banking. I can’t remember the last time I bought a CD or actually went to the bank.

Website flash intros are not only soooo 1999, they’re downright obnoxious. Usually conceived by some designer with very little real online development experience who thinks it would be really cool to put some obscure, highly-visual opening on the site. When most users encounter one of these time-wasting intros, they immediate try to find the skip button. I know I do. And if there isn’t a skip button, I’m outta there.

So I was a bit surprised today to be impressed by what is essentially a site intro. While I was looking for some Danish-oriented party stuff (don’t ask), I stumbled on a site that had an intro that was actually good — probably because it was relevant. At least I think it was. Even though I can’t read a word of it (I think it’s Dutch), I got the point. And it actually entertained me and made me curious to see more about the HEMA product offerings.