Roominate gives a modern twist to a typical girl's dollhouse. Along with building individual rooms, girls can also change the wiring and rig different rooms with working light switches, buzzers, or even fans. 

The project began with three women majoring in engineering, math, and science who saw that there is a gap in girls' toys that inspire engineering and electronics. The women, being in a field dominated by men, wanted to offer toys that promoted a different kind of play for young girls. With the help of Kickstarter, they created Roominate to hopefully inspire girls to get out of their prepackaged pink Barbie boxes and get down and dirty with electronics and building. They succeeded their goal of $25,000 and accumulated over $85,000 to fund the project. For those lucky enough who got to snag a kit will have two wooden walls, a floor, various building pieces to construct furniture, one complete circuit, and assorted decorations.

Technology is ever changing and is becoming more integrated in our daily lives.
It's refreshing to see that toys are reflecting the expansive world of electronics to not only boys, but girls as well. Creativity and exposure to different ideas shouldn’t be limited by our sex, and Roominate makes room for young female engineers to learn and grow without feeling alienated.

Is your brand on Pinterest? If so, what kind of metrics are you using and how are you tabulating them? (You are tracking against some sort of success metric, right?)

If these questions leave you with a look more awkward than Phil Mickelson's smile as he approaches the 18th green, then fear not; there is hope. Enter Curalate.

As stated in the video above,

Curalate uses some pretty cool technologies to automagically find, match, and remember images that are about your brand. We take the impossible and make it possible, discovering, tracking and measuring the sharing of your brand's content on visual platforms like Pinterest.

Curalate is packed full of stats and graphs, and appears to be thorough to say the least. My only caution on this one is to make sure you don't get lost in the data. As with most things online, it's possible to track a minutia of data points, but not all data points truly matter. Make sure you don't get lost tabulating results that aren't actionable or insightful.

Thanks, Ben!

As technology continues to evolve, one thing remains constant — great advertising is driven by great ideas. It is not the platform selected that makes a campaign successful. The TV is not what makes the TV commercial interesting. It is the message, the call-to-action, the piece of advice or the perspective that makes a brand's voice resonate. 

In today's world, it's easy to get lost in exciting announcements of new gadgets, platforms and updates. Google's Project Re: Brief aims to help adjust marketers' focus from the channel back to the content being shared. It has done this through an hour-long video in which iconic, "old school" advertisers were reunited in New York to re-launch their infamous campaigns for four global brands — Coca-Cola, Volvo, Alka-Seltzer and Avis — using current technologies. 

The takeaway is clear for all advertisers. It's time to start thinking creatively. Google has also done a good job of practicing what they preach.  By helping advertisers everywhere to improve their campaigns through inspiring, nostalgic content, they are setting their advertising services up for greater success as well. 

At the end of the day, when advertisers think creatively, the consumer, brand and marketing platform can all benefit. The consumer and brand can hold more meaningful conversations and the platforms gain user activity needed for survival. That leaves one last question — what are you going to say? 

Many of us share what we eat on social media, but imagine if what you eat is actually the result of what people share. Tasty Tweets was created by three creative designers from the Copenhagen Institute of Interactive Design.

Tasty Tweets collects Twitter mentions of specific words describing various fruits (blueberry, pineapple, apple or carrot) on Twitter and creates an edible smoothie representation of this. Twitter data so good you can taste it. As we all know, mentions and trends consistently change therefore no smoothie is identical.

Each smoothie's data is also represented graphically on a computer screen showing the proportions of flavors. Past smoothies can also be compared to one another via the historic view of trends over time. This is the most delicious data visualization we've seen yet.

The effect of social media is a powerful, transformative beast. Situations that would have gone unnoticed ten years ago are now at the forefront of our everyday lives, and most would agree that that’s not a bad thing. In the past week we’ve seen some amazingly hilarious and genuinely touching examples of how the Internet is connecting people from all walks of life for causes big or small.

The first has a real sense of humor. When Matthew Inman from the famous cartoon site The Oatmeal was delivered a cease and desist letter from FunnyJunk.com for pointing out on his site that they stole his cartoons, most people would expect him to settle to make it go away. The Oatmeal, for people who aren’t avid fans, just doesn’t work like that though. Inman’s impeccable sense of humor is what keeps his fans coming back, and he seemed damned to succumb to an aggregation site’s absurd request for $20,000 in settlement money for content he had created in the first place.

To spite the people behind the allegations, Inman used his artistic skills and smarts to find a way to get the word out and make an example of the situation. Operation BearLove Good, Cancer Bad was launched on Indiegogo on June 11th with the following premise:

“I'm trying to raise $20k to donate half to the National Wildlife Federation (for the bears), and half to the American Cancer Society (because cancer is shitty).”