iPlot

A New Way to See the Internet: Google Chrome Videos by BBH

Here's how you do product demos right: Advertising firm BBH has produced a series of videos for the Google Chrome browser, and you have to give them credit for creating such intuitive, almost naive metaphors for a very unemotional 'technocratic' brand. Since Peter Greenaway no one has married math and artistic expression more convincingly. It's truly "A New Way to See the Internet."

From the BBH labs site: "We took Google’s ingenuity & innovation as inspiration in developing the idea for seven short films (& an intro), demonstrating the benefits of Google Chrome. Every creation is built by hand, filmed in camera, with no special effects added. Even the music where Jacqui, the harpist, is playing is live on set. As it should always be with Google, the product is the hero. We celebrate the Chrome product, but we hope in a 'Googley' way." 

A look behind the scenes

New design mind issue Launches with TED Salon in London

TED Curator Chris Anderson – who had 844,821…wait 844,833 followers the last time we looked – tweeted about it yesterday, and we’re thrilled that the word is now out about the new special TEDGlobal edition of our design mind magazine, “The Substance of Things Not Seen."

We officially unveiled the new issue on Monday with an intimate TED Salon ("More Substance of Things Not Seen") with 120 TEDsters and friends at the Unicorn Theater in London. Hosted by Bruno Giussani, TED’s European director, and Sam Martin, editor-in-chief of design mind, the evening featured three TED Talks.

Fabio Sergio, creative director at frog design, explored the possibilities of using data produced by the human body to educate the human mind: "How to design (for) awareness and self-reflection? How to design platforms that people can use to encourage and challenge each other to follow what they believe are virtuous behaviors?"

His main proposition goes like this: We live in a world of data. From keeping track of our household expenses to sharing our running data with the community at Nike+: What happens if we go on with this idea and gain the ability to keep track of even more areas?

Sergio's vision can be neatly summarized as: track, share, and change. He sees four intersecting opportunities: Access to our own data streams and services to accrue and store our bit crumbs forever; individual and collective aggregations to reveal hidden patterns; well-designed interactive tools of self-reflection to visualize, manipulate, and shape raw data into meaningful information; and social networks that encourage and sustain virtuous behavior by treating it as social currency.

In his prediction, it is essential that we track more data of our lives, our behavior, and the things we use. To make this data more accessible, visualization is key. Secondly, the data that we collect should be made usable for our social lives. Thirdly, data analysis and sharing it with our environment to trigger social pressure could trigger change. An example: Imagine you could keep track of your Toyota Prius CO2 emission and share that data with other drivers on the road in front of you. A display in your car would show you that the Prius next to you has ejected fewer emissions than you. Wouldn’t this be the perfect challenge? Now imagine you could see your friends’, your family’s, your neighbor’s emissions. Instead of just saving the environment as a single player, it would transfer it into a collective challenge – a playful way to save our planet and a great way to show off in front of your friends at the next dinner party! "It's all about love and passion again," Sergio said, and "empathy."

Fields Wicker-Miurin, co-founder of Leaders' Quest, presented her vision of new leadership based on field-based insights from around the world. Wicker-Miurin trains business leaders by connecting them to other leaders. This sounds rather common - however, her leaders live in the Amazon forest or are advocates of HIV education in India or collect and display artifacts related to uneasy periods in Chinese history: they are leaders that face the real challenges of our time.

Wicker-Miurin spoke forcefully about Benki, a young tribesman from deep in the Amazon, facing the threat of deforestation, which not only has an impact on climate change, but also, much more immediately, on the existence of his people. Becoming a leader very early in life, he recognized that the environment, the animals, the rivers, the air he breathes and his tribe's existence were in danger. That's when he took a step out of the Amazon and traveled 3000 km to the Earth Summit in Rio -- to tell the world outside about the world inside the forest, and connect the two worlds. He spoke, but he also learned a lot, and brought those learnings home. Almost 20 years have past and the Ashaninkas (Benki's tribe) have reforested 25% of their territory, created schools, brought satellite Internet to the village, and more. After describing other profiles from around the world, Wicker-Miurin summarized the seven characteristics of the "new leaders": they go away from what they know; build bridges and walk across them; have a sense of the great arc of time; know that they depend on others; remember that “it's not about them, but it starts with them”; and have humility.

 

Misha Glenny, underworld investigator and author of the book McMafia-Seriously Organized Crime, is interested in different kinds of leaders: key figures in the "shadow economy" of organzied crime. In conversation with TED's Bruno Giussani, Glenny discussed very openly, and with genuine humour, his research methods, the encounters with his sources, and some behind-the-scenes episodes. Among many other things, we learned that the FARC had no interest in kidnapping him, that fake names are often references to characters in gangster movies, and that human traffickers and drug dealers were especially hit hard by the financial crisis. Glenny was also interviewed for the new design mind issue ("Hiding in Plain Sight").

Andreas Raptopoulos, founder of FutureAcoustic, gave an exclusive technology demo of reactive soundscapes. And singer/songwriter Lou Rhodes concluded the program with a stunning "unplugged" live performance.

The advance copies of design mind were in high demand.

The moderators, Bruno Giussani and Sam Martin, awaiting the "Substance of Things Not Seen"...

On the other side of the pond, simultaneously, the launch was more grassroots-style. Promoted via twitter, an ad-hoc group of 50 strangers (a Twitter Flashmob, if you will) convened at the café in our back alley at noon sharp, uttered the password “Oxford,” and picked up their free copy.

There’s already a lot of buzz about the magazine on Twitter (search for “designmind” and “frogdesign”) and on blogs. BusinessWeek just re-published Beth Comstock’s (CMO and SVP of GE) article from the new issue, in full content, online. Core77 has a nice write-up featuring frog designer’s Laura Richardson’s article, and so does Nathaniel Whittemore on Change.org. TED.com has highlighted the issue on its blog.

All photos by Robert Leslie (except for the one at the bottom, which is by Jacob Zukerman). You can find more on Flickr.

London Design Festival Celebrates the Art and Business of Design

Several of my colleagues are in London this week to unveil the special TEDGlobal issue of our design mind magazine in a very special TED Salon on Monday, with the title "More Substance of Things Not Seen." The event will be co-hosted by frog design and TED, and moderated by Sam Martin, editor-in-chief of design mind, and Bruno Giussani, European director of TED. More about that soon.

It comes in handy for the frog delegation that this is also the first week of the magnanimous London Design Festival, an eclectic assembly of design-related programs, exhibitions, and parties all over town.

You can watch an introduction by Festival Director Ben Evans here.

Yesterday Jaime Hayón unveiled The Tournament, his chess board installation that will be used to play chess today for the first time by the lucky applicants who signed up to pit their wits against English Chess Federation guests and world champion players.

Possibly the world’s tallest paper tower, Paper Monument, by Shigeru Ban has been completed alongside Marc Newson’s Supercell structure.

Much of the Festival program starts this weekend, including the opening of exhibitions at the festival hub, the V&A. There is a flurry of activity around the Oxo Tower Wharf, which opens its doors to coincide with the Festival, London Fashion Week, and London Open House. Brunswick House on Wandsworth Road in Vauxhall is the setting for Super-Squat - a design invasion. RE-made (in Britain) at A-Z studios on Hardwidge Street in London Bridge is also open.

A 6 minute train ride from London Bridge is South London's creative hotspot, Deptford, which witnesses the re-launch of Committee's Gallop Complex, accommodating Committee’s design studio, a coffee bar and a one-seat cinema. Across the river at Somerset House, The Sorrell Foundation's exhibition What’s Next for Schools? is open. Just round the corner the London Transport Museum hosts The Outer Limits – Beyond Zone One poster exhibition depicting the glories of suburbia.

In the West End, Ligne Roset opens a show called Urban Nature and Armani / Cassa launch their new collection of furniture, accessories, limited editions and exclusive textiles by Rubelli in New Bond Street. Not far from there La Maison de la Région Languedoc–Roussillon host their first exhibition of contemporary regional French design entitled Sud de France Design 2009 in Cavendish Square.

In the West, Young Creative Poland showcases emerging Polish talent in the Brompton Design District whilst SCP West in Westbourne Grove launches a new range of decorative bone china by Donna Wilson. On the Kings Road Designers Guild store hosts an exhibition called The Chair.

In the East, there is even more than usual to see, including, for fans of graphic design, Made in YCN on Rivington Street in Shoreditch. Emerge open their first graduate showcase at Rich Mix, and Magma in Clerkenwell open their exhibition called Russian Doll. If you're in the area you can go on a stroll with Studio PH on a guided walk of the area entitled MetaboliCity.

Back to frog design: On Monday morning, frog president Doreen Lorenzo will be one of the panelists in the Financial Times’ "Business of Design" Talks at the V&A’s Sackler Center. The "Responses to the Recession" panel will explore how design-led companies are coping with the current economic crisis. Are tight-spending consumers now in charge or can big brands still drive buying behavior? Will the market polarize into a world of ultra-luxury products for the “haves” and super-inexpensive ones for the “have-nots”? What strategies – back to basics, diffusion lines, etc. – work best in a downturn? Doreen will be joined by Miguel Fluxà Ortí, the Vice President of Camper; Rolf Sachs, Designer; and Geoffroy de La Bourdonnaye, Chief Executive Officer of Liberty.

TEDIndia: The Future Beckons

I'll miss it (because of my soon-to-be-born baby girl), but I wish I could go to this one: From November 4-7, 2009, TEDIndia will offer a vision of the future that's rich with invention, entrepreneurship, cross-disciplinary problem-solving, unexpected solutions and sensory delight. Hosted in a country that’s reinventing itself -- and reshaping the world.

Watch this preview:

Is Advertising Dead? or The Third Way of Building Brand Equity

(Credit): Element 22

There seem to be three (non-mutually exclusive) models for marketers tasked with building brand equity: marketing scarcity, marketing artificial scarcity, or marketing relevance.

Scarcity seems to be at the core of all marketing: an exclusive, unique value that can be reproduced; an original idea replicated for many. That's how markets work, how marketing works. Branding is effective when it keeps the aura of an original idea intact despite its mechanical reproduction. Apple's original idea, for instance, could be described as "technology must be fun and human," and it has not lost an inch of its integrity. That's the trait of a strong brand: the idea remains scarce while its distribution becomes abundant. The scarcity of all branded, manufactured products is of course artificial. If it wasn't, these products wouldn't need to be branded. That's the whole point (and the difference between water and bottled water.)

Some brands have taken this concept a step further by creating a special type of artificial scarcity: "democratic exclusivity." Sounds paradoxical? Well, it is. But it works. Gmail has pioneered it: An (exclusive) invitation-only service that pretty much everyone can get invited to (democratic). As another example, take Apple's strategy with the iPhone app store. It is a closed system (exclusive) but principally open for third parties (democratic). Look at the Kindle that Amazon purportedly shares as an app for other mobile devices. It shows that it's certainly good to have recognizable hardware (exclusive) but the true value lies in the software that you own and that you can use to extend the reach of your brand (democratic). Or Radiohead's pay-as-you-like release of “In Rainbows”: Buyers could determine the price (democratic) but the offer only stood for a limited period of time (exclusive). The album - online and physical distribution combined - sold more than Radiohead's previous releases, and the radically democratic way of pricing created a significant amount of brand equity for the band. Democratic exclusivity at its best: artificial scarcity in abundance.

The third and perhaps most game-changing model for marketers is selling relevance rather than scarcity. Jeff Jarvis points to Digg's new advertising system that enables users to vote on ads. Techcrunch calls it a "self service advertising product" that is "somewhat similar to Google Adwords, but with a twist." The twist is essentially a reversal of the traditional advertising paradigm: The most popular ads, as voted on by Digg users, will get more prominent placement and a lower cost-per-click. In other words: The more users digg an ad, the less the advertiser pays. "The Digg system rests on a Cluetrainy need to deliver authentic value and relevance – like Google's ads," Jarvis notes, and he argues "that's the way advertising probably needs to go: The better your relationship (which springs from a better product and service), the more your customers will market it for you, the less you'll have to pay to market it." Jarvis is right: "The future of advertising needs to be selling – that is, enabling – relevance instead of selling scarce space, time, or eyeballs. The future needs to be about adding value – relevance – rather than selling scarcity (extracting what the market will bear).”

Equity is the accumulation, the repeated occurrence, of actions, interactions, and transactions that add value. The best way, then, to build brand equity is to repeatedly and consistently add value through all your interactions with customers. Advertising doesn't add value; branded content does (information). Promotions don't add value; branded entertainment does (entertainment). When you brand something, you don't just market scarcity and advertise your products and services, you market your ability to add value that is relevant.

The web, and the social web in particular, reconciles artificial scarcity with relevance, and that's why more and more branding dollars are moving online. It is the ideal forum for creating an abundance of scarce moments, thousands of small great ideas instead of one great big one. These small great ideas come to live in brief moments of attachment with customers that are personalized and truly relevant for them.

"Advertising is failure," says Jeff Jarvis, and he thinks "media only get in the way of customer relationships." And indeed, how will you make more friends at a party? Showing up with a big banner around your neck that says "I am a great friend" or engaging in a handful of conversations with strangers, listening to their stories and detecting affinities whilst accomplishing a sense of privacy that gradually becomes intimate? Right. In the end, that’s what we should be doing as marketers to build real, sustainable brand equity – creating publicity through intimacy, loyalty through decency.

next09: The Seven Rules of the Chief Meaning Officer

(c) next09

I just came back from the next09 conference in Hamburg, one of Europe's leading digital/creative/marketing forums that stands out in the conference circuit because of its unique German-international focus (bilingual program, 80% international attendees, many international speakers). This year's theme was "Share Economy," and the 1,300 attendees comprised of European VCs and angel investors, web 2.0 entrepreneurs, media, creative agencies, and execs from leading German companies (from BMW to Deutsche Bank to Deutsche Telekom).

In talking to many German attendees, my impression was that the German creative community shows no signs of a downturn. The German start-up scene in particular, if that is any indicator, is alive and kicking. There are many new promising web 2.0 firms run by smart entrepreneurs (many of them funded by entrepreneurs who made a fortune during the dot com heyday), and there is a lot of money to go around. Notwithstanding this newly found confidence, however, Germans still look to the US, and in particular to Silicon Valley, for technology trends and innovative business models – this is nothing new but next09 was a stark reminder of how powerful the Valley myth still is. Consequently, there was a large contingent of social media folks from the Bay Area.

I met several great people including Lane Becker, the founder of Adaptive Path and co-founder and president of Get Satisfaction (the "people-powered customer service" that seems to be everybody's darling these days), Natasha Friis Saxberg, the founder of Mentory, a web-based mentoring network, Daniel Reckling from Neckermann.de, Germany's largest online retailer, Stephan Loyen from Simyo (a German discount telco), Darius Miranda from Wells Fargo (which appears to have a pretty sophisticated social media B2B strategy), and many others.

In conversations with Jackson Bond and Johannes Haus from Xing, the European equivalent to LinkedIn, it became evident that for social networks and other web players 'conversations' are the next big frontier. The business world is ready to embrace an enterprise Twitter, and many business communities (social networks and intra-company networks alike) are working on proprietary internal micro-blogging services – micro micro-blogging, if you will, that can be better customized and controlled. Yammer for everyone. In one of the main stage sessions at next09, Stowe Boyd ("Unmarketing") presented the Open Enterprise 2009 study, which predicts that in a few years 80% of knowledge-based tasks in corporations will be happening outside of formal organizational boundaries and be open-sourced, crowd-sourced, social, and conversational.

In this vein, I was invited to speak about "The Shrinking Brand – Marketing in a Small World," a talk I had given before at the eMarketing conference in San Francisco. But after listening to Jeff Jarvis' terrific key note on "The Great Restructuring," Umair Haque's pledge for "Constructive Capitalism," and Andrew Keen's passionate rebuttal of both, I felt the need to change the focus of my talk and approach it from a broader view. It was also more fun to present something new. And so I came up with the "Seven Rules of the Chief Meaning Officer" (I know, I know, ten would have been better, but sometimes there are only seven...), based on a concept I've been blogging about over the past few months. This was the first time I ever shared it at a public forum.

My key points, in a nutshell: As brands face an unprecedented level of competition, transparency, and consumer empowerment on the social web, 'meaning' is becoming the new powerful currency that connects brands with their brandholders in the 'share economy.' The new marketing leader, the Chief Meaning Officer, is a strategic activist, social media entrepreneur, constant innovator, and integrator. The Chief Meaning Officer has the potential to transform business through meaningful marketing – marketing that consistently creates added social value, not as an afterthought but a sine qua non. While marketing has always been the art of turning friends into customers and customers into friends, it is now the art of finding, befriending, and activating the like-minded for a common cause, for the common good – and for profit. Brands that have a reason to exist, an argument to win, will be more appealing than ever.

The Seven Rules:
1. Listen and converse (and converge)
2. Atomize your brand
3. Activate your customers
4. Think and act like a media company
5. Give more than you take
6. Be the change
7. Be yourself

Here are the slides:

Tim Leberecht@NEXT09: The Seven Rules of the Chief Meaning Officer

View more presentations from Frog Design.

More about the other next09 talks – and the emerging 'Share Economy' (that you may also call a "Twitter Economy") – in the next couple of days…

Monocle Launches Monocle Weekly: Small Talk, Big Issues

Yes, we live (again) in the "age of conversations." There is something reassuring about listening to smart people having cultured conversations. When I was young, I would listen for hours to music-free radio programming that sounded like black-and-white movies.

Today, Monocle Magazine brought some of that magic back by launching Monocle Weekly, a 30-minute audio podcast. Hosted by editor in chief Tyler Brûlé, the short-form show extends the publication's monthly print content by offering fresh angles on stories in current and past issues, discussions, previews, field reports, and interviews. The light conversations on serious issues are entertaining and informative, and the old-fashioned stereo split of voices evokes the coziness of good old vintage radio.

Highlights of the first issue include FT markets correspondent Rachel Morarjee revealing why 'under the mattress' has become a favorite place to keep your savings (at least in the UK), and philosopher Alain de Botton explaining why happiness will be more important than watching your salary in 2009: "There is no wealth but life, so concentrate on your portfolio of life, and not your portfolio of cash."

Well said. Although this may not be the most effective response to someone who just lost his or her job, the longing for new meaning in private and public life ("why exactly do we work?") will likely be an overarching theme in the forthcoming year. This presents a huge opportunity for brands of all kinds and industries: they are the arbiters of meaning.

Listen yourself: http://monocle.com/The-Monocle-Weekly/ (also available on iTunes)

Small New World of Micro: Short Tales and the End of Big Ideas

The world is small. Art has known this for centuries and embraced a tradition that goes all the way back to Zen: the ability to reduce the complexity of the world into small things and short forms, geared towards niche audiences. Poets, novelists, sculptors, painters, and composers have always had an affinity for the beauty of small things and short forms -- sonnets; Cycladic figurines; La Rochefoucauld's Maximes; the two-and-a-half minutes of Webern's Five Pieces for Orchestra, Opus 10; photomicrography; Very Small Buildings in architecture; or the Japanese haiku. All these artifacts are tiny in scale, short in duration, and excessively modest in the claims they make on our attention. They occupy very little time or space and imprint themselves only lightly on the human senses -- like a stinging ray of light that illuminates hearts and minds for the blink of an eye and celebrates the presence of absence.

A particularly moving example is Hemingway's super-short tale "For sale: baby shoes, never worn." The loquacious laconic of Hemingway's micro-story has now been given a new congenial forum with the emergence of micro-blogging -- an obvious match. New York Times writer Matt Richtel is writing a "Twiller," a murder mystery story in 140-character increments starring hookers, killers, and (surprise!) Barack Obama (more about him later). Other micro-story attempts on Twitter include Small Places, Slice, novelsin3lines, GoodCaptain, Twittories (a "Twiller" wiki), and Copyblogger's Twitter writing contest from earlier this year. Moreover, there are off-Twitter programs such as Wired Magazine's Very Short Story collection from 2006 (that featured six-word stories by renowned futurists and science fiction writers), mobile phone novels (so called "keitai shousetus," big in Japan), Nokia's (Wieden + Kennedy's) ad campaign "Somebody Else's Phone," Shortfolio (a blog that publishes stories with less than 500 words), Facebook application Just Three Words, and Brave New Fiction, a web site that helps writers compose entire stories by writing one 140-character line every day. Baby steps towards "War and Peace." And this is just the top of a whole long tail of short tales…

For (micro-) novelists, structural constraints (which, as we all know, fuel creativity) may result in "saying more with less," but how do you express big ideas such as, say, philosophical treatises, in micro-formats? That seems more of a challenge -- although one could argue that "what cannot be twittered, must remain in silence" (to paraphrase Ars Technica's cute paraphrasing of Wittgenstein).

This raises a bigger question: What if, on a philosophical level, the need for conveying big ideas is on the decline? What if the short tale is replacing the grand old narrative and in fact remains the only appropriate format in a small world that creates a growing number of small ideas in the absence of the big one(s)? Has the "end of history" (Fukuyama) bred the beginning of our stories? Are Twitter novels (and other micro-formats) perhaps the manifestation of a new plural, a new relativism that is not only salient in the fragmentation of media outlets ("Global Voices" instead of "Voice of America") but also the intellectual discourse itself? Or do they rather represent an activation and visualization of a plurality that has been latent anyway?

In a riveting BBC radio talk (listen to the full recording below), TED curator Chris Anderson (whose conference's mission is to promote "Ideas Worth Spreading") and philosopher and writer Alain de Botton recently discussed whether "the age of big ideas is over." De Botton opined that "I share the nostalgia for big ideas, but I'm also weary of them to some extent. I think that part of the problem of a big idea, as it's sometimes defined in the media, is that it has a certain simplicity and naivety to it. Many of the best ideas are really quite secular and quite small and have to do with very small but very important improvements to certain areas of life: an aspect of how to teach mass, a side of how you improve insulation in a building. These are not necessarily things that will get people out in the street, but they are significant ideas nevertheless."

Add IPM Radio4's channel to your page

But what about Obama? Wasn't his entire platform built on "big ideas?" Doesn’t his election contradict de Botton or at least suggest that big ideas will enjoy a renaissance? De Botton offers a nuanced answer to this: "He didn’t say 'I've got one big idea.' He said 'We can make a change.' And I think that’s the right way to do it. If you say you've got one big idea, and that idea somehow comes on stock as one big idea normally does, then you're in trouble. Much better to say we can find inspiration and we can make a change, and then look for the smaller ones."

Hemingway on Obama: "Big challenges, many ideas, little time."

Disruptive Realism

Associate Creative Director Dave Hoffer has coined a new term: Disruptive Realism. After discussing some examples in this video, he was inspired to elaborate:

"I've had a number of conversations about this since the video was posted and I realize that the video doesn't give a really conclusive definition.

Disruptive Realism is an expression presented in an everyday context that disrupts peoples perceptions about different things. Expression can mean many things and it a way it's art but it's also much more expansive a term than just art.

Banksy's graffiti looks real enough that you might do a double take looking at it. It draws you into the content which is disruptive...like a little girl flying a refrigerator kite in New Orleans.

The other two examples are even more non-conventional than the word Art implies. Most people hear the word art and they think of a painting in a museum. Because Bruno Taylor's work is an experience that involves physical designs like the swing set in the bus stop, the viewer is no longer viewing, they're interacting and the videos he takes of people enjoying the installations are, in fact, part of the art. So this example is difficult to define, but definitely real and definitely disruptive.

Improv Everywhere is one part performance art and one part massive, crowdsourced goof. People get together (often strangers) to collaborate on a kind of a joke on the unsuspecting and unknowing non-participants. In a way, it's almost an anti-terrorism...Humorism? But again, very real and very disruptive.

In the case of the fake NY Times, I would say that absolutely, it's Disruptive Realism and if the issue's headline was that the wars are over, then it's a hopeful message, which is a very good thing.

Another example a friend pointed out to me was Reverse Graffiti, where Paul "Moose" Curtis (awesome middle name by the way) "makes pictures by cleaning." He goes on to say that reverse graffiti is also commentary in that he can't "not tow the environmental line" so his art is disruptive in that he says that people walk up to it and realize that his work is dirt removal and that the world is "really, really dirty." If that ain't reality and if that ain't disruptive then I don't know what is. Hopefully viewers are moved to clean more and ride their bike to work because the art is a very visceral represesentation of how nasty pollution is.

Yet another example was Orson Welles's 'War of the Worlds' radio broadcast, which was meant as entertainment and likely a commentary on how evolution had been twisted into Social Darwinism (which is an interpretation of the HG Wells book on which the broadcast was based.) Regardless of its intention, the broadcast caused mass hysteria. An excellent example of Disruptive Realism."

Facebook in Reality

Hat tip to Sara Munday who pointed me to the "Facebook in Reality" video she came across at the Picnic conference in Amsterdam. It's from a sketch comedy troupe called Idiots of Ants and a brilliant spoof on the notion of "radical transparency." The original Facebook, meanwhile, is suing the German StudiVZ, a social networking site for students, for taking a leaf or two from Facebook. Oh well...