Webby Global

Last month we were fortunate to meet Pim Betist from The Netherlands, creator of Sellaband.com. The site gives bands a cool new way to “make it” by matching them up with 5,000 believers (fans) who each invest $10. Once $50,000 is raised, the band gets studio time to make a record, and Sellaband aids with distribution and sales. Pim gave us samples of Sellaband success-story-albums; by the end of our evening, even we were inspired to start a band.

Stay tuned for sellabrand; more to come.

In London, at The Webby 5s at The ICA back in December 2007, we were fortunate enough to meet David McCandless: author and wry cynic who is as wonderfully in love with the Web as we are.

When you really need some laughs and need a break from your life online, take a minute to check out David McCandless. A London-based writer, David’s newest book is a genuine laugh-out-loud satire of the Web itself.

On a recent trip to The Netherlands for Innovation Playground in The Hague, I met The Robotic Fish, an invention by computer scientists at The University of Essex.

The robot I saw, covered with blue rubber with it’s own life-like fins, was the size of an average carp and swam in a large tank as if it were real. Miraculously, it moved completely naturally–with the same physicality and at the same speed of a live fish. Using infrared sensors, the fish (robot?) never bumped into anything and knew when to turn. Three of these currently “live” in the London aquarium alongside real fish.

Wondering “what’s the point?” How about a robotic dolphin for UK aquariums prohibited from keeping live mammals? The team is now developing this, ideally with an interactive touch-screen for visitors (”swim left, swim right, turn around”) in front of the tank. Or maybe underwater jellyfish research, oceanic photography, detecting oil leaks in pipelines…

What if you could use the Internet to get your street cleaned up? In Britain, mySociety makes this (and so much more) possible with FixMyStreet. It couldn’t be easier: enter your post code, find your street on the map, describe the problem, and off it goes to the local council.

People can also join up to affect change about almost anything through PledgeBank (”I’ll do it, but only if you help). And, at least in London, mySociety might have Google Maps beat: their clever travel maps calculate exact travel times for a given distance, display housing costs among neighborhoods, and weigh the costs/benefits of your transportation options.

(if only it were possible to map this for NYC!).

Allen Mendelsohn, Plank Design
Montreal, Canada

Canada is a big place. There are parts of the country that have no Starbucks in a thousand-kilometre radius. Now, perhaps because of the great distances in Canada, the need to be brought together, Canadians lead the world in amount of time spent online. OK maybe it’s the weather too, keeping us inside during the long winters. But the fact remains that Canadians know the Internet. We’re educated and sophisticated. And we demand as much from the websites we use.

And as a result, some of the best of the Web has come from Canada: Flickr, Digg (in part), Wikitravel, Plenttyoffish, and StumbleUpon were all developed in Canada and are huge success stories. There is no doubt in my mind that innovation on the Web will come from Canada for a long time to come.

The vastness of Canada also influences the way we create. But the fact is, we all know the web has no borders. That makes it easy for Canadians to create for Americans, or anyone. My company, Plank, with our offices in Montreal, creates Websites for famous American film directors, literary magazines based in North Carolina, and hospitals in Tanzania.

We Canadians may have a few quirks, eh. We may have accents (to you at least). We may have an irrational love of a pile of greasy foodstuffs others may cringe at. But we’re more like you than you know; the Web brings us all together. And brings us closer to the rest of the world.

I like to visit museums when in a new city, hoping for an “ah-ha” moment among paintings or sculptures. Something to make me stop and think differently, even if only for two minutes. It turns out you don’t even have to go anywhere to find this experience (no crowds!).

Enter Rafael Rozendaal, a Web artist whom I was lucky to meet at The Webby 5s at The ICA on December 3, 2007 in London. Rafael is from The Netherlands but currently lives in Paris. He’s also a proud member of Neen, an artists’ movement. Rafael’s work, to me, feels like live paintings posing questions that aren’t meant to be answered. Pretty cool.