Monthly Archives: September 2013

Let’s Be Frank: Cheers To The Great Inventors

Inventors

Here’s to the great “brand inventors” of our time. They were the inspiration and driving force behind the brands we have come to love. Their ideas are timeless and they fought hard to bring them to life. We like that and are inspired by these extraordinary thinkers and doers…the great inventors. The one’s who followed an unfiltered approach to success. This is the sentiment behind Ideas without Borders, the platform on which Canopy rests.

Following are some you know and some you may not.

Information Overload: Larry Page and Sergey Brinn
Invented the most efficient tool ever known to man for getting information about anything and everything. Google.

Mom’s Solution to Temper Tantrums: Ruth Handler
Invented every little girl’s best friend growing up and every Mom’s solution to a temper tantrum. The Barbie Doll.

Scooped: Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield
Inventive founders who scooped the category with humor, social responsibility and oh so good ice cream. Ben and Jerry’s Ice Cream.

Jeanius: Levi Strauss
A true blue inventor who put the rivets and red tab in jeans for millions worldwide. Levi’s.

Mobile Music: Nobutoshi Kihara
Revolutionized how and where we listen to music. Sony Walkman.

Triple Threat: Elon Musk
The definition of all-in: inventor, businessman, and investor. Tesla Motors, PayPal and SpaceX.

 

Computers That Paint

It’s easy to tell the difference between art created by humans and art generated by computers. No one could fail to distinguish the small nuances and imperfections of a human-created painting against a technically perfect, but somehow stilted and cold, computer piece of art. However, a new algorithm developed by Kenichi Yoneda, better known as Kynd, creates curiously human-looking paintings with an automated painter.

Using the program, called openFrameworks, the artist is able to simulate realistic painting methods, using a brush or a palate knife, blending pigments drying at different rates. It’s a intriguing process to watch digital paint drying, much more so than watching actual paint dry.

The objective, rather than making a beautiful work of art, is to explore how closely computers can come to re-creating the way humans paint, and perhaps investigate the gray area between man-made and computer-generated.

What sparked our fire: The precision in which a computer can mimic the human act of painting.

Will this new algorithm make art enthusiasts skeptical about authenticity?

 

Record Less, Enjoy More.

What can you remember about yesterday? How about Monday, last week? What about June 23rd? March 17th? Odds are, you can’t remember something about every single day over the past year. The slow moments, the quiet days, they are all overshadowed by larger events and get lost in the shuffle of routine.

Cesar Kuriyama sought to fix that by recording one-second clips of each day for a year, starting on his 30th birthday and ending on his 31st. What resulted was a 6 minute long, watchable documentation of every day throughout that year. There are moments ranging from the beautiful to the mundane, from the sad to the heartwarming. It’s an incredible slice of life, and Kuriyama designed an app that will allow others to create their own second-a-day videos.

In an app called 1 Second Everyday, Kuriyama hopes to share with others the experience that so profoundly affected his own life. It influenced him to make the most out of each day, to live in the moment and to do something worth documenting.

He also mentions how, instead of dealing with the common smartphone problem of recording but not experiencing, he has found that capturing one second “helped me hone in on my old tendencies to over capture a moment or event. Like many, I used to take too many photos and videos … Now I record less and enjoy the moment more.”

The app is currently available on Android and iOS 7.

What sparked our fire: How technology enables us to easily create our own personal narratives, in video format.

What would your first one second video be?

 

Marc-eting 101: Activate Effectively

ActivateEffectively

We asked Canopy’s Managing Director, Marc Sampogna, “What is your #1 marketing tip that is both effective and profitable?” Find out what he had to say below.

The ability to paint the entire picture across every touch-point, activate it seamlessly and make it shareable will ultimately result in success and profitability for your brand. If you’re developing an ad campaign, how do you generate a conversation around it and optimize it across other applications? If you’ve developed a new website, how do you create an engagement strategy that elicits conversation and conversions? The answer, a strong “activation plan”, and it involves multiple items to make it work: SEO, social media, advertising or packaging for that matter. Develop a strategically sound plan that brings them all together, and broadcasts a consistent message. It’s an investment, but it will create loyalty, which results in profitability and results.

 

Go Ahead, Eat It!

EdibleWrapper

The last time you finished a bag of chips or some other tasty snack, you probably crumpled the bag unhappily in your hand and looked for a trash receptacle, or shoved it in your bag and found it later, probably with the same amount of unhappiness. Fortunately, there might soon be a delicious solution to your plastic problem: wrappers you can eat.

The project, called WikiCells, seeks to use “natural packaging” to keep foods fresh in an edible, nontoxic way. It has been speculated that this packaging could actually be used to season or flavor the food it protects, such as a fruity packaging for yogurt, or a chocolate membrane for hot chocolate. The possibilities are incredible, and may just be able to solve the plastic problem that has been plaguing our landfills.

What sparked our fire: The nature of which doctors are lending their expertise to help reduce our plastic waste problem.

How will the emerging edible wrapper technology effect the consumer packaged goods industry?