Shonzilla, a pattern-seeking animal

iFart economy

Q: What is iFart economy?
A: It’s the impact that a simple product, regardless how bizarre, can provoke in your immediate environment. Thanks to viral effects of humor everyone understands this effect expands to a wider audience and, consequently, creates its own market niche.

Watch the the commercial for the application for the iPhone and iPod Touch. One has to admit it’s fun as hell regardless of your educational background, ethicity, zodiac sign or your favorite brand of mobile phone. The reason why I’m writing about it is that it is sold through iTunes Store for $1. Joel Comm, the iFart developer, has revealed that it is downloaded over 10.000 times a day. Yes, that’s over ten thousand times every day, give or take. During last Christmas it was particularly popular and was sold nearly 40.000 times. Knowing 30% is sliced off by Apple – do the math and draw your own conclusions…

Perhaps more people should be making mobile applications, developing for the popular mobile platforms like the upcoming iPhone 3.0, Android, Symbian, WebOS (on still anticipated Palm Pre)…? Maybe developers should less enterprise applications and more fun ones that can be used and enjoyed by anyone?

You can tell that this cheap mobile app is viral with a potential to inspire some priceless moments. You don’t believe me? Watch what happens when a kid uses iFart during City Council meeting.

The Crisis of Credit Visualized is the best explanation of financial crisis of 2007-2009 you’ll find IMHO.

Maximum respect to the author, John Levoff, who crafted this video as a part of his thesis work.

You can see which countries are affected by the financial crisis and to what extent in this SVG image (NOTE: you can zoom the map). SVG stands for Scalable Vector Graphics and it is supported out-of-the-box in all web browsers except for IE.

Thanks to Miloš for sending the link.

[via Vimeo]

Balancing Economy, Equity, and Ecology Through Design

Watch this great lecture about a sustainable mind set, design frameworks and processes that can help us create a self-sustainable, nature- and user-friendly environment.

This one’s for Igor but I think everyone will enjoy this!