Rap Stats Tells Us What’s Trending In Rhyme

What truer barometer of culture is there than popular music? Better still there’s rap music. Rap, with its unique sense of place and style, bluster and sheer abundance of lyrics – it’s almost the perfect reference for what’s notable in the world. Rap Genius is a publication dedicated to rap lyrics and they developed RapStats a semantic analysis tool that allows you to pick out trends for literally anything going back three decades.

 

Beer Bot Barman

As anyone who has ever had the privilege of working behind a bar will attest, the art of pouring a perfect beer is something that takes more than a little practice. Japanese beer maker Asahi decided to address this problem by creating a robot barman, the robot is able to pour up to 6 beers at once, each glass taking roughly 12 seconds to fill. We hope Asahi now turns their attention to the next big bar room problem; who was next in line?

 

LoveRoom

Loveroom is a confidently discriminatory peer2peer accommodation site – the AirBnB for the beautiful and amorously hopeful.  A more accurate description of this platform is probably ‘its a dating site with bedrooms’, a matchmaker for attractive travellers and a self confident community of spare bedroom owners.  Still though, it’s fascinating to observe yet another category experiencing extreme verticalisation as an opportunity to differentiate their offering in a crowded niche.

 

24 Hours of Happy

It’s been a very big week for interactive videos. First Bob Dylan blew our minds with Rolling Stone, and now Pharrell Williams, arguably the king of cool, has released what is lauded to be the world first 24hour interactive video.  Yes, ‘24 Hours of Happy’ allows you to browse through a full 24 hours of filmed content, accompanied by the looping and very catchy new Pharrell single “Happy”. All hail Pharrell – king of the ear worms.

 

Hyper Reality Kickstarter Film

Filmmaker Keiichi Matsuda has a vision, a vision of the future no less, and one that he has managed to bring to life through the medium of film.  Art institutes have recognized his work as have many film festivals and he is now using Kickstarter to help fund an ambitious project in Medellin Columbia. It’s here that he plans to meld film, augmented reality and design to create an advanced series of interconnected short interactive video experiences in which he will depict an altered hyper reality and hopefully give culture and innovation a little shove.