Archive for the ‘Cool Books’ Category

Apr 19
April 19, 2011 at 14:48

Some form of Entertainment

vorrmvanvermaak_coverJust released: Vorm van Vermaak. A book about Dutch Television design by Roy van Vilsteren and Liselotte Doeswijk .

(Sorry for the English followers, but all links are Dutch.) There is a site for the book which definitely is worth a visit. It is high on nostalgia, all these images from our childhoods. But it is also a very intriguing look behind the scenes. It shows  the context in which the designs that have been part of every living room since the 1950’s were created. It’s about the creation of Zeitgeist.

Everything is interesting, but there was one thing that brought a little tear to my eye: The first fully digitally rendered 3D station call on Dutch television: Teleac.

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Jan 5
January 5, 2011 at 15:28

Cameras

AfterDark-Blog.pngI’ve written hundreds of short video concepts and scripts, but often I’m still doubting about how to write about points of view. Especially since most of the words end up on the desk of Marketing Managers (of whom I’m not always sure they’ve got right  creative mind to interpret this this properly). The question I struggle with: do we mention the camera as having a role in framing the view. Whenever possible I’ll try to write around it. Until now.

This weekend I read Murakami’s After Dark. And Murakami knows how to use the camera. As a literary device, to add a sense of voyeurism, or from the other side, a sense of being watched. But, the thing that struck me, also as an instrument to describe the reader / narrator point of view in a very explicit and mechanical way, without holding back.

What’s comforting in this for me is that the explicit presence of a camera doesn’t necessarily break the narrative. Au contraire (mon frère); the ease with which Murakami employs the camera on all levels shows that a complex understanding of what a camera is and connotes might be deeply embedded in our collective mind.

John Fox is quickly done with liking Murakami’s Camera approach. See the 3:40 and 3:41 entries in his great After Dark review.

Or, if you happen to have a spare afternoon coming up, I can recommend reading the book itself. It will be an afternoon well spent.

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Oct 1
October 1, 2010 at 11:20

Creating Magic – By Lee Cockerell

Creating MagicDon’t you have two round ears on top of your head and isn’t your girlfriend wearing a fancy red ‘n white dress? Don’t worry! Lee Cockerell gives advice on how to create magic, even without the ears…

As you may have seen in our ‘cool books’ category, we like to learn from the books we read and reflect our own vision on them. This book definitely fits in this category. However it does that not only because of the 10 common sense strategies Lee writes about, but also because Lee is the former Executive Vice President of Operations for the Walt Disney World® Resort in Orlando. (You may have noticed in the ‘our faces’ section of this website that I am a themepark addict.) After working for a few different hotel corporations, Lee joined Disney with the start of the Disneyland Paris project in 1990. I had heard of Lee before, not knowing he wrote a book about leadership. While listening to a themepark-podcast (That’s what we addicts do…), I heard an interview about his book. I ordered the Dutch version of the book right way (I would recomend reading the original English version by the way. Or at least, not the Dutch version because the translations might get ‘itchy’…).

Let me give you a short summary…
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Aug 4
August 4, 2010 at 13:10

A Book about innocent: Our story and some things we’ve learned

innocent_book_coverI don’t like fruit. It has probably something to do with the fact that my mum and dad were greengrocers and my brother and I could eat all the fruit we wanted, whenever we wanted. This is also the reason that my cousins don’t like pastry and fruit pie. Their father and my uncle had a baker’s shop (but that’s a completely different story).

Since I have a caring wife and two kids, to whom I have to give “the good example”, I’m obliged to eat two pieces of fruit every day. But as I mentioned before, I don’t like fruit. It’s not that I hate it either, but it simply takes too much time to eat some and most times I don’t even like the taste of it. Actually if I wasn’t positively sure that it was healthy for me, I wouldn’t eat it at all!

Coming to this conclusion, I started looking for solutions and also started drinking smoothies or other “healthy” fruit drinks. Problem with this readymade stuff is that it’s always a kind of chemical and you can’t make out if it is healthy for you or not. You can also make it yourself, but this is simply too much work. It’s so much work that I might even consider eating fruit instead (soo much work!). In the supermarket, the place I’d least expect it, I found Innocent Smoothie and I was charmed right away. Not only because it tastes good, but also because of the way they designed their packages. Since these are so different -they write all kinds of funny stuff on their packaging- I got interested in the company behind this product.

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Jul 30
July 30, 2010 at 11:25

Drive – Daniel H. Pink

Drive; the surprising truth about what motivates usThe surprising truth on what motivates us!

Well, luckely for us at 3DIMERCE.com it’s not quite a surprise. We don’t believe in extrinsic motivation, but in the ability of each employee to grow and develop in which everybody realizes his or hers fullest potential. And that’s exactly what the terrific book is all about. Apparently a lot of companies still believe in giving high bonuses and other financial stimulants to motivate their managers and employees. Dan Pink proofs in Drive that this doesn’t work, it even brings out worst in most people. In the book there is an abundance of studies and tests that we conducted during this and last century, that give an insight in why extrinsic motivators makes us less creative, perform less, focus on short term and even provoke unethical behaviour.

In the early days of the industrial revolution and during the 20th century, the “carrots & sticks” approach was working well. Dan calls this motivation 2.0. Simple tasks that don’t require much creativity and initiative can be stimulated by external ‘if-then’ rewards. So straight-forward production work benefits from financial incentives to make people work harder.

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Jun 15
June 15, 2010 at 17:10

Traffic, Tom Vanderbilt

Traffic-TomVanderbiltWhy we drive the way we do (and what it says about us)

People familiar with 3Dimerce might know we are quite a car-savvy company, and, only very recently, I too joined the legion of motorists within 3Dimerce.

Among car enthusiasts like us, traffic is often considered just an inconvenient byproduct of everybody driving a car. We all have our assumptions about why we are the good drivers, and why everyone around us is messing things up. We keep making this fundamental attribution error again and again, thinking all others can’t drive and don’t pay attention, but always finding an excuse in circumstances for our own shortcomings.

Traffic busts all these assumptions – with scientific back up – and gets to the core of what really is happening when we hit the streets together. And it (sometimes painfully) exposes the blind spot every one has regarding his own behavior.

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May 25
May 25, 2010 at 13:12

Buy.ology by Martin Lindstrom

buyology-martinlindstrom
Apparently our average time to decide what to buy is 2 seconds. So if we’re faced with a shelf of -let’s say- toilet paper, we decide almost instantly what brand to buy and what to leave in the store. At least that’s one of Martin Lindstrom’s claims in his interesting book “Buy.ology; Truth and Lies About Why We Buy”. As the subtitle suggests it gives the reader an insight in the brain of the consumer and discloses some mindblowing -and sometime shocking- facts on our own buying behaviour. Everything is based on years of research by Martin and a team of neuro-scientist. Let me talk you through the -in my opinion- the most interesting parts.

The book starts with a chapter on how the idea of neuromarketing started and how the results where measured on thousands of participants. Lindstrom used two main techniques of analyzing the brain responses to different (marketing) stimuli:
1. fMRI: a type of specialized MRI scan that measures the change in blood flow related to neural activity in the brain.
2. SST: A kind of EEG-scan that records electrical activity in the brains.
With these two techniques, he and his team grounded all the interesting facts and claims in this essay. Really fascinating!

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