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During a dull moment, our Tom Pounder (@gutpap) came across the intriguing Stylate.com, a website for buying ‘stock brands’. The site sells company names – including the baffle-tastic ‘Striplet’, ‘MagicItem’ and ‘HelpTruck’ – with matching logos and domain names. For the bargain price of $250, you can pass the most fun bit of creating a startup to someone else.

Having circulated his find around the agency, Tom inadvertently started an email game of ‘define the brand’ with some of the more obscure company names.

Here are our favourites:

Vehicley

Car rental for people who like to be spoken to like children. “Would you like your vehicley now?”

TempBuy


Are you fed up with things you bought still being there the next day? With TempBuy, you get all the rush of buying something, without the annoyance of actually having to OWN it. You buy, then we break into your house a few hours later and take it back. And best of all, you’ve still paid for it. Why hasn’t anyone thought of this sooner? We’re baffled.

MuteSwitch

The ultimate in noise limitation devices.  Had enough of your wife going on, or the husband who can’t shut up about the cost of that new outfit… just buy Muteswitch.  Developed by Adam Sandler in every film he did for three years, MuteSwitch is the world’s first remote that shuts everyone up.  Through the use of totally unharmful electro-magnetic charges* MuteSwitch has two settings: silenced but awake, or full comatose. Simply pick how much peace & quiet you want.  As used by Jeff Bridges in Iron Man 2.

*tests still ongoing, proof of fatalities was inconclusive

Countmeter

A brilliantly helpful tool for those visiting Transylvania. Helps keep an eye on the number of counts you’re facing at any one time.  Never be caught out and vampirised again with the new Countmeter.  No need for excess wooden stakes, or off-putting breath ever again.

Filmcitizen


Are your neighbours a bit shifty-lookin’? Does their behaviour behind closed curtains raise your suspicions? You need Filmcitizen. Easily spy on humans of any denomination with instant upload to MI5, CrimeWatch or YouPorn. Filter and transition effects coming soon!

Zipperr


Pronounced ‘zip-urgh’, Zipperr is a site dedicated to spoiling your ‘me time’. When you’re feeling frisky and you’re worried about straying from the path of moral rightitude, come to us. You’ll see something appealing that will lead your hand to your flies – then something so grossly scarring that you’ll be unwilling or able to feel good again for weeks to come. And when you do? Time for Zipperr again. Brought to you by Mums Against Crusty Cumrags.

UnRecruit

When you’ve hired someone and it’s just not working out, you need UnRecruit. This amazing app plants evidence of the crime of your choice so you can easily and quickly call ‘gross misconduct’. Choose from ‘boned the boss’ (complete with photoshopped picture of employee and boss in cupboard), ’stole office supplies’ (with X-ray showing stapler in rectum) or ’shat on meeting table’ (with incriminating poo pile). PLUS, coming soon: ‘got naked and humped the CEO’ (with photos)*

*This actually happened at the Albion summer party. No one was unrecruited, though.

On Sunday 14th August I got an email from Tim Malbon of Made by Many, the ace social web technology agency. They’d had a get together with Good for Nothing, the people who stage creative collaborations for good causes.

They’d decided to do something about the East African Famine. They realised that this was a crisis on a massive scale, which was hardly getting any attention, because of our preoccupation with the riots and the recession. They wanted to do something that would draw attention to it, and raise money for it.

Their idea was 50/50. They wanted to rope in makers and do-ers to create 50 fundraising projects, within 50 days. (Following Mark Earls ‘light 100 fires’ thinking, it’s more likely that a few of 50 projects will get traction, than if we all concentrated on one project, which might fail.)

They had a few example ideas to illustrate the kind of thing we might like to do. First on this list of bullet points was a Twitter Swear Jar. In brackets at the end of the short description was “still looking for someone to do this idea by the way…”.

I immediately liked the idea of the Swearjar. We’ve got a track record with swearing at Albion, and I’m childish enough to think it’s funny, and it seemed like the kind of fun idea that might catch-on. I started to try and build some support amongst our dev team for this voluntary project.

In conversations with Tim it became clear it was an idea they’d had back in October 2010 for a pitch, and they’d been looking for a chance to realise it since. They were busy building the 50/50 platform, so they were really keen for us to develop it.

The project gained some momentum on 23 August when we were running the Marketing Academy digital faculty at Albion. We were hosting 20-odd rising stars of the marketing world and, as part of the day, had promised to run a workshop where they would scope and paper-prototype a new web service. The Swearjar seemed like the perfect brief for this – fun, for a good cause, not too complicated – and they all really engaged with it and did some great thinking.

On 24th August a crack team of Albionites hunkered down, did a definitive set of wireframes, and committed ourselves to building it.

On 25th of August, our project page on the 50/50.gd site went live: http://5050.gd/projects/f-ckfamine-swearjar

On 30th August Stuart Eccles of Made by Many gave us some Ruby code he written previously for parsing the Twitter stream, which kicked our coding effort into life. Thanks Stu.

We spent the next 4 weeks designing and coding the site, in between client work and in our spare time.

On 29 August we started testing the almost-finished Swearjar app with a wider group inside Albion.

Then a surprising thing happened. Charityswearbox.com launched. Exactly the same idea, and a very similar execution. What. A. Fucking. Nightmare.

Anyway, after some teeth gnashing and soul searching, and some diplomacy from 50/50, we’ve decided to launch our Swearjar anyway – and Charity Swearbox will also (hopefully) come onto the 50/50 platform.

So now 50/50 has two Twitter swearing apps. We’re going head to head. May the best Twitter swearing app win. There’s nothing wrong with healthy competition in the charity sector. Hopefully both together will raise more money that either would have alone.

(BTW, it’s not unusual for people to have the same idea independently. The lightbulb, the internal combustion engine, asteroid movies. And now swear-tracking apps for Twitter.)

We think Charity Swearbox is great. But we think Swearjar is better. Please sign up right now and start swearing for Africa.

www.swearjar.cc

A massive thanks to @drcongo and @eliphinobeats for building the thing, and to @samwander and @gringomoses for helping to make it happen. And thanks to @madebymany and @goodfornothing for having the incredible energy to will 50/50 into life.

Introducing Air New Zealand’s Mason & Jason, the truly inseparable sheep twins. Until now life has been pretty rough for Mason & Jason. They’ve never been able to fit into conventional airline seats, so they’ve had to make do with having to fly down in the cargo hold. It’s not ideal. But now Air New Zealand have introduced the Economy SkycouchTM, dubbed “Cuddle Class”, and it’s the perfect space for any couple to relax. Even inseparable sheep twins.

The work launched this week in the US and UK with a mini series of three online films featuring Mason & Jason as they introduce the premium features of “Cuddle Class”: dreaming, drinking and watching movies all on demand. There are some nice cameos in the films too, but we wont spoil it for you (*cough* The Hoff *cough*). You can also see what’s down the back of Mason & Jason’s Economy SkycouchTM on Facebook for your chance to win a flight on the fully redesigned long haul planes. The campaign is being supported in digital media in the UK, US and New Zealand and has been made by a combination of Albion talent across our London and West Coast offices.

Enjoy….

Thanks to everyone who joined us at the Albion Society last week , we had a great time and hope you all took something away from it.

If you couldn’t make it, never fear – we’ve compiled the best bits into a handy video. Enjoy!

Albion Society – Humanising Data from Albion London on Vimeo.

A huge thanks to all of our panelists. Charlie Hunter-Schyff from 02 Media, Geoff Watts from Editd and last but not least, our chair, Olivia Solon from Wired.co.uk. (Also, a big thanks to our very own Glyn Britton!)

Interested in future Albion Society events? Drop us a note at hello@albionlondon.com to be added to the mailing list. Alternatively, get your tweet on @albionsociety.