While the mandate might seem simple — the video needs to be about innovation, invention, creativity and/or entrepreneurship (the values we hold dear) — the selection process actually involves a surprisingly complex number of considerations, such as balance, educational content, local relevance, chuckle-factor and good taste.

That’s why it was pleasing to stumble across this short clip at 4:22 this afternoon. It’s in such good taste, I find myself quite thirsty. Happy Friday Anthillians!

Beer Fetching Robot by Willow Garage

The invention was the product of Willow Garage, which decided to use its third summer hackathon to make every hackers dream a reality. The Willow Garage hackathon starts on a Monday and ends with a demo on Friday afternoon. This year, the participants were rewarded in the most obvious way… with a cold and refreshing brew.

Hibiki Kono is a 13-year-old, self-confessed Spiderman fan who spent five months developing a technology that would allow him to climb like his idol. Using two 1,400-watt vacuum cleaners (purchased from a local supermarket), the King’s College School, Cambridge, UK student, modified a suction device that enables him to crawl up walls.

Perhaps this isn’t mind blowing technology but, considering his age, who knows what this bright spark will be producing when he reaches adulthood. We could have a real superhero on our hands!

Here, Managing Director of venture capital firm Draper Fisher Jurvetson (DFJ) Steve Jurvetson, speaking at the 11th Annual Top Tech Trends at the Churchill Club in 2009, gives his view on what the next five to six years hold and where he sees the opportunities in federated media.

Using three examples of aggregation, the telecoms industry and real-time search results, he proposes how it will be possible to harness the power of the collective crowds.

If you thought it was difficult keeping pace with the evolution of modern media, brace yourself because its going to get a whole lot faster.

The vehicle that brought him his fame (and, ultimately, changed the world) became a centenarian in the last couple of years and this video details the process that got the Model T onto the streets.

While it’s fascinating to watch the innovation that was changing people’s everyday lives 100 years ago and draw comparisons with today, it also offers a compelling five minute history lesson to ensure that you don’t go misquoting one of the most quoted businessmen of all time.

Well, now he’s been transmogrified into a physical presence once again with the help of some modern stop motion trickery.

While this clip is pretty impressive, what is intriguing is that with stop motion all the rage at the moment, a lot of the subjects appear to feature technologies and toys from yesteryear.

Curiouser and curiouser…

The iPad is no exception. The third-party gadget floodgates have opened and we’re already becoming inundated with optional extras to help us play and adapt our new shiny toy. That’s why this video caught our attention. Not only is it a novel way to display your iPad, but it’s… kind of cool, with a hint of ‘chindogu’ madness likely to impress both early-adopters and luddites.

Plus, at least someone’s doing something nice to an iPad for a change and not destroying it.

Using the theory of behavioural economics and a number of humorous but valid examples, Sutherland explains that when faced with sizeable challenges, the common response of most corporations and governments is to seek big, expensive fixes. In doing so, more obvious and cheaper solutions that stand a higher chance of success are generally ignored.

He argues that we need to move away from this way of thinking and focus on a methodology of looking for the tiny answers that have a disproportionately profound effect relative to the effort they require. It’s a methodology so rarely used that it doesn’t even have a name in the English language.

Nowadays, you only have to head down into the underground system, or walk along the streets, of many of the world’s major cities to see that traditional print adverts are being replaced by screens displaying full-blown video ads in place of their static ancestors.

Well, Sony has recently developed the prototype of a rollable OLED (organic LED) screen that can be bent and distorted while still rendering crystal clear 432 by 240 pixel video images.

With the potential for screens to be wrapped pretty much anywhere and around non-linear surfaces, this means that the sky is the limit for running ads anywhere or screening video wherever you like – cue a scene from any 90′s sci-fi movie.

Here, Honda has built on its enormously successful 2006 ‘Impossible Dream‘ campaign, and released a new extended version for 2010 to air across 28 nations. The ad still features the original and distinctly ‘Village People-esque’ hero as he strives from one impossible dream (honda product) to the next, but is 20-odd seconds longer and flows a lot more smoothly. More importantly, it features a greater number of Honda’s technological achievements including the HondaJet, the CR-Z Hybrid Coupe, the hydrogen-powered FCX Clarity and the humanoid robot ASIMO.

I don’t know if its the visualisation of the open road, the marvel of Honda’s machines or Andy Williams singing ‘Dream the Impossible Dream’, but this got me seriously reconsidering my humble Mazda!

Chip Heath is Professor of Organisational Behavior in the Graduate School of Business at Stanford University and has consulted to organisations such as Nike and Microsoft on the topic of ‘making ideas stick‘. He is also co-author, alongside his brother Dan,  of one of our favourite business books at Anthill. (You guessed it, Made to Stick.)

Here he examines why it is that certain ideas, such as unsubstantiated urban myths and folk medicinal cures, can penetrate minds to the point that they will actually influence individual behaviour, while we struggle in the board room or sales floor to get our point across.

Is it true that we only use 10% of our brains? No, yet many believe it. Remember the tale of the guy waking up in a bath of ice with a missing kidney after accepting a drink from an attractive stanger in a hotel bar? Well, it actually never happened.

Heath and his brother have studied many of the legends that seem to draw us in so that he can apply their common traits and help people (and companies) create messages that will break through the mass of ideas we’re confronted by every day and stay lodged in our heads.

This clip is long at 60 minutes but very interesting viewing with valuable lessons to learn. Perhaps grab your earphones and listen while performing a mundane task. (That method of influencing behaviour is called ‘contextualisation’).

MIT’s Eric von Hippel on Lego and Open Innovation

My Desk is 8-Bit by Alex Varanese

Pixels by Patrick Jean

Michael Lewis is probably the best and most readable chronicler of its current financial state. In this fascinating piece, he investigates the collapse of Iceland and comes to the conclusion that mass delusion and lack of dissenting voices, products of Iceland’s provincial and isolated culture, were keys to this “perfect bubble” and ensuing disaster.

In fact, he blames a mono-culture. For 1,000 years, Iceland had one industry, fishing. The industry developed into one where toughness and risk-taking were the only way to succeed. This approach permeated the culture of Iceland, much like rice paddies apparently taught the Chinese mathematics and the virtue of diligence and patience.

When fishing made Iceland wealthy and secure, many Icelanders moved away from the unpleasant work on the boats to a more sophisticated and glitzier line of work, investment banking. And we all know how that went.

Recently, Iceland has started to reinvent itself as a hot bed of creative thinking.

Iceland’s journalism “haven”

For example, digital activists, like the people behind the Iceland Modern Media Initiative are striving to position Iceland as a “journalism haven”,  featuring an ultra-modern Freedom of Information Act and enhanced whistleblower protections.

The movement has won cross-party support (19 out of 63 MPs presented the proposal to Iceland’s Parliament on 18 February) and aims adopt the strongest press and source protection laws from around the world.

This would turn the country into an international “haven”, affording jurisdictional protections much like a tax haven, but designed to attract online publishers as a safe place to do business.

Online publishers that decide to set up shop in Iceland would be afforded enhanced protections against libel claims and other common legal areas of concern.

For example, recent rulings in Europe maintain that, for internet publication, each page view is publication afresh, regardless of how long ago the material was first posted. This has resulted in the silent removal of investigative newspaper stories, including those over five years old, from the on-line archives of the Guardian and other major newspapers.

Proposed Icelandic laws operate like a statute of limitations, preventing this and other laws, sometimes considered repressive, from interfering with press freedoms.

When you consider that all journalism is now online journalism and that servers can now be based anywhere (as the ‘jurisdiction’ of publication), this is a pretty smart move.

Here’s a video from Al Jazeera news, providing more detail on the initiative:

From the ashes (of Eyjafjallajokull)

We all know the dangers of a single industry economy overly dependent on a few industries.

When Iceland went bankrupt in October 2008, the announcement was hard to fathom. It’s not often that a country goes bankrupt. Simply, it could not pay back its external debts, and the Icelandic currency, the krona, became essentially valueless in the rest of the world. That meant the country could no longer pay for imports.

Of course, this outcome devastated many lives. Yet, Iceland as a whole, is now beginning to embrace the ash-clad silver-lining that such a crisis invariably brings with it; A fresh start.

It is using this ‘clean slate’ to seemingly pursue a kind of commercial ‘renaissance’ (of the kind that Greece may one day envy). It is broadening its options to include the previously inconceivable (another mental shift that the law makers in Greece should perhaps observe).

Case in point: ‘Inspired by Iceland’.

How do you make a cold, wind-swept, isolated country sound appealing when that same destination is partly responsible for its own isolation and the forced isolation of European travellers for much of April and May?

Cue cart-wheeling citizens of Iceland:

When things get cold make ice-cream

The past 18-months have been tough for Australian businesses. But when things look particularly bleak, just think of Iceland.

Its bean-counters went snow-blind, its primary product went out to sea and then whatever goodwill it had left disappeared in a biiiiiiig puff of smoke.

Next time you find yourself in a financial blizzard, do as they now do in Iceland. Make ice-cream.

In this TEDx talk, Simon Sinek explores the reasons why only some companies and leaders succeed when the tools and materials for success are available to everyone. Drawing examples from Apple, the Wright Brothers and Martin Luther King, Sinek uses his simple but powerful model, the ‘golden circle’, and the question ‘why’ to illustrate how inspirational leaders achieve greatness.

He counters his argument with the example of TiVo, a world-class technology that – until last June – struggled to gain much market share. It’s inspirational viewing.

The internet has enabled ever greater possibilities for creative viral marketing, which encourage potential customers to jump on the meme bandwagon and fuel the dissemination of commercial messages with their own enthusiasm. However, as with most things on the internet, the lifespan of this approach is generally short lived.

A new approach that seems to be gaining popularity is embedding your product within a short film that, on face value, is documenting something entirely different.

Enter the new Hi-Tec ad for its waterproof running shoes. Mirroring the internet’s ever popular extreme sports clips, the shoe company has subtly dropped its product into a short film of adventurers attempting to do the impossible.

Subtle and inadvertent advertising is nothing new, but the medium of the internet and the technology now available to advertisers means that they can employ this technique in new and immediately available new ways.

Can you spot the product shot?