Big Eye Deers

Fake fundraising efforts for the Haiti disaster are spreading like wildfire on Facebook. Dozens of fan pages have been set up, urging users to join and promising a $1 donation for each member. One group this weekend attracted 1.5 million members before it was disabled.

Meanwhile, during the weekend, Facebook officials had to beat back a rumor that the firm had promised a $1 donation for every member that changed their status to include a message about Haiti.

“This status is being tracked, the owners of facebook have confirmed they will send $1 to the rescue fund for the Haiti earthquake disaster for everytime this is cut and paste as a status,” read one form of the bogus claim. “You only have to leave it for a minimum of 1 hour. Lets all do our bit to help.”

Facebook spokesman Barry Schnitt said the firm took aggressive steps to quell the rumor.  It posted a note on its blog on Saturday warning about the bogus message.

“Beware of scams and hoaxes and ensure that your donations for Haiti get to the right places,” the social networking company wrote on its blog.   Contrary to a current meme, Facebook is not donating $1 for statuses, however we are sharing reputable resources via the “Other Pages” tab on the Global Disaster Relief on Facebook Page.”

Read more here.

Exploring a new city is always fun. But if you can’t get there, a gorgeous, zoomable 360-degree view photo can be an acceptable substitute.

360 Cities, a Dutch company, has created a stunning panoramic photo of Prague in the Czech Republic.

What makes this panoramic photo interesting to viewers is that you can zoom in and out, move up or down or change your view–much like with Google Street View maps.

The photo has been assembled from 600 shots clicked by a 21-megapixel Canon 5D Mark II camera and a 70-200mm lens, set to 200mm. The camera was mounted on a special robotic device that turned it tiny increments every few hours. The resulting data from the camera was about 40-gigabytes.

The finished Photoshop file is 120 GB. Loading the raw files into a computer and stitching the photo took about a week. Martin used a four year-old Windows PC with two single-core 3 GHz Xeon processors and 8 GB of RAM. He also bought a solid state drive to speed up some tasks.

The photo measures 192,000 x 96,000 pixels, or 18.4 billion pixels altogether.

So start exploring Prague. If you zoom in enough, you can even see laundry hanging out to dry in some of the buildings.

Read more here.

For all you graphic design aficionados out there, check out the Typo/Graphic Posters site, which features a fantastic collection of compelling and provocative posters, curated from more than 300 designers and agencies globally. The site aims to be ‘a timeless source for studies, inspiration and promotion of good design through poster culture and cultivation of typography and pure forms of design.’

The collection can be organized and viewed by category (solo designer, studio, exhibition, font foundry, school), and ordered alphabetically or randomly – the layout is simply and elegantly arranged, like having a mini art gallery displayed on your monitor!

See the collection here.

It’s been a spectacular year for Placebo, with a multi-million selling album that topped the charts across Europe, a string of career defining festival performances and an MTV Music Award for Best Alternative group.

Big Eye Deers is delighted to be Placebo’s web partner, providing all they need in development, design and strategy.  This year we’ve worked together on many projects including the re-invigorated Placeboworld site, with its fresh emphasis on social media and fan-supplied content, a custom Google maps-driven gigs archive, a film festival site and a hugely successful album launch online playback campaign.

As a Christmas present to the legions of Placebo fans worldwide, the band wanted to offer an Advent calendar with a twist – each day would feature exclusive online content, including new videos, backstage footage, promotional vouchers, competitions and live photography.

The design brief was to go festive, but keep it Placebo – black and gold with abstract lights hit the spot.  The database-driven backend, working through a custom CMS system, provides automatically updated content that is refreshed on the stroke of midnight each day.  jQuery-driven animations take care of the visual overlays, keeping things elegant and clean on the scripting side.

It’s been a huge viral success, with an impressive buzz building on fan forums, blogs, and tweets – and the best is yet to come, with some really special announcements towards the end of the month…

Experience the Placebo Christmas experience here.

This track download was a key part of the high profile campaign for the launch of global clothing and music brand Atticus’ latest album, Atticus Presents: Volume 1.

We developed an efficient, appealing and easy to use data capture and download form, and hooked it all up to our custom content delivery system.

We also set up a dedicated cloud hosted virtual machine, with over 1GB of burstable bandwidth, which means consistently high download speeds – even under the extremely heavy loads.

Check it out for yourself here.

Google is gearing up for an all-out assault on the mobile-phone market that will include a new, Google-branded handset and the first comprehensive Google phone service with unlimited free calls.

For the first time, a single company will control everything from the software in users’ phones to the services they use to make calls and surf the web.

The Googlephone promises to be one of the most advanced smartphones, with a large touchscreen display and a processor almost twice as fast as the one powering Apple’s iPhone 3GS. It will probably be the first phone to run a new version of Google’s Android software, codenamed Flan, offering high-speed 3-D gaming said to be as good as that of many handheld consoles.

Read more here.

Big Eye Deers created a dynamic and compelling brand, in addition to delivering a new website using innovative navigation, full-screen video/photos and blog posts with a bold use of full-screen photographic backdrops.

Syllabus develops and coordinates music programming and strategy for some of the world’s largest brands, so we created a strong, design-led homepage that accurately conveyed the creativity that’s at the heart of their business.

Making sure the design was right is only half the story – we have also built a custom CMS so they can update content and add videos to the site at their own convenience, with Vimeo integration to provide seamlessly integrated video content.

See it for yourself here.

During the Placebo Winter 2009 tour dates, fans will not only be able to watch the live gigs, but they’ll also get the chance to see a Short Film Festival that will be screened on the main stage screens before the gig and during the artist changeovers.

The ShortsTV Live Music Film Festival, launched at Placebo’s Paris show in October, features the work of eight highly talented international film makers for which the band themselves shortlisted. Fans have been asked to vote for their favourite, so Big Eye Deers created a subdomain on the Placeboworld site, complete with analytics,  Vimeo integration and a dynamic jQuery voting component.

A DVD of all eight films will be available to purchase in the PLACEBOWORLD store and all profits will benefit the SOMALY MAM charity, a non-profit organization dedicated to fighting the $12billion per year sex-trafficking industry.

Vote for your favourite here.

To mark the 40th anniversary of the first stirrings of the internet, the Guardian asked its readers for their experiences of life online.

Hundreds responded – click on the link below to see the interactive documentary of their stories and videos, alongside the Guardian’s own research and interviews with key figures.

Read all about it here.

Once again, Big Eye Deers helps Placebo go one step further in reaching their fans across the globe. The band’s website now boasts an interactive ‘Gigs’ page, which enables fans to not only buy tickets for each show, but allows them to pinpoint the venue’s location on a Google Maps driven application, managed by an easy to use CMS.

And it gets better – a complete history of Placebo gigs can be found on the ‘Gigs Archive’ page, with the option for fans to leave comments and upload photos (a la Flickr) for each show. All the fan-submitted content is moderated by the Placeboworld team.  Using a combination of Google Maps, jQuery and Big Eye Deers own CMS system, we’ve delivered an easy to use and immersive experience that gives fans an opportunity to interact with and relive the live Placebo experience.

It’s just another way that Big Eye Deers and Placebo are building a strong community around the band by ensuring their fans enjoy a more rewarding and interactive online experience.

Check it out for yourself here: http://www.placeboworld.co.uk/gigs.php