Erased Tapes did a tour featuring Nils Frahm, Ólafur Arnalds and Winged Victory for the Sullen. I attended one of their shows in Berlin and it was amazing.
Horse – Mighty Oaks
My good friends Claudio and Ian are doing an amazing job with their band called Mighty Oaks. A recent feature by ARD during the Reeperbahn festival in Hamburg shows that these guys are seriously kicking ass.
Blom & Blom: Industrial Authentics
The last months I have been helping out my friends Kamiel & Martijn with the launch of their new company called Blom & Blom.
In their own words:
Blom & Blom is about two brothers. Two brothers who share a passion for forgotten items from forgotten places. Unique items. Items that once had an industrial life, but have now been abandoned; left to perish. Items with a rich, and almost epic history. Items that deserve a new life.
So what they do is discover forgotten lamps and other furniture, to grant them a new life. Here are some images that make up for exactly such a great story:
Exploring those abandoned buildings does have something magical, I’m looking forward to future adventures with them.
Design
The design has been done by Till Wiedeck, who has done a great job in developing not only a super clear identity for them, but also approached the webdesign in a very lean attitude. We shaped and modified the basic concept with the whole team bringing the end result to the level it is now. So proud of this.
The website is build using WordPress and WP E-commerce plugin. There are some cool responsive features and the site is highly optimized using W3 Total Cache, but I’ll make a writeup of the technical details later.
For now, check out Blomandblom.com, or view their video portrait:
Cut the World
Seems like since Carice van Houten has been featured in Game of Thrones she’s been kicking ass lately. This sums that all up: a music video for Anthony & the Johnsons featuring Willem Dafoe & Carice van Houten. Filmed at Schiphol.
Things I learned
Frequently I’m amazed by what people learn and share on the internet, I love it! Seriously, if you feel you are lacking skills for something, learn it. The internet is made for that. By using the internet on a daily basis, I run into (mostly cool, sometimes silly) interesting things. Whenever I find these things worth wile to share, I post them to my Tumblr.
Check out Things I learned.
MailChimp publishes study on mobile email
Today MailChimp, the cool kids who know email over at Atlanta, have released a study: Email on Mobile Devices. While working on an email project over at SoundCloud, I’ve seen some other companies doing some efforts to display their transactional emails nicely on mobile. Then Campaign Monitor published a blogpost on how to make Twitters email notifications compatible on mobile. This proved my gut feeling, but I didn’t had the numbers.
Summary
While the research is not going so deep on the subject and the studies are quite simple, there are some things that I find worth noting:
While Return Path published a study saying Mobile email open rates increase with 34%, we now have a complete overview in this document.
Mobile email open rates increased 34% in the last six months of 2011, according to a study by ReturnPath. Compared to mobile, desktop email opens dropped by 9.5%. Similarly, email open rates via webmail decreased by 11%.
Boom! 34% increase in the second half of 2011, that means it should be a bigger number by now.
72% of the people we tested read their emails in bed.
I confess, I do that too. Frankly, while I disabled notifications, I read my emails everywhere. I’ll be looking more into email notification trends and hope to post my learnings here soon.
Oh and also, check out Mandrill, the transactional email platform MailChimp has launched lately; I really liked how two of their engineers were dogfooding the platform with their own pet project.