Creative agency Cosalux and Deutsche Post DHL have created a Facebook application, Social Memories, which turns your social circle into a gorgeous, infographic inspired book.

While it’s great to see pics from your favourite events and best friend’s birthday arranged in a glossy magazine-style, pages dedicated to the words you use most in your status updates and the male:female ratio of your friends are even more interesting.

Once the app has generated your book, you can adjust the colour palette, pick your language and (naturally enough) share the whole thing on Facebook. And if you’re particularly enamoured you can get it professionally printed and bound for €19 + shipping.

Souvenirs of our digital lives can be good business.

Link: http://apps.facebook.com/mysocialmemories/

Theatre arguably hasn’t changed all that much in several thousand years. Even with the advent of video recording technology early last century, the idea of recording plays hasn’t gone much further than stationary cameras.

Digital Theatre is a new company aiming to tackle this by using cinematic techniques to bring recorded theatre to the masses.

December’s edition of Wired UK explained the idea:

Using up to ten cameras positioned around the auditorium, [the] team operate like a cinematic crew, exploiting angles and field sizes to create a movie that is later put online to download for £6.99. In the process, they hope to make British theatre accessible to all. So far, visitors from about 50 countries have downloaded shows from their repertoire.

They are currently working with partners like the Royal Shakespeare Company and the Young Vic amongst others. As a natural extension (and bringing the whole idea of DVD extras to mind) they are also beginning to venture into behind the scenes content too.

Site: www.digitaltheatre.com

Underwood is a business born completely out of love, in this case a combined love of vinyl records and short stories.

Twice a year the company produces a limited edition vinyl recording of two writers reading their short stories. And just in case you wanted to know, the name Underwood is taken from the typewriter invented by Frank Wagner in 1896.

Site: www.underwoodstories.com

We’ve covered a host of travel related business ideas and Unlocked Guides – the newly launched series of the children’s travel guides – sit firmly in the ‘it must have been done before’ camp.

And it has, but not a lot and often not very well.

Unlocked Guides deliver a kids’-eye-view of cities like London and Edinburgh containing interesting facts, places to go and plenty of illustrations – all developed in conjunction with kids and parents through regular workshops.

“all over the world, parents are researching trips without getting input from their children. We like children, and we decided they deserved better, so we started to write our Unlocked Guides”

Started by a couple of ex-management consultant twenty-somethings, Factfinder, the company behind the guides, also produces kid-friendly travel guides and fact sheets for travel and tourism companies.

Every industry has its own underserved niche – where will you find yours?

Pic: engage-toi

Here’s one to file under ‘brilliant ideas that someone must have thought of before but apparently didn’t’.

Irish startup, TuneTrak have worked out a way of stamping individual music tracks so that artists can be notified whenever they are played on any one one of over 10,000 radio stations across the globe. Artists (or their labels) also get sent an MP3 recording which they can present as proof if the radio station in question has not paid a royalty.

Outside of pursuing royalties, there’s perhaps an even greater opportunity for labels to collect useful business intelligence data to help plan promotional budgets.

Needless to say, TuneTrak have attracted interest – and funding – from the music industry.

It’ll be interesting to see whether this technology can go beyond radio and prove effective at tracking the use of music (or any other kind of digital media) in other settings.

Via: YourTechStuff

Society6 got a bit of a mention last week in our piece on selling art online but, as promised, I figured it deserved a plug of its own.

They describe themselves as: “a platform for the world’s artists and creatives to promote their work and connect with unique opportunities.”

The first half of that description is fair enough. Artsists can upload their work into a personal gallery, promote the work of others and sell high-quality prints via the site.

But it’s the second part of the statement that makes Society6 stand out.

Connecting with unique opportunities means they actively seek out collaborations with brands like Good Magazine, MTV, Urban Outfitters, VANS and video game maker EA (as well as smaller businesses and projects).

Actively engagement between artists and brands makes a ton of sense for everyone involved: brands get to stay fresh and unique, artists get their work seen and make money.

I wonder if they’d be interested in collaborating on some cover art for our upcoming Iddictive Guides series?

Site: www.society6.com

Comic book artist Ethan Nicolle (29) spent the Christmas holidays playing with his brother Malachai (5).

Malachai dreamt up Axe Cop (a cop with a fireman’s axe as a weapon) and his sidekick Flute Cop (a cop with a flute as a weapon of course).

“The story that followed became more and more brilliant, until I couldn’t contain myself and I had to draw the whole thing into a one page comic. From there the saga continued, and over the course of my week-long visit we cranked out the first four episodes of AXE COP. I posted the comics to my blog and on Facebook and they got great responses. I decided to give AXE COP a home on the internet here and attempt to continue the saga as often as I have time to draw them, and I can get Malachai to write them.”

Axe Cop is now 25 episodes in, has 10,000+ Facebook fans and a YouTube video channel (Episode One is brilliant). You can also buy Axe Cop t-shirts, prints, limited edition sketches or even donate to Malachai’s college fund.

OK, so perhaps not a full blown business – but it does show that when you create something insanely brilliant, finding ways to make money from it isn’t that difficult.

Site: axecop.com

Markus Neuert knew that something was wrong. His work in financial analysis for a Fortune 500 company wasn’t rocking his world – he wanted more than his cubicle was delivering.

And so he decided to do something about it.

“It took me the better part of a year to figure out my true passion which also coincided with what I’ve always been good … sports and visual arts.

It now seems so obvious, but when you’ve spent forever and a day to suppress your passions over the lure of corporate money and a fast track career, then things get blurry.”

The resulting company CycleFilm, is a niche production company specialising in road cycling.

Delivering in both DVD and online formats, the company produce event coverage, recons of famous routes, documentaries and commercials – targeting both fans and businesses in the industry. Services to businesses focus on helping them create content to better connect with online audiences.

Same Model, Different Passions?

CycleFilm looks like a great business – and great fun. What interests me most though is how you might ‘do a Marksu’ and apply the same framework to just about any passion you might have.

That framework is to smash together a media format you love (and can deliver), with a subject you’re passionate about.

And there’s a market for it. Smart businesses are increasingly seeing the benefit in high-quality, multi-media content in attracting and engaging audiences – particularly online. Equally, consumers have near unlimited choice online and are using that choice to seek out niche media that speaks directly (and authentically) to their passions.

In other words, there’s a media company for every passion. What’s yours?

Site: www.cyclefilm.com