Girls amaze with the right incitaments

When working with Stardoll I got amazed by the users almost every day. They did the most surprising things, maybe not what you expect 11-year old girls to do. When getting the right incitaments million of young girls get extremely high tech and business minded.

In the beginning there were no ways to get Stardollars but through paying real money. Only a few percentages can convince their parents that it is worth it and millions of girls stood stone-broke. This made them very creative. There was a flood of valuable and great suggestions on how they could earn Stardollars. Mini games was a model they knew from other communities, but they also suggested starting own stores, sell their old stuff, get ads on the site, write styling and gossip blogs, become an in game profession or just to get some money every day for logging in. (This was long before any Facebook games). Very few girls asked to get presents as it is part of the game to choose your purchases to create your own identity.

As soon as they got the feature to sell their old stuff and more, they became the world's best promotors and marketers. They used all forums available to announce their sales, to present themselves, to get friends, to make themselves interesting. They try out different messages and learn the effects. They soon learned how to use gift cards to offer eachother real money in purchases instead of Stardollars only as intended.

When starting local campaigns offering special items to different markets, the girls showed advanced tech skills. They easily found out how to track and use a proxy servers and vpn's to take advantage of all offers. Bloggers scan all local version and report where to find what. Through this work they get lots of readers on their own blogs, lots of pageviews and money through ads.

When offering Stardollars in reward for playing mini games, there were soon girls connecting systems/bots for cheating. Overall we learned that if there was a chance that anyone would be able to do something unintended, they would. Sometime they found out an extremely tricky pattern of logging in and out and clicking different buttons to get blue hair and so on.

This is only positive! They are devoted and engaged and it's extremely important to see how the right incitament can get any girl interested in technique and business. It only tells me that education in schools have not yet understood this.

Eco product development from WWF

Fantastic product development! “Save as WWF, save a tree” is a plug-in enables documents to be disseminated as pdf files that cannot be printed.

No more needed to be said but read about the entire concept on WWF.

Med olika perspektiv

När jag gick Tegnérgatan fram igår fastnade jag i snön när jag glimtade en underbar helkroppsfigur stående inne på ett galleri. En staty, fast målad, kanske gjord i papier maché, kanske något annat material, och så fin. Hon var nästan naken, med bara en tunn genomskinlig voile över sig och fötterna flöt över i sin nakenhet direkt i de högklackade skorna.

Jag gick in och hittade vackra böcker på en stubbe och mängder med tavlor där konstnärinnan Lotta Hannerz har jobbat med perspektiv och dimensioner på olika sätt. Kreativt, roligt, smart, uppmärksamt, sorligt och vackert.

Take care of the smurfs for me today

When I started to play Farmville I got that 'aha' feeling. This is how it should be done. Today I say ok, every game can't be done exactly the same, it's not fun in the long run. But here is a version with those additions making it wonderful. The foundation is the same but as the Smurfs got a known history there are so many stories to build on. The presentsmurf brings me presents ever day, the firesmurf puts things on fire. There are different houses to buy/build for different effects and reasons. This is to me an improved and updated version of Farmville. Plus that the smurfs are lovable and always have been.

Smurf's Villag is for free on iTunes AppStore

More on the Farmville Aha feeling

Additions: Several blogs are reporting on the payment issue - when assigning you add your ITunes account and the kids easily make the money just click away...

Kinect opens up for innovations

Pelle Penttinen tweeted yesterday that he was thinking about buying a Kinect and if it is fun. I was thinking that it's still much like wii but that there sooner or later will probably appear the most fantastic innovative games and ideas that we can't even imagine right now. This is a fun start - an updated version of hand puppet shadows. Check out more on engaget.

November gray on my mind

BCBGMaxAzria Fall 2010

Gray is maybe the color that has the most impact on my mind. A gray snow slushy suburb square is so totally depressing, while a bare birch wood in november encourages me to breath life.





'It's gray' doesn't sound very positive. Gray sounds dull and gloomy, out of spirit, neutral. It's an everyday color making no difference. It doesn't require any attention. And exactly this can be relieving, soothing, meditative. It' lets the mind rest and focus on it's own path without getting interrupted.


It's amazing how different you can experience a gray landscape. To some extention it has to do with the materials. Concrete and steel connote construction, non flexibility and forced order while organic materials as whool, wood and stone signals wisdom of age, memories and hidden secrets. It's also possible to copy these two different versions through combining different shades of gray with eachother or just using one plain shade.

wall art fr Germany

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grönt och gult

Kenza sets the path

I'm so happy that, somewhat I almost feel pride over bloggers like Kenza show everyone that there are other ways than those already set by men. There are successful business ideas and roads to take and make that only girls believe in. The men with power or competing say it is impossible that there is any big money in not being educated and writing about unimportant stuff as fashion, fun and just being young. Important to who? Obviously it is important to lots of ignored people. 200000 SEK per month (20000 USD) just by ads is not that small money.

Internet has opened up a market where the consumer leads no matter what businessmen decide is great or not. I'm looking forward to a future where women who have gained the same power will be a part of the business analysis and will be part of a more diverse trade.

Kenza has now her name on shoes

Proof on her blog (in swedish)

Barneys Recycles Espresso Foil Bags

Ho ho ho... Barneys New York Recycles Espresso Foil Bags Into Glamorous Gown - creative, branding and trendsetting


via ecouterre

Farmville for kids

Both Stardoll and Girlsgogames have lost quite a bit of traffic the last year. To Facebook??? Many of the users are too young though and there are more parents than I who know that Facebook was made for an older audience and that it is most uncertain whether it's suited for kids. But there is unexpected competition anyway.

My 8 year old girl used to stay a lot on both Stardoll and Girlsgogames. She's not anymore, she plays Farmville. But then you need friends on Facebook? Says who?

She plays it mostly on the iPad somewhere around us where we are at the moment. We can hear her comments and questions and easily help her out when required. And then her dad forwards messages from her neighbour - the son of a colleague at work. He thinks she's not working enough to enlarge her farm. She replies through the dads that he should make his farm look a little nicer. Back and forth it goes. They've been playing for some weeks now. Through their dads accounts without ever seeing Facebook.

The image from Mashable provides great figures on Farmville usage.

Looklet's impact on lifestyle

I love looklet, but here they show that they are not aware of the impact they as a messanger and images as a medium have. It's obvious that they try to be startling with headlines as 'Smooth Criminals' and 'Pamela Des Barres', but I truly hope the fashion concept below doesn't spread around. It's so easy to get used to and accept an image, a style, a concept, a habit just by seeing or hearing it often enough. This is a stylish image, but the lifestyle is maybe not that grate and should not be glorified. It's even a lie that you will be able to stay a chic party queen all through your pregnancy and the following years - says a bitter mother of three :-). And again we'd rather be Joan than Betty.

The problem is that I just helped them spread it around...