Our latest project in the ongoing Boosted Series is Secret Sites, a scavenger hunt through the bizarre and wonderful corners of Internet culture.

Sound strange? Let us explain.

Our partners, Samsung and Intel, wanted the third installment of our Boosted campaign to retain the clue-based riddles of our last game, Tweetcracker. So, we’ve created several hidden sites as easter eggs around the Internet and created a clue-based, Hangman-inspired quest to find them.

Every few days the Boosted Secret Sites hub page reveals a challenge consisting of a URL full of numbered blanks. We post clues on Facebook and Twitter to help players find them. The hook? The first, eligible person who visits a Secret Site wins a Samsung Series 7 with 2nd Gen Intel Core i5 Processors.

Each secret site is a tribute embracing the knock-knock-jokes of Internet culture: the single-serving site. We’re not only informing our target of tech-savvy folks that Samsung makes laptops with Intel processors, we’re letting them know that together, these brands get the internet. The first challenge led users to www.ScratchAndSniffWebsite.com.

We didn’t need to bury the message about the Series 7 within the execution. We created ads that are, at their core, a fun and enjoyable experience (gasp!). And luckily, Samsung and Intel were on board. How couldn’t they be when we have a 312px tall Intel logo on www.ClientDreamWebsite.com.

Check out www.BoostedSecretSites.com now!

It’s our distinct pleasure to introduce the eighth episode of The GE Show: Manufacturing. (Don’t know about The GE Show? It’s a episodic series we make with GE, showcasing their technology, people, and problem-solving in inventive ways.) This was an exciting episode for us, not just because we got to visit enormous factories and play computer games all day, but because we got a chance to delve into the guts of a company that makes real physical things — a rarity these days.

IN 20XX PANDA WERE FLYING THROUGH A SKY TO FIGHT WATERMELON.

FOR GREAT POWER AND BATTLE FLY AND WALKING FOR JUSTICE.

A PANDA IS YOU.

Rachel Nash and I would like to announce the public debut of DARLING MY PANDA VIOLENCE WALK (ダーリング・まい・パンダ・暴力散歩), a music-responsive side-scrolling video game and the second installment of Project Popcorn.
Inspired by and lovingly poking fun at Japanese anime, video games, and bizarre mistranslations thereof, DMPVW allows you to enter a link to any YouTube video and use that music as the soundtrack for your game. Various aspects of the game respond directly to what’s going on at any given moment in the music you choose; enemies pop up and march across the screen to the beat, enter at a height corresponding to a particular pitch, and even the boss may be more or less aggressive depending on the song. When you get hit, the music briefly distorts.

Some songs are definitely more difficult than others.

Whether you win or lose, you can post your score to Facebook in the form of a custom-generated graphic (which can also be sent to friends to gloat over your superior performance).

We’ve got a lot of ideas for future improvements and features, including multiplayer, and more bosses and stages.

The music-processing guts of the game are built on the ALF audio processing library for ActionScript created by Drexel’s METlab. Without this key component, this project would not have been possible.

I’d like to express great admiration, affection, and apologies to Miki Higashino, Konami Kukeiha Club, and Konami, whose music and games inspired and helped shape this game from start to finish. In particular, Konami Kukeiha Club’s track ‘Burning Heat’, from the opening stage of the game ‘Gradius II: Gofer no Yabo’, may have been the true seminal inspiration for this entire game. The version included as a preset here is a remake from one of Konami’s Dance Dance Revolution games. The opening 8-bit music that plays as your song is loading is the boss music from the NES/Famicom version of Salamander, or Life Force as it is known in the States.

P.S. All of the Japanese text is legit and actually means something.

Are you interested in becoming the next Twitter, but have trouble writing with brevity? Do you feel you could have made Instagram, if not for your fierce devotion to your StarTAC? Despite all this, you still have the opportunity to create the Next Big Startup, thanks to Vitamin T’s latest offering: the Starter Upper. It’s your one-stop app for starting up your startup, based on a tried and true method of entrepreneurship – simple addition.

Episode 6 of The GE Show has just taken flight, and we’re awfully proud. (Don’t know about The GE Show? It’s a episodic series we make with GE, showcasing their technology, people, and problem-solving in inventive ways.) This time we’ve returned to the fertile skies of the aviation world, exploring the problems and potential of the future of flight.

These entrepreneurs, designers and artists are changing the status quo. They’re not over-thinking, they’re relying on their own instincts and volition to benefit the greater good. They are just doing. And doing so with a purpose. And consumers are beginning to connect with that purpose. Thoughtful ideation, design and production is moving consumers toward more mindful and meaningful consumption.

Have you ever wanted to see how an idea you had, or a tool you used, spread around the world as it went from person to person? We set out to do just that with Spark, a sharing game that celebrates the release of Firefox’s first mobile browser, as much as it celebrates the global community it was designed for.

Sign up to get your own virtual “Spark” and then pass it to your social network to watch it change, grow and travel around the world.

Real-time visualizations of your personal statistics show you how far your Spark has traveled. And as you play, you can choose to meet challenges, which provide the opportunity to earn over forty virtual badges.

But the real fun comes in being a part of something larger than yourself. A colorful interactive global data visualization of the full community’s progress allows you to watch Spark spread throughout the world.

The Spark site is a robust mobile site with an accompanying browser site. While the Firefox mobile browser is only available for Android phones, Spark is for everybody. Log in on your preferred mobile device or browser and start a Spark.