VH1 My Lil Lohan Facebook App

VH1 Best Week EverVH1′s Best Week Ever and Plastic Past are proud to introduce My Lil Lohan, VH1′s very first foray into the fast-paced world of Facebook Applications.  VH1 invited Plastic Past to pitch a variety of Facebook Application concepts that spoke to the spirit and playfulness with which the Best Week Ever audience view the VH1 brand.  The result of these sessions is My Lil Lohan, a Facebook application that lets anyone adopt a Lindsay Lohan of their own to take care of.

Now you can adopt your very own Lindsay Lohan, and do your best to keep her sane and sober by giving her the care and attention she needs.  Or destroy her with sex, drugs, and Rock n’ Roll.  The choice is yours, and you can also help or harm your friends’ Lil Lohans too.

IN THE PRESS

Widget Marketing – Overcoming Audience Fragmentation While Increasing Engagement“, JupiterResearch, September 16, 2008

My Lil Lohan is Facebook Dynamite“, The Daily Reveille, November 14, 2007

My Lil Lohan“, Indiana Daily Student, November 12, 2007

The official My Lil Lohan application on Facebook

My Lil Lohan

Invite friends to a Bender with Lindsay

Invite friends to go on a Bender with Matt's Lil Lohan

Choice gifts for Lindsay

Give gifts to your own or your friends' Lil Lohans


Dirty Secret Facebook App

Dirty Secret is a Facebook application that allows users to spill the beans about their friends anonymously.  Users can browse secrets within their friend communities, within their “networks”, or for everyone, including strangers.

Each secret has a comment board and a voting system attached to it where users can debate the veracity of the claims being made.  Only The person about whom the secret is told has the right to delete it.

Dirty Secret screen

Dirty Secret screen

Dirty Secret screen

Dirty Secret screen


Subway Status Facebook App

ss_icon4

Subway Status is an application for Facebook that allows New Yorkers to post updates on the status of the subways, meet their neighbors and read service announcements pulled from the Metropolitan Transportation Authority’s Web site. Users can check for delays, complain about local transit issues — such as the campaign for an F train express — and keep track of weekend changes, all without leaving their social network.

By combining the New York transportation experience with new forms of social networking, Plastic Past is augmenting the normal subway experience and bridging the boundaries between online and offline activities.

IN THE PRESS

A Site Where Riders Can Compare Notes (And Complain, Too)“, New York Times, August 23, 2007

Facebook To Reduce Rage, Increase Hookups On Subway“, New York Magazine, August 22, 2007

Even the Subway’s on Facebook“, Metro NY, August 28, 2007

The subways are in your facebook, upadatin’ ur transit alerts“, Second Ave. Sagas, August 23, 2007

Click to go to Subway Status on Facebook

picture-2


Blockr Book Publisher

Blockr is a web application that makes it easy to design, publish, and sell books.  Part social network, part design software, part book publisher, and part e-commerce, Blockr required an analytical mind to pore over their business plan, the initial creative ideas, and convert those needs into an effective and practical design or a web application that could be developed in time for impatient venture capitalists.

Having worked with Blockr CEO Jamie Rosen in the 90′s as part of his Comet Systems startup company, Plastic Past President, Amos Bloomberg, felt comfortable tackling the job.  We designed and launched a full-featured yet easy-to-use web application that attracted the first early adopter user community, and eventually lead to further financing for the fledgling company.

Digital equivalent of a napkin sketch outlining all site features

The digital equivalent of a napkin sketch outlining the flow of the entire application

user flow comparison

User flow comparison

The book editor screen

The book editor wireframe

The image picker interface

The image picker interface

Sitemap

Sitemap


Esprsso News Reading Platform

Esprsso.net brings together two of our favorite things: news reading and conversation.  While sipping the proverbial cup, users of Esprsso can read news originating from virtually any news sources or blog, while engaging their peers in discussion.

Esprsso works in much the same way as other news aggregators, such as Google Reader and Daylife.  However, Esprsso makes sharing of news as simple as a single click.  Each article has a discussion board where readers can leave comments.  Additionally, readers can rate articles, bookmark articles, forward them to friends, and organize articles into custom “Channels” of news to which others users can then subscribe.

Picture 1

Links

The official Esprsso site

Review in the New York Law Journal, April 17, 2007


M2M Mobile Museum Guide

The M2M Mobile Museum Guide is a proposal done in collaboration with Jared Lamenzo and Shagun Singh to allow visitors to the American Museum of Natural History to augment their museum experience using Sony’s Playstation portable console.

Due to space constraints, the museum is only able to display limited information about any exhibit.  Furthermore, at any given time, only a small fraction of the museum’s collection can be displayed.  Through a partnership with Sony, the M2M Mobile Museum Guide will create rich interactive experiences that bring to life the valuable artifacts in the museums possession in a way that engages and enhances the educational experience latent in each exhibit.

Visitors will be able to delve deeper into the topics touched upon in the exhibits.  With the M2M Mobile Museum Guide, students can play educational games with other students, like treasure hunts in the museum’s collection, take fun quizzes that cover the core topics of each exhibit, bookmark favorite artifacts on display and later retrieve that list of favorites with links to more information about each artifact on the museum’s website.

Picture 1

Picture 1


Needies Interactive Robotic Plush Dolls

Needies are interactive plush dolls inspired by codependent, high-maintenance relationships.  Each Needie has a custom-developed electronic nervous system that they use to talk, sing, and feel hugs.  Needies communicate with each other verbally and wirelessly.

Totally attention-starved, they compete with each other for human affection — or, getting touch, as they like to say.

When you give Needies touch (by hugging and squeezing them), they will return your kindness with songs and shameless flattery.

But remember that Needies always know when other Needies are getting touch! If one Needie is getting touch while others are neglected, the unloved Needies will conspire to take its place.

mossie_kelly2

Kelly holding Mossie

Links

The official Needies site

Needies in the press


Popstick Reality Star Power

Working with Popstick on a proposal for a new online reality show for AOL, we developed the concepts for a pitch revolving around an online social network of game show participants.  Visitors to the site could vote for their favorite contestant, and any visitor to the site could participate to become one of the select few featured contestants.

Reality Star Power home screen

Reality Star Power home screen

Reality Star Power latest episode screen

Reality Star Power latest episode screen

Reality Star Power contestant profile screen

Reality Star Power contestant profile screen


Natalie Jeremijenko’s Robot Ducks

Natalie Jeremijenko contacted us one week before the opening of the Save the Robots festival in Dublin.  She had been commissioned by The Ark to create a series of Robot Ducks that festival goers could use to communicate with the real ducks in the pond at St. Stephen’s Green in central Dublin.

Working under duress, we express-ordered plastic decoy ducks used for hunting, and then set about re-purposing them to become vehicles for greater duck-human communication.  Using small audio/video transceivers, we embedded a camera, microphone, and speaker inside of each duck that could be viewed and controlled wirelessly from laptops in the park.  Users could also use a handheld remote-control motor system embedded inside each duck to maneuver it around the pond.  This turned out to be a big success in Dublin.

Robot Ducks featured in Res Magazine

Robot Ducks featured in Res Magazine

Duck picnic before departure for Dublin

Duck picnic before departure for Dublin

Permit this family to drive ducks

Permit this family to drive ducks

Robot duck playing hard to get in Dublin

Robot duck playing hard to get in Dublin


Autoimage Self-Organizing Self Portraits

Autoimage is a self-organizing self-portrait.

Based on a model of how the brain learns to recognize faces, each pixel in an Autoimage portrait learns where it belongs in the image as a whole based on the activity of the pixels around it.

Autoimage brings the age-old medium of the portrait into the era of the network. Self-organizing portraits respond to the modern metaphor of life as the sum of complex interactions among many small independent agents.

Picture 3

The official Autoimage site