By Kristina Loring - October 23, 2011
Sometimes between the hoard of inspirational talks and sessions that challenge the status quo—and blow your mind at best— you have to find a quiet place away from the stimuli and wax poetic with a stranger. I was lucky enough to find Matt Jones.
By Kristina Loring - October 22, 2011
The delightful designer Thomas Thwaites took the stage today to offer a close examination of a complex design challenge. Unlike his session peers from the State Department, he wasn’t addressing the problematic organism of the U.S. foreign policy, but rather the boggling complexities of, well, a toaster.
By Kristina Loring - October 21, 2011
This year’s PopTech conference in Camden, Maine focuses on the theme of “Rebalancing”; it reflects the time of extreme transition we’re in as a global society and the turbulent reevaluation our systems and institutions are undergoing –whether it’s taking place in the environment or education, the economy or the media, healthcare or design.
But using the verb rebalancing almost implies that there was equilibrium in the first place. As speaker and author Stephanie Coontz pointed out at the beginning of her talk, “rebalancing is not something you do once, it’s a way of life.”
By Kristina Loring - June 17, 2011
It’s clear that mobile technology is a powerful vehicle for sharing information and creating meaningful connections in previously isolated communities. Mobile tech has the power to transform industries from energy to journalism, and frog and its partners believe it can transform healthcare in a deeply impactful way as well. We created Project Masiluleke in partnership with the Aricent Group, PopTech, iTEACH, Praeklt, Nokia Simens, and others to build a network of support and awareness around HIV/AIDS.
By Kristina Loring - June 3, 2011
Years after the end of apartheid, South Africa is still striving to recreate its identity. Many outdated social and economic systems have undergone massive changes on a national and local level, all with the goal of cultivating diversity while also preserving tradition. The result is that great strides in racial equality and civil rights have been achieved. Economic equality, however, is still part of a hopeful future—one for which a number of social innovators in the country are working hard to achieve.
By Kristina Loring - March 15, 2011
A new type of public intimacy exists in an era of the New Transparency, where the sharing of our identities online is said to be our most valuable social currency. But what is the backlash to expressing intimate details in a social forum? How does that shape or prohibit the control you have over your favorite brand: yourself? Read on for notes on authenticity, free expression, and the ability to “fail” in open communities.
By Kristina Loring - March 12, 2011
“We have greatly overestimated value of access to info and greatly underestimated value of access to each other — Clay Shirky at #sxsw
The highlights of my SXSW ’11 experience, thus far, have been found in the sessions that underscore the creative commons culture of documenting, sharing, and remixing that hacktivists, journalists, and members of civil society as a whole are embracing.
By Kristina Loring - January 10, 2011
frog Creative Director Howard Nuk gives a full behind-the-scenes look at the design of frog and ECOtality's Blink family of electric vehicle chargers.
EV's and hybrids have moved to the forefront of the alternative energy movement, and may possibly become the future of everyday transportation. But only if the right ecosystem is put in place to support the mass of energy-conscious consumers who hope to hit the road in one of the new EVs soon to hit the streets.
By Kristina Loring - December 22, 2010
In 2010, it seemed everyone was eager to declare that print was finally dead, even before a proper funeral. The economic recession shed light on the outrageous cost of production (printing the New York Times costs twice as much as sending every subscriber a free Kindle) and led to threats of pay walls as solutions to covet content. Meanwhile, both the industry and icons of web journalism speculated about whether or not the iPad would be able to save our favorite magazines from vanishing entirely. And all this because of the Internet, where you don’t just look for news but the news is able to find you with the aid of real-time social sharing tools courtesy of powerful social networks. Curator Lauren Cornell focuses on the implications of these shifting flows of data in her new exhibit Free at the New Museum in New York. In a statement about the exhibit, Cornell comments on the power behind our growing digital culture "The internet is not just a medium, but also a territory populated and fought over by individuals, corporations, and governments; a communications tool; and a cultural catalyst."
So instead of fearing such a powerful cultural catalyst, long-time print publishers must embrace and harness it. In order to stake a claim in this growing digital territory, magazines will have to re-imagine their identity and disrupt their current content and advertising model to appeal to new hyper-social audiences thirsting for interactive media.
By Kristina Loring - December 14, 2010
frog launches Tempt’d, a new app harnessing social networks for behavior change, to coincide with MTV’s docu-series about overweight teens transforming their health.
In the sea of status updates and tweets that compose our virtual conversations, new ways of understanding our own identities and relationships to our community are emerging. Nowhere is this behavior more apparent than with teens, who have grown up with social media and use it to express their passions, obsessions and experiences in real time. Understanding how integral social media is to teens and the potential it has to impact their behavior, frog has partnered with MTV for its new show “I Used To Be Fat,” a docu-series that chronicles several teens’ quests to lose weight the summer before they enter college.
