The Summer is here and our windows open, which means we play more music than ever. So it's about time we shared with you our Summer Playlist, courtesy of the Dub team. Talk about a mixed bag! This should provide plenty of intrigue and insight into the kind of people we truly are!

Click here to experience it for yourself.

Track listing:

1. American Wedding by Gogol Bordello
2. Fast Friends by Paul Dempsey
3. Time to Pretend (MGMT) by Paul Dempsey
4. The Day You Come by Powderfinger
5. Do The Astral Plane by Flying Lotus
6. Cool Runnings by Bunny Wailer
7. Brighter Day by Pinch
8. Dance With Me by Nouvelle Vague
9. Beach Girls by Tapes 'n' Tapes
10. Elusive by Scott Matthews
11. Dzoka Uyamwe by Oliver Mtukudzi
12. Twilight Galaxy by Metric

If you've never heard of it, then The Research Club is a must-attend for any market research professional. It's simply an open, warm and inviting event for market research professionals to attend and make new contacts - nothing more, nothing less! So successful has it become that there's now a Research Club in Amsterdam, Paris, Hamburg and Frankfurt, as well as London.

There's a Research Club meet-up tonight at Tiger Tiger on Haymarket, from 6.30pm, so if you're free, why not drop by. No invite required. We're leaving soon, see you there!

There's been some considerable buzz around location-based services for some time now, but thats mainly among us consultants. That was until the arrival of Gowalla, Google Latitude and especially the rapidly rising Foursquare. These applications allow you to connect and follow friends as they travel the world (or just your local postcode). They work by using the geo-data captured from your mobile device and then, in the case of Foursquare, get you to 'check-in' to the precise destination. Simple, fun, insightful!

We like Foursquare not only because it keeps us up-to-date with the movements of our friends, but it also allows is to discover new and exciting places to visit in cities around the world, thanks to our well-travelled friends. Perhaps more importantly, the service has massive potential for business owners - especially retailers and operators - in that users can be tracked and rewarded for multiple visits to destinations. This offers great opportunities for customer and brand loyalty schemes and deepens engagement with customers in the 2.0 way.

Best of all, Foursquare harnesses gaming mechanics to increase participation. Simply, the more you visit, the higher your points. Earn points for multiple visits to the same destination or be rewarded with Adventurer status when you check-in to new destinations.

Here's how points are currently awarded:

• +5 points for your first time checking-in at a venue
• +5 points for adding a new venue
• +1 point for per checkin, increasing by +1 with each checkin (e.g. your 1st checkin of the day is +1, 2nd checkin of the day +2 points, etc)

We've even witnessed meet-ups in Sydney and New York for those awarded Mayoral status! So what are you waiting for, drop by Foursquare, befriend me and then drop by Dub....we're waiting for you!

At Dub, we're always interested in new and engaging ways of presenting dry, statistical data.

The guys over at Creative Cloud have done just that. Focusing on Twitter, they've come up with a stat-saturated design showing what would happen if you printed out the 7 billion Tweets posted to-date.

Enjoy.

It's Christmas Eve and following a big year for us here at Dub, we're still working hard, albeit with the music playing and the mince pies going down a treat!

We're very excited about 2010 and an impending rebrand and repositioning of the business to better reflect the Social Business Design that we deliver. More of that to come in new year, but keep you eyes peeled.

We hope that you've  had a year of achievement, fun and laughter, and that 2010 delivers your dreams and ambitions. A very merry Christmas from all the team at Dub.

x

One’s a vegemite-cruncher, the other a copper-topped raving lunatic! No, I’m not referring to Cadbury's latest ad characters, but Dub’s newest recruits Sam and Dan.

Sam joins our team as Lead Developer, fresh off the plane from Brisbane. Someone forgot to tell him that we're not on the beach though as he never wears shoes - strewth! Sam eats PHP code for breakfast and says he can’t wait to experience the English summer. But it’s here already Sam! In his spare time he likes to dance, so much so that he's dedicated a website to it, see here.

Strewth - where are my thongs?

Dan joins us as Business Development Manager. Having previously worked at Rainmaker, one of the UK’s leading Business Development specialists, as well as research, design and innovation experts Sense Worldwide, The Brewery and Lloyd Northover, he knows a thing or two about closing the deal - shame he doesn’t know how to get to work on time, or even where work is yet!

Dan the New Business Man

We welcome them both to our team as we grow the business.

The BBC featured a fascinating new book on their breakfast show today, called 'UK at Home'. The book is the latest project from Rick Smolan and Jennifer Erwitt, founders of Against All Odds Productions. Their company specializes in the design and execution of large-scale global photographic projects that combine compelling storytelling with state-of-the-art technology. Smolan is a former Time, Life, and National Geographic photographer, best known as the creator of the Day in the Life book series; and Erwitt has served as the director of many of those projects.

Essentially what these two, and 150 other leading photo-journalists, have done is visited homes around the UK (and America for it's sister book, America at Home) and snapped the most important place in the general publics lives. What it captures are our most intimate moments, providing an insight into how we live, the relationships we form with those around us (and objects precious to our lives), and how we play, learn and consume.

If we were to publish a book from all the data and behaviours that our own work has captured, this would be it, though perhaps our would be a bit rougher around the edges. The beauty of this project is the nature by which the content (us, the general public) have taken part in it's production - a form of co-creation. To cap it, the publishers have created an interface whereby individuals can order the book with their own photograph uploaded and printed on the front cover, here.

The man behind the term 'crowdsourcing', Jeff Howe, and publisher Random House have, of course, teamed up with Creative Review to launch a competition to design the cover of the upcoming UK edition of Crowdsourcing. A website called Coversourcing has been set up to allow participants to post their entries. The all important reward for winning is a signed first edition, framed artwork and £500 cash. What we like about this is the active encouragement to collaborate with other creatives, be they illustrators, photographers etc., in creating an entry, and how entrants can use Flickr to upload their work, making it beautifully simple.

Simple idea - get 10,000 people to draw a picture of a sheep (facing to the left). Pay out $0.02 for each picture. Bring all these pictures together. Show the world!

I like this little idea because it's simple, fun and engaging (at least for a little bit). The site is intuitive to use, focusing entirely on the task in hand. As an experiment into how to engage an audience, this one works.

Go and have a look for yourself.... you could even get involved!

thesheepmarket.com