R&D Summary - week 5

What a week! Or two actually, since we skipped last weeks summary. The reason for that was that we were all busy in San Francisco, where we spent most of the last two weeks. Apart from visiting our office there (safely ensconced within Weldon Owen), we had a few workshops and met a bunch of inspiring people.

A few days was spent planning our annual trend report Media Map - trends and post-it notes were flying all over the place. We had all done a lot of initial research and the time had come to make sense of it all. Not the easiest task in the world, but a lot of fun. We might come back to a few of the things that we came up with later on.

We also set off to visit a number of places in order to get a feel of the local Silicon Valley atmosphere. First up was Stamen Design, who had been kind enough to invite Sara and me to a christmas party in December. Their work had been among our favorites a long time.



After that, we head to Palo Alto and Mountain View for two days of entrepreneurship and bright thinking. We met with Y-Combinator, Anybots, Tapulous, Zong and Ribbit. A most learning experience all in all. The team was instantly hooked on TapTap Revenge - especially Alex, as you can see above. We also went out to Stanford to talk to Media X, CDR and INJO.



Back in Sweden, Emil's quest to Gowalla-check-in at all the featured places in San Francisco led to the only reasonable action (he almost made it, I think). Creating our own Bonnier R&D spot. We found a few Incase items here and there, so we'll give you a reason to stop by.

That's all for this week - stay tuned for a few real blog posts soon. We have a few ideas that we'll share with you in the coming weeks.