Flickr Archives - Steve Sammartino

Mistakes are awesome

Posted on April 29, 2009 by Steve Sammartino

I’ve made so many mistakes since I started rentoid, but everyone of them has lead me to a new insight, idea of method. And I’m not alone, so of the greatest inventions, business and ideas are the results of mistakes or unexpected evolutions. The terrific photosharing website Flickr.com started it’s life as an on line game before evolving. The point is it’s worth letting things develop before trying to patch everything. See what path it takes us on. Especially for websites, where unintended uses often lead us to great enlightenment.

While watching this old school break dancing lesson on Youtube – one of the great forefathers of BBoy-ing Crazy Legs said something in the first minute of the video below regarding mistakes. Advice worth remembering in startup land.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7bF3tTzW2Ik]

New York Series: So much advertising

Posted on February 6, 2009 by Steve Sammartino

I am absolutely flummoxed at how deep the media channels flow in the USA.

I’ve never such visual pollution in one city. So much advertising.The thing I’m most surprised about is the ethical (pun intended) pharmaceutical category. TV advertisements for Drug X, encouraging people to go to the doctor to see if they have disease Y, in which case they should ask the doctor to prescribe drug X. This is so wrong, on so many levels. Start ups out there, please be in business for good – sales should be your secondary objective – helping people your first.

times-square

Sure, Times Square is kind of cool to look at, a real visual orgy. But it just never ends.

If you’re in the media business in Australia or Europe, there are plenty of new spaces which can be leveraged. I’ll provide a summary of new media channels with a photo essay at the end of the trip. But in the interim here’s a link to an historical advertising photo stream I found on flickr. Quite interesting.

Creative Inspiration – visuals

Posted on November 18, 2008 by Steve Sammartino

Google images is a “good” place to find a photo or image – if we have it in mind.

Flickr is an “awesome” place for ‘creative inspiration’. When ever I’m struggling to find an image for something, and just can’t think of the best visual to do it…. I let the Flickr community do the thinking for me.

It’s a very cool way to leverage ‘semantic web’ for a visual solution. We can find visual interpretations our life experience would just never think of. Just click on the examples below and quickly scroll to see the great images we find for these words:

Sure, visuals aren’t game winning. But if we’re going to use them, they may as well be poignant and memorable. Oh yeh, be sure to use creative commons before you rip ’em.

(Irony – no visual in this post!)

Steve – founder rentoid.com