Archive for the ‘Technology’ Category

Philips unveils latest wake-up light campaign

Business, Climate, Design, Film, Marketing, Media, Miscellaneous, Offbeat, Science, Society, Swedish Life, Technology, Tourism: October 29th, 2010 by VT

Philips’ advertising campaigns for the wake-up light have historically challenged the prestige of the product, testing the wake-up light’s mettle in real life. In this latest campaign, the test is on an epic scale.

Watch the clip for the trailer here.

Philips travels to Longyearbyen, Norway, where winter lasts for four months and the sun doesn’t rise at all in this period. A town where the local people look with dread to the winter months: a time of little enjoyment and confusion. A period when, without the differentiation of day and night, time itself is without meaning.

Enter Philips and the wake-up light with a simple mission: to restore residents Longyearbyen’s daily routine and help them combat the negative impact of living without natural light for four months.

The wake-up light simulates sunrise, allowing users to, perhaps not surprisingly, wake up in an environment similar to a bright summer’s day. The theory behind the experiment is that this will combat the negative effects of waking, living and then going to sleep in darkness and should help the user readjust to a more natural cycle.

The full footage for the experiment will be released in November. Will it work? Wait and see.

Dolph Lundgren vs. Unicorn

Film, Marketing, Media, Miscellaneous, Music, Offbeat, Swedish Life, Technology: September 10th, 2010 by VT

These were uploaded on Thursday:

Dolph Lundgren grills a unicorn

Dolph Lundgren loses his head

Just in case you missed it the first time, here’s Lundgren’s rendition of Elvis Presley’s “A Little Less Conversation” at Melodifestivalen in February.

The magic of Google Analytics

Business, Health, Marketing, Media, Miscellaneous, Music, Newsbites, Offbeat, Society, Swedish Life, Technology: July 23rd, 2010 by VT

Sometimes older articles on The Local find new life weeks, months or even years after they are initially published when they are picked up by external sites.

Recent examples of this are a sudden spike in traffic of 8,000 readers on June 16th to Swedish parents keep 2-year-old’s gender secret, initially published nearly a year earlier on June 23rd, thanks to a pickup on i am bored.

More recently, on July 8th, Cracked.com cited our article Black Cobra gang steals selection of small cakes from March in a roundup of 5 bizarre real-life gangs, sending 4,700 readers our way to read about their exploits that merited the mention (they came in 3rd).

This week alone, we’ve seen a significant spike on Artists lose out as fans stop burning CDs and Cerebral palsy fraudster gets 3 years in jail thanks to Fark and Swedish women vote to keep their tops on thanks to reddit.

How can we narrow down the dates, numbers and sources of the traffic coming to our site? Google Analytics. We could spend hours tooling around to see where people are coming from to our site, but we would never get any work done.

We love to see where our stories end up on the Internet, so please feel free to share any articles (old or new) that amuse or enrage you from our site (using the buttons at the bottom of each story or elsewhere). And don’t forget to check out our new and improved Facebook page.

Stewardess reaches for hijacker injector

Film, Marketing, Offbeat, Technology: November 24th, 2008 by PO

Recently The Local had a couple of articles cataloguing the proud history of Swedish invention and innovation.

There are two reasons the invention shown in the clip below was not included: 1. It’s not Swedish. 2. It’s patently absurd.

But while the invention may not be Swedish, the company using it to market its services most certainly is.

Allow us to present… The Hijacker Injector. Look and learn as one of stewardesses on a flight takes on a hijacker using this very unique invention. Wonder why it never took off?

Branson offers ultimate enlightenment from Kiruna

Technology, Tourism: January 2nd, 2008 by PR

Fancy a trip into the northern lights? For anybody with a spare £100,000 knocking about, this could be the ultimate enlightenment, as James Randerson reports in The Guardian.

Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic plans to offer commercial space flights from its base in New Mexico from 2010 and will begin operating from Kiruna in northern Sweden some time after that.

Sweden offers one important advantage over the US, though. Passengers paying $200,000 (about £100,000) a ticket for the two-hour flight will be able to fly into the aurora borealis – the northern lights – something that no human has done before.

Microsoft standards row revisited

Technology: September 10th, 2007 by PO

The Seattle Times runs a postmortem on Microsoft’s recent Swedish misadventure.

Is Microsoft up to its old tricks? Could it be that the Colossus of Redmond wasn’t chastened by a decade of antitrust oversight, and it’s still bullying and conniving the tech industry?

Background here and here.