Casey and I spent some time over the weekend with our friend Adrienne putting together a brand for their little music collective, which is named Violin and Stuff. Casey plays cello and Adrienne plays violin and together they play wedding music and are also available for studio work. They are both classically trained but what makes them special is their indie-feel and ability to play creatively by ear. They offer a base of normal wedding pieces and will also learn your requests to make each performance unique.

We created a nice logo that has some of the feel of what they represent. Casey really wanted a highly typographic logo with a serifed, traditional font and we thought it might be neat to incorporate the F-hole from a violin or cello. We started with some more traditional fonts like Caslon, Garamond, and Times but none looked quite right. We eventually drifted towards Jos Buivenga's fantastic free font, Fontin. To get an F-hole we needed a nice italic F. Fontin's F wasn't quite what we wanted so we ended up blending together the stem from Garamond with the serifs from Fontin. Here is our final result:

Next we needed to make some nice business cards so that they can market themselves in the real world (a lot of their business will be word of mouth). We pictured something handcrafted and because Casey had some of the equipment hanging around, ended up silkscreening them. We bought neon pink paint and some nice paper from Opus. We had some friends over and had a little business card making party — and with a lot of help from our friend Caitlin they turned out great:

Finally, since all that the business cards have is a URL we needed to get the site up as soon as possible. I created a design mockup a few weeks back and it was just a matter of translating it to real HTML and CSS. It is built in Drupal and should be easy to extend and for Casey and Adrienne to change when they like. Now that the basics are done, I would eventually like to get a Muxtape-like player up in order to easily sample their music.

I'm very happy with how this turned out. We created a strong brand for them to market themselves and we have so many good ideas on how to build on this in the future — we're even thinking of a photo shoot sometime soon!

Here is a video demonstration of a thought control device created by Emotiv Systems of Australia. Even though this lecture is kind of long I think it is extremely important to watch — this kind of technology is going to surround us quite soon.

What is so remarkable is that the device will be retailing for only $299 USD and is completely non-invasive. There are so many applications for this it is boggling. I would love to see it in action and some of my first questions were:

1. Can I record data of myself typing and can this be mapped to a point where I don't need a keyboard anymore?
2. As per the example in the video, if I map a rotate in different axes can the software learn when I am trying to combine actions? Could I then dynamically rotate in many axes at once?
3. Will this be available in an open way? Will we be able to apply the SDK on Linux for example?

Also, OCZ has a device called the Neural Impulse Actuator which will be available for $159 USD. I haven't seen a demonstration yet but I imagine its capabilities are somewhat similar.

I am excited about this as there is so much opportunity for business and innovation. It will be remarkable when we start seeing this kind of technology in our everyday lives and the potential is hard to imagine.

Next steps: They have an SDK available which I intend to poke around in and is there anyone in Vancouver already exploring this technology?