This week I have learnt to make mistakes. And
that failure is ok – necessary, even. In other words, I’ve learnt that you have to make mistakes in order to get something really good.

Yes, that’s right, I’ve been introduced to
the marvelous Soichiro Honda. For the unitiated, he’s the chap who came up with the whole Honda
business – and an awfully clever chap at that. I particularly like his take on baby
spiders (a bit like thinking outside the box, or, the best way to get from A to B is via Z, P, J and F).

From my perspective, it’s really interesting to see how clients can affect an agency’s philosophy. It isn’t a clinical or purely commercial
relation that ties the two together; there’s symbiosis and exchange between them. For someone new to advertising, this is both surprising and rather nice.

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(Thoughts courtesy of Planning Placement newbie James.)

Dwindling
land for farming? Meet the ‘freight farm’: a reused freight container that
grows all sorts of veg in a tiny space. Or check out Mosaic, which hooks small-time investors to clean energy projects, a bit like a facebook for solar panels. Or Bina, where Big Data is put
to work to find a cure for cancer.

A lot of these are crowd-funded, or germinated in an internetty-type environment. They beg the question: why the rise in world-saving? What's with all the online do-gooding?

Well, you
could make a vague link between techno-altruism and the ascent of
Silicon Valley, which always seemed to be at the nicer end of American capitalism
(see, for example, Google’s famous ‘Don’t be Evil’ policy).

Or you could point out that the web is all about helping people link up with other people. Webby projects might just have a tendency to altruism built in to them if they're gestated in an amniotic soup of connectivity, rather than, say, warfare. 

Maybe its simpler. Increasing connections with other like-minded types makes it easier for nice people to realise nice
ideas. Food for thought, especially in the wake of TED and SXSW. 

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(Thoughts courtesy of Planning Placement newbie James.)