Ariel Waldman » ariel waldman

Full spread in Linux Format

Ariel Waldman — Tue, 13 Dec 2011 03:38:20 +0000

Okay, I’m not precisely the hot centerfold spread (that was saved for a revealing penguin shot), but I was put on the cover of Linux Format! I tried to talk the interviewers into making the cover a picture of Tux in an astronaut suit (like GitHub’s octonaut) – sadly this didn’t come to fruition.

Here’s the PDF of the article, or you can go buy the full magazine here.

A quick correction in the article that I alerted the writers about: Jeremy Keith is the original founder of Science Hack Day in London – I founded the second Science Hack Day in SF (which I should probably write a blog post about) and am leading up the charge in helping others create Science Hack Days around the world.

Covert Operation

Ariel Waldman — Wed, 02 Apr 2008 09:10:15 +0000

I’ve been digging through a lot of my old work this past week and stumbled across a pitch that was a lot of fun to execute. In 2005/2006, my former agency VML received a RFP from Ubisoft to create buzz for their upcoming release of Splinter Cell 4. I had directed a very large brainstorming session for creating various concepts for the pitch. With an incredibly creative and talented team, we came up with some awesomely insane guerrilla ideas to pitch, but we wanted to somehow prove to Ubisoft that we were able to not only create these ideas, but to actually execute them as well. My favorite projects have always been the ones that I’ve been involved with from creation to execution, and part of the reason I really enjoyed working at VML for so long was to be able to do random things like this.

The night before the pitch, Adam Kellogg, Aaron Weidner, and myself flew in to San Francisco and acquired a generator, a $60k projector, and a minivan. The result is this video. Adam edited the video overnight and we presented it the next morning in the pitch (note: this was never meant to be a viral video). At the end of the video, we turned to Ubisoft and said “now, imagine if that was the NSA building” – their jaws dropped. Needless to say, most of our ideas required a budget for bail.

Arielwaldman.com launches!

Ariel Waldman — Wed, 19 Mar 2008 09:34:42 +0000

Arielwaldman.com launches today! This will be a place where I talk about social media and related topics. I will continue to blog at Shake Well Before Use as well, but there was a demand for having a site more tailored to my personal opinions and adventures – thus this site was created. I will most likely be updating this weekly instead of daily, so feel free to subscribe via RSS.