(Photo: OKFocus)

The Merry Pranksters

From Old Spice’s viral “The Man Your Man Could Smell Like” campaign to the contentious Skittles spot that made One Million Moms cry bestiality, bizarre or aggressive advertising has become commonplace in our internet-addled society. To nab the attention of customers toggling between screens, advertisers frequently toe the line between inappropriate and outrageous, but few are as unabashedly controversial as the Queens-based OKFocus. Named to AdAge’s Creativity 50 in July, OKFocus is a rebel brand’s dream, equal parts design snob and attention-seeking internet troll. And as advertising moves online, OKFocus clients like Google and the Museum of Contemporary Art have taken note.

Helmed by Ryder Ripps, Jonathan Vingiano and Jules LaPlace, the boutique digital firm has implemented its fair share of next-gen, buzzy web products, including a live online dance party for Smirnoff and a game for Google Plus’s video-chat system that, using facial recognition technology, allows users to draw on the screen without using the mouse or keyboard.

The boundary-pushing agency is perhaps most notorious for its foray into pranksterism with WhoDat.Biz, a domain lookup site that purported to be the first company born of rapper Kanye West’s new startup, Donda Media. Users were shocked: did the stylish rapper just put out an ugly update of Whois.net? It took several hours before tech blogs realized that OKFocus was behind the viral prank. In one fell swoop, OKFocus called attention to the internet’s false preconceptions about Mr. West’s startup and demonstrated how dangerous the hive-mind can be when it latches onto bogus news, serving up a valuable lesson for brands and consumers alike.

What differentiates the agency’s aesthetic from others is its devotion to levity, to the idea that design can and should be fun. By mixing this philosophy with cutting-edge web technology, OKFocus creates products that stick in the minds of users long after they’ve moved onto the next big thing. As Mr. Vingiano put it in an interview with The Creator’s Project, “There’s something about this lack of humor in modern web design that is just so appalling.”

When OKFocus realized, for example, that New Yorkers frequently complain about unreliable L train service, they devised Is the L Train Fucked?, a single-serving website that flashes “yes” or “no” depending on the train’s status. By capitalizing on zeitgeist-y controversy and translating it in a humorous way, the trio behind OKFocus have established themselves as expert buzz-builders, unafraid of deploying a good stunt. As TV advertisers rush to out-weird themselves, OKFocus’s trolling instincts seem like the natural evolution of an industry obsessed with going viral.

Next: Dan Loeb, Third Point LLC: the Poison Pen

Back to the beginning

(Illustration: Robert Grossman)

Jack Dorsey, cofounder of Twitter and Square, recently tried to disabuse the tech industry of its infatuation with the word ‘disruption.’ “We don’t want ‘disruption,’ where we just move things around. We want a direction. We want a purpose,” he said on stage at TechCrunch Disrupt, humbly suggesting the biannual conference change its name. But it’s more than just semantics. The tech sector’s claim to produce world-changing products and services often gets drowned out in a chorus of me-too companies solving problems no one ever complained about. The umpteenth nightlife-recommendations tool or empty real-time dating app can obscure the whirr of a nascent robotics sector in Manhattan or a futuristic, even revolutionary, experiment in manufacturing in Queens.

However, there are insurgents in our midst, quietly pushing the city closer to Mayor Bloomberg’s goal of "reclaiming our title as the world capital of technological innovation." To identify those mindful mutineers, we tried to look beyond established leaders (see: Wilson, Fred) to the next class of innovators, who are forcing corporations to come to terms with the mobile revolution or shepherding startups toward making money without selling out. We found investors, developers, educators and agitators. We identified pioneering companies that set off the self-education craze (you’re welcome, Peter Thiel). We spotted a trio of provocateurs in Long Island City and an open-source radical on Roosevelt Island. Looking at this constellation of entrepreneurs, you can start to see the outline of New York’s tech future taking shape.

Valery Komissarova, Grishin Robotics: Rallying the Robots

Phineas Barnes, First Round Capital: the Bottom-Up Investor

Marleen Vogelaar, Shapeways: the Manufacturing Maven 

Anil Dash, Activate and ThinkUp: Amiable Agitator

Alex Taub and Michael Schonfeld, Dwolla: The Credit Card Killers

Mike Karnjanaprakorn, Skillshare: The Principal of New York

Rick Webb, Tumblr: The Undercover Ad Man

Deborah Estrin, CornellNYC Tech: the Entrepreneurial Egghead

Ryder Ripps, Jonathan Vingiano and Jules LaPlace, OKFocus: The Merry Pranksters

Daniel Loeb, Third Point LLC: the Poison Pen

This story appeared on the cover of the November 14, 2012 issue of The New York Observer. 

(Photo: Styleblaster)

Styleblaster, a project installed by a handful of Brooklyn-based technologists that uses a camera to chronicle the sartorial choices of Williamsburg residents and upload the photos in real-time to the web, has quickly devolved into trolling.

When a Daily Dot commenter used Google Maps to sleuth out the address, it spread across the internet lightning-fast. The camera is situated in a window at 234 Driggs Ave., a block from the Bedford Avenue stop.

Now, Styleblaster has become the target of orchestrated trolling attacks from sites like Remezcla, which dispatched a blogger to strut in weird masks and costumes in front of the camera. Donning colorful masks, sombreros and big thick mustaches, they quickly racked up a fair amount of "tophats," which is the style blog's equivalent of an upvote.

The Remezcla team aren't the only ones who have taken to mugging for the camera. Otherwise oblivious passersby quickly caught on once word of Styleblaster hit the web--one even gave the finger to the camera. Here's a picture of a girl slurping a soda and making a "what up" gesture.

A "destination for New York City peacocks," indeed.

(Photo: Styleblaster)

In an effort to catalog the underappreciated diversity of style in gentrified Williamsburg, a team of Brooklyn technologists has set up a camera outside their apartment that records the street stylings of passersby and posts the images online. But if passersbys don’t want to be recorded, they’re kind of out of luck.

The site, called Styleblaster, aims to “become a destination for New York City peacocks to traipse by and show off what makes the neighborhood hop.” Using a camera perched a block from the Bedford Ave. L train, the site captures and immediately uploads images of Brooklynites walking by in real time. Users can then click a tophat to signal whether or not the subject is “stylin’."

Click once through Styleblaster and you land on a picture of a moody girl with dark, blunt bangs trudging down the block in heavy black boots; click again and it's a mom pushing a baby stroller; again, and it's a dude with his hand down his pants.

Styleblaster is a personal project of Jules Laplace, the technology director for OkFocus, the creative agency behind the Kanye West/Donda Media PR stunt. The team created WhoDat.biz, a domain lookup site that purported to be the first startup of rapper Kanye West but was eventually revealed to be a big hoax.

Mr. Laplace has created a host of other online projects and games, like Where's the Pixel? and video-sharing chat site Scanner Jammer. Mr. Laplace's business partner, Ryder Ripps, told Betabeat via email that the project is not affiliated with OkFocus.

The idea for the site came from Mr. Laplace and his roommates, who are all "fairly technically minded." His roommate, new media artist and recent NYU ITP grad Jack Kalish, designed the software that takes the photos. "The camera sits in our apartment and takes a photo whenever someone passes by our window," Mr. Laplace said over email. "We have a webcam hooked up to a Processing sketch, which sends pictures up into the cloud.  To get people walking from right to left--so they'd be seen front on--we do motion detection using an optical flow field.  It's pretty cool, seeing it at work: it looks like the person is pulling a bunch of rubber bands across the frame, which tell it to snap the picture."

Mr. Laplace said the goal is to capture a portrait of Williamsburg fashion live and as it happens. "It's an egalitarian take on streetstyle," he said. "There's more to Williamsburg than hipsters and rich ex-Manhattanites. Everybody has their own style, and our site celebrates that."

But the project resurfaces privacy issues that were thrust into the mainstream by the scandal surrounding Reddit's creepshots forum, where users posted sexualized photos of women without their consent before Reddit administrators shut it down. Still, Mr. Laplace insists that unlike WhoDat.biz, this isn’t one of OkFocus’ attempts at subversiveness. He dismissed privacy concerns by noting that with the amount of foot traffic the block sees, the images are quite ephemeral.

"As far as privacy goes, we count on people to be dressed well when they go out in public--especially on a brisk fall day," he said. "Don't expect the pictures to hang around, though. Fashion gets stale after a couple of days, so we don't see a point in constructing an endless archive. This is really about the moment."

There are surveillance cameras installed all over New York City, inside ATMs and subway stations and convenience stores. The laws in New York regarding video surveillance are very specific. To summarize, video surveillance is only illegal if the subject has a reasonable expectation of privacy, meaning "a place and time when a reasonable person would believe that he or she could fully disrobe in privacy." You're probably not going to begin undressing on Bedford Avenue--unless you're the dude with his hand in his pants.

"I'd like to think that sort of behavior [related to Creepshots] is a relic of a time when people really were awful to each other online," Mr. Laplace added. "The internet's junior high phase, if you will. Our site isn't here to judge people or make fun of them. We're really just in it for the fashion, to be inspired by normal people and our great neighborhood."

(h/t Adrian Chen)