TechCrunch just posted this article about the web start-up CloudFlare, which offers a quite impressive and affordable CDN solution. CloudFlare created the video above for this entry, and if you watch it you’ll notice quite a few references to unicorns and rainbows. The source of those references, the website cornify.com stems from an idea sparked in the Fi offices a little over two years ago.
Back then, to indicate his outstanding professional expertise, our sys admin had the MSN status message “Unicorns and rainbows on-demand”. Randomly inspired by this, I created a small web experiment called Cornify, “the world’s #1 unicorn and rainbow distribution service”. Cornify was an instant hit and took on a life of its own. The site has now spread 30 million unicorns and rainbows across the web, won an SXSW award, taken me to MIT to talk about Internet culture at ROFLConand keeps making people happy on a daily basis. If you’re interested in more of the back story, watch this video of a presentation I gave recently to 1200 people at the Columbus Museum of Art.
From an MSN message to this TechCrunch article has been quite an interesting road with lots of funny stories happen along the way. It just shows that ideas can come out of the most unexpected places and can lead to surprising results. And as unrelated as Cornify topically is to the work we do at Fi, it has been an amazing learning experience to experience viral dynamics first hand. And that experience is great to have when advising clients on digital strategy.
So next time you have a crazy idea, don’t hesitate, it may just take you to some unexpected places.
And to leave you with one more story, here’s how to cornify the real world.
- Christoph Ono, Senior Interactive Developer
