Business - Written Wednesday, January 7, 2009 by Denis Hancock - 1 Comment

Creating a wikinomics-enabled baby gift (storybook)

Last year I was blessed with the birth of my daughter (now 9 months old), and I wanted to come up with a special gift that both she, and her immediate family could enjoy for years. Given that I was working on some wikinomics-related research, I sat down to think about how I could put some of the principles into play to create a unique and interesting gift. What I came up with was a story book about the first two months of her life – and I thought I’d post the process here for others that might want to do the same. Here’s what I did – it’s fairly easy, and can be done at quite a reasonable cost.

Like a lot of new parents, I had a huge number of digital photographs of my daughter over the first two months of her life. While I was originally thinking of a simple picture book, I’ve always liked the look of sketch drawings – but I’m not really a great sketch artist. However, I stumbled upon a very cool site called befunky.com, where any photo can be turned into a sketch using the cartoonizer. I did about 40 of them, saved them to my hard drive, and I think the results were pretty impressive. Here’s an example of the output from my daughter’s first few minutes of life:

Read the rest of the post here.