When we decide to book a break away to a new destination we look to friends, family and most importantly online reviews to help make our decision. The Canadian Tourism Commission has made full use of this behaviour to help create a new campaign to encourage American citizens to consider Canada as a holiday destination.
Those visiting Canada love to share their experiences in Twitter by uploading videos, photos, comments etc. All this great content has been used to launch live interactive street murals, that inspire Americans on their daily travels to book a Canadian trip. These murals cleverly pull content from Twitter to display real-time updates from and about Canada. Passers by can interact with the content on the screens by flicking through live tweets and be inspired by all the great things there is to do in Canada. I love how digital and Twitter have been cleverly combined to take what’s happening online into the real world to transform an American city landscape.
I’ve never been to Canada, and never really thought about visiting. I feel the main reason for this is that I’ve not heard of anything interesting to do there. However, if I walked down a street and passed a giant interactive Twitter mural containing hits and tips I would definitely be inspired into booking a trip.
Morning session of bada developer day over and time for lunch. It’s been an interesting morning so far with some great talks from Phil Northam, Paul Wilkins, Manfred and Eric Chang covering everything from Samsung marketing through to detailed explanations of method calls. So something for everyone.
Paul Wilkins discussed the merging of systems, connecting your mobile to your PC to your TV, and that Samsung are not just creating brand new exciting electronic products, but are also spearheading this innovation. Anything with a plug has potential basically! So exciting releases expected.
The bada development environment supports c++, the examples made use of the open source eclipse IDE that is a good sign for developers across all platforms and not just PC. However, saying that, it appears the excellent UI builder is currently only supported for PC. Will this become available on Mac?
The namespace bada has created such as content or sound is accessed based on privilege levels. Developers have varying degrees of privileges depending on their status as a developer, if they are a developer partner, then they have full privileges’.
The use of c++ does mean that as developers there is already that wealth of historical knowledge surrounding this tried and tested language, unlike something more bespoke such as objective-c, which is relatively new. There has been a tweak to the original language, in particular the use of exceptions, bada has developed its own process for this, and because of such, they have also created there own construct method, with manual memory assignment.
The UI allows for the standard handset objects such as lists, buttons etc, but it also allows developers to embed flash objects and actual browsers into their applications.
A great feature is the ability to embed browsers into your applications, Eric Chang showed us a great use of this, using Google maps, and the standard Google map JavaScript API, what’s more, developers don’t require a Google api key to embed the maps!
Being Friday and the end of a somewhat busy week I was delighted to come across this video. I feel that such machines should exist in every work place.
Coca Cola invites college students in the U.S to experience the happiness factory via “the happiness machine”. When visiting their vending machine they get a little more than expected.
So far it has racked up 1,223,441 views on YouTube. The only distribution sources for the video were a tweet from the Coke Twitter account and their Facebook fan page. Interactive YouTube feature have been used to great effect as the video finishes with a call to action “Share the Happiness” alongside the question “Where will the happiness strike next?”.
Didn’t get a Nintendo Wii for Xmas? Fear not Adidas can help…
Adidas have cleverly crafted a 3-D virtual world that can be accessed and played using a new range of men’s sneakers. How does this work? I hear you say…Well all users have to do is go to the Adidas site and with their sneakers tongue. The tongue contains a code embedded in it. Holding this in front of their computer webcam will open up a virtual world in front of them. Using the trainer they can navigate around just like a computer controller.
Chris Barbour, head of digital marketing for Adidas Originals states “The foundation of augmented reality lies in adding a layer to the real world,” he goes onto say “That’s what we have done. We have taken a real world item and added a fantastic virtual world on top of that”
Adidas’ new augmented reality shoes won’t be out it purchase until February 2010. With this idea in mind I will be interested to see what Nike’s plans are for the coming year with their footwear range and ever changing technology. I will be sure to post it here when I see anything.
With this being my very last post of 2009. I thought i would post about a singer/songwriter who has used this year to develop a huge social media fan base and is likely to big in 2010. Last week a friend of mine sent me a link to London born Mia Rose singing in Youtube
I was surprised to discover that Mia has built up a huge following by posting videos of herself singing and playing the guitar since 2006. Her latest song ‘What would Christmas be like?’ uploaded just 3 weeks ago, has had 1,216,855 views, with 7,447 ratings and 5,697 comments. She had recently asked her online community of fans to design the CD cover to her latest single. This is a great example of an up and coming singer seeing the benefits of using social networks to build a fan base and then rewarding them. I look forward to seeing what social media delights 2010 will bring. Merry Christmas and a happy new year
Really like this Facebook campaign by Ikea, One of those ideas that you think…damn that is so simple I wished id thought of it.
To promote their new store opening in Malmo, Ikea set-up a Facebook profile for Gordon Gustavsson, the store’s manager. Pictures of the stores showrooms were uploaded to Gustavsson photo album. Any friends of the Ikea Facebook page had the opportunity to tag themselves in photos in order to win free furniture. The first user to tag a specific product in a photo would receive that item for free. This use of Facebook photo tags generated a great deal of online publicity as the photos spread around the social networking site. The photo tags appeared not only on the specific users profiles but also in news feed. This in turn basically used Facebook for one big word of mouth promotion…. So simple and effective
I had a un-expected surprise last week to find that I had a new follower on twitter. That follower was non other than the TV show I’m a Celebrity. So naturally I accepted. Although once an avid fan of the show but not so much now (as I found a job and am no longer a student with time on my hands) I was keen to see what interesting things they had to tweet me. I have to say I was pleasantly surprised by their twitter presence.
They appear to be a TV show using Twitter to offer genuine fan engagement. The official I’m A Celebrity…Twitter feed encourages fans to @reply for the chance to be used on the spin off show I’m A Celebrity…NOW on ITV2. It’s nice to see that I’m a celeb know their audience’s behavior in that that they will be online at the same time as watching the show and are rewarding them for this.
For all those avid fans of seeing the current z list celebs eating kangaroo anus and having to be covered in cockroaches you can show support for them using Twibbon.
I have to say there is only so many times you can see someone eat a wiggity grub without feeling the need to vomit.
I always find it really interesting when a simple idea to take social media beyond the realms of a computer screen is hatched. Recently I came across a guy from South Africa called Sam Wilson who has created a blog, http://illscreamyourtweets.com, where he invites users to send Tweets to @ScreamUrTweets.
Once every week, Sam makes his way to the top of Table Mountain in Cape Town and simply, screams your tweets to whoever is in earshot. Your tweet could go from never being read by anyone to being screamed really loudly. This could be a good way for those who regularly use twitter to tweet about the bad experiences they have with a service or product and to get it all out in the open (quite literately).
Once Sam has screamed your tweets he will then upload them into Youtube:
I wonder how he would shout a tweet if it was all written in CAPITALS…
As the number of twitter users grows more and more business are seeing the benefit of adding Twitter to their digital media strategies. Green tomato cars an eco-friendly taxi service in London is no exception. They claim to be the first private hire service in the UK to take bookings via twitter. There’s no need to rely on a phone to get a ride with them. Simply direct message your booking details to @greentomatocars a tweet back is then recieved containing a unique booking reference number. You then sit back and wait for a Toyota Prius, (the world’s most popular hybrid car, which emits half as much carbon dioxide as a traditional black cab does) to pull up and whisk you on your ‘green’ journey. A cool idea in theory the take up isn’t huge with just 423 followers, but I’m sure the more people become aware of it the more it will be used…Spread the word.
A business-to-customer communication strategy such as this example is great at immediately engaging with their customers providing intimate social conversations that fit in with our digital lifestyle. Doing this also creates brand loyalty, which for any brands should be the up most importance.
A Few months ago I wrote in my very first spreading jam post about ‘chalk bot’ a printing robot like device that allowed tweets to be printed in the real world. Since then I have come across another clever ‘writing robot’ called the Voicebot. The voicebot is an installation, which gives young people a playful and powerful way to have a direct voice in the House of Parliament letting MPs know what they really care about.
The Voicebot’s website poses the question ‘what do you care about? The robot armed with marker pen then writes out the answers, which must be 160 characters or less. From October 12th the Voicebot will be installed in the House of Commons so young people can voice their concerns inside the corridors of power. The best entries will be displayed for Westminster’s politicians and policy makers to read.
Why not have your say by visiting the Voicebot’s website. As you will see, it’s as easy as updating your Facebook status or writing a tweet. The Voicebot was built by v, the National Young Volunteers Service, and Sidekick Studios to create a way for young people to have a direct voice in the Houses of Parliament by turning virtual social networking like messages into physical ones.
A Few months ago I wrote in my very first spreading jam post about 
