Mini get-away: Virtual reality game from Stockholm

I love this game. The rules are simple but the game is not easy. You download the iphone app. Find the virtual mini and you ‘take’ it if you get within 50 metres of it. Then comes the tricky bit … you have to keep other players from taking the mini from you. Keep hold of it and you win a real life mini. Nice.

Watch this space for mash-ups from every agency going

From here

@handypearce

 

No! You can’t enter our social media competition

I just had a rather interesting experience with a guy from Vodafone Australia looking after the Android Man Social Media comp. The problem – I tried to enter with a photo of Android Man and an iphone:

Full size image and actual caption here.

The story goes like this:

I went down to checkout Vodafone Australia’s Android Man competition. The game: locate Android Man from his cryptic tweets, take a creative photograph, upload it to facebook and you could win a HTC Desire HD.

My idea for the ‘creative photograph’ was to give Android Man my iphone in the hope that he would give me a shiny new HTC Desire HD in return. However, after I took the shot I was approached and encouraged to delete the shot. The conversation went something like this:

Vodaman: “You can’t take a photograph of Android Man and an iPhone”
Me: “Why not? The competition is take a creative photo. That’s creative”
Vodaman: “I want you to delete the photo of Android Man and the iPhone”
Me: “Sorry mate, it’s user generated content, social media, my phone, my picture and a public space”
Vodaman: “Delete the photo or I can help delete it for you”
Me: “Seeing as you put it so nicely … Sorry I’m not deleting it”
Vodaman: “Look if you upload Android Man and the iphone to the Vodafone AU facebook group it will be removed and you won’t win the competition”
Me: “Fair enough … You know. You sometimes see dolphins here some times. Seriously. I’ve seen one once.”
Vodaman: “Just one?”
Me: “Just once. It was looking for something.”
Vodaman: “Maybe some food?”
Me: “Yeah maybe”

Well … yeah …I made the dolphin bit up, but the rest actually happened.

I love social media competitions like this. In fact I helped create The Smirnoff Secret Party Treasure Hunt a few years ago. However, this incident highlights just how important it is that everyone from the ground up is aware of just how transparent social media is. Your people are your brand and they need to know that everything they say and do can be repeated and tweeted and be the make and break of such campaigns.

Just sayin

@handypearce

Update (16.54 on 28/10): Nice response from @vodafone_au

Unboxing the Parrot AR Drone

We love unboxing gadgets! …and the AR Drone from Parrot is GREAT fun. The Drone is controlled via an iPhone app which works by tilting your phone to steer whilst viewing a live video feed through a camera mounted in the Drone. It’s a truly usable Augmented Reality device.

 

How to buy in Australia: We ordered it from Amazon.com. It took 3 days to be delivered to Sydney from the US and cost just under $350.00 AUD including delivery.

So here it is the unboxing through to a test flight…

 
Amazon delivers it in a HUGE box…

Slightly smaller, but still big box inside…

The Drone is neatly packed surrounded by protective cardboard.

No unwrapping necessary. It pops straight out. Nothing to assamble.

Battery, battery pack and stickers for the external shell.

It comes with the outdoor shell, and adaptors for Au, UK, US, EU.

Below: Unboxed looking at home in the studio…

Below: @bradyohalloran takes an instagram photo of the AR Drone:

Below: Flight Test: This a video taken from the Drone’s camera in the studio.

Below: We do like the idea of attaching a GoPro camera to the Drone to attain HD video – here’s a nice clip of someone flying the drone pretty high… (you can unlock the altitude sensor in the iphone app allowing you to go up as hi as the wifi lets you).

Below: The Promo Vid for the AR Drone.

Things you should know before you buy:

You get one battery that lasts for about 15 mins flying time.
Charger comes with four adaptors incl AUS, UK, US, EU.
You need an iphone or ipod touch to control it.
You don’t need a wifi network (the Drone creates one).
It takes about 5-10 mins to get to grips with the controls.
You need a seperate app to record video.
Onboard Video is 15fps
There is a secondary camera on the bottom of the Drone.
You need 2 of them to have a virtual dogfight.
It’s much bigger than it looks.
It’s a lot of fun.

The real life colour picker is now real

When building a website, a tool that could give you the colour code of anything on your screen would be awesome – not quite as awesome as this concept I talked previously about, but still pretty great.

So a company called Pantone must have thought so too and they just announced Capsure, a sort of handheld scanner – just place it on anything and it’ll ID your hue in CMYK and RGB.

unfortunately it costs US$649 and that is pretty hefty even with the Aussie Dollar being strong at the moment.

If you have the money to spend you can pick it up here

@maniac13

R.A.E.D – A Meme an Internet star waiting to to be born.

It’s not often you see something quite this, urm… well you just have to watch this to believe it.

The actual rap starts at around 3mins so feel free to skip the ‘acting’ part at the beginning.
RAED says there are No More Tears To Cry. We disagree, the tears are flowing. Sheer interwebs awesomeness.

Currently sitting at 16,884 views at time of publishing.

We’re now a record label!

We’ve seen how digital and social media, and specifically earned platforms such as Facebook, YouTube and Twitter, can propel an unsigned artist into the mainstream of music success.

People like Lily Allen (famous after being discovered on MySpace), Justin Bieber (discovered on YouTube in what is debatably the worst example of YouTube’s possibilities), and even Lady Gaga who was discovered on YouTube and MySpace Music, represent a fundamental shift in how we are selecting popular artists and musicians.

Rather than the traditional push method where ‘Record Labels’ would pick and choose artists based on ‘marketability’ and their own industry agendas, we’re seeing a transition to a pull method. We’re self-selecting as an audience, and determining who will fill our iPods and PCs.

When you consider that social media is underpinned by two pillars: content curation and collaboration, it seems a natural platform for music and ‘stars’ to snowball into popular culture. As Andy Warhol once so famously said “”In the future, everyone will be world-famous for 15 minutes.”      …Perhaps the new paradigm of this is “in social media, everyone could be world-famous”

The role of social media and music

We are publishers by our very nature, collaborating with one another as peers to appeal to our inherent need for fame and recognition. With social media, though, we have gained the tools that have the potential to scale our peer-level communications to a truly mass-market. And music is by its nature a social experience, binding people together with common emotions and values.

In what is perhaps the natural iteration of this, Razorfish in the US has stepped into the role of quasi-record label by forming a strategic partnership with an unsigned artist, AM.

David Deal, Vice President of Marketing at Razorfish, explained:

“How does an emerging indie artist in the dysfunctional music industry find an audience anymore?

My employer Razorfish is tackling that challenge through an unusual co-branding relationship with indie musician AM, which sees Razorfish playing the role of quasi-record label, concert promoter, and DJ. And so far we are having a lot of fun while building our brand with a creative and smart musician.

“We’re intrigued by the challenge of helping a promising artist find a national audience given how the traditional recording industry distribution model is broken,” said David Deal, vice president of marketing for Razorfish and the would-be A&R man guiding the agency’s partnership with AM. And if Razorfish or any of its clients can earn cachet through association with an up-and-coming artist, so much the better.”

What interests me is the idea that the traditional recording industry distribution model is broken.

Razorfish US have demonstrated that digital, and specifically social media, can play a critical role in bringing music to a mass audience. But for me, it’s a question of what comes first: the lagging of traditional record labels in their push model, or the growing prominence of the push model by the socially-connected. And further, how do you monetize this?

YouTube and music

Earlier this year, Lady Gaga’s manager, Troy Carter, stated that Lady Gaga “create (s) music videos for YouTube.”

When you look at some of the statistics with video views on YouTube (Bieber’s catalyst video achieved 55 millions views), it does make sense for artists to create their content specifically for social media.

Even Susan Boyle, the unlikely hit sensation of 2009, has demonstrated the value of YouTube in achieving success. Yes, she used the reality TV platform to position herself in-front of a National audience, but it was the ‘cloud’ that really propelled her into success. Her audition video saw more than 100 million views in two weeks. A social movement grew, seeing her favoured to take out the title of ‘Britain’s Got Talent’ winner (she came runner-up).

Yet despite the massive amount of exposure, and social currency, Susan is purportedly still ‘poor’, with sales figures of her records disappointing.

Indeed, the question of revenue remains; how do you leverage the social popularity of a ‘digital artist’ and generate offline record sales. iTunes, and indeed other music-sharing platforms, are surely the key?

A digital advertising agency and sustainable music: the future?

But what if the revenue aspect of music wasn’t up to ‘traditional record sales’ and was instead based on another traditional revenue stream: advertising?

When we’re talking about artists achieving video views in excess of 50 – 100 million views, the opportunity for advertising revenue is very real. We know YouTube and Google have demonstrated the ad potential for high-view videos, and indeed Sony is purported to be a revenue-sharing partner with YouTube.

So, perhaps that’s where digital agencies such as Razorfish can really create a new paradigm in music. No longer do we need to pay for the right to access content (in this case the actual songs of artists such as AM), to achieve success and sustainability for an artist or the industry.

The value Razorfish, and indeed this model, presents to the industry is in its roots – creating content that resonates with a social audience, and generating revenue for their client, which in this case is a musician.

This model could allow artists from around the world to build social networks of fans who share their enthusiasm for independent artists with others through platforms such as Last.fm. But instead of relying on a dwindling group of large music publishers and radio stations building markets for a handful of artists around the world and attempting to generate ‘record sales’ in what is surely a digital world of music consumption, we actually turn it upside down.

This is essentially what the Spotify model could and should be. The Freemium version (a live online streaming platform for music) enables you to listen to playlists of your favourite artists, with advertising in-between songs. The gap in Spotify, however, is that the advertising revenue doesn’t go to the artist.

So, what if we marry this platform, the popularity of peer-based music sharing platforms like Last.fm, with advertising-generating platforms such as YouTube and even Google, to create a new wave of accessible music?

I believe this is what MySpace Music was seeking to do, yet by perhaps failure of its own brand, hasn’t really seen success in its advertising subsidized streaming platform.

And this is, in my opinion, a key opportunity for a digital agency such as Razorfish; it’s our job to always remember that we must focus on content and sharing. Facilitating brands, ideas and messaging – or in this case, music – into digital environments where the community and artist can form a true symbiotic relationship, based on accessibility, sustained by partners and advertising revenue-sharing.

And as a side note, I for one (as a Razorfish employee) am excited about the opportunity to work with up and coming Australian artists based on the pioneering by our US partner. If you’re keen, you can email me

So, what do you think?

a little burst of Friday fun…

Share pretty pictures with Instagram

Last week saw the launch of the free micro-photo-blogging (coined) iPhone/iPod app Instagram, which allows to to quickly share pictures from your iDevice to share with friends through Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, Flickr and the application itself. In that time, it has reportedly been downloaded over 100K times.

Instagram works like a streamlined Tumblr, managing the photo snapping, titling and even location tagging through the Foursquare API. In addition to making the whole photo-sharing thing quick and easy, Instagram lets you apply one of a whole bunch of image filters that make your shots look all arty/old and suprisingly not naff.

The shot above is one I took fairly recently.

Check it out!

Corona rewards Facebook Likers with Times Square ego ride

In theory I’ll be on a giant billboard in Times Square along with 45,000 others (and growing). Why? because by liking Corona on Facebook they’ll integrate/feed you into their ad in Times Square. More on Mashable here:

Google TV has landed

Sony anounced today its new range of Internet TVs that are being powered by GoogleTV

It comes with a keyboard remote that has a querty keypad, a mouse pad and generally reminds me of a Playstation controller.

Engadget was able to go hands-on already so check out the video below:

http://www.viddler.com/simple/31479d50/

I believe Internet TVs are the future and this seems to be a great step into the right direction.

Sony is hitting the ground running too as the new TVs will be available in the US from this weekend and will cost from USD399 (24”) to USD1399 (46”) – With the Aussie dollar being strong there might be a bargain in here

@maniac13

Wonderful Computer Graphics seem almost too real…

This is 10 minutes of your time you won’t regret spending. Breathtaking CGI / animation meets architecture and photography. Hard to believe this is all computer rendered. Quite stunning – just watch it:

The Third & The Seventh by Alex Roman. “A FULL-CG animated piece that tries to illustrate architecture art across a photographic point of view where main subjects are already-built spaces. Sometimes in an abstract way. Sometimes surreal.”

Awesome work. http://vimeo.com/7809605

The Death of Social Media?

Most morbid social media campaign yet? The gist: Take a photo of yourself DEAD and you could end up in next year’s horror movie Redd Inc. According to the company there have been a few ‘inadmissable photos’ so far.

Above: User generated death.
http://www.reddincthemovie.com/Submissions/Art/Fake-your-own-death/Page2/Art225

 

 
The website: http://www.reddincthemovie.com

It’s making the news… Article about it in the Daily Tele.

Project launch: The Fresh Start Project

“We wanna make this digital” is the cry of many a client when they enter their ‘digital’ agency with a shiny new TVC and poster under their arm. Too many agencies will take a client’s TVC (and money) and make it ‘digital’ simply by putting a browser around it or sending it’s animated cousin off to Double Click.

I’m proud to say that’s not what we do here at Amnesia Razorfish. When our client, realestate.com.au, shared their really nice ATL spring campaign with us, we got really fired-up by the challenge of making this campaign come to life in the digital space. We didn’t want to simply TELL consumers that realestate.com.au helps give people a fresh start, we wanted to actually GIVE someone a fresh start. Some one that really needed a fresh start.

Say hello to The Fresh Start Project from realestate.com.au.  The aim of the campaign is simple. Build a a new home, for a family in need, through people’s use of realestate.com.au. As users interact with realestate.com.au they collect ‘bricks’ which they can donate to the 1 million brick target. In partnership with Habitat for Humanity Australia, the house will be built. There’s no augmented or virtual reality here. Sure – it won’t cause world peace, but it will make a real difference to a real family in real need. And that’s why I love this project so much. Hope you do too.

Visit the site >

Getting one step closer to a minority report future

Microsoft Research always has some cool stuff to show and this time it is called Light Space.

Just imaging a room that is monitored by depth sensing cameras and projections that react like a surface table on any old surface.

But not only that – just grab some content from the table projection and move it to the wall by simply touching it. Not quite as smooth as Tom Cruise did in Minority Report, but it is a first step.

Sounds futuristic? Check out the video below

@maniac13

Criticker is the social thinking man’s IMDB.

The IMDB business is almost 20 years old (true, just 10 days to go) and although we all love it the site hasn’t changed much or matured beyond its web 1.0 status. Yes it has 57 million visitors every month but it’s not without flaws. Indeed I think there are some interesting lessons to be learned in how to utilise social and crowdsourcing from the little movie recommendations site Criticker.com especially when it comes to movie rankings – read on:

 
Aliens – only 8.5/10 ? Pffft come on it’s a 9.1 easy!

So here’s the problem (and I will bet this has happened to you at some point): You watch a movie, love it only to find IMDB users gave it a crummy 6.5 out of 10 (or vice versa – a crap movie gets a good score on IMDB). The issue of course is that movies are rated by everyone INCLUDING people who also hate the sort of movies you love. In short IMDB does nothing more than merely aggregate the mass opinion of everyone. In the real world we make many choices based on trusted opinions, not just those of the many.

Enter Criticker…
Criticker calls itself a ‘movie recommendation engine’. How does it work? It calculates ratings by analysing movies that YOU like/dislike then it finds OTHER PEOPLE with the same likes/dislikes and then gives you a Probable Score Indicator (PSI) based on the result. In short it ranks movies based on scores from people just like you.

The outcome is that when you search for a movie, your Criticker predicted score is much more likely to be the score you would actually give it. Here’s an example: The film I searched for here is Clockwork Orange. My PSI (probable score) on Cricketer is adjusted to 79/100 (that rating is based on other ratings of people like me). On IMDB it is rated en masse at 8.5/10. The reality here is that Cricketer is much closer than IMDB (I’d probably give it a 75).

Social web 2.0
I’ve been using Criticker for 18 months, I’ve scored about 230 movies and I find the more data I give it, the better it becomes at predicting my scores. Bottom line – this is a truly intelligent and useful crowdsourcing tool and it works. I love it.

BTW: Here’s my profile on Criticker… feel free to hate the movies I <3
http://www.criticker.com/profile/eunmac

Oh PS: If you like it, pop them a donation – this is a startup run by a couple of movie buffs and they need support.

Amnesia an open response to Mumbrella, Bundy Rum, and Leo Burnett

You know, we could have gotten all wound up and upset that Mumbrella incorrectly accused Amnesia of engineering a fake media stunt for Diageo and Bundaberg Rum yesterday.

The thing is, it’s Friday and we’d prefer to lighten the mood around this non-existent fake campaign with a more appropriate social response. As such we’re not sparing Mumbrella, Diageo, Leo’s or ourselves in the following images. We hope everyone involved can see the lighter side – you see we believe social media is better served with a side salad of good humour:

So here it is… the truth as it happened yesterday afternoon:

 

(Disclaimer: the above images are FAKE).

The final word: There’s no fake campaign. There is no higher purpose or master plan. Good luck to Diageo with the new brand. Good luck to Leo’s who do a great job on the Bundy brand. To staff at Amnesia – please carry on pressing the ‘like’ button on your personal pages (provided it works within our social media guidelines of course):

Happy Friday everyone.

Amnesia Razorfish Team.