AtPlay Update: 11 March 2007

Insure by phone. An interesting article over at insurance news portal announces that Metropolitan Life have launched a new product called Cover2go – simply SMS them a number to have R10 deducted from your airtime and be covered against accidental death for the next 6 days for R60,000. It’s been launched as a trial in the taxi ranks in Jo’burg. Can’t imagine why :) Still, a really neat offering. I’ll be interested to see how it is policed though, especially since I would think a large proportion of that market are on pay as you go type non-contracts. Perhaps you have to SMS your ID number to them.

While on the subject of buying through SMS, a really useful one for me is being able to purchase electricity via SMS. A quick Google found 3 in SA – ibuy.co.za, ipay.co.za and energy.co.za. I ‘m not too sure about leaving my credit card details stored online though, although it would be a small price to pay to avoid the accusing stares I get when the power goes out in the middle of American Idol (albeit stares in complete darkness).

Then, from the what-will-they-do-next-with-an-ipod department, I bring you two products. First up we have Big George Foreman and his gipod200! Because every barbecue needs an ipod docking station. Secondly somthing to err, tickle your fancy. It’s called the OhMiBod, because sometimes, 2 speeds just ain’t enough. Link may be seen as somewhat risqué, so if you’re easily offended, rather just keep reading.

There was an email kicking about earlier in the week about a cool 3D mobile phone campaign that Saatchi NZ did recently. HP Labs have developed something similar called mscape, which runs on mobile phones that have GPS units embedded in them. OK, so not all mobiles have GPS’ at the moment, but then a short while ago we never had camera’s in our phones. So anyways, what’s cool about this is that anyone can go and create an experience or game using images, sound and video, and then, using the GPS unit in the phone, this is overlaid and activated as you move around in the real world. It’s technology like this that makes working in interactive that much more interesting, as it lets us bridge online and offline spaces – it’s something we started doing with semacodes on the Peugeot 107 campaign. Sounds awesome, go check it out.

So you’re sitting in the cinema right, waiting for the movie to start. And it’s pretty damn boring. So what do you do? You become a joystick, that’s what. MSNBC have launched something in some US cinemas called NewsBreaker live. Cameras mounted in the cinema monitor the collective movement of the crowd, and use this to control a game of breakout on the screen. As blocks are broken news headlines from MSNBC drop down. I actually doubt people are reading them.

Then lastly for those who like pretty things, a flickr photoset of business cards.

Bullard who?

Until today I didn’t know who David Bullard was.  But then yesterday, with a brilliant piece of marketing, he changed that.

Basically, by insulting bloggers in a poorly researched and inflammatory article, he’s put his name well and truly on the radar.

Others have summed it up and pulled it apart far better than I could hope to, but there was this I had to comment on:

It’s rather sad how many people think the tedious minutiae of their lives will be of any interest to anyone else.

Clearly he hasn’t heard of the Twitter phenomenon then.

Go read the responses and voice your opinion here.  I’ve got better things to do.  Like write about what I had for breakfast.

Socialtext Open

Edit: I’ve stuck the full notes up on the Socialtext wiki over here. Documenting a wiki, it kinda makes sense to put it on an actual wiki :)

Socialtext is an enterprise wiki that helps team collaboration. There is an open source version called Socialtext Open. I’ve started documenting my installation steps for getting release 2.9.5.2 running on Ubuntu 7.04.

Read it here.

A social networking experiment

There’s a lot of talk about facebook at the moment so I thought I’d try a little experiment. I’ve gone and set up a group on facebook called I Shmaak Amatomu. If you know what this means and feel the same, please join me there. It’s going to be interesting to see how this spreads :)

http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=2394140616

AtPlay Update: 4 March 2007

An update on that whole US presidential race going online that I mentioned before – well the latest is that there will be a Republican vs Democrat debate online. Users will be able to post questions and have them answered in real time. It will be interesting to see how well something like this holds up as I’m sure that closer to the time it will generate a lot of attention and with it a lot of network traffic. Luckily Yahoo! are one of the partners in this and as the owners of flickr, probably have the capacity to manage all the added attention :) While we’re on the subject though, Barack Obama has requested that Presidential debates (all of them, not specifically the online ones) be licensed under the Creative Commons license. This means that anyone who wants will be able to edit and share the debates as they wish. This will no doubt win him the support of the all the open source pundits out there, and provide plenty of fuel for budding video editors.

Staying with US politics for the moment it seems that the US Army doesn’t share in Barack Obama’s pro-open stance. Soldiers have been ordered that they cannot post to blogs or send personal email without clearing the content with their superior officer. I can’t say I’ve ever read a soldiers blog so I’m not going to miss out. No doubt a debate will rage over freedom of speech versus giving away military secrets. You’d have to be pretty stupid to announce something like troop positions on your blog, but slip-ups do happen. We’ll see how it all pans out.

Turning to matters less weighty: for those of you who have not been able to set up your Mii help is at hand. Some kind soul has recreated the entire Mii editor on a webpage, so instead of recreating yourself in painstaking detail on the Wii and denying Tom the opportunity of getting that magical 7 under par, you can while away your lunch hour at your very own desk, making tweaks to your hairline and choosing an appropriate nose. Check it out, but be warned, I haven’t yet tried to transfer one of these onto the Wii, so you may just be wasting your time. But at least you won’t be wasting Tom’s :)
http://www.miieditor.com/

The winners for this years Webby Awards (thinks Oscars for the Web) have been announced. As you would expect, Youtube, flickr and facebook did pretty well, but so did Saatchi! Saatchi NZ were nominated for Rubbish Films in the Telecommunications category and Saatchi LA won the People’s Voice for the Toyota Yaris virtual test drive. Both very very cool sites.

AtPlay Update: 20 April 2007

The AtPlay update from 20th April:

So apparently the iPhone will be launched at the end of June and Cingular (official carrier for iPhone in the US) have requested 1 million iPhones for the launch. And that’s just to cover the people that have already signed up. Over 6.5 million Nintendo Wii’s have been sold worldwide, and you may have noticed that there is 1 in AtPlay. You know – the place where all the creatives hang out.

Speaking of phones, there’s been a lot of talk about a possible Google phone. The latest rumour is that they are now in production and should be delivered to market end 2007/beginning 2008. Of interest to us is that while the iPhone is launching on Cingular, industry watchers are touting Orange as the initial partner for the Google phone.

So Google. Some clever guy at Carnegie Mellon in the states came up with a game called ESP where two random people online are shown the same photo at the same time. The object is to guess the same keyword for the image – as soon as they agree on a keyword, they move to the next image. The more images you agree on, the higher your score. Google have licensed the technology and are using it to get people to label, and therefore describe, all of the images they have in their search engine. It’s something a computer cannot do, and by turning it into a challenge where points are awarded, people are lining up to help make the Google search engine even more powerful! Go try it out.

Here’s an interesting press release. It’s from a company in the US called Campus Food that manage an online network of campus restaurants. The press release is all about their new service where students can set up favorite foods and then place their orders through SMS. The interesting thing about the press release is not so much what they’re announcing, but how they do it. On the page is a link to a Youtube video that explains the service, a podcast about it and buttons to share and blog the link on all the popular social networking sites like facebook, digg and del.icio.us. Clearly the PR people knew where to find their target market and how to talk to them.

Lastly, an update on the Folding@home thing – I set up a Saatchi & Saatchi Team, so if anyone wants to install the Folding@home screen saver and pitch in, the team id is 66630

Since the next Friday (27th) was a public holiday, we skipped a week. Scheduled transmission resumes today.

Mac battery annoyances

A couple of days ago the Software Update had a battery firmware upgrade (1.2), which seemed like a great idea at the time. It all installed without a hitch and when I rebooted it sat and thought for a while, as I expected it would. All seemed happy in Macland until I popped the power cord out to go sit somewhere else. 3 seconds after pulling the cord, the machine shut down. No warning message, no save now or lose your work, it just died. This was somewhat dissapointing since the battery appeared to be charged. Sometimes, like this morning, I can start it up immediately without the power cable being in, but this evening it wouldn’t start up without being plugged into the power. Of course when it boots it shows the battery as fully charged. Naturally there are useful suggestions on the web, but these all involve running the battery down completely, something I cannot achieve since it shuts itself down at the first hint of trouble.

This may seem like a bitch session, but it’s not. This morning I emailed Digicape and they mailed me back almost immediately and said bring it in we’ll sort it out. I’ve had a few other niggles with the notebook since I got it but I get such great service that it doesn’t really matter. I’ve had an HP NX7010 for about the same period of time as the Mac and that (touch wood) hasn’t given me a single problem (unless you count installing Vista on it, but I think that was more my fault for installing Vista in the first place) but if I had to choose, I’d still take the Mac. I guess if I’d had shoddy service and was perpetually fighting to get my machine sorted out I would have a different outlook, but so far so good.

AtPlay Update: 12 April 2007

This was the first AtPlay update that went out on the 12th of April, as mentioned in the previous post.

The Numbers Game

• China Mobile (the worlds largest mobile operator) announced that they now have 301 million subscribers. That’s more than the entire population of the United States.
• Apple has sold 100 million iPods. In five and a half years.

Clever uses for annoying technology

Seen that flashing orange thing on the back of Grant Scholtz’s phone? Well they’ve made a cellphone cradle using the same idea. Put your phone on silent, pop it in the holder and watch it flash when your phone rings. No longer do you have to inflict dodgy 80′s TV theme ringtones on the rest of us.

http://www.puremodern.com/-strse-159/SIGNAL-Cell-phone-adviser/Detail.bok

US Presidential elections

With US elections coming up, candidates are scrambling about before the primaries next year. We may not care terribly much, but what is certainly interesting is that MySpace has announced that they will be holding a presidential primary on the 1st and 2nd of Jan 2008. Every MySpace user will be able to cast a vote for their favorite candidate. Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, John Edwards (presumably not the same guy who chats with the dead), Rudy Guiliani and John McCain all have their own MySpace pages. If the number of friends they have is anything to go by, Barack Obama is well in the lead with 89000 friends. This is probably because Barack Obama has seen the future and set up a social networking site of his own (http://my.barackobama.com)

Saatchi does its bit

The University of Stanford in the US runs a project called Folding@Home. Paraphrasing from the website: “Proteins are biology’s workhorse, but before they can carry out any of their important functions, they need to assemble themselves together, or fold. This process of protein folding, while critical and fundamental to all biology, in many ways remains a mystery. Moreover, when proteins do not fold correctly, or mis-fold, there can be serious consequences, including many well known diseases such as Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s and many cancers.”

The Folding@Home project is a distributed computing project – anyone, anywhere in the world, can download a small piece of software and assist in running these protein folding simulations. Each computer downloads a small piece of protein information, simluates the folding process over a few hours, and then uploads the results.

So how does this affect us? Well, when Sue and Raynor aren’t beating each other up at Tekken, the Playstation 3 stops dishing up eye candy (as in the game graphics….) and starts simulating protein folding. If the last 3 paragraphs just confused you, wander on by (if you’re in Cape Town) and I’ll explain with suitable sound effects and arm waving.

See it in action here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/mediafrenzy/456411125/in/pool-saatchicapetown/

And while you’re on the flickr site, check out the Saatchi Cape Town flickr group: http://www.flickr.com/groups/saatchicapetown/pool/

Climbing the internet marketing learning curve

One of the challenges of working in the interactive division within a traditionally non-interactive agency is helping people to understand just what it is that we do. We wouldn’t want people to think that we stood around and played games all day.

A few years ago it was like fighting an uphill battle. We lived in our own little isolated world and were referred to as “those crazy internet guys” . Every now and again we’d be thrown the dregs of a budget from a larger campaign to see what we could do¹.  But now things have changed. We have a worldwide Interactive Creative Director and a whole way of thinking that drives interactive throughout the agency. So it started to make sense to get back on the education trail.

And this time it’s been a whole lot easier. Most people around the agency have digital camera’s, have registered on facebook or some other social networking site and some even have their own blogs.

So what I’m doing is sending out an email each week that has some interesting stuff in it from an interactive or technology viewpoint. The idea is not to try and create experts in our field, but rather to get people thinking and talking about what is possible and where we can push things. It’s been going out for the last two weeks and so far it’s been well received.

I’ll post the first two here either today or tomorrow to catch up and then post them here each Friday when they go out.

¹ Not strictly true, but it makes for a more interesting story

The internet, everywhere

We were driving up to Ceres this afternoon, when with about 10km to go, we drove past what looked like a shop just off the road. The first thing that struck me was the name – ubiqua. It looked Latin, but no Latin that I knew¹. The next thing that struck me was that here, 2 hours outside of Cape Town, in what appears to be the middle of nowhere, was a great big URL stuck on the side of the building.

Now that I’m back home and in interwebland I have discovered that it’s not a shop, but a grass roots community project. And I think it’s really cool that not only have they got a website, but they’ve stuck it up big and bold on the side of their building.

www.ubiqua.co.za

That’s the great thing about the internet – anyone can go out there and market themselves.

¹ not a difficult thing to achieve^2
2 I thought it was ubique, just spelt wrong. That would have made the blog title quite pithy, since it means everywhere^3
3 I’ve also learned from their website that ubiqua means the people of the bush