It must be pretty hard to stand out from the competition when every ski field has, well, er, snow and mountains. So if you can come up with something novel that adds value to skiers’ experience, as Vail has done with its EpicMix app, then all the better. Using the radio frequency identification chip in lift tickets, EpicMix tracks the progress of skiers, giving them rewards, badges, live friend connectivity, statistics and instant access to photos taken by the resort’s photographer (as you will see from the video). Very cool.
Public toilets can be a true test of your ability to squat and hold your breath at the same time. So kudos to two New Yorkers who have created a network of private loos you can access via CLOO (it’s short for community loo). Payment is made using quick tap phone technology. And ‘suppliers’ even get free loo paper to stay stocked. While I’m on the subject, what do the cubicles in office loos always have that gap at the bottom? The last thing I want to hear is somebody machine-gunning last night’s vindaloo!
My eyelids tend to get very heavy when people start talking technology but a recent post on Digital Ministry did catch my attention. The guts of Jon Mooney’s argument is that mobile websites are simpler, cheaper and just as good given the advances in the likes of HTML5. Not knowing the man, I couldn’t tell you whether he has commercial imperatives for talking in this way. One commenter has given an alternate view, which is: “Interesting, BUT I would say that another arguement may state that the mobile site is increasingly not needed these days? If I want facebook, linkedIn, Wikipedia, Google etc I go to that icon. If on the other hand I need specific information on a company I normally look at that website through my ipad or laptop. The internet icon is now just another icon on my iPhone desktop, it’s like a parallel universe. If I like you are on my iphone desktop, if I don’t you are invisible. Will a great mobile site change this?”
It’s that time of year again for the Contagious round-up of the best in digital. Some of my personal favourites from recent CDs (editions 22 and 23) include: ‘Breaking the Cycle’ – a campaign from U by Kotex that shakes up the crimson tide category with its sheer honesty; ‘Let’s Colour’ – a Dulux campaign with great feel good factor; and, ‘Microsoft Kin’ – branded entertainment that had the balls to ask if a person’s social media friends were really friends at all.
The silly season is never ending at the Orange offices, as you can see from The Feed: a random collection of light hearted fun designed to get all buddy with customers. This week it’s a Santalookalike competition. But in the past they’ve posted ‘Secret Portraits’ (student illustrators interpreting your tweets), the Film Flipper (a very basic tool to randomly choose the movie you’ll see), and who can forget the Singing Tweetograms. People tend to hate telcos like they hate banks. Rather than serving up this sort of fluff, I wonder if it would just be better to you know…give people what they want…like skilled call centre staff and accurate billing. Am I being grumpy? Sorry.
Another campaign from Dare, this time a fictitious Product Testing Institute created for the launch of Sony’s Xperia X10. The general thrust is that the X10 is the easiest smartphone to use, no matter whether you’re a guido, glam, toddler or model. You can tell these are paid actors from the whole faux reality kind of way it has been shot (complete with deadpan central character). I wonder if the viewing would have been more compelling had they used real dumb people. Not that you ever want to make people look stupid but sometimes they just are. The YouTube numbers ranged from 300,000 to 1.2 million views per clip so I think the campaign pretty much did it’s job in terms of eyeballs. And I doubt it woul have cost too much to produce. So pats on the back all round, I’d say.
Telling kids what they can’t do must be a tough job, so kudos to JWT Sydney for dreaming up this iPhone app.
It’s a racing game hijacked by a phone call that warns against the use of mobiles while driving. I had a better idea – simply raise the legal driving age to 23 – but I don’t think anyone was listening.
I’m a sucker for big picture backgrounds plus video content. And this site for Mercedes has both in spades. If I was being fussy, I’d argue some of the interactive prompts, such as those encountered in the test drive, don’t feel very natural or entirely convincing. We can be so desperate to engage users that we don’t see how it can get in the way of enjoying content. Still, a pretty good effort. There’s also an iPhone app that lets you race through tunnels like the one in the shoot.
Well that’s it! I’m off to find my riches writing keitai (or cellphone) novels for the Japanese teen market – just like this 15 year old, Bunny (an alias, not her real name). Quoting the LA Times: “The size of the keitai novel market is unclear, but Maho i-Land Co., one of the largest keitai novel content providers, boasts 1 million online book titles and 6 million users.” I actually find the whole spirit of cooperation within the keitai movement quite amazing. Quoting again: “Most writers upload the content as they finish so they get instant feedback from the readers, who access the stories on the website and click through the pages. Authors respond to readers by correcting errors and, in some cases, altering story lines.” Critics with their noses turned strictly upwards are unlikely to nominate Bunny any time soon for a Booker Prize but who really cares when she’s creaming it to the tune of $611,000 (I take that to be US dollars) for one three-volume novel?
Did you know more people in the US have iPhones than Twitter accounts? I digress because this mobile application for Lynx was actually created in London by BBH London. It’s the unexpected twist at the end that made it my favourite (see also, ‘Spin the Bottle‘ and ‘Perfect Man Revealed‘). I just wonder if the agency could have gone a little more raw than ‘addy’ in the execution, given it is meant to be viral.
