Gift Cards As Speaker, Camera
One of Target's gift cards this year is a 1.2MP digital camera (via).
BestBuy's cards have a little speaker and a 3.5mm jack that you can plug into your iPod. (via )
AC/DC Music Video in Excel
An AC/DC music video in an Excel file (and on YouTube). A good example of a viral that didn't have to be (just) a video.
See also:
PowerPoint Karaoke
Make Games with MS Excel
Games for MS Excel
Contextual Advertising in Word Documents
Contextual Advertising in PDF
Advertising in Calendars
Not like Pirelli Calendars (wiki), but still pretty cool, in a geeky kind of way. Calgoo: "a permission-based marketing medium that uses the electronic calendar as the delivery channel." In other words, your ad messages in other people's Outlooks and iCals via a dynamic calendar feed. See the demo to understand how everything works.
Also:
Bookmarkable Banners with Reminders from Spongecell
AdLab's Inbox: Claymation, Widgets, and NASDAQ
Letters to the editor from the past few weeks. Keep'em coming.
-- An Orange America: an abstract visualization of the aggregate conversation on Twitter showing frequency and context of election-related words. Simon, one of the creators (together with JESS3), writes:
"To make it work, we take a sample from Twitter every 30 seconds and analyze them in 50-result batches for associations and term matches. They accumulate for 5 minutes and then we flush sample aggregates to the database. So the database has samples from when it started through present in 5-minute granularity. As new terms trend, they begin to populate on the X-axis. The system back end will be implemented using a Java-based stack and PostgreSQL RDBMS. The presentation will be implemented using Flash targeted to Player 9, standards-compliant XHTML/CSS targeted to modern browser versions with significant market share (Safari 2+, Firefox 2+, IE 6+)."
-- Scientific American: Does Consumerism Make Us Crazy? (No.) -- from Micah
-- Media Tools for Creative Professionals
-- Reader Lena from Russia has a question. Do you know of any now-common English words that were minted by the ad industry in the past? Or, in her own words, "I'm looking for - words that were created especially for advertising and PR, brand-names, etc. They may be quite common nowadays, but I really need to know what words appeared thanks to advertising."
-- Widget strategies
-- A beautifully illustrated report from Razorfish. Tip: print the report to pdf; will be easier to read. Oh, and this: "Razorfish is strengthening its brand by choosing one of the most memorable and iconic names in the digital world. After extensive brand awareness research, we determined that the name Razorfish already enjoys powerful brand equity and best represents our evolution into the global agency of the future, which taps into the immersive and social nature of digital."
-- CellForce claims to have "the world's largest consumer database of U.S. cell phone users and email addresses", but since there was no URL in the press release, there won't be any here.
-- NASDAQ sells ad space on its website. NYSE apparently doesn't.
-- Here's a company that creates video claymation tutorials - Claytorial.
-- Roberto asks: "I would like to know if you could put a link to our web page." Sure. Here's a link to the site of a company that "offers the Bentley´s of Billboards."
-- An Orange America: an abstract visualization of the aggregate conversation on Twitter showing frequency and context of election-related words. Simon, one of the creators (together with JESS3), writes:
"To make it work, we take a sample from Twitter every 30 seconds and analyze them in 50-result batches for associations and term matches. They accumulate for 5 minutes and then we flush sample aggregates to the database. So the database has samples from when it started through present in 5-minute granularity. As new terms trend, they begin to populate on the X-axis. The system back end will be implemented using a Java-based stack and PostgreSQL RDBMS. The presentation will be implemented using Flash targeted to Player 9, standards-compliant XHTML/CSS targeted to modern browser versions with significant market share (Safari 2+, Firefox 2+, IE 6+)."
-- Scientific American: Does Consumerism Make Us Crazy? (No.) -- from Micah
-- Media Tools for Creative Professionals
-- Reader Lena from Russia has a question. Do you know of any now-common English words that were minted by the ad industry in the past? Or, in her own words, "I'm looking for - words that were created especially for advertising and PR, brand-names, etc. They may be quite common nowadays, but I really need to know what words appeared thanks to advertising."
-- Widget strategies
-- A beautifully illustrated report from Razorfish. Tip: print the report to pdf; will be easier to read. Oh, and this: "Razorfish is strengthening its brand by choosing one of the most memorable and iconic names in the digital world. After extensive brand awareness research, we determined that the name Razorfish already enjoys powerful brand equity and best represents our evolution into the global agency of the future, which taps into the immersive and social nature of digital."
-- CellForce claims to have "the world's largest consumer database of U.S. cell phone users and email addresses", but since there was no URL in the press release, there won't be any here.
-- NASDAQ sells ad space on its website. NYSE apparently doesn't.
-- Here's a company that creates video claymation tutorials - Claytorial.
-- Roberto asks: "I would like to know if you could put a link to our web page." Sure. Here's a link to the site of a company that "offers the Bentley´s of Billboards."
CNN "Hologram" and Other Studio Gadgetry
Wired runs an overview of the heavy gadgetry trotted out by networks during last night's elections coverage. The CNN's "hologram" was not a hologram at all, unfortunately, but we have to admit that this "via hologram" sounds pretty awesome. Here's a similar effect of "telepresence" as demonstrated by Cisco.
MSNBC's 3D set-up from Brainstorm was pretty cool, too.
Loved the virtual capitol on CNN: "The "virtual Capitol" is newer, and so perhaps cooler. I'm standing in the studio looking at an empty desk, and glance up at a monitor and see how a full model of the Capitol building has somehow been dropped on top of that desk (which is still empty). Then you can open the top of the Capitol (don't try this at home) and see how the seats are being won and lost as the night goes on." (source )
Video of the virtual capitol.
Barcode Scanner Apps for Android Reviewed
AndroidApps.com reviews two barcode scanning and comparison shopping apps for Android phones: ShopSavvy and CompareEverywhere. I already wrote about the implications of putting an instant price-matching device in the hands of retail shoppers, but there are other interesting angles to it. These applications seem to be among the few with one or two natural business models built into them from the start. Placing contextual recommendations next to price look-up results is one; powering branded wishlists and registries is another.
The reviews of both apps are below.
Earlier:
Barcode, Iris Scanners for Google Android
The Future of Retail: Instant Price Match
The reviews of both apps are below.
Earlier:
Barcode, Iris Scanners for Google Android
The Future of Retail: Instant Price Match
Road as Medium, Plays Back Music for Honda
(image: gigdoggy)
When we run out of space for billboards on our roads' sides, we'll embed jingles into the pavement.
GigDoggy: "A Japanese engineer by the name of Shizuo Shinoda was the first to come up with the brilliant idea of transforming roads into a playback medium. The system works by cutting thousands of little grooves in the asphalt that produce a sound when a vehicle drives over them. The grooves are a few millimeters deep and 6 to 12 millimeters wide, and the closer you bring them together the higher the pitch will be when driven over. Production cost is about $20 000. Mr Shinoda got the idea by driving his car over markings a bulldozer had previously scraped off a street and realized he was generating a series a tones."
Video below: music roads in Japan.
From WSJ (thank you, Robert): the making-of video of the Civic Musical Road in Lancaster, CA that played an overture from William Tell until nearby residents complained. It is now being rebuilt elsewhere.
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