Post-its – not just for memos anymore

A beautiful video, but for those of you looking to do this yourselves good luck getting this stationery requisition through the office manager…

EepyBird’s Sticky Note experiment from Eepybird on Vimeo.

Eyebrows

I’ve been party to many debates on this one – CGeye-brows (like what I did there?) or are these kids just phenomenal? The balloon scratching is what makes it for me, I think I might even like it better than the Gorilla and definitely more than the airport race. Good skills Fallon.

Every day I Spotify myself

A Twitter friend of mine (@barneyc) was kind enough to throw me an invite to Spotify’s music streaming service last week. It’s a brilliant piece of kit – download the app onto your computer and from there you can instantly listen to a massive catalogue of songs, create playlists and even scrobble to your last.fm profile using the iTunes-style interface (as you can see below), which should be familiar to even the most technophobic users.

My amazing super created playlist, you can't see but I have a bit of Jay-Z in there too

Gone now are the days when I’ve had to suffer weak internet radio when I get sick of my own music collection.  Gone also is buying an album off the back of a couple of good singles and a couple of 30 second song snippets, as Spotify allows you to listen to songs an unlimited number of times (as well as allowing you to click through to buy of course).  While the song selection isn’t as extensive or as international as I’d like at the moment (the Red Hot Chili Peppers for example have gaping holes in their back catalogue), the service IS still in beta and I’m sure it’ll improve over time.

Spotify has a premium ad-free version (£9.99/month) and a free, invitation only ad-funded version, where the main advertisers at present are Vodafone pushing the Blackberry and DirectGov – which makes sense considering the current early adopter userbase and the fact that UK Sales Director Jon Mitchell has a fine GCap Media pedigree.

There’s pretty fierce competition in the digital music industry, but if Spotify can get a solid mobile service to market they’ll have a serious advantage.  They’ve already started by taking on a heavy-hitting European Yahoo! exec to head up their “portable solutions” division so they certainly seem to be on the right track.

UPDATE:

Spotify have had to restrict their music catalogue and remove some artists due to licensing issues.  FYI artists and labels, I’m MORE likely to buy your tracks if they are on here than not.

Grip

I’ve always thought that if I worked in an advertising agency that I’d love to have an automotive client – cool product, nice fat budget and a good chance of winning an award!  For me the majority of car ads generally seem to be slick, movie-quality level affairs that feature 4×4s flying around on roof tops or in deserts or some such.  They are also immensely dull, and seem like such a waste of potential considering the sums of money involved.  There are exceptions of course, one of these these being the new Audi Quattro ad by BBH London (and the Skoda that Fallon made out of cake, but that’s another post).

The whole concept is based around grip; and relating the way in which humans know how much grip to apply in different situations to how the Audi Quattro’s four wheel drive system.  The imagery they use to illustrate the point is a hand (it could be anyone’s hand, which helps you relate) holding a frog, a cricket ball, a tomato, a hammer etc, and all summed up with the ‘independent grip, intelligently applied’ strapline.  This is how advertising should be – a clear and simple message, intelligently communicated.

LinkedIn x Apps = Better

At a recent First Tuesday someone in the audience asked Kevin Eyres, European MD of LinkedIn, “what’s the value in taking the time to be on business networking site?”  Kevin’s response was that LinkedIn were looking to move towards being a place where people do business rather than just add connections, an answer that has been cemented today by the annoucement that LinkedIn has taken the plunge using OpenSocial and have added what looks to be some pretty useful apps to their platform.

I’m delighted to see Huddle, a company I mentioned earlier on this year as one of the more useful app developers, has their Workspaces the featured apps list, and I’m even more impressed with the interesting selection LinkedIn has gone with.  There seems to be a degree of overlap between the practical trio of Google Presentation, Slideshare and Box.net with regard to sharing presentations & documents (although there is enough to differentiate them), ditto the very sorely needed blog connecting & embedding pair of WordPress and Blog Link.  Dopplr-alike travel app Tripit (who out of your contacts is where and when) and Company Buzz (who’s talking about your your company and what they’re saying) are good choices too, but I’m less interested in Amazon Reading List – perhaps a del.ico.us app would be a bit more useful, rather than wading through lists of books that “internet visionaries” have put up to look smart (but actually haven’t read).

All-in-all a great move from LinkedIn and a brilliant step in the right direction.

The future of NFC is delicious

Plucked from Victoria Richardson’s Twitter feed (Proxama’s Head of Marketing), here’s a link to Nokia Phone Blog’s article on MIT’s recent NFC study. A lot of the concepts I mentioned in my last post are there, with the exception of the NFC-built sandwich. YUM YUM

NFC, a realistic future tech

NFC tech has been cropping up on my radar a lot more recently, so I rocked along to the most recent Mobile Monday (if you’re not signed up and have an interest in mobile, sort yourself out) last week to see Proxama and o2 talk about the technology and its applications. There are tons of new technologies that are/were supposed to be the next big thing, but o2 ran an NFC trial recently and the outcome is definitely worth paying attention to.

The trial covered using a NFC equipped Nokia for transport (Oyster), payments (Barclaycard-Visa), access control (VIP entrance into the o2) and smart posters. The more interesting results are that 9/10 trialists were comfortable using the technology and 78% said they would like to use their phone to pay/travel in the future. People were more interested in using the Oyster functionality than the payments functionality, which makes sense. The Suica card in Japan works in the same way as the Oyster, and mobile operator Au has a Suica SIM card service that is tremendously popular. When it comes to the lower interest in the NFC payments, the MoMo panel believed people are only getting used to the chip & PIN system and have new tech fatigue, but I have to think that people are (at this stage) just not familiar enough using their phones for anything bar SMS and calls to be secure making payments on it just yet.

There’s no doubt in my mind that payments and transport will be the foundation that widespread NFC adoption will have to be built on, but the more interesting aspect from a creative advertising point of view is what can be done with smart posters. I’m a big believer that there are only two things that deliver real value in the digital world – utility and content. On the utility front, I like the idea of a person touching a smart poster for a concert with their phone and getting gig info & a click-through-to-buy-ticket option, which cuts out the middle step on the whole shortcode to WAP push that we’re used to. As far as content goes, you could have a NFC/Bluetooth combo where the user could download an exclusive music video or a trailer and passes it on to others virally.

Still, seeing as we won’t have a critical mass of NFC equipped phones till 2011-2013 at the earliest, this is all pipe dream stuff at the moment. It’s true that NFC won’t have the same problems getting adopted that say i-mode did, as o2 aren’t looking for exclusivity. However the panel at MoMo did make it clear that there are a large number of stakeholders (banks, operators, handset makers etc) to satisfy to get things going, as each party feels that the customer/user belongs to them. I think NFC will make it though, as there seems to be enough diverse high level players taking an interest at this early stage to help it progress.

Did you hear the one about the chocolate fingers, arf arf

Twix have got a ‘Get the Girl’ interactive game going on their main site at the moment. It’s buggy (almost every time I play, it freezes at some stage) and a wee bit too cheesy, but in spite of that I can’t help but like it. It involves your Twix-munching “Joe Sixpack” (thanks Sarah) protagonist trying to get the girl-next-door back to his place while avoiding the weird best friend, sexy ex and his own stupidity. A lot of time definitely went into the game, and the high production values and situations held my attention longer than most interactive virals have to date.

Why do girls only ever come back when the place is a dump?

Twix’s creative agency Nitro are responsible for the piece (and some nice rollover banner ads), which follows from their Chew it Over campaign. I’d like to see a UK version (ideally starring Kirsty Gallagher), but I don’t know that Twix has enough products for sale on this side of the pond to be motivated enough to knock it out.

Putting Animals in Positions of Power is Key to Revitalising the Global Economy

I was watching clips from last night’s Colbert Report and he mentioned Tama the Stationmaster cat, a feline who has apparently boosted the local economy around the the Japanese rural town of Kinokawa to the tune of over $10 million in 2007 by attracting tourists through the previously infrequently used Kishigawa line. I remember reading the story when Tama was “promoted” to stationmaster of the previously unmanned station, but who could have predicted that the simple daughter of a stray cat could rise to such heights? Taro Aso should maybe drop her a line to get her campaigning for the upcoming lower house election to see if she can’t also boost the LDP’s fast-rotting approval rating…

Shooo kyuute:

Congrats to Sponge

NOT Sponge Group

Congratulations to Sponge Group on hitting 48 on the Sunday Times Tech 100. FRED was housed at Sponge during our inception, and having been there on the ground floor I can most definitely say Alex and Dan are doing a brilliant job and this is well deserved. Sponge winning the Autotrader account for their mobile site shows the direction they’re moving in, and the kind of value a full service mobile agency can add to a company’s digital portfolio.