My first iPhone App

I don't often pimp out my own work. Much of it is behind the scenes stuff like PowerPoint documents, Information Architecture, and things that may or may not involve spending a lot of time on Facebook & Twitter (depending on if you're reading this and are in fact my boss).

But today is different. Today I'm proud to announce something really tangible. Proof that my 4 years in digital marketing have not been completely spent on Facebook / watching the BBC iPlayer / playing Bejeweled on my phone (maybe).

Right now you can go here and download that proof.

It is an iPhone App (I can hear you all yawning already). But I'm exceptionally happy to say its not a waste of space / crappy game app which serves no purpose other than to fool people to 'engage' with my clients' brands. It is in fact useful.

Research from MORE TH>N shows that a massive 38% of people who are involved in a road traffic incident do not have sufficient details of the incident when they phone up their insurance company to register a claim request. 38%?!! That's a huge number of people paying premiums which they don't benefit from because they don't have the details they need to get money off of their insurance company. Crazy shit no?

MORE TH>N are a nice brand however. They want to do more... as it were, for their customers. So in response they briefed Hyper - "What can we do to make sure more people have the right details when making a claim?"

I had a think. We all had a think. Then I thought harder.

"How about a mobile phone app which makes it really easy to collect all the information needed by the insurance company and then sends it straight to the insurance company via e-mail, CCing you as well."

And thus my first iPhone app idea was born - and I'm proud of it. Its only available in the UK - but people insured by ANY insurer can use it (although you will need to get some details like their phone number and any claims handling e-mail address to change the settings to ensure it is in fact your insurance company that you send the info to rather than to MORE TH>N who probably won't be of much help).

I hope you decide to download it - hoping that you never need to use it.

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Hilarious use of Google Wave

Just spotted this on TechCrunch. I burst out giggling in the office with 15 people staring at me with a 'wtf? mate' oO look on their face. I sent it round the office, other people giggled - some people didn't get it. Sucks to be them.

In my opinion this is the funniest thing I've seen on the web for quite a long time.

Even though I'm on Google Wave now - its a lonely place as I imagine it is for many people who probably only have a small number of contacts who also managed to get an invite. Until Wave is rolled out with a wider release, it will keep on being a bit useless.

In the meantime however I look forward to seeing inventive uses of it like the above. It does at least illustrate how useful this could be for collaborative script writing if nothing else.

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Battle of the Big Thinkers

Thinking, Drinking, Sinking, Feeling. (Explored!)
Originally uploaded by PsstMinnie

I recently entered into an APG competition of the same name as this blog post. You can find out more about it here - www.battleofbigthinking.com. Sadly my entry wasn't selected to take me through to the live event where 3 lucky people get to talk about their idea for 3 minutes before the audience will vote for a winner. Its a bit of fun, and would have been great to get through to the live event, but sadly it wasn't to be.

This was my entry:

"When we're playing games, we're not suffering." - Jane McGonigal.

Jane argues that games such as World of Warcraft promote addictive behaviour through providing a level of fulfilment which is exceptionally hard to achieve in the 'real world'.

I challenge the media driven brands of today to consider this statement closely if they want to be the brands of tomorrow. In an economy where attention is scarce, most brands will be fighting for attention scraps left over by the corporations who provide the most fulfilment. Without doubt, a gaming company will have the attention monopoly in the years to come.

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Best Microsoft Ad Ever

Just saw this new ad for Windows 7 and I absolutely love it. It made me smile and laugh out loud and feels deceptively non-corporate. Hats off to M$ for having a good sense of humour and letting such an awesome but non traditional ad pave the way for their biggest product launch in years.

Love it.

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Geek Porn v2.0

Just over 2 years ago I posted about some Geek Porn that was coming my way. I'm sad to say that computer has struggled over the last 2 years, with several returns to Overclockers to get it fixed. The hard drive kept failing, the case window came back cracked after 1 repair visit, and the CPU heatsink came back physically bent out of shape after the second visit. However after that it was stable, and worked, and Overclockers made it crystal clear I wasn't getting my money back.

I'll put it down to bad luck as Overclockers generally have very high recommendations from most people, including my best friend who's never had a problem with their computers.

I started thinking about getting a new pr0n box because my current one (specs viewable on the link above) is failing @ quite a lot of common tasks these days - alt tabbing out of a game and trying to open a web browser taking up to a couple of minutes to complete. Despite my belief that my problems with Overclockers being a 1 off, somewhere in the back of mind it hurt too much to fork out any more money to them on a new pre-built computer so I started looking at Dell again.

Above is my new Geek Porn... the specs are insane - my wallet is screaming with hurt - but I reckon its going to be a stunning machine. Full spec below.

I'll let you know how I get on with it.

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Studio XPS™ 435-(D00SX403) Intel® Core™ i7 processor 950 (3.06Ghz, 8MB L2 cache, 4.8GT/sec), Genuine Windows Vista® Home Premium SP1 (64 BIT) - English

Item	Description
Base	Intel® Core™ i7 processor 950 (3.06Ghz, 8MB L2 cache, 4.8GT/sec)
Memory	9216MB 1067MHz Tri Channel DDR3 SDRAM [3x2048 + 3x1024]
Keyboard	Dell™ USB Entry Keyboard - UK/Irish (QWERTY)
Monitor	Display Not Included
Video Card	1GB DDR3 ATI® Radeon™ HD 4870 graphics card
Hard Drive	1TB (7200rpm) Serial ATA/100 Hard Drive
Microsoft Operating System	Genuine Windows Vista® Home Premium SP1 (64 BIT) - English
Mouse	Dell Optical Scroll USB (2 buttons scroll) DUAL TONE Mouse
Optical Devices	16X DVD+/-RW Drive
Sound Cards	Integrated HDA 7.1 Dolby Digital Audio
Speakers	No Speakers (Speakers are required to hear audio from your system)
Wireless Networking	Internal Enhanced Wireless 802.11n PCIe Card - EUR
Shipping Documents	English - Documentation with UK Power Cord
Gedis Bundle Reference	D09SX403
Standard Warranty	1 Year Premium Warranty Support
Enhanced Service Packs	1Yr Premium Warranty Support
Order Information	Studio XPS 435 DT Order - UK
Dell System Media Kit	XPS 435T Resource DVD (Diagnostic & Drivers)
Accidental Damage Support	No Accidental Damage Support
Protect your Data	DataSafe Online Backup 2GB 1 year
DataSafe	Datasafe Local 2.0 Basic
Microsoft Application Software	Microsoft® Works 9 - English
Protect your new PC	No Security/Anti-Virus Protection - English

Really nice, simple explanation of the opportunity of Social Media

Its our fault that Video Games usually suck

Anthony Burch passionately explains why the gaming industry is churning out high-budget shitty games which aren't actually fun or creative. Its all our fault. He's got a point. Maybe I should cancel my World of Crackcraft subscription.

Watch it. Tell me if you disagree. Or agree.

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We want to be known

I remember being pointed to Post Secret a little while ago and then re-found it more recently. Its a service run by a guy called Frank who invites people to post in their deepest secrets anonymously using postcards as a medium of choice. He then scans a selection of them and puts them on the blog linked above.

Many are funny, many are sad, and many are heart breaking. The video above explains in a lovely way what motivates people to take part and send in their secrets to Frank. Ultimately.. we want to be known and we want to know that we aren't alone in facing the problems that life throws at us. What isn't mentioned is that many of the people who take part are desperately lonely. Not necessarily meaning that they have no friends or family, but much of the time that they feel disconnected from those around them and desperately want to change their situation and either learn how to connect to those around them, or find people who provide them with a stability and peace of mind that they're able to function as 'normal' people and accept that life is how it is.

Its a lovely video - have a watch - the up-front bit is quite eloquent about our new media landscape and how it affects our behaviour (within this context) and be sure to check out the blog about once/week.

Also sorry for the lack of blogging recently - work has been crazy busy. I need to have down time at work to be able to spend enough time looking around for good shit on the Internet (bizarre considering my occupation I know).

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Faking 'Viral'

This ugly thing is what is called a 'proof of concept' banner. It does what it says on the tin.

A while ago I was having a chat with someone from FlashTalking who are a company which like making online banner ads a bit exciting and sexy when at all possible as well as charging advertisers reasonable bandwidth costs for the pleasure of using their internet pipes to make the banners come to life in vivo. With glazed eyes, I spoke at length about how funny it would be if we could make an online banner ad that actually pulls in a YouTube video dynamically, so when people click on the ad/hover over it, it begins to play.

"So whut? I seen videos in banners before" - The key thing isn't the video. Its the +1 count on YouTube that's good - and also the fact that you don't pay for Rich Media adserving as the bandwidth being used is YouTube's (Snootch)

The trends on YouTube are subject to many factors ranging from genuine WOM generated by things like Britain's Got Talent, to the 'featured videos' to simply watching what other people are watching. The 'most viewed' list being a bit of a holy grail for advertisers in the knowledge that if you manage to hit the top results on 'most viewed', that you've achieved the video equivalent of reaching positions 1 to 3 in Google (a.k.a you're going to increase your site traffic/views a lot for the time that you can hold that position).

The effect of popular stuff getting more popular by being popular in the first place (concise no?) has been named by someone else more cleverer than me. It is called 'Cumulative advantage' and you can read more about it here (thanks Faris for the tip).

This type of ad format will no doubt only work a couple of times (if at all) as YouTube/Google reserve the right to cease certain services/charge for bandwidth costs if people send high amounts of traffic to their services for commercial reasons.

As video ads need to be rollover/click to initiate - we're subject to digital banner interaction rates (approx 5%) for the success of the campaign. However if you buy a Yahoo! and MSN homepage takeover - you should get about 1 million video views (in a day) which should see your video firmly in the 'most viewed' list on YouTube for about a month which should in turn generate another couple of million 'natural' views. I'm not saying you should go out and buy homepage takeovers just to try this out - but if you ARE going to be buying them anyway, why not maximise your ROI in this age of 'where the money at?' by using this type of ad format? 

This isn't a replacement for creating genuinely good content which may in turn spread virally across the internets - its just a cheeky way of making bog standard video go nuts on YouTube for a while.

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I Made This™

Help Needed: What's the point of Wired UK?

In my mind, Wired Magazine has always had a global appeal. Perhaps this is the route of the problem..'in my mind' doesn't count for much. I did ask Google to see if they knew the answer, but they didn't. So 'in my mind' is all I have to go with at the minute.

So if we assume that Wired had a global appeal - what additional value is created through the localisation of this publication in the UK? Wired Italia I understand because of the language barrier - but Wired UK?

To me, one of the best things about Wired is that it does an amazing job of capturing interesting stuff from around the world and bringing it to my attention. Not just any interesting stuff, but interesting stuff with history, context and substance above and beyond the rules of the 'Natural Selection of Interesting'. These rules of selection which govern how content in the digital broth rise to the top of our attentionsphere are tailored to the environment of online where long form written content often doesn't win. For this reason I still rely on Wired (and occasionally the Discovery Channel) to fulfill my deeper curiosities which need those things I mentioned above like history, context and substance. 

So! If in a globally connected and already mainly English speaking context - what benefit can be had from localising a magazine which draws on trends from around the world and already has a global appeal? 

Am I supposed to have a subscription to both magazines? If I just get the UK magazine will I miss out on all the exciting stuff in the US magazine which isn't being covered in the UK edition?

What am I supposed to do? Its more confusing than the really tricky levels of Portal.

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Grown Up Digital

We all need something to grow
Originally uploaded by Pablo Barra

Back in November '08, a lovely lady from Edinburgh Business School asked me to write a book review for the International Journal of Advertising. It was for a book called "Grown Up Digital", written by Don Tapscott who also authored Growing Up Digital and Wikinomics amongst other nice books.

Having grown up digital myself, I thought it sounded like a good thing to do so I said yes. This month the review was published in the IJA - you can read it here. I hope you like it.

p.s. I wrote it before it became apparent that people who work at Google in fact don't really like it all that much unless they are amongst the chosen few who work in the Mountain View paradise in California. Shame really - but something you learn to live with when you grow up digital... anything you write tends to become irrelevant, or simply bettered in a very short space of time.

p.p.s the p.s. won't make sense unless you read the book review. So here it is again, just incase.

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If you search for...

I loled

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How to ensure marketing content goes viral

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F**k my life

I found this little gem of a site through Twitter not long ago. Essentialy its a sounding board for anyone and everyone who's having a really really bad day to share whats happened that has caused them to think "F**k my life".

Here's a nice example or 2.

"Today, I ran out of underwear and so I went into my mom's drawer to borrow a pair from her. It was then that I found out my mom uses the same vibrator as I do. FML"

and 

"Today, we had some family over. A nasty need to wank seized me when I saw her : my 17 year old cousin. I went to my unoccupied parents’ bedroom. My sister's baby walkie talkie was on and the whole family heard me. FML"

All hilarious stuff. Today I tried to post my own FML.

One of my bosses called me by my brother's name - and didn't realise his mistake for a good few minutes. My brother has never worked here and I've worked here for 6 months. FML etc.

Unfortunately - FML rejected my submission. FML

Geekmented Reality

Faris talks quite a bit about augmented reality over on his blog. Its pretty interesting stuff really - overlaying digital invormation over the real world through some handy display or even an eyeball implant (yum..), and in doing so making the real world a more connected place where the infinite information available on the internet can enrich peoples' lives in new and unexpected ways. If and when it becomes a commonplace reality, I have no doubt that the endless applications it will have will mimic the growth and development of the Internet, both surprising us and changing our lives forever.

Some really smart people at MIT (those guys are always up to some clever stuff) - have "developed a wearable computing system that turns any surface into an interactive display screen. The wearer can summon virtual gadgets and internet data at will, then dispel them like smoke when they're done." 

Have a look at this pretty cool video which they've made, demonstrating the life hacking ability of their gizmo.

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