iBeer is the #5 top paid app on the iPhone. It's a great tool to show off to your friends and it costs $3.99 AUD
Cool. But for Free you can get the iPint App which does the same thing + has a free game. This is what picked up silver at Cannes 2008.
I always assumed Apple users were pretty smart. But this might be a case of over excited and over cashed nerds.
Many app on there are what you'd expect for free anyway. Todo lists apps for $3. C'mon.
It'll be interesting to see the new breed of apps coming for the iPhone in the future. Apple will also have to create a better way to sort through them as already it's 80% utter shite, 10% useless and 8% what you'd expect anyway and 2% inspired.
This is a great addition to Youtube. You can see advertisers scrambling to be the first to create something big with this. Right now it seems to be card tricks and this cup and ball demo that are filling up the most viewed videos.
Here's how to add your own annotations to a Youtube video.
It certainly opens up a new dimension to Youtube videos.
Google Analytics have released the beta of Benchmarking reports. See the full article here. You'll need to Opt in to share your data anonymously though, which is a fair trade.
So now you can compare your travel site with the industry average. Sadly no way to compare via country, only "Category" but it's nice to compare. The more sites that opt in the better the results will be. Give it a few months for all the major players to opt in before you start to use the benchmarking as gospel.
Posted in the category of It-Doesn't-Need-To-Be-Done-But-When-It-Is-Done-It's-Pretty-Damn-Cool, mega advertising conglomerate Dentsu of Japan has an interesting little SWF embedded on their website - a visually synched representation of the lifts being used in their building, shown in real-time:
Amazingly, browsing their otherwise pretty dry site, I read they service a total of six THOUSAND clients.
Widgets are big business. A recent report on Techcruch showed that 81% of the US web audience were exposed to a widget. While I doubt their metrics the fact is widgets are generating a stack load of impressions and it's all unpaid media and most times in content or prominent positions. No one complains about "Widget blindness".
Gigya and Clearspring are two new companies that both offer the widget creator a simple one click way of embedding your widget on the huge variety of social network sites out there. It's the "build once" mentality and then let these companies worry about the implementation hassles. So you create your widget, add their code and then you're ready to roll. It auto creates the jpegs for iGoogle and Facebook, users can login to many of the networks form the widget and post without leaving the site. It even imports their email contacts to make sending an email simple.
We've used Gigya for a little over 2 weeks now and have found it an invaluable tool.
You can also use Gigya custom reports as a replacement for Mochibot tracking (although Mochibot provides more detailed info for what we need.)
Gigya also allows you to fully style the format of the buttons and size. Although I prefer to keep it generic.
Here's what the reports and interface for Giya looks like
Clearspring's "Launchpad" tool looks similar and I'd say it's worth checking out both.
Clearspring offers a page based way of embedding the Widget and also an in WIdget version. These don't seem to have an option to style the look and feel though.
So if you're still using a simple Youtube style of embed code text field in your widgets then do yourself a favor and check out Gigya and Clearspring.
What about poor old paid media?
Both companies will be in a position to offer ad serving through the widgets. While the better way to go is to create a branded widget that actually enhances the user's experience there will always be money to be made from paid media. Revenue share is one way to greeze
I find it funny that both companies present themselves in a similar fashion. Way to differentiate yourselves.
Widgets Smidgets:
If Widget's aren't your thing but you like this idea of a one click solution for the myriad of social networks out there check out.
Addthis.com: Let's you put one button on your site instead of the 20+ you need to hit Digg, Del.icio.us, Redit etc etc
Flux.com: A way to have your content shared across users Myspace blog, Facebook accounts etc etc
An interesting technology from the Australian Centre for Visual Technology called VideoTrace. You can download the paper describing the technology here
The simple models it generate are perfect for Google Earth 3D models, low poly video games and Michael Gondry film clips.
With the huge coverage multi touch screens, photosyth and other international based technology has been getting lately it's nice to see some Aussies doing something interesting too.
Sometimes you need to post a video online and the number of views, favorites and links doesn't matter. What matters is quality. Youtube's quality is a low 200kps and your video, let's say your show reel or beautifully crafted TVC, looks awful in Youtube's 320x240 blurry vision.
There is an alternative which offers all the community sharing aspects of Youtube but with increased quality. Not only that it supports HD. Upload a 1280x720 clip and Vimeo will auto create a small version (400x300) and allow viewers to watch the full HD footage. Here's Vimeos HD FAQ which explains more.
Users have the option of turning off HD at any time and load the smaller clip so bandwidth is not an issue.
Click here to see a comparison of videos on both Youtube and Vimeo.
The Simpsons movie is 8 days away (I would say how great it is but I've been told not tell anyone I've seen it) and we're heading into the biggest marketing push Fox has ever done. So big they have put together a website to showcase the promotions. See Yellow.
What's not on there is the new Simpsonize Me tool for Burger King. Just launched by CP+B.
Now it's a little rough around the edges (read: buggy) but when it does work it's actually pretty cool. Uploading a face definitely takes the grunt work out of creating a character.
Here's me Simpsonized. I had to adjust the hair but it's a pretty good likeness. It's even captured my terrible fashion sense. I also Simpsonized myself age 80. As you can see I no longer wear glasses and my ears are bigger but I've now got a great sense for fashion. I look forward to my Versace days to come in my 80's.
What's confusing is that the official Simpsons site has their own Create your own Simpsons avatar tool. Here's the Simpsons character I created a few weeks back. To launch two similar online initiatives seems a waste and also takes the allure off the BK one.
What's missing from both is a gallery function. I want to see other people's characters. I want to see them all in a huge crowd shot. I guess I'll have to browse the Flickr groups and fan forums for my fix.
And and if you dial you age in at 200 this is what you get. Don't do it as you have to upload your photo again after.
As for what else is happening outside of what's mentioned on See Yellow, there is also:
Both Samsung and Vans should have created official sites for these promotions. Their corporate sites (Vans | Samsung) don't even mention these at all. You can't rely on bloggers as your only form of information distribution!
Even more detailed info can be found on Wikipedia.
It finally arrived yesterday, and i'm writing this entry from a new iphone. While without flash still it doesn't quite provide the full web experience, the future and potential oportunities are great. The browsing experience is quite nice, and it's likely that both publishers and advertisers will soon be talking about a very different mobile experience set. Or rather, those of us that present options to take advantage of the new form factor that has just lauched will grow our businesses.
Rumor has it that a european 3G version will be announced as early as july 2nd, with delivery set for the fall. If nokia, motorola and microsoft push there mobile browsers up to attempt to match mobile safari, then the opportunities will really crank up. Lets hope so, and in the meantime, start playing with an iphone and thinking about what you can build.
Right, there's a lovely thing going down about, Flash 9 and it's 3D prowess is enabling another dimension (scuse the pun) to what we as creatives can do.
This is a sweet example of texture mapping from users being rendered realtime, forgive me as I do not speak russian, so I cannot therfore translate - can anyone out there help with this?
Anyway it looks cool and no doubt we'll be seeing more and more of this in ads and sites as we go on.
I finally had time over the Easter Long weekend to sit down and check out Joost.
Now rather than go into the pros and cons of this new tech I'll show you how to experience Joost without having to download the program.
Take $20, go to your nearest Blockbuster (or independent video retailer) and ask them where the 20c weekly movies are. Then with your $20 spend all you have on the cheapest movies you can find. Don't worry about genres or titles just pick a few from everywhere. Take them home and pile them up with the spines visible.
Now sit back and tell yourself it's the future of TV.
Ok seriously though, now to actually be a little constructive with my feedback:
Joost is currently in Beta so it's still a little rough but with the content available right now it's probably a few good months away.
Adverts: The adverts have no intelligence to them and interrupt the shows at odd times. I was told they would be geo targeted but I saw 5 T-Mobile ads and I have no idea how to get a T-Mobile. Following that I had a heaps of Garnier ads on the GameStar TV channel? If they can Geo Target it and they have no relevant advertisers then don't show me anything.
Lack of Features:
There didn't seem to be a "favs" or "to watch" list. Unlike TV, I expected to plan a play list of shows I wanted to watch then site back. But I found myself constantly getting bored then flicking through the channel listings. I spend longer looking for good content than actually sitting back watching it.
Then there are feature which seem useless like Chat. Don't just add features in because you can, concentrate on what it's meant to be good at then expand from there. I'd prefer to read peoples reviews or comments on a piece of video like on Youtube. You watch and then read the comments. Some of the time you find out interesting tid bits about the video, a lot of the time its just banter but it still adds to the experience.
Show Info:
Most of the content is supplied with very little data. This may be due to it being so old, but having a gaming channel with no date as to when this show aired is useless. I don't want to hear about a crap game released in 2005. And what if I want more info on a movie above the supplied sentence?
All in all to me it feels really sloppy. It feels clunky and it's boring.
Oh, and for those that feel they are missing out here's the quality of TV on the Sci Fi Channel. The almost complete series of Total Recall 2070. it wasn't good in 1999 and it certainly isn't any good now.
Has anyone had a different experience with Joost? Maybe I'm jaded or expected more or at least enough to keep me interested for longer than it took to type this.
