KFC Creates New Private/Public Partnership to Pilot Test the Corporate Sponsorship of Fire Prevention Tools to Aid Cash-Strapped Cities
First Pothole Refreshing, Now Fire Safety: Kentucky Fried Chicken Asks Mayors to Nominate U.S. Cities for KFC-Branded Fire Hydrant or Extinguisher Funding
LOUISVI
LLE, Ky.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Step aside roadside billboards. To help cities pay for needed fire safety repairs and improvements during difficult economic times, KFC unveiled an advertising campaign to bring the brand’s iconic logo to neighborhood fire hydrants and fire extinguishers in public buildings. Designed to launch KFC’s new Fiery Grilled Wings, this first-of-its-kind advertising program supports the important issue of fire prevention and safety.
“We are always looking for outside-the-bucket marketing ideas”
“With January being the peak month for residential fires, KFC wanted to raise awareness about this important issue and launch our new KFC Fiery Grilled Wings by supporting local fire departments nationwide,” said Javier Benito, executive vice president of marketing and food innovation for KFC. “This unique marketing concept will help pay for new fire extinguishers and fire hydrants in cities in exchange for branding the equipment with Fiery Grilled Wings logos.”
KFC Cooks Up a Pilot Test in Indiana
In Brazil, Ind., 85 fire hydrants needed repairs the city couldn’t afford due to budget constraints. To help, KFC repaired hydrants while also branding them with the KFC and Fiery Grilled Wings logos.
“Brazil has been faced with budget constraints for several years, and unfortunately, fire hydrant maintenance has suffered because of them,” said Brazil Mayor Ann Bradshaw. “We’re thrilled that KFC recognizes that cities are being forced to make these difficult decisions and has stepped up to help us.”
Just over 60 miles east along I-70, KFC teamed up with Third Street Partners to provide Indianapolis Mayor Greg Ballard with branded residential smoke detectors as well as branded fire extinguishers for gyms and recreation centers throughout the city.
Creative public/private partnerships have become a mainstay in Indiana’s capitol city and have served as a way for many municipal agencies to overcome budget shortfalls. Third Street Partners represents the City of Indianapolis as it seeks to create revenue-generating public/private partnerships for the city.
Additionally, KFC issued an open offer to mayors nationwide, asking them to describe their need for fire extinguishers and hydrants in their community. Three other lucky cities will receive KFC’s assistance.
“Public safety is job one in Indianapolis,” said Mayor Ballard. “Cities everywhere are working to overcome budget challenges, and partnerships like this one with KFC offer a welcome opportunity to support important fire prevention and safety efforts.”
A Pothole-Filling Advertising Legacy
KFC’s track record of private/public partnerships began last spring when the brand issued an open offer to mayors of cities nationwide asking them to describe their city streets’ state of disrepair. Four cities from coast to coast received KFC-refreshed potholes, branded via a large stencil that read “Re-Freshed by KFC” in eye-catching, but non-permanent street chalk. The unique marketing campaign attracted worldwide attention.
“We are always looking for outside-the-bucket marketing ideas,” Benito added. “Much like our ‘Re-Freshed by KFC’ pothole repair program that promoted our fresh chicken, this partnership was tailor-made for our new Fiery Grilled Wings.”
Remember when virtual reality 
Maybe people are searching for it more just because they are not sure what it means, but it definitely is entering the collective consciousness. If virtual reality is a complete immersion in a digital world, augmented reality (AR) is more a digital overlay onto the real world. It enhances the real world with digital data, and therefore it is much more interesting than a completely fabricated environment. There is an element of magic to AR apps because they juxtapose data and graphics where they have no business showing up.
The advent of touchscreen mobile phones with GPS and cameras such as the iPhone and Android phones is giving rise to an array of AR apps from Sekai Camera, Layar, and more
But that is just the start. Universityresearch labs
You can take your virtual reality and get lost on Second Life. I’ll take augmented reality any day. It’s just more real.
Smartphones are bringing the once-SF concept of augmented reality into the everyday world
Augmented reality: the Nearest Tube iPhone app
Augmented reality is a lively creative mess. Now that smartphones have relieved us from unstylish fantasies of goggles, the technology is finally getting real. In 2010, the world is becoming subtitled, and your future will be augmented.
Augmented reality applications enable users to see additional layers of data when they view normal objects through smartphones or webcams.
Since programming an augmented reality application is easy, every computer student can develop augmented software for a smartphone. Very many of them are. These days, applications mushroom everywhere a bit of augmentable content is to be found.
As in the early days on the internet it is a wild augmented west, and so you need a guide. In part one of our review, we highlight the seven most important things the informed user of today needs to know about augmented reality.
Part two will focus on journalism and augmented reality.
Layar is paving the way. As the witty Japanese introduction illustrates, Layar makes use of the smartphone camera and compass. As you look on your screen information is overlayed on top of the world surrounding you.
A lot of augmented reality applications allow that, but what makes Layar so appealing is that it allows external developers to submit, well, layers, a decision that helped it to become the most flourishing augmented reality application even though it is only available for the Android phones and not ready for the iPhone.
Popular examples are Wikitude, which presents data about nearby points of interest, or Yelp which is providing reviews of nearby restaurants, shopping and nightlife possibilities. Since it can be used for any form of data there is even an application showing where hundreds of billions of US dollars of US recovery funding got spent.
Lost? Among the most popular applications at the moment are travel applications, perfect for augmented reality. Nearest Tube, London Tube and London Bus help you handy to find your way through London, but of course there is an application for nearly every large city by now.
Several astronomical applications transform you into an 21st century explorer, such as the Heads Up Navigator, the sympathetic old school Theodolite and Sun Seeker or Accrossair. And there will be more to come, as a world full of subtitles makes perfect sense for lost travellers.
If you find yourself holding tight to your laptop on the street seeking somewhere with free Wi-Fi, download WorkSnug. It's a navigation app on the same principle as the nearest-tube-applications, but also provides you with information about Wi-Fi spots' power supply and coffee quality, and makes it easy to get in touch with other lonesome nerds.
At the moment WorkSnug is only available for the iPhone and in London, but it's coming to Madrid, Barcelona, Berlin and Paris in February before hitting San Francisco and New York in March.
The addition of an 3D object is another important augmented reality feature. Several games already make use of this: Mosquitos, Wanted Dead or Alive, and Firefighter 360 place targets in the world surrounding you while the multiplayer game Gunman simply uses the T-shirt colour of your friends.
If you are not a bloodthirsty teenager but a knackered parent you should get The Hidden Park, a game that combines technology and outdoor experience; this neatly designed iPhone game keeps your child busy in London's Kensington Gardens or South Bank, New York's Central Park or Munich's Englische Garten.
So after the interactive media artists Blast Theory have already tested what's possible in urban gaming, and augmented reality will boost this further. Yet to be invented is the augmented reality movie, but you can watch an early version of what might be to come in the video above.
One thing that's striking about augmented reality is that it is so everyday. In 2009, applications were developed for a lot of different day-to-day situations. They help you find your car, test the size of the parcel you packed before you go to the post office, arrange and test new furniture, or present information about the food you're buying like the one Giuseppe Costanza developed at London's Central Saint Martin's for the communication design course.
Interact with your computer using the physical world: SixthSense uses natural hand gestures to interact with the computer. It projects the screen on your hand or any other surface using a tiny small wearable gestural interface. Developed by the Fluid Interfaces Group of the MIT Media Lab, this application is yet to be mass-marketed but pretty impressive.
2010 will be the year where augmented reality will reach the mass market, because finally smartphones are widely available, the applications are easy to use and pretty useful. To stay on top of developments, follow the London based Augmented Planet blog run by Lester Madden, The Augmented Times, or Games Alfresco, which is a bit more dedicated to the reinvention of interactive entertainment.
If you really wanna dig deep, get down with augmented reality guru Bruce Sterling, who recently gave a keynote about the dawn of the augmented reality industry.
Watch out for part two of our special on augmented reality and journalism.Just a month or so after augmented reality browser Layar won EUR 75,000 in Vodafone's Mobile Clicks contest, the technology was already being put to work in a custom-designed application for Louisiana's Voodoo Experience music festival.
Layar is a free mobile browser for Android devices and the iPhone that overlays computer-generated information on top of real-time, on-screen images from the handset's built-in camera. The Voodoo app was designed by New Orleans ad firm Zehnder Communications using Layar 2.0 to let festival-goers with enabled phones get information on performances, attractions and services simply by pointing their phone cameras toward key parts of the festival grounds. When viewing concert stages, for instance, one custom AR layer provided information on lineups, schedules and current artists performing, including artist profiles and Web links. Pointing a phone camera at a vendor would show menus and pricing, while other points of interest highlighted by the app included vendor locations, artist displays, restrooms, ATMs, entrances and exits, medical sites and other services. Zehnder was one the first 50 firms worldwide named as developers of the Layar platform. A demo of the Voodoo app is available on Vimeo.
In addition to a whole new world of entertainment and useful information for mobile consumers, augmented reality also opens up a wealth of new OFF=ON opportunities for advertisers. Time to explore the possibilities for *your* tech-savvy brand...?
Website: www.z-comm.com
Contact: jzehnder@z-comm.com
It was a huge year for data. There's no denying it. Data is about to explode.
Applications sprung up left and right that help you understand your data - your Web traffic, your finances, and your life. There are now online marketplaces that sell data as files or via API. Data.gov launched to provide the public with usable, machine-readable data on a national scale. State and local governments followed, and data availability expands every day.
At the same time, there are now tons of tools that you can use to visualize your data. It's not just Excel anymore, and a lot of it is browser-based. Some of the tools even have aesthetics to boot.
It's exciting times for data, indeed.
Data has been declared sexy, and the rise of the data scientist is here.
With all the new projects this year, it was hard to filter down to the best, but here they are: two honorable mentions and the five best data visualization projects of 2009. Visualizations were chosen based on analysis, aesthetics, and most importantly, how well they told their story (or how well they let you tell yours).
The MTV VMA Tweet Tracker, a glorified bubble chart from Stamen Design and Radian6, showed the buzz on Twitter over the MTV VMAs. As I watched iJustine talk about the visualization on television, pointing out highlights in the bubbles and tags, I thought, "Visualization sure has branched out." Plus, the explosion of Kanye West's face on my computer screen was hilarious.
We all know there were major problems going on with banks and credit this year, but it's a safe bet that most didn't quite know why. Jonathan Jarvis attempted to explain with his thesis project, Crisis of Credit Visualized. It isn't perfect, and it doesn't explain every detail, but it does explain a lot.
Photosynth, by Microsoft Live Labs, smartly strings photos together to create something of a browsable 3-D environment. It was actually released last year. I don't think it was really put to good use until this year though. With the inauguration of President Barack Obama, a historic event people won't soon forget, MSNBC used Photosynth to provide a view of the inaugural stands.
Unemployment rate was another important and recurring topic this year, and there were a lot of visualizations - maps, bar charts, and graphics - that showed it. None did it better than Shan Carter, Amanda Cox, and Kevin Quealy of The New York Times. In The Jobless Rate for People Like You, we were able to see the changes over time and filter down to different demographics. Transitions and browsability were top notch.
OpenStreetMap: A Year of Edits showed all the changes to OpenStreetMap data in 2008. The visualization itself, by ITO, is beautiful, and what the animated map represents - a worldwide effort in providing an accurate geographic data source - is even more amazing.
Protovis, from the Stanford visualization guys Mike Bostock and Jeffrey Heer, is a "graphical approach to visualization." More importantly, it uses Javascript and SVG for web-native visualizations, which is where things are headed with, uh, visualization on the Web. True, there are plenty of Javascript libraries that let you make basic graphs, but none are nearly this advanced, and true, Protovis doesn't work in all browsers, but if you're reading this, you're probably smart enough to be on a modern browser, unless you're locked into Internet Explorer at work.
On the Origin of Species, by Ben Fry, shows the changes to Charles Darwins' theory of evolution over time. I think a lot of you missed this one, because I posted it on Labor Day, but nevertheless, it's an elegant visual. It's a simple concept executed really well. Origin shows the full growing (and shrinking) text as little blocks with an emphasis on the evolution of Darwin's ideas. They were 20 years in the making.
Origins is actually an offshoot of a much larger project yet to be released (if ever), according to Fry, so I'm of course really looking forward to seeing the rest.
There you have it. It's the top five visualizations of 2009. There was a lot of great stuff churned out this year, and no doubt next year will be even better.
Back to you - what do you think was the best visualization of the year? Leave your picks in the comments below.
How does it work? Just open the app, snap a photo and voilà: Google (
While the technology is pretty remarkable, Google admits that it is still in its infancy. So while some image searches work brilliantly — think photos of books, business cards, artwork, places, logos and landmarks — don’t be too disappointed if your image searches for food, animals, plants and cars are less than stellar.
Still, the application should prove useful, and we hope to see versions of it made available for other smartphone users as well. For now, though, iPhone (
Watch the video below for a demonstration of Google Goggles.
December 7, 2009
Combining an Arduino microcontroller with a Fisher Price Activity Center, Bart Swennen, Gert Vos, and Johannes Taelman have put together a device which allows toddlers to communicate non-verbally with their caretakers through Twitter. Dubbed ‘Twoddler,” the device captures data from toddler interactions within the activity center and translates them to tweets that can be followed by the toddler’s parents; the toddler mashing the image of his mother for a predetermined amount of time might be translated to a tweet like ‘I’d like to see my mommy now.”
INCA Award 2009 WINNER: Twoddler from IBBT on Vimeo.
The project is the 2009 winner of the Innovative and Creative Applications Award.
[via CNET]
