Now this is a service - Ticketfree

An awesome utility idea that i would so use - thanks Springwise

More than 41 million speeding tickets are issued to drivers in the United States each year, according to TrafficTicketSecrets.com. With an average cost of USD 150 each, that amounts to more than USD 6 billion lost annually by US consumers. Therein lies the motivation behind Ticketfree, a site that ensures its customers will “never pay a speeding ticket, red light ticket, photo radar ticket or traffic violation again.”

Canadian Ticketfree operates on a simple membership plan whereby an annual fee covers the costs of any tickets members get over the course of that year. A membership fee of USD 169 covers all speeding tickets for a year, up to a maximum of USD 600; for USD 299, red-light and photo-radar tickets are covered as well, up to a cap of USD 900; and a USD 449 fee buys coverage for all of the above plus parking and equipment tickets too, up to a maximum total of USD 1,200. Upon receiving a qualifying ticket, members simply visit the Ticketfree site and enter the details; the company will then pay the associated fine and send the member a confirmation email. Not covered by Ticketfree are DUI and other violations resulting from dangerous behaviour, the company says.

Ticketing is on the rise, Ticketfree notes, so a little peace of mind could go a long way for many frequent drivers. Currently, however, the company covers only those within the United States and Canada; one to emulate in other parts of the ticket-prone and lead-footed world...? (Related: Fare dodgers take Paris Métro for a ride with insurance pots against fines.)

Website:www.ticketfree.org
Contact: general@ticketfree.ca

Spotted by: Michael Henr

Facebook Research: Brands Lean on Interactive Marketing –Yet Lack Social Marketing Skills

Nice framework approach from Jeremiah Owyang on how to approach, and rate, your facebook page activity.

This is followup data from the Altimeter Report: The 8 Success Criteria For Facebook Page Marketing, you should read this first.

Thanks to your help, Altimeter Group’s latest research on Facebook Marketing Best Practices, which now has over 17,000 views, and over 1,900 downloads (see slideshare stats) in less than a week. While we tried to include as much helpful information in the report, it was only the highlights of our findings. There’s far more data, scorecards, and findings that just aren’t able to fit into the report. Below is some additional information from our quantitative and qualitative study about the findings. Expect us to share more helpful data to marketers over the coming weeks, Altimeter clients can contact us for more details from the specific criteria, data, screenshots and scorecard.

[A fundamental mindset change must occur as brands approach social networks. In addition to interactive marketing (human-to-computer) brands must add social marketing (peer-to-peer) to their playbook.]

In the below graphic, we’ve aggregated the scores of the 30 brands to find out which of the criteria they’re good at –and which ones there are missed opportunities. We’ve then provided additional analysis on why we think brands scored this way, and some recommendations to improve. Research Graphic: Brands Great at Messaging and Branding –Yet Lack at Setting Expectations, Peer to Peer, and Advovacy

Criteria	How They Scored	Our Take: Why Brands Performed This Way	How Brands Can Improve Their Score
Set Community Expectations	2.08 (Immature or”Take off”)	Brands failed to be clear why they were doing a Facebook effort, likely due to the fact that they jumped into the the social network bandwagon. Most brands are experimenting, and are unable to articulate their purpose	Clearly have a business objective and be sure the site goals cascades these objectives. By not doing so, sets company up for a potential backlash as unchecked or unsolved customer woes can quickly cascade to their friends, on brands owns pages.
Provide Cohesive Branding	3.90 (Adolescence or “Climbing”)	Brands showed some sophistication from over a decade of online interactive marketing has taught them how to cascade their experience to all touch points	This is a huge risk. Customer that have product complaints may echo them loudly here, and if the brand doesn’t respond, this public griping could escalate into a full blown groundswell. Continue to reflect the brand in all digital channels, but don’t overwhelm the member experience.
Be Up To Date	5.00 (Exceptional or “Escape Velocity”)	Brands have a strong legacy of broadcast marketing, which is also know as message bombardment. Brands demonstrated an incredible ability to propagate messages at a rapid rate, not unusual for other mediums as well.	Continue this energy of being interactive with their customers, but in addition to populating the Facebook page with up to date updates, ensure they are engaging in a two-way dialog.
Live Authenticity	2.87 (Immature or”Take off”)	Brands suffered at being ’social’ in a social network, and are in many cases afraid to show their human side. Decades of being logo centric has cascaded to social networks and most members may question having conversations with a logo.	Behave in the same way the members are behaving: be social. Put the human side first by showing the team photos, giving human replies, and responding with first and last name.
Participate in Dialog	3.10 (Adolescence or “Climbing”)	Mixed bag of performance, while some brands may interact, often it was inconsistent. Even after a few years of social marketing blogging, forums, and Twitter, brands are still struggling to have real conversations with their members.	Interact with customers by engaging in a two way conversation. To scale, you don’t need to respond to every message, but set expectations on how frequently you’ll respond.
Enable Peer to Peer Interactions	2.03 (Immature or”Take off”)	Poor performance from brands here. In many cases, we expect brands hid from these features as they are difficult to moderate, manage, and risk of conversations going awry.	Better features are needed by using third party community applications, as well as hiring seasoned, well trained community managers to monitor and moderate.
Foster Advocacy	2.27 (Immature or”Take off”)	Brands are barely able to participate in the conversation let alone rely on the advanced features such as sharing or using your own members to share on your behalf.	At the bare minimum, encourage members to share content with each other and to cascade the branded experience to friends. As brands gain confidence, create formal advocacy programs.
Solicit a Call to Action	2.45 (Immature or”Take off”)	Unsure of even interacting with their members, it’s no surprise they didn’t know how to engage them for next steps or even conversion.	Don’t rush this. Until you’re scoring 4 or above on the previous mentioned criteria, I encourage brands to avoid this. Yet, for those that are succeeding in the other criteria, they can help members with conversion.

Summary: Brands Must Learn Social Marketing –Beyond Interactive Marketing
Brands are applying their years of experience of applying interactive marketing and broadcast marketing to the social web and it shows. With the natural inclination to brand and broadcast, we see these same behaviors in the Facebook Marketing. Yet, despite these existing strengths, brands are missing the two way aspect or ’social aspect’ of social network marketing. They must start to leverage peer to peer communications to reduce costs and content publication, show their human side, and quickly set expectations of what’s required –or risk a brand backlash. While setting community expectations doesn’t guarantee that a customer backlash could occur, it could help funnel them to the right place to be quickly supported. Yet, as problems are resolved, don’t shove them under the carpet in the call center, be sure to indicate back to the community they’ve been solved. Above all, brands must change their mindset from interactive marketing (human to computer) to also include social marketing (human to human)

SMS slingshot

Some cool interactive projection stuff, Thanks Digital Buzz blog.

Always amazes me that this sort of stuff just doesn't seem to have much uptake in Australia

Sony's 360 degree display

WOW... imagine this on a really really large scale

iButterfly

Nice AR game / slash coupon app

NIKE WRITE THE FUTURE | DIGITAL PINBALL

Always loved Double You's work from my time in Spain. This show's they've still got it

Interactive installation located in Madrid and Barcelona's Nike Stores that invite the consumers to play with the Elite Series boots that fit with their game: accuracy (T90), control (CTR360), touch (Tiempo) and speed (Mercurial). Launched in Stores during the world cup, this digital pinball was created and produced by DoubleYou for Nike Spain.

BBC World Cup Website Showcases Semantic Technologies

Great explanation of how BBC used semantic web approaches to deliver a dynamic and intelligent experience for the world cup. Via ReadWriteWeb

Written by Richard MacManus / July 13, 2010 5:27 AM / 8 Comments

« Prior Post Next Post »

The soccer World Cup has now ended, with Spain the victor. England was unceremoniously dumped out before the quarter finals - but if there was a World Cup for the Semantic Web, then the BBC may have lifted the trophy for its country. A post on the BBC Internet site explains how the BBC World Cup 2010 website used "dynamic semantic publishing" technology.

It's an impressive demonstration of how a large, mainstream website can have added meaning and structure.

ReadWriteWeb's Guide to The Semantic Web:

1. Semantic Web Adoption by Facebook, Best Buy & Others
2. It's All Semantics: Open Data, Linked Data & The Semantic Web
3. The State of Linked Data in 2010
4. Top 10 Semantic Web Products of 2009
5. ReadWriteWeb Interview With Tim Berners-Lee

The BBC World Cup site featured over 700 webpages and was powered by a semantic publishing framework. The site boasted a comprehensive ontology (a map of concepts), that output "automated metadata-driven web pages" created on-the-fly.

Jem Rayfield, Senior Technical Architect, BBC News and Knowledge, explained further:

"The underlying publishing framework does not author content directly; rather it publishes data about the content - metadata. The published metadata describes the world cup content at a fairly low-level of granularity, providing rich content relationships and semantic navigation. By querying this published metadata we are able to create dynamic page aggregations for teams, groups and players."

The basis of this system was an ontology that described how World Cup facts related to each other. For example, "Frank Lampard" was part of the "England Squad" and the "England Squad" competed in "Group C" of the "FIFA World Cup 2010". The ontology also included "journalist-authored assets" such as stories, blogs, profiles, images, video and statistics.

The publishing platform had both manual and automated tagging features. BBC journalists could, for example, tag Frank Lampard in a story about the disallowed goal from England's last-16 loss against Germany. This is a normal part of most modern-day publishing systems (we tag content in this manner here at ReadWriteWeb). But the BBC World Cup site also automatically analyzed journalist content and matched it "against the World Cup ontology." It did this by using what it describes as a "natural language and ontological determiner process." [Update: IBM wrote in to inform us that the technology behind this was IBM LanguageWare.] This is similar to software such as Thomson Reuters' Calais or the new Extractiv product that we reviewed yesterday. In the BBC's case, the resulting tags were moderated before being published.

The BBC used Semantic Web technologies such as RDF and SPARQL to build their World Cup site. The stated goal was to achieve "intelligent mapping of journalist assets to concepts and queries."

The site reportedly served millions of page requests a day throughout the World Cup. The BBC may use this semantic publishing platform for other parts of the BBC sports site; and it will certainly deploy it again for the the London 2012 Olympics.

The official explanatory post has the technical details, should you wish to follow up. Let us know in the comments about other large scale Semantic Web deployments that you know of.

Update: See also The World Cup and a call to action around Linked Data, by the BBC's John O'Donovan. Thanks Georgi Kobilarov for the pointer.