Mobile Fanta App Only Teens Can Hear

Thanks BNET for this

Ogilvy Advertising has created what sounds like an unbelievably annoying Fanta campaign for teens. It consists of a mobile app that uses high-pitched frequencies that those over 20 generally can’t hear. (Your hearing declines with age.) The sounds include wolf whistles, “pssts,” and warnings tagged to words or phrases such as “cool,” “uncool” and “let’s get out of here.”

Ogilvy’s digital strategy director Giles Rhys Jones reports that the noises were played during a presentation of the work to the Ogilvy board and, you guessed it, none of the oldies heard any of them:

Despite the prevalence of ironic t-shirts, difficult glasses and trainers hinting at at least a desire to recapture their youth, no one noticed.

The device was created by “mad inventor” Howard Stapleton, who was responsible for “teen mosquito repellant,” a device that plays classical music outdoors in order to annoy da yoof and make them shuffle along to the bus shelter instead.

10 of the Best Adobe AIR Applications

Thanks Mashable for this run down on ten of the best for air

December 1, 2008 - 8:33 pm PDT - by Sean P. Aune 2 Comments

Are you getting the most out of your Adobe AIR installation? Are you one of those people that installed it for one specific application and never explored what else was out there? Well, it’s time to get more out of AIR, and here are 10 apps that will make you anxious to get AIR up and running.

What are the Adobe AIR apps that you couldn’t live without? Tell us in the comments!

DeskTube - DeskTube lets you get complete control over YouTube on your desktop. Search, watch, comment, get embed codes, upload your own videos and even download the videos you are currently watching as MOV files.

Dorame - Dorame doesn’t add much to the Pandora listening experience, but it does give you the freedom of being outside of your browser and changing up the appearance of the service.

EarthBrowser - EarthBrowser gives you live updates of clouds, earthquakes, the weather, satellite overlays, volcanoes, fires and a whole lot more.

Feedalizr - Many people have downloaded service specific apps like TweetDeck, Twhirl and so on, but Feedalizr rolls several social tools into one app. You can work with Facebook, Flickr, FriendFeed, Jaiku, Twitter and VideoVideo all from this one handy interface.

Google Analytics - While most people love looking at statistics about their websites, Google Analytics can be a bit slow at times for those webmasters that use their tools. This Adobe AIR app gives you the ability to open reports in multiple tabs for easier switching and allows you to change date ranges faster.

MiniTask - A desktop tool for creating detailed to-do lists that you can separate out by categories, copy the items out to other programs, set reminders, print out task sheets and more.

Posty - Get all of your FriendFeed. Identi.ca, Jaiku, Pownce, Tumblr and Twitter updates in one handy application with built-in URL shortening, spell checking, message search and more.

TweetDeck - While it seems that apps that only work with one social site are becoming passe, TweetDeck gives you so much control over how you see your Tweets, it is well worth it. Your incoming messages are already split into columns for timeline, replies and direct messages, and then you can build custom columns for things such as work, friends and more.

Twhirl - The odds are fairly high that this is the application you installed Adobe Air for in the first place, but that doesn’t exclude it from the list in case it wasn’t. Probably the most popular of the Twitter clients, Twhirl also supports interactions with multiple accounts for FriendFeed, laconi.ca, seesmic and Twitter.

Yammer - Yammer, the private corporate microblogging service, gets a desktop client that runs on the Adobe AIR platform, allowing you to use all the features of the service freed from your browser.

now this is being transparent

thanks damian: http://www.internode.on.net/customer-service/

Top Mobile Trend: Mobile Wallets

Thanks again Next Great Thing

November 3rd, 2008 by Sarah

Wallets don’t mix with skinny jeans, and since we hope cargo pants won’t be back anytime soon, we’re eagerly anticipating m-commerce.

Spurred by a generation used to paying with a click, mobile payment systems are in high demand Stateside. And thanks to the emergence of Near Field Communications and other innovative solutions, it won’t be long before we get them.

Just in the last week of October, both Visa (San Francisco) and New York-based Citi’s Mobile Money Ventures (MMV) announced the rollout of initiatives designed to enhance the banking functionality of people’s mobile phones.

Visa has a pilot program in Canada (through the Royal Bank of Canada (RBC) and Rogers Wireless ) that lets users wave and pay for goods at the point of sale using their mobile phones.

Pilot participants will be issued specially equipped, near-field communications-enabled Motorola mobile phones that can simply be waved at Visa payWave-enabled checkout readers at select retail stores and fast food restaurants in Toronto’s downtown.

Citibank Hong Kong is letting customers perform mobile banking or stock trading using MMV’s m-banking platform, which is independent of device and network.

Among the features that Hong Kong customers can use are account inquiry and management, funds transfers, payments and time deposit accounts. Also available is stock trading, including buying and selling, pending order management, stock quotes and portfolio management.

Meanwhile, some smaller fish are figuring out alternate ways to enable mobile payments using existing (and widely used) mobile technology:

Tagattitude uses the voice function of phones for secure payment through a technology called Near Sound Data Transfer—NSDT. The two phones establish an audio channel, go through a series of questions and then transfer money from one account to another. Here is a video of the mobile payment in action (WARNING: it may cause dizziness and motion sickness.)

Anam Mobile SMS Money Transfer allows users to send money to another person using standard text messaging. After both parties subscribe to the service, subscriber A can send money to subscriber B with a standard text and then both subscribers receive texts back when the money has been transferred.

PocketFuzz equips cash-only retailers at festivals, venues, and concerts with their simple SMS-based payment solution that works with any major card or bank, any carrier, and any phone. A buyer’s text along with their personalized secure 4 digit PIN completes a secure transaction in mere seconds. Charges appear on users credit card or bank statements just as any other purchase would. First time users can set-up their account online or using a call back method.

At the end of the day, we just want to dial up a Big Mac. And we don’t think we should have to move to Japan to do it.

Tarpipe begins to tackle personal content overload

Thanks Mr. Cracknell at LittleLucifer for this post from cnet

Posted by Rafe Needleman

Tarpipe is one of the most curious experiments in social media that I've seen lately. It takes personal content (e-mail messages, primarily) as input, and can shunt it to one or more desinations, transforming it in the process. For example, I created a Tarpipe e-mail address that will take a pictures I send it and posts it to Flickr, update Twitter with a link to the Flickr page, and put the picture and the Twitter URL in an Evernote record for me. All I have to do is send the e-mail.

Tarpipe looks a lot like Yahoo Pipes. They work in similar ways: Users drag service and function boxes around on the workspace and connect them with blue tubes to control the flow of data. But Yahoo is about taking inputs from several sources and then creating a universal RSS output. Tarpipe is more about directly updating personal content services like Twitter, Flickr, Friendfeed, Delicious, and Evernote, which Yahoo Pipes doesn't do. The service has the potential to be the answer to the lament I first talked about in The looming crisis: Personal syndication overload.

This workflow takes an e-mailed photo attachment, sends it to Flickr, posts a TinyURL link to it on Twitter, and archives the photo and the Twitter link in my Evernote account.

The app will currently update several personal services: The ones I mentioned, plus a few others like Tumblr, Plurk, and Jaiku. But one problem with the system right now is that, unless you are a programmer, it's inflexible as to inputs. You can e-mail Tarpipe items, and manipulate that data. You can also use an online form for input, but you cannot create complex workflows around form data, other than to direct it to the services you've connected to your account. (The developer interface is apparently quite robust, though.)

Twitterpipe: Coming
One thing end users can't do, at least not yet, is ask Tarpipe to monitor a personal RSS feed (like a Twitter account) and then process that for further transmission to other services. RSS "slurping" is coming, Tarpipe creator Bruno Pedro told me.

Tarpipe keeps a log of all the data it's handled for you.

That's one of the things I'm waiting for. I would like to continue to use the input methods I'm comfortable with (for Twitter, that means Twhirl) and have Tarpipe selectively send my output to other sources based on content (perhaps using hashtags).

The other thing I'm waiting for, which Pedro is working on, is community aggregation. When this is running, you'll be able to monitor and reply to your audience as they comment on your posts. This solves the issue of fractured community for people who contribute their work or thoughts to multiple sources. The concept is this: Tarpipe will track all the items it posts on your behalf. It will monitor those posts at their new homes for replies from other users. It will be able to notify you of those replies so you can participate in discussions that spring up. (Related: MyBlogLog; Typepad Comments.)

The system may also help you connect conversations together that are on different services. For example, if I use Tarpipe to post a photo to Flickr and a link to the photo on Twitter, and then the conversation picks up Twitter, Tarpipe may be able to attach that discussion to the Flickr page.

Pedro told me that Tarpipe may also get features to help its users meld their social networks together on the various services they are signed up for. He calls this the "unified social graph," and says, "You'll be able to follow your social network, invite your contacts to Tarpipe and send messages to specific people."

And finally, he's working on adding new content destinations to Tarpipe, like Facebook, Myspace, Hi5, Picasa, and video sharing services. Richer programmatic access (more APIs) is in the works, too.

An interesting effort
Tarpipe is not done. It's too hard to use, and key parts of its feature set have yet to be built. It is, though, an extremely interesting middleman service for handling what is becoming a real problem for a lot of people: Personal content management not just for what we read, but for what we create.

See also: Ping.fm, Pixelpipe, and Friendfeed.

Tweeting the terror: How social media reacted to Mumbai

Thanks CNN

(CNN) -- It was the day social media appeared to come of age and signaled itself as a news-gathering force to be reckoned with.

A wounded man is carried from the attacked rail station.

The minute news broke of the terrorist attacks on Mumbai, India, social media sites like Twitter were inundated with a huge volume of messages.

With more than 6 million members worldwide, an estimated 80 messages, or "tweets," were being sent to Twitter.com via SMS every five seconds, providing eyewitness accounts and updates.

Many Twitter users also sent pleas for blood donors to make their way to specific hospitals in Mumbai where doctors were faced with low stocks and rising casualties.

Others sent information about helplines and contact numbers for those who had friends and relatives caught up in the attacks. Tweeters were also mobilized to help with transcribing a list of the dead and injured from hospitals, which were quickly posted online.

As Twitter user "naomieve" wrote: "Mumbai is not a city under attack as much as it is a social media experiment in action."

Neha Viswanathan, a former regional editor for Southeast Asia and a volunteer at Global Voices, told CNN, "Even before I actually heard of it on the news I saw stuff about this on Twitter.

"People were sending in messages about what they were hearing. There were at least five or six blogs from people who were trapped, or who were very close to what happened."

One tweet from "Dupree" appeared to be coming from inside one of the hotels: "Mumbai terrorists are asking hotel reception for rooms of American citizens and holding them hostage on one floor."

A group of Mumbai-based bloggers turned their Metroblog into a news wire service, while the blog MumbaiHelp offered to help users get through to their family and friends in the city, or to get information about them, and has had a number of successes.

Flickr also proved a useful source of haunting images chronicling the aftermath of the attacks. Journalist Vinukumar Ranganathan's stream of photos were published by CNN and other major broadcasters. iReport.com: Are you there? Share your photos, videos and stories

A Google Map showing the key locations and buildings with links to news stories and eyewitness accounts, and CNN's iReporters flooded the site with their videos and images of the terror attacks.

However, as is the case with such widespread dissemination of information, a vast number of the posts on Twitter amounted to unsubstantiated rumors and wild inaccuracies.

For example, a rumor that the Indian government was asking tweeters to stop live updates to avoid compromising its security efforts was published and republished on the site.

This was seemingly given credence by at least one major news Web site, which posted the tweet on its live update.

It read simply: "Indian government asks for live Twitter updates from Mumbai to cease immediately. ALL LIVE UPDATES - PLEASE STOP TWEETING."

Then it was suggested via Twitter that terrorists were using the medium to gain information about what Indian security forces were doing, which led to numerous abusive postings urging the terrorists to "die, die, die, if you're reading this."

As blogger Tim Mallon put it, "I started to see and (sic) ugly side to Twitter, far from being a crowd-sourced version of the news it was actually an incoherent, rumour-fueled mob operating in a mad echo chamber of tweets, re-tweets and re-re-tweets.

"During the hour or so I followed on Twitter there were wildly differing estimates of the numbers killed and injured - ranging up to 1,000."

What is clear that although Twitter remains a useful tool for mobilizing efforts and gaining eyewitness accounts during a disaster, the sourcing of most of the news cannot be trusted.

A quick trawl through the enormous numbers of tweets showed that most were sourced from mainstream media.

Someone tweets a news headline, their friends see it and retweet, prompting an endless circle of recycled information.

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