Nice AR game / slash coupon app
Monday, July 26, 2010
Tuesday, July 20, 2010
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.
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.
Thursday, July 15, 2010
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
It's an impressive demonstration of how a large, mainstream website can have added meaning and structure.
ReadWriteWeb's Guide to The Semantic Web:
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.
Friday, July 9, 2010
Foursquare Launches Location Layers - This is Big
I agree... this could be a huge development. Thanks Josh and ReadWriteWeb
Written by Marshall Kirkpatrick / July 6, 2010 11:44 AM
IFC polled its member base for short descriptions of their favorite places in the towns they lived in or visited, then picked the place-descriptions that best suited the IFC's brand ("Always on, slightly off") to upload into a Foursquare database. Foursquare users can now opt-into getting those tips pushed to them whenever they check in near one of the annotated locations. It's a chance to effectively say, "I want to see this town as IFC fans see it." For marketers, this has got to be incredibly appealing, and for urban explorers it could be one of the best examples yet of effective Augmented Reality.
Location as Platform
In January, Canadian newspaper chain Metro did a deal with Foursquare that tied content like restaurant reviews to specific locations as "tips." When we saw that, we said that the era of location as platform had arrived. Then, in April the Wall St. Journal began experimenting with location-based news, adding interesting news tidbits to locations around New York City on Foursquare. That was getting interesting - not just lightweight content like restaurant reviews but things like a note that a terrorism suspect was once arrested in a particular location!
Please Push Me
A Psychedelic Journey
IFC's crowdsourcing its data set is very cool. It's not hard to imagine any number of organizations mobilizing their constituents to mark-up the physical world like this. Other organizations already have data geo-located. The Huffington Post Foursquare page is very sparse right now, but imagine if stories were parsed for geolocation (Superfeedr now does that automatically, for example) and populated locations by XML. You might check in downtown and get pushed a note from Huffington Post coverage of a protest or other news event a few blocks away. Not into HuffPo? How about a HotAir layer? Why silo yourself? Let's get a Memeorandum layer in Foursquare!
There may be some technical matters to work out before dynamic content can be fed into Foursquare, but I'm sure the company is working on those. (In response to this article Huffington Post Social Media Editor Rob Fishman tweets that many of the ideas discussed here "are already underway.")I'm ready to follow the local historical society, an environmental justice organization or two, perhaps an art-graffiti-watchers association - the possibilities are nearly endless. Imagine allowing background location tracking and notification for some layers. "To see the world through the lenses of my favorite organizations" would be a nice addition to the reasons why people say they use check-in apps.
Can Facebook implement this kind of feature once location is rolled into its service? It's a little hard to imagine; this feels like a feature that would best come from a service with location at its core.
In a perfect world, these location-based social networks would act like browsers, able to see and post interoperable location-based data from and to any platform. Don't hold your breathe on that, though. The potential impact of marking-up the world is large enough that single vendors are most likely to try to dominate it all on their own first.
This is a really exciting idea.
LOVE this work
'Battle of the Cheetos': Social Game To Determine 'Crunchy' or 'Puffy' Dominance via Genwow
Usually choosing variants of snack foods is a personal thing, from plain to ruffled and everywhere in between.
But Cheetos wants to change all that, with Battle of the Cheetos, a social game from Goodby and North Kingdom designed to enable you to choose your favorite battle fields - Mashable, Gawker, BoingBoing.net, you name it - and the call out your friends and others for battles that can be tracked and saved via Facebook. You can even taunt your opponent by activating your PC's microphone.
http://www.battleofthecheetos.com/
Friday, June 25, 2010
Wednesday, June 23, 2010
Video: LEGO’s Social Media Strategy
Thanks Digital Buzz Blog
Diving into LEGO's Strategy Behind Connecting Their Amazing Network of Fans -- presented by Jake McKee from GasPedal on Vimeo.
This is a great video from Jake McKee (formally LEGO’s Global Community Relations Specialist) discussing how LEGO found, supported and incubated their biggest fans from around the world to help pull the company out of a pretty dark time to be back on top of the world, lead in part, by a strong social media strategy.
A word of warning, this is a 30 minute video, from a conference late last year (so skip the first 30 secs) and is not exactly their strategy, but more a case study of success, however, it’s well worth the time, and probably something you won’t have time to watch at your desk today so just make sure you remember to watch it later!
Jake McKee makes three really strong, but incredibly simple (how often do we see simplicity works socially?!) points.
1. Look beyond your target customers
2. Support existing fans
3. Find what works and replicate
1. Look beyond your target customers
Your target market isn’t always your biggest group of talkers. For years, LEGO was focused on kids — that is, until they realized adults had created their own community of enthusiasts. When LEGO started connecting these talkers, not only did they increase their word of mouth, they immediately helped their bottom line. Whereas kids were spending $20 a year on LEGOs, these adults were spending around $1,000.
2. Support existing fans
Without LEGO’s knowledge, adult fans had already created an online LEGO community and marketplace. LEGO approached this group by offering support and resources in the form of an ambassador program. By offering to support what these fans were already doing so well -instead of demanding ownership and control -LEGO was welcomed into the community.
3. Find what works and replicate
The enthusiasm of the adult fans helped teach LEGO how to gain more participation from their other fans- including kids. Jake says that when you find something that works with one fan group, try applying it to other groups of talkers. Because the fundamentals of great communities are the same, strategies behind one fan community can often generate similar success for another community. (via Igor on Viral Blog)
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