Below is a press release outlining a new venture for FMC and a synergy with my role as Head of Interactive at United Agents.

As how we are entertained and what formats entertain us, be they games, social gaming, websiodes or ripped movies, so we must engage the digital native audience and that ain’t slapping a banner ad on the side of a page and hoping they’ll click-thru. New monetisation models need to be defined and advertisers/brands are key to that development. We want our content for free.

Naked and FMC are working on some highly innovative Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Appvertising, Branding (general) | No Comments »      

I just added this to the Qajack blog and as it touches on how we define a viral video now online video is ubiquitous have copied it here to encourage debate:

Dave and I met via Skype this morning to discuss the intro video for Qajack. It’s got to be:

1. Cheap
2. Cheaper
3. Viral
4. Informative
5. Not contrived

It’s also got to capture the imagination of our target early adopter audience. So I went away and did some research on You Tube, starting with Telly Savalas who played Kojack, figuring Qajack sounds like Kojack so that was reason enough.

Not sure that sends out the right message and also turns out Telly’s dead.

Or this, which contains the immortal line ‘come pour yourself on me‘ (!) and features a model who looks like Maud Adams star of the above but with a prosthetic nose and blonde wig… weird:

Or ask the community to create their own, Current TV style:

This I think is supposed to be serious, or so clever as to appear to be serious but actually be a dig at L’Oreal. Either way it’s ugly man dancing genius.

If we actively go about creating a viral, does that negate it’s virality? Hey these are questions only Qajack can answer!

What do you think?

Posted in Qajack, Viral Marketing | No Comments »      

With the half hearted British summer in full cold/hot/wet/wet/wet/cold/a bit hotness, I love a dip in a good Flickr pool.

Posted in Art, Data Visualization | No Comments »      

(via psfk)

Much rabid excitement was generated last week with the announcement of GPS for the 3G iPhone. A host of location-based software is scheduled for mobile phones which should be genuinely useful. However, this technology raises a big question: what does broadcasting your every move mean to our eroding notion of privacy?

New York Magazine reports:

Technology was certainly not supposed to know you were at the laundromat. Or the Yankees game. Or your co-worker’s apartment when you were supposed to be working late. But now when you’re at the laundromat, everyone will know. Because you’ll be letting them Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in 2 Minute Critique, Mobile, iPhone | No Comments »      

Posted in TFI Friday | 1 Comment »      

‘Social media widget’, it sounds like something you might need even though you’re not sure why, ain’t words great like that.

Great to see Coke innovating in this space, appvertising writ large with a view to looking kindly upon a can of the brown fizzy treacle next time you pass the store.

Brands swift to innovate in the widget/application space display an understanding of the evolving ad markets and the needs of so called Millenials.

(via Read/Write) Coca-Cola quietly launched one of their first social media applications last weekend, a bookmarking widget for Facebook called CokeTag. (Coke Singapore also has a Facebook application out, promoting a tie-in with UEFA EURO 2008.) Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Appvertising | 1 Comment »      

Did you know that Amazon makes 20-30% of it’s sales through recommendations? This and other valuable lessons on building recommendation systems can be found here.

Choice quotes:

‘… find ways to collect as much user input as possible without being disruptive. People don’t train systems, they try to benefit themselves, but this is the best kind of training data.’

‘…when thinking about recommendations or targeted content/advertising, the most important to think about is all the different things that people do on your site anyway: tagging, buying, titling, clicking, determine how much of that you can capture, and try some basic, quick-running algorithms.’

Posted in Data Visualization | No Comments »      

‘Warcraft’ Sequel Lets Gamers Play A Character Playing ‘Warcraft’

Posted in Video | No Comments »      

Thanks to Mike at Techcrunch for the ticket for this Mashup Conference. We declined the optional upgrade to demo Qajack for one of two reasons:

a. It’s not ready to demo
b. There is no demo
c. This is a third reason

Highlights were meeting Kosso from Phreadz, Mark at Netbenefit and the guys at Ugame and failing to locate Kate Burns from Daily Motion or Ben Mason from Cake who looked sharp and disappeared.

The wonders of being able to text questions to the panel on stage so that they appeared on the screen behind them led to some classics, which went somthing like this:
Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in 2 Minute Critique | No Comments »      

Who said that developing isn’t hard work?

You’d better watch this Apple “Safari Technologies Evangelist” running into humid trouble after her presentation about Key Practices for iPhone Application Development…. Quite funny and weird to see that online, they could have recorded it again, no?

Watch out this fun one and other great iPhone SDK presentation videos here: http://developer.apple.com

Posted in Design, Mobile, New Business Model, Uncategorized, Video, Web Apps, iPhone | No Comments »