POST DIGITAL

on: project hope

Jigsaw a creative group based out of Milwaukee came up with an heart-warming interactive exhibit at St. Vincents Regional Cancer Center at St. Mary’s Hospital where 7,000 guests could engage with a 45′ X 7′ rear-projecting interactive wall. Guests could walk by the wall, engage with hundreds of hand written messages drifting around the color changing field. Guests could then us a stylus to write a message of hope on a kiosk which would be re-written on the wall. This wall was a living, breathing organism. Some of the messages would read “Hope is a smile on a child’s face,” “Hope is another year with my mom”, “Hope is my family”. This exhibit blurs the line between a creative campaign and makes an emotional connection with each member that views it, breathes it or lives in the space it is in.

The messages submitted are displayed in their original handwriting on an experiential site. The “Hope Is___” site [@ http://www.stateofthearthope.com/hopeis/] invites people to share their message of hope with the community and read other inspirational messages.

on: tv+web convergence

Can google capitalize on Apple's failure?

Sony is the second company to bring Google’s Android-based “connected TV” solution to market with their TVs and set-top box available @Best Buy.  Here are a few observations:

• It has the potential to make television content more democratic.
• It opens a foundation for Web/TV convergence by blending Over-the-Air (OTA) shows with Over-the-Top (OTT) streaming content in a unified search function.
• The streaming HD content is sharp – almost as good as the cable box.
• The “leanback” U/X works particulary well and is easy to navigate.
• The ultimate success of GoogleTV (and others) will be in the content partnerships they create. The ones they have “out of the box” just begin to hint at the potential of a true arsenal of content.

on: tv + twitter = social tv

Television has always been a social event.  Since the early days of broadcast people have used it as a reason to gather with friends and share an expereince.  Today, tweets give people new social context for content broadcasted on TV.  Here are a few TV and Twitter from this past year:

The 2010 World Cup: Although not real-time, the Guardian News’ instant Twitter replay made quite a lot of buzz during this year’s World Cup. It’s remarkable the kind of emotion a bunch of resizing circles can convey. Even better, is the story behind the project.

 

 

2010 Primetime Emmy Awards: This year’s Emmy Awards were the first time in 30 years that there was no west coast time delay. Not only did, host, Jimmy Fallon integrate Tweets into the live broadcast but NBC parallel broadcasted behind the scenes video on “the second screen” leveraging Ustream and its social stream Twitter (and Facebook) integration.

 

Brand Bowl 2010: It seems every year people talk as much about the Super Bowl’s TV spots, around the water cooler, as they do the actual game itself. This past February, Mullen & Radian6 visualized the “virtual water cooler” through a dynamic Super Bowl commercial leader board based on real time Twitter sentiment.  It was a fun way to keep score of the brand advertisers at the same time of keeping score of the game.

 
 

 

2010 MTV Movie Awards and VMAs: MTV first visualized live Twitter activity during the broadcast of the 2009 VMAs. They stepped up a notch this year with both the MTV Movie Awards and VMAs broadcasts providing in depth Twitter metrics and multiple views/filters of the real-time Twitter activity.

 
 

 

Modern Family Twitter Monitoring: Twitter doesn’t just benefit the content consumer but also content creators.  I love how Modern Family’s Steve Levitan and his writing team mines Twitter for real-time insights, “When the show airs live on the east coast we hit twitter and search Modern Family. What we find, is that people are watching the show and in real-time they’re basically laughing on Twitter. And we get instant feedback on what lines work.”

on: facebook's video chat parnership with skype

This past week I was able to tool around with facebook at an creative garage they held @wunderman. Like any good reporter / blogger I had a # of burning questions for them. [mainly to feed a few topics I am covering in a project I am working on called the "friendshift"] How connected can facebook make us? Will there be a facebook phone? With a trend towards "real friends" will FB be investing in a one-to-one video chat?  Those questions were ususally met with PR perfect faces.

The theme of many of conversations centered on the possibilities of the open-graph. Disperate data on it's own is usless history. When you combine data with a purpose to provide relevancy what you get is stonger connections.  When Tal Alter stumbled on to a random piece of code in the Facebook - it helped validate what I think may be the future of social media. 

Enabling REAL connections.

Location was the first phase. What happens when you combine it with live video?  Check this out.  It's an code object, which is called VideoChat. It appears to have everything one would beed to introduce video chatting functionality.  The most interesting portion of this code object  are the properties which refer to Skype. They clearly suggest indicate a video chat function that allows you to connect with Skype users. Or something as simple as being able to associate your Skype id with your facebook identity.

[ Via Tal Alter ]

Since the begining of it's launch, Facebook has planned it's interace as a platform - not a destination. With millions of active users contirbuting to the social graph across the web, is the next revolution as simple as providing a global conduit for real-time relevance with real people?  Could the "REAL" mean using augmented reality to develop 1-to-1 Holograms or something more sci-fi?

What do you think?

on: t-mobile's welcome back

T-mobile has made the flash mob core to expressing the emotion of how we connect through their services.   The life's for sharing flash mob just keeps getting better and better.

Check out all the action at http://www.youtube.com/user/lifesforsharing

on: designing data

on: puma's after hours athlete

Puma and Droga5 are bringing back the joy of being active.  It celebrates a different type of athlete.

Check out : http://www.puma.com/social
 

Puma also opened a Social club earlier this summer at South Street Seaport in New York during the World Cup.

on: diesel's facepark

All the cool kids say so... social media is bullshit.   Diesel hosted an "analog" party to engage people in Germany with the brand. They encouraged people to get off the computer (and stop reading blogs like this) and go out to meet instead of tweet.

Thanks to @adsoftheworld for the find.  Check out http://adsoftheworld.com/media/ambient/diesel_be_stupid_facepark  to view the case study.

on: augmenting forever 21

While walking in Times Square I was caught off-guard by Forever21's massive augmented reality billboard. The augmented reality billboard uses video of a model dressed in Forever 21 clothes and takes virtual photo of the crowd, then she occasionally selects people from the crown below, picking them up and throwing them into a Forever 21 bag.   

Check out this video taken Cliff Kaung

 

 
 

ON: Boxee

Think of the copious amounts of videos that exist all across the vast World Wide Web today. This is where Boxee comes in and helps us maintain whatever sanity we will have while embarking on this impossible quest of entertainment.

Boxee gathers the videos from a plethora of websites like Hulu, Youtube, and even Cnn.com, and feeds it to you in a very aesthetically pleasing and easy-to-use interface. You can even organize the videos, images, and music on your own computer with Boxee.

The best part of Boxee is the  community. Boxee suggests media to you mainly via your friends you form friend groups with other Boxee users and you can see what they, rewatching or even suggest your own videos to them.

Download it today at http://www.boxee.tv/