Blog

Vyclone

Vyclone is an app that allows a group of people to film the same events, turning the raw footage into an edited film made up of multiple angles. The app can either put everything together for you, or you can edit the raw footage yourself. Simple and effective.

Find out more on the Vyclone website.

Hijack

Meat Pack, a sneaker store in Guatemala, created a promotion and accompanying app which targeted customers based on their location. The app offers a discount starting at 99% to people currently in competitors stores, decreasing by 1% every second. An innovative way of ‘hijacking’ competitors customers.

WeΔther

WeΔther uses your location to offer you wardrobe suggestions based on the weather. The suggestions link to retailers should you wish to buy. Super simple, super awesome.

Check out WeΔther here.

Perception

To promote the US TV show, Perception, they created an interactive billboard in New York that could be manipulated by passers by, creating visual effects as well as sounds that related to the show itself. It created enough impact to slow down and even stop the usually hectic NYC pedestrians.

Fußball+

As part of a Google+ Hangout hackathon, rehabstudio created an 8-player WebGL Fußball game using the Google Hangouts API. Great stuff!

Take a look at Fußball+ here.

Google Play: Tests

Continuing in the same intriguing style as the Chrome test videos, Google have created a series demonstrating the cloud syncing abilities of ‘Play’. You can find out more about Google Play here, and see the rest of the test videos here.

Google Chrome: Web Lab Experiments

Sticking with Google, they’re continuing their Chrome Experiments with a year-long public exhibition at the Science Museum in London, bringing together physical and digital in some really interesting ways.

Find out more about Chrome Web Lab.

Sonic Notify

Sonic Notify is an incredible (and slightly terrifying) platform that allows media to be delivered to a smartphone via ultra high-frequency audio signals. Imagine you’re at a concert, and at the end your phone vibrates. You take it out of your pocket, and you have a special thanks from the band, with a promotional offer attached. All triggered by an inaudible sound played with the music.

Check out Sonic Notify yourself here.

Facade Printer

A robot that works much like an inkjet printer – except it’s designed to paint graphics onto walls. The process is automated and controlled by simple software. This technology will no doubt evolve over time, perhaps replacing the need to scaffold buildings to place advertising or graphics.

Find out more about the Facade Printer here.

London Eye ‘Olympic Positivity Lightshow’

The London Eye will be transformed into a giant Olympics sentiment analysis tool, being lit up each night of the games to show positive/negative sentiment on Twitter. I wonder how much it will light up during commuter hours…

See the BBC News article on the London Eye Olympic Positivity Lightshow.

Nike Shoe Boxxxx Facebook App

Tapping into sneaker enthusiasts love of collecting, Nike Sportswear Japan have developed a Facebook app that allows users to collect and swap virtual shoes. The app tells the story behind sneakers, whilst rewarding users with points for their collection.

See the Nike Shoe Boxxx Facebook App for yourself.

Self-Playing Piano takes song requests from Twitter

Stanley the piano is a fascinating musical instrument. He’s managed to learn how to play songs from everyone performing at musical festival ‘Capital Hill Block Party’, and you can request songs simply by tweeting at him. Well done, Stanley.

Meet Stanley the piano.

The internet was kind to us last week. Here’s some of our favourite nuggets of goodness.

More Gymkhana madness

Part five of Ken Block’s (DC Shoes owner and rally driver) Gymkhana series. This time we’re taken on a visually stunning tour of San Francisco, where he shows off yet more of his utterly insane driving skills.

Lego Builders of Sound

To promote the new Lego Star Wars range of toys, a ‘barrel organ’ was created completely from Lego bricks and characters. When the barrel organ is turns, it plays the Star Wars theme.

How far will you go for a free snack?

Australian brand Fantastic Delite wanted to find out. So they built a vending machine dishing out various tasks for the public to perform in exchange for a tasty treat. From hitting a button on the machine 100 times (which eventually rose to 5,000!) to standing on one leg and dancing in the street, it seems people will do nearly anything for free swag.

The V Motion Project

Hook up a Kinect to some music production software and what do you get? Something like this…

More behind the scenes info here.

Perfect Curve’s Digital Strategy

“Digital is one of the most crucial things for a modern brand manager to get right, so the pressure is on for Siobhan to explain her strategy”. Who else has heard industry folk making just as much sense as this? ;-)

O2: Relaxed Community Management

O2 had all sorts of network problems last week. But it seems they loosened the reigns on their Community Manager, providing us with some entertaining tweet exchanges. Nice work shifting the focus onto O2 lols and away from having no phone signal!

Read some of the best tweets here.

Microsoft release ‘Surface’

Microsoft made a big song and dance about their tablet release. It certainly sounds like an impressive machine (though you’d be hard pressed to tell from the promo video above!) It has a few unique features, but will it be enough to compete with the iPad? We’ll have to wait and see.

Take a look at the Surface here.

Contactless payment at Isle of Wight Festival

13,000 ticket holders at this year’s Isle of Wight Festival were given Mastercard PayPass wristbands, which could be topped up and used to enter the event and purchase food over the weekend. They could even set an auto top-up feature – pretty handy if you suddenly find you’ve lost your change in the mud!

A shame the festival was such a washout – with that much rain contactless payment was probably the last thing on many festival-goers minds…

Read more here.

Tweet for tea

Short of change but still fancy an iced tea? This vending machine in Cape Town allows you to pay with a tweet.

Read more here.

Code Club

Code Club is a free after school program which teaches children how to code – a great idea we’ll sure you’ll agree. This volunteer interview video features one or two famous faces…

Learn more about Code Club here.

Were you out about on the internet last week? We were.

Moving out posters

Ikea created posters that doubled as storage boxes and could even be transformed into a fully functional chair! The campaign led to genuine increases in store traffic and sales, while providing potential customers with a useful free resource.

Read more here.

Coldplay LED wristbands

Whether you’re a fan of their music or not, you can’t deny Coldplay’s recent live shows have been visually spectacular. LED wristbands were given to fans as they enter the venue, which were later activated by radio signal to transform the audience into one giant light show.

Coca-Cola security cameras

Another sickly sweet Coca-Cola ad showing some smile-inducing moments captured on CCTV. Real or staged? You decide.

Don’t mess with The Oatmeal

Hugely popular online comic The Oatmeal was threatened with a questionable lawsuit and demanded to pay $20k in damages to someone who was posting his work without permission. The comic’s author decided to ignore the legal challenge, and instead raise the equivalent sum for charity. He managed to raise the initial $20k in just 64 minutes, and to date has raised over $170k. Brilliant.

Read the full (rather hilarious) story here.

Here’s some internet nuggets that grabbed our attention last week.

Airtime

The latest venture from Sean Parker (of Napster and Facebook fame). It’s essentially live video chat using Facebook, but an interesting twist is the ’Chat Roulette’ style feature, which connects you with random users who share similar Facebook interests. Will it end up being full of hilariously inappropriate internet trolls? Only time will tell…

Airtime official website

Advertising on cup sleeves

Y&R Dubai came up with this innovative approach to drive awareness of the Gulf News newspaper – each hour the top headline is printed onto a coffee cup sleeve.

Click here to read about it

MaKey MaKey

Fun kickstarter project – turn pretty much anything you like into a keyboard or controller. Including people. And bananas.

MaKey MaKey official website

Virtual clothes

Tesco have begun promoting their F&F clothing range in smaller London based stores, using AR platform Aurasma. The range is displayed in a virtual shop window, allowing passers-by to purchase directly from their phones.

Read more about it here

A (NSFW) ode to internet trolls

‘Dedicated to hard working internet trolls everywhere. Love ya, keep on trollin’!’

Time for our weekly roundup of digital talking points that had the office nattering around the water cooler…

Thunderclap your tweets

Submit your tweet to Thunderclap. Get people to ‘back it’. Then, if you reach enough support during the time limit, everyone tweets the same message in unison increasing its reach and viral potential.

A simple concept that’s still in its beta phase, but effective nonetheless.

Social media with a conscience from Smirnoff

A fantastically innovative idea from two students of the Miami Ad School. Buy your friends a cab ride home to stop them drinking and driving, and earn rewards in the process.

Boys with toys

Handheld projection mapping? Where do we get our hands on one of these for the office?

Dove bring the positive

Dove’s Ad Makeover campaign finally lands in the UK, converting negative, self-conscious and deprecating Facebook ads into positive, motivational ones.

A touchscreen with buttons?!

Tactus technology promises the feel of real buttons without sacrificing any of the functionality of a touchscreen. Could this be the future of modern smartphone and tablet technology?

It’s not every day an account we’re working on gets voted one of the top 100 social brands in the country. Actually, make that one of the top 20 social brands in the country. Oh, and make that two accounts we’re working on…

Yup, according to top social agency Headstream – who published their second annual roundup of the UK’s most socially effective brands this morning – both Lurpak and Cravendale have exploded into the top 20, beating off such giants as Ford, Marmite, Google and last year’s no.1, Dell.

What’s more, this represents two out of only five FMCG brands in the top 25 results, with no other dairy brands even breaking the top 100! Needless to say, we’re very proud.

The Social Brands 100 list was drawn from an initial crowdsourced pool of 300 nominated brands, with the final results calculated using a combined ‘data score’ from social media monitoring firm Brandwatch and a ‘panel score’ from a panel of top industry judges. This panel included Twitter’s UK head of sales Bruce Daisley, and judged each brand in a number of key areas such as their success in creating a credible community and their prioritizing of fans’ needs over the brand’s own.

A huge thank you goes out to all our staff working across these two accounts and everyone else who helps make Outside Line one of the top social agencies out there.

Next year we’re aiming even higher, with even more of our brands in the top spots. Make sure you come and join us…

What does it mean to do business in a truly social economy? More importantly, what does it take to succeed?

These are two questions at the forefront of any modern marketer’s mind, although the answers are slightly harder to come by. Thankfully, this month we’re hosting our very own seminar on the subject so you can really get to grips with your place as part of ‘The Networked Economy’.

Taking place at The Hospital Club in Central London on the morning of Friday 25th May, our planning director Ronnie Crosbie will be taking guests on a whistle-stop tour through three of the most influential marketing texts of recent times – Alan Moore’s ‘No Straight Lines’, Joseph Pine & Kim Korn’s ‘Infinite Possibility’ and Alex Bogusky & John Windsor’s ‘Baked In’.

Using these texts as a foundation, Ronnie will look at how advances in social, mobile and digital technology have rewritten the landscape of the modern marketplace, returning us to an economy in which word-of-mouth, personal recommendation and social communication are once again the keys to brand success.

The talk runs from 8.30am – 10am. Attendance is entirely free, however places are limited.

To reserve your seat, send us an email with the details of how many places you would like and which company they are for.

We look forward to seeing you there.