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Choco-location

Like a contemporary golden ticket, Nestlé has fitted several Kit Kats with GPS devices. When activated, the devices will guide the Nestlé team to deliver a £10,000 cheque to each lucky winner of the ‘We Will Find You’ competition.

Mumsnet interview

Founder of the Mumsnet community, Carrie Longton, shares tips for budding entrepreneurs looking to set up their own digital start-ups, and muses on what makes a great brand partnership work with mums in mind. Watch the interview with Carrie here.

Everyday data

Our very own Ronnie Crosbie recently pondered ‘Does the Internet of Things have a home in the UK?’

The Internet of Things being a complex system that will create value from the information given up by our fridges, cars, house plants and bicycles along with everything else.

Smart targeting

Companies can now match their customer data, including email addresses, to Facebook’s information. This exciting new change will enable advanced ad targeting and behavioural insights.

With 36% of people expecting brands to use their social profile to target their messaging with more relevance, this is a boon for both consumers and brands.

Social currency

To support their new savoury snack range, Kellogg’s have opened a ‘Tweet Shop’ in London, allowing customers to ‘pay’ for their snacks with a tweet from their own accounts. Read more about this tweet for a treat initiative.

Virtual fridges at Gatwick airport

Tesco are trialing ‘virtual fridges’ at Gatwick airport, allowing travellers to order their groceries online for delivery when they return from holiday by scanning an interactive display with a smartphone app. Whether you think it’s genuinely useful or just a PR stunt, a similar offering in South Korea has generated 55,000 customers to date. Will we be ordering our groceries at bus stops and tube stations in the near future?

Remote control Minis

You may have noticed some rather mini Minis collecting javelins, discus and other field throw-ables at the London 2012 Olympics. The RC cars were supplied by BMW, and made for a fun yet practical PR for the brand.

Gigapixel images from London 2012

Gigapixel images are composed of 1 billion pixels, or 1000 times 1 megapixel. As you’d imagine, they make for some incredibly detailed photographs, and these images from London 2012 are no exception.

Check out the Gigapixel images from Getty at London 2012 here.

Instant Direct Mail

It’s rare I get excited about direct mail, but this campaign for Pfaff Auto in Canada gives it a new lease of life. Imagine receiving a postcard featuring a shiny new Porsche parked on your very own driveway – pretty effective!

Sight

A short film by Eran May-raz and Daniel Lazo, a graduation project from Bezaleal academy of arts. Having seen what Google Glass is apparently capable of, it’s hard to imagine this isn’t a terrifyingly accurate look into our future.

This is Now

A visual tool that steams photos instantly from Instagram from major cities across the world.

See This is Now for yourself.

Slavery Footprint

A great use of HTML5 to create a survey raising awareness of slavery. Each question is interactive and engaging, making is far more interesting than your standard radio button survey. The result is undoubtedly powerful.

Check your slavery footprint now.

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.

Google pull out all the stops

We’ve been getting pretty excited since the announcement of Google’s Project Glass, but this live demo really kicked our “just shut up and take our money!” thoughts into overdrive. Skydiving, backflipping, abseiling-whilst-Google Hangout-ing madness.

Build stuff with Lego, in Chrome.

Sticking with Google, they created this rather fun demonstration of Chrome’s abilities, allowing you to build things with Lego. Who doesn’t love playing with Lego?

Build with Chrome.

Canon Mixed Reality Headset

Pretty impressive tech from Canon, with plenty of potential uses – the most obvious being to train engineers and technicians to work on complicated machines. We’re sure we’ll be seeing some fascinating uses of this technology over the coming months.

Gilt taste

The iPad is great to use in the kitchen, with a whole host of recipes and cooking apps at your fingertips. What’s not so great is when you’re in the middle of a recipe, your hands are covered in flour and eggs, but you need to scroll or turn a page. It’s a classic problem, which this app solves by using the front facing camera and simple gesturing.

Read more here.

Foodmood

A really interesting app that measures food sentiment across the globe, via tweets. You can drill down to individual countries, and there’s plenty of things to play with.

Check it out 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.