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Posts Tagged ‘raise-awareness’

And you thought tweeting from space was an achievement?

Ukrainian TV journalist Julia Gorodetskaya (@gorodetskaya) has sent the first documented underwater tweet from the floor of a 19-feet deep dolphinarium in Odessa, Ukraine. The scuba tweeting session was broadcasted by local media (see subtitled video below) and documented by regional press.

The tweet was sent via a mobile phone sealed in plastic from the Twitter website, using the Opera Mini browser. Radio waves passed to the surface through an elongated antenna.

The preparation process and the actual underwater tweeting was also filmed and broadcasted live by Boris Khodorkovsky to his QIK account and published on YouTube and other social media services. You can find pictures of the whole thing on Flickr.

Gorodetskaya, who did not know how to dive or swim prior to the event, sent a total of four messages to Twitter. Below is the first one.

In English, it reads: “This is first in history #underwater_tweet. I told you, @netocrat.”

The event was dreamed up and organized by a national mobile operator to tout the quality of its network. And I can’t help but think about the wonderful opportunity to raise awareness for a good cause in the process that was somehow overlooked, and therefor terribly wasted.

As geo social networks gain some traction, we are beginning to see novel forms of marketing and advertisements triggered by people’s location.  On Foursquare, for instance, you can get a discount if you check into a restaurant or even get a free meal if you become the mayor. GowallaIncase messenger bags, computer backpacks, and iPhone sleeves. Collect all the badges and you get a chance to win a real Incase product.

Gowalla is doing the promotion in partnership with Incase. Apple has nothing to do with it, but because the location of Apple Stores is known, Gowalla can trigger the promotional badges whenever someone enters a store. The badges serve as a virtual product placement. The hope is obviously to raise awareness of Incase products at the point of purchase. “Our experimental goal is simply to encourage people to visit a real world location where they can actually find and sample the Incase products,” says Gowalla founder Josh Williams.

It is very much an experiment, which is in keeping with Gowalla’s focus on virtual goods. In this case, there is a link between the virtual goods and real-world goods. Gowalla will be tracking impressions, check-ins, number of badges collected and other metrics to figure out how best to charge for such promotions in the future. It seems that one easy way to charge is to tie a coupon to each virtual good and then simply track purchases. Or maybe if you collect all the badges, then you get a discount.

But there’s a line between cool virtual goods and spammy ads. The key is to keep it fun and make it seem like a game.

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Rally Software, a company that provides agile project management applications to for software development, has just raised $16 million in funding led by Greylock Partners. The brings Rally’s total funding up to nearly $50 million. The new funding will be used to hire additional engineers. Tom Bogan, Venture Partner of Greylock, will join Rally’s board of directors.

Rally’s products and services helps businesses implement Agile software development and Lean practices with the right combination of tools, services and best practices. Rally’s clients include Cisco, Microsoft, AOL, and Hewlett-Packard. Last year, the company acquired 6th Sense Analytics.

Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.

The mobile Web grew 110 percent in the U.S. last year and 148 percent worldwide as measured by growth in pageviews, according to a new Quantcast Mobile Trends report (embedded below). Even so, the mobile Web accounted for only 1.26 percent of Web consumption in the U.S. (and 0.99 percent worldwide).

Apple’s iPhone and iPod Touch drove much of this growth. In the U.S., Apple has a commanding 65 percent market share of mobile Web access as of the end of December, 2009. Only 41 percent of that is from the iPhone. The other 24 percent comes from the iPod Touch, which has been growing rapidly as a mobile Web device even though it only has WiFi. Globally, Apple also dominates in every market except Africa (where simpler and cheaper Java phones still rule).

Android isn’t really much of a player yet outside the U.S. But inside the U.S, Android is coming up fast, with 12 percent market share. Android is now the No. 2 mobile Web operating system, recently beating out Blackberry’s RIM OS, which has an 8.7 percent market share.

The sudden growth spurt of Android jives with Admob data showing that it doubled since October. And that’s before today’s release of the Nexus One. Most of that share comes from HTC handsets, and Verizon’s launch of the Droid in November. (Motorola’s Droid is the yellow part of the chart below.

Quantcast Mobile Report1

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Plenty of Spotify users share what they’re listening to with the world using Twitter, thanks to a one-click sharing option that’s baked into the much-hyped online music application. This in turn apparently inspires creative coders to use the data for building cool stuff on top of all that rich, public information.

SpotiChart, for example, is an amazing pet project by London-based developer Benoit Xhenseval that aggregates Spotify tweets from public Twitter accounts and parses the data in order to build dynamic global music charts based on streams of tracks, albums, playlists, artists and more.

SpotiChart regularly tracks the public Twitter timeline for tweets that contain the word spotify (which can be in a URL, even when it is shortened by one of the many tools for that) and upon reception contacts the Spotify service to get the details of items. SpotiChart then weeds out duplicate tweets, compiles the rest and turns the data into custom charts.

Every now and then (see schedule), SpotiChart will create updated charts and alert followers of the @SpotiChart account, which means in between 7 and 12 tweets per day will be sent to these users. Custom charts for tracks, albums and artists also have their own RSS feed, which updates once every day.

Great stuff, Xhenseval. But expect some backlash over that one unsolicited tweet your service sends out to random Spotify users to raise awareness for SpotiChart.

(Via Kieran McGrady)

Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.

Mobile content delivery startup Myxer has officially delivered over 10 million free ringtones to iPhone users.Myxer allows users to download ringtone in two ways. First, Myxer’s free ringtone podcasts allows any iTunes user to pull ringtones directly from the channel. And the startup has a standalone site that gives users the ability to download from a catalog of more than two million ringtones and sync them to the device from their PC.

The easier of the two options is surprisingly subscribing to the podcast. Being subscribed means that iTunes will check for new files as they become available, allowing users to get Myxer ringtones directly from iTunes and on their mobile phone every time they sync. Two new ringtones are added each week.

In addition to ringtones, Myxer offers over 2 million free ad-supported ringtones, wallpapers and videos and currently counts more than 27 million users. Users can also make their own ringtones, videos and wallpaper from music and files a customer already owns. Competitors include mSpot, Playphone and SendMe.

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Augmented reality (AR), also known as mixed reality, is currently a hot topic in the technology world after it has been regarded as too futuristic for the last couple of years. The idea has been around for quite some time now: Combine the real world with computer-generated data, for example graphics

See the original post here: 
Canon uses augmented reality HMD system to enhance product design process