We got musical in Digital Honey this week. And this is your tuneful mix of digital links for your listening pleasure!
Music of the month
Edan Kwan created this enthralling game completely in HTML 5 for the NYC band Ra Ra Riot. Navigate a world of sound with your mouse, collecting the blue dots but avoiding the red ones. We can barely believe this is all built in HTML 5!
Favourite of the blogs
Masterchef Synaesthesia has been hitting the blogs in a big way. So much so that we’ve found ourselves humming it around the office, “…base, base, base, base, buttery biscuit base…” Check out everyone’s favourite foodie duo in this musical mix video.
Tech of the week
Chris Milk and Aaron Koblin (of Wilderness Downtown fame) teamed up with the Google Chrome team to build 3 Dreams of Black. This interactive video is built around the music of Danger Mouse, Daniel Luppi, and Norah Jones using Chrome’s WebGL engine to render 3D graphics on the fly.
Got some great digital links to share? Tweet us! @TheBlueHive or use the hashtag #digitalhoney.
21st July 2011
Notes: 5
Digital Honey doesn’t stop, we’re here all summer!
Favourite of the blogs
To help promote their adoption drive, Pedigree created human to canine pairing software called Doggelganger. The Flash site scans your face then searches a global doggy database to match it with your four-legged twin. Find out if you’re a Greyhound or a Labrador. Woof, woof!
Most significant in social
Perrier’s YouTube channel is getting saucy. With every view the channel evolves, adding a new video to build up an increasingly raunchy looking club which is obviously filled with Perrier. A reward for users who take the time to interact, or just a blatant headline grabbing device?
Tech of the week
You can now use an image to start your Google search. Simply drag-and-drop an image into the search bar and Google will analyse it then look for web page results as well as similar images.
Got some great digital links to share? Tweet us! @TheBlueHive or use the hashtag #digitalhoney.
The sun is starting to shine over our Canary Wharf home, but that doesn’t mean we’re taking a summer break just yet!
Tech of the week
Cats: the Internet loves cats. And so do we! Friskies love cats so much they created an iPad game especially for them. You wouldn’t really trust those claws with your iPad though, would you?
Favourite of the blogs
The Burning House Project really caught our eye. As the introduction says; “If your house was burning, what would you take with you? Think of it as an interview condensed into one question.” It’s a fascinating insight into what contributors hold dear.
Most significant in social
Turkish mobile operator Turkcell ‘played’ with their Internet savvy users. Running an interactive competition through Twitter, they asked users to participate with their tweets to virtually unwrap a prize.
Got some great digital links to share? Tweet us! @TheBlueHive or use the hashtag #digitalhoney.
May was always going to be a long month. But lucky for you, we packed it full of digital goodies to enjoy!
Most significant in social
We like the thought behind the Sunday Times’ Social List. Connect your Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Foursquare accounts to see where you rank against other users. But beware; you’ll only see your position against others who have signed up, so don’t get too excited about your place at the top!
Favourite of the blogs
An Ericsson survey showed us that 35 percent of owners use their smartphone before getting out of bed (the most popular activity being accessing Facebook). So do we need our fix of social media first thing, or is it just any excuse for a short lie-in?
Music of the month
This is a supremely clever use of open APIs: BBCify let’s you subscribe to Spotify playlists for any BBC show and they’re even automatically updated with each broadcast. The service plugs together the BBC Programmes API (to get listings of BBC radio and TV shows) with the Spotify Metadata API (to match the listings to tracks). It’s certainly one way to hit Spotify’s 10 hours per month limit!
Got some great digital links to share? Tweet us! @TheBlueHive or use the hashtag #digitalhoney.
Our mid-May digital delights are in; this is the best of the office circulars and cool digital doodads.
Best in digital data
Chromaroma is ‘gamifying’ the London transport system using Oyster touch-in data. Sign up and be part of a team trying to capture and hold various stations across the London tube network. Definitely a fun use of open TfL data!
Tech of the week
This clever tech uses the front-facing camera on the iPad2 to track the users head and produce pseudo-3D images on the screen. It’s a great demo, but sadly we don’t think the iPad has enough power to make this work in a real-world application like a game (yet).
Most significant in social
Real birds tweeting on Twitter using a bacon fat keyboard! It’s all over now, but this was lovely to watch during the winter months; the birds tweeted away and got fed at the same time.
Favourite of the blogs
Jose Duarte has hand-crafted these ‘infographics’ in real life and you can even request a kit to make your own. See more on his Flickr account.
Got some great digital links to share? Tweet us! @TheBlueHive or use the hashtag #digitalhoney.
February seems to come around so quickly when you’re busy creating car ads! But the digital goodies never stop, here’s the Digital Honey roundup for this week.
Best in digital data
Mapping the most common surnames in London (from the 2001 Electoral Roll) along with the origins of those names to illustrate the diversity of the capital.
Mapping London surnames
Tech of the week
An interesting student-made concept for WESC; shoes with embedded RFID tags and integration to social networks.
Most significant in social
Marking the 50th anniversary the inauguration of JFK this site is compiling snippets of his inauguration speech as performed by the public. A lovely social mashup.
Our JFK Speech
Bonus isn’t-advertising-ridiculous video
John St. had a huge challenge on their hands, but their innovative integrated campaign produced amazing results…
Got some great digital links to share? Tweet us! @TheBlueHive or use the hashtag #digitalhoney.
After a long winter hiatus we felt a new style Digital Honey for a new year was in order. Let’s get digital…
Favourite of the blogs
If you fancy a daily dose of fwuffy-bwunny-wabbit action then this is the blog for you. Brighten up your day and your desktop.
Daily Bunny
Tech of the week
Young French kids try to identify tech from the 80s, isn’t it amazing how much can change in just a generation?!
Best in digital data
There are som surprises in the 2010 AddThis data - email is still huge and the growth of StumbleUpon shares far outpaced Facebook!
AddThis sharing trends in 2010
Most significant in social
KLM’s Social Surprise experiment really impressed us, with thoughtful mixing of social media and real-world goodies for their tweeting passengers.
Got some great digital links to share? Tweet us! @TheBlueHive or use the hashtag #digitalhoney.
Every fortnight at Blue Hive, we get together to indulge our passion and appetite for all things digital. We share links, discuss new ideas and vote on the best content. We call it Digital Honey.
Google’s campaign to win the browser war has been hard fought in the past few months. Following up on their low-fi Rube Goldberg machines and, more recently, their speed tests comes Chrome Fastball. A decidedly more high tech campaign, Fastball combines various web services into an addictive game.
The game builds on the ‘simple but speedy’ ethos of Google’s offering. The goal is to get the chrome ball to the end of the course, completing a series of challenges sandwiched between YouTube clips. Each challenge uses a different web service; guess the best method of transport (Google maps), complete the artist name (Last.fm), and find ever lower indexed search terms (Google search).
It’s the fact that this game uses Google (and non-Google) services that makes it so interesting. It manages to create a clever and compelling campaign from exactly the sites that Chrome users will load up every day. But it also retains the over-arching campaign look and feel and key message; Chrome is both simple and fast.
Every fortnight at Blue Hive, we get together to indulge our passion and appetite for all things digital. We share links, discuss new ideas and vote on the best content. We call it Digital Honey.
We got in touch with our inner fashionista this week and took a look at the brilliant Westfield Fashion Detector. Have you ever been browsing Facebook photos, jealously eying up your friend’s new jacket? Or been walking down the street and spotted your perfect party dress? The Fashion Detector is for you.
The Fashion Detector web plugin allows you to select a photo, highlight that jacket and quickly search for it across all the Westfield shops. Pretty clever, the mobile app is where it gets genius though. The app let’s you snap a photo of anyone and search Westfield for that dress. Creepy?! Well, yes, a little, but this is the Internet!
The idea is certainly genius. It’s sure to drive sales and boost the brand, but its brilliance is in answering that problem we’ve all felt; “oh, that’s nice, I want it!” The problem is…it doesn’t exist. Yep, it’s just a concept put together by students at Miami Ad School. The technology isn’t there yet, in fact it’s not even close, such complex image recognition would be required that it’ll be a long time coming.
So we’re consigning this one to the growing pile of apps in the ‘wouldn’t that be cool, one day maybe’ category. Oh well, a girl can dream.
Every fortnight at Blue Hive we get together to indulge our passion and appetite for all things digital. We share links, discuss new ideas and vote on the best content. We call it Digital Honey.
There is a problem we see time and time again: brands using technology for technology’s sake rather than using it to actually add value to the brand or product message. The biggest culprit in recent years has certainly been Augmented Reality.
Agencies have been swarming to use Augmented Reality (AR) in every campaign, plastering on QR codes and praying that their consumers will actually use them. And hey, if it doesn’t produce positive ROI it will win an award…right?!
We’ve seen very few genuinely useful examples of AR. Crispin and Porter used it to demonstrate the value of a $1 note promoting the Burger King $1 menu and Rayban gave consumers the chance to virtually try on their new range of sunglasses (as demonstrated by our very own Nick Hearne).
Now Olympus is entering that exclusive club of brands using AR to great effect. They have created an AR demo of the new PEN E-PL1 to allow users to virtually test drive the camera. The user holds the special Olympus QR card in front of their webcam; on screen it’s replaced with a dynamic 3D Olympus E-PL1. But the experience goes even further; allowing the user to interact with the camera controls, take photos (of yourself!), shoot video, try the flash, remove the lens and even play with the in-camera effects.
What makes the Olympus AR experience so good is just how useful the virtual experience actually is. It’s sure to engage a more techy audience, and is publicised in consumer mags such as Wired and Popular Science because of this, but it’s a great product demonstration for any user.
It’s refreshing to see Augmented Reality being used for a genuinely useful purpose rather than just another tick on the digital check list. To see the product demonstration in its entirety visit http://www.getolympus.com/pen/.
