Posts Tagged 'Youtube'

Virgin’s Zombie Nation

You might well think there’s enough funny looking folk around already, but if you want to add more to your landscape, then try Virgin Trains new online game Don’t Go Zombie. It’s powered by Google Street View and is interactive with Facebook, just tap in your post code, start roaming the streets and ‘get ready to rescue the dead… tired’. Your task is to reach your destination whilst getting the car-driving ‘wretched ones’ to the safety of a Virgin train using your super-powered ticket machine. These lost souls are frustrated drivers who have been ‘zombiefied’ by good old traffic jams, stress, and lack of toilets. But watch out for the zombies who can also leave you permanently zombiefied. All is not lost though, you can invite your Facebook friends to rescue you, and have your profile picture turned into a zombie avatar until you’re saved. Richard Branson himself is reported to be being immortalized as a zombie later this month. Great sound effects, we just wish ticket machines really did make those peow peow noises…

Wave goodbye to Google Wave

We bid farewell to the Google Wave project, which has been called to an end with Lead Wave Developer Urs Hölzle stating in a Google blog post “Wave has not seen the user adoption we would have liked.” Once hailed as a potential replacement to email the web-based collaboration tool had big ambitions from the offset. We too we’re excited by its possibilities when we tested it out in beta last September. It wasn’t short of innovative features, character-by-character live typing, the simultaneous sharing of information and images and collaborative editing – this is pretty neat stuff. Though all these whizzy features may have ultimately been its downfall proving too daunting for many users to get to grips with. It’s not all bad news though, Wave took collaboration to a new level and while it may no longer exist as a standalone product many of the technological innovations it spawned are being used to enhance its existing products.

If you hadn’t heard of Newport before last week…

…we’re sure you have now. Newport (Ymerodraeth State of Mind), a YouTube viral covering Jay Z and Alicia Keys recent chart topper Empire State of Mind, replaces the New York inspired lyrics to describe the Welsh city of Newport with lines such as “When you’re in Newport. Chips, cheese, curry makes you feel brand new, washed down with a Special Brew.” The video was the brain child of first time film maker MJ Delaney, who got the idea for the video hanging out on the sofa with her boyfriend, singing alternative lyrics ‘for a laugh’. Since graduating from Oxford in 2007, MJ, who has relatives in Newport, has been getting by doing research work and made the film in a day with £100. But she has since had offers to create more music promos and even to release the song.  Demonstrating the power and influence of social media; it had over 1.5 million hits on YouTube, was covered by the BBC and the ITV News at 10, has apparently been seen by Jay Z himself, and led to the rapper Alex Warren’s impending audition for the next X-Men movie. But surely the highest accolade was Alex and his co-star singer Terema Wainwright, who nabbed the role after coming to her audition dressed as Alicia Keys, being invited to the reopening of the Newport Transporter Bridge.
The hit internet video was removed from YouTube on Tuesday, apparently due to a copyright dispute with EMI but has been followed up by yet another parody from Welsh exports Goldie Looking Chain.

An alternative way to view the world (and a map)

Take a minute to marvel at Google Earth View. Unveiled this Monday, this new feature to Google maps fuses the popular map application with Google Earth.
For users, this means the ability to view the earth from a three dimensional perspective complete with stunning imagery which lets you explore mountains, terrains and cityscapes in full detail. This doesn’t stop at a ground-floor level; you can even dive below the ocean surface to roam around the Titanic. Then, in a single fluid motion switch right back to the traditional Google Maps view.
Dramatising the 3D capabilities even further, the inclusion of world-famous landmarks including the Taj Majal, Sydney Opera house and Coliseum of Rome, available at the single click of a button in the left hand navigation, ups the wow-factor of the overall experience.
As mentioned by Google Product Manage Peter Birch “The new Earth view is on the Google Earth API and browser plugin, which make it easy for web developers to include Google Earth in their own websites. If you’ve already installed Google Earth, you can start using Earth view right away. Otherwise, with one click you can download and install the browser plugin and you’ll be ready to start exploring in 3D.”
Its not often a map can get us excited, but this one’s a game-changer. Have a play for yourself or watch the video demo by clicking the large image above.

A nod to the past to appreciate the present

Such is the fast paced nature of the web, eyes are always firmly fixed on the next trend or innovation. However, over the past week it caught our attention that it’s been the anniversary of a couple of internet firsts. So we thought we pay tribute to these important milestones that shaped the web as we know it today.

On April 23rd  2005, the very first video was uploaded to Youtube. Shot by Yakov Lapitsk and titled ‘me at the zoo’ this nineteen second clip sparked a new phenomenon with a massive 24 hours of video content now uploaded every minute, daily. From humble beginnings to the second largest search engine in the world – happy 5th birthday Youtube.

On April 22nd 1993, Mosaic – the first web browser capable of displaying both text and images on the same page, in the same window – was launched, bringing life, colour and creativity to the web, which until that point was predominantly text based. As Wired put it “Mosaic made the web come to life with color and images, something that, for many people, finally provided the online experience they were missing. It made the web a pleasure to use.”

Spotify vs Mflow

Spotify has gone social, with more than just some minor tweaks on it’s new version 0.4.3, a ‘total music management platform’, launched yesterday. Spotify has stepped up it’s game since Mflow was released publicly last week and aims to engage with users and increase the amount of time they spend on the software, increasing appeal to advertisers. Users now have an editable public profile with an inbox where they can send and receive music from friends, and view and subscribe to other users playlists and favorite artists. It’s got the Twitter popularity aspect too, you can monitor how popular your music tastes are by how many users subscribe to your playlists. You can import music from your Windows Media Player or iTunes library, integrating it straight into your Spotify library and the Gracenote digital file identification service has also been added, a function which searches for and updates the track names of your music files. Users can link their profile to their Facebook account, instantly add friends profiles and see any music they’ve posted on Facebook in Spotify’s feed. Daniel Ek, CEO of Spotify told the BBC, “We’ve enabled people to share music through their friends on Facebook really, really simply and we’ve also managed to make it so you can play your own music through the Spotify client. That’s in a nutshell what we’ve done.”

In the red corner, the latest X-factor cyborg flashes a Colgate smile as he churns through an achy Breaky Brat’s tired ballad. In the blue corner is a soap avoiding anarchist and a preachy song largely notable for its profane repeated catch phrase in a temper tantrum climax. Old Smelly from LA won.

The victory was celebrated and decried. A triumph of popular groundswell movements over the soul less corporate machine. A cynical denial of a poor Geordie teenager’s reward for rehashing last years song in a pretty wrapper. As Jimmi Carr says, you can’t polish a turd but you can roll it in glitter. People are attracted to familiar pretty baubles and well crafted spin. Find the right dog and sheep can be herded in surprising directions.

What this event illustrates is not how popular the X-factor is, or even how many people hate Simon Cowell. What is interesting is that it demonstrates how much untapped potential there is in the music market. The vast majority of the people who downloaded Killing In The Name are not hard core fans but merely disillusioned by their exclusion from a contrived process that often rewards mediocrity and paints the airwaves in coats of beige. He who controls the airwaves controls the purse strings, or at least used to. The ability to control the channels is diminishing fast.

Analogue product has become intangibly digital. Controlled distribution became peer to peer sharing. The rich media promotion machine with its expensive barriers to entry, high production values and smug presenters; is increasingly being undermined by web cams, compressed content and word of mouth communication through social networks. The barking music industry watchdogs, chained to their infrastructure kennels by increasingly inefficient chains of production and distribution; are being overwhelmed by a flood of nimble cats. As everyone who has attempted knows, it is very difficult to herd cats. RATM manged to do it but unifying events such as this are difficult to engineer without appearing contrived.

So what does this mean for web marketing in 2010? There will be a mad rush into social media. Someone will try and engineer a similar download stunt. It will fail miserably. Smart music marketers will target offers into social media via pay per click ads targeting profile preferences, or the friends of those users (hence Facebook’s recent “Privacy” changes). Exclusive content will increasingly be delivered into social media rather than the current practice of rehashing archive material. Social media will become an active part of “live” presentations through traditional media, and there will be more paid download opportunities than you can poke a stick at.

Social media is a tsunami but just having a board is not enough if you don’t know how to surf. The X Factor has a Facebook group with nearly a million fans, a dedicated YouTube channel with over 230 million views and enough tweets to bury the London Eye in pigeon poo; but, they still got their butt kicked by a couple of amateurs. The lesson is it is one thing to have a fast car but another entirely to drive it around the track. Social media optimisation and targeting will be the big discussion point and service offering next year… and yes we can provide it. Thanks for asking.