This one has been doing the email rounds, and making many of us chuckle.

What started out as a amusing review of a kitsch ‘three wolf moon’ t-shirt on Amazon, has led to a 2,300% uptake in sales (!), making it the most sold item in the clothing store. The review which describes the t-shirt as ‘intrinsically sweet’ and made the wearer ‘immediately approached by women’ has made the t-shirt a cult sensation. Read the full review here  and the full story here.

The producers of the t-shirt who were initially not best pleased at the comments, have taken the opportunity to produce an additional 400,000 shirts to meet the demand, saying ”we’ll take ironic fashion any day”. 

We would now like to try and push the ‘horse moon’ t-shirt, as modeled by our very own Sam Edwards. Undoubtedly it is also ’intrinsically sweet’ but the verdict is still out with the women. Sorry Sam….

The credit crunch friendly

Sainsbury Annual Report - nice, cost effective and interactive approach to put an annual report into market. Long live trees.

The not so credit crunch friendly

Sketch - the chic London bar’s site is quite nice to move around. 

The fun and addictive

VW GTI - enter the GTI lab and race a model around a giant scalextric track. My best time is 21:00. Beat that!

According to Experian’s latest Insight Report, UK internet users are spending less time on transactional sites and more on social networks and user content driven websites. In fact, social networks overtook retail websites in the UK for the first time in January 2009 and by March were receiving 14 per cent more internet visits. 

Whilst these statistics are significant, many brands are struggling to benefit from the shift in people’s attention to what is considered a less commercially friendly medium. A further study by Vignette Corporation found that investment in social media will be increased by an average of 40 per cent amongst the companies surveyed. What’s suprising is that many of them recognise the importance of Web 2.0, but 40 per cent of them have no social media process or strategy in place!

What social media allows people and brands to do is open up conversations, be it around products, services, innovations, attiditudes… the list goes on. One best practice example which we like is Best Buy in the States, which has adapted its business model to suit the digital, interactive world. Whilst they run a commercial website, they also embrance twitter and blogging to open a dialogue with their customers. Check out this nice video about them and their change in business model.

Last weekend saw the return of the annual 48 Hour YouTube Cannes Young Lions competition.

This year’s brief for Oxfam was to create a video that will inspire millions of people around the world to join the global movement for action on climate change.

Check out the YouTube channel and vote for your favorite entry before the deadline at Midnight on May 31st. This is a great example of how a project; brief, entry, voting and results can be managed exclusively online.

Another google earth game (a boat simulator). Drive a barge, cruise liner, or air ship anywhere in the real (sattelite mapped) world!  If you have the google earth plug-in you can even play it in your browser. I would imagine that these kinds of simulators are going to start popping up more and more often. During flights I would love to be able use my gphone to see in real time where my aircraft is on the planet.

Here’s a one from over the pond which caught our attention. Google have now launch Google TV ads in the States, which allows users to book advertising space and submit a live ad to national television in seconds.

You simply hit ‘new TV campaign’, select your desired network and/or audience by searching for relevant keywords, upload or CREATE! your own ad, select the number of impressions you would like to pay for, and the click ’save campaign’. 

You can’t quite imagine media agencies shaking in their boots quite yet, but watch this space….

This is a great free app fro the google and iPhone. It’s very simple to use - scan a bar code - see the price comparisons online. It would be a great app for the BlackBerry!

We love digital, because it has the ‘Now Wow’, it isn’t a prerecorded script that can’t go wrong, it is like watching the World Rally Championships - fast cars are exciting, but fast cars crashing is even more exciting.

Digital is an enabler that can broadcast the physical, whether it be action, ideas or thoughts, in real time, because digital is instantly reactive. The ‘Now Wow’ gives gravitas to an idea, don’t just do it, but do it for real, and do it live, crashes and all.

Doritos have done a good job at using the ‘Now Wow’ with their Dodge Ball competition.

There was a staggering fact from the governments Digital Britain Report this week, stating the average British adult spends almost half of all their waking hours using the services of the communications sector or browsing, watching or listening to the audio-visual content.

This is only set to increase, as features on mobile devices become more sophisticated and widespread, and then the ‘average British adult’ becomes more educated about those features.

Wikitude has put Augmented Reality (AR) to good use. So far I think AR has been used as a gimmick for ‘wow factor’, but not to have lasting value. This is different, combining the Android phone GPS and compass technology to give a real time AR travel guide.

2008 was the year of gimmicky AR applications, 2009 could be the year for utility AR applications, due to an AR developers toolkit for the iPhone and uptake on Android.

It’s pretty hard to deny the usefulness of Google maps. Not only can you play with a global map of infinite detail in seconds, but with the addition of Street View you can also view and explore places in first-person.

If you had to, one of the few holes you could poke in the platform is that it doesn’t really integrate the first person street view, into the bigger picture map.

The Here & There projection of Manhattan does just this, giving an enhanced first-person and brids-eye view of a city.  It puts the viewer simultaneously above the city and in it where she stands, both looking down and looking directly around them.

So far it’s been developed to a 2D representation of New York. However with location based technologies racing out of their infancy, how long until we start seeing this distorted but very handy view of our surroundings developed into a 3D interactive world? Could be very useful in digital city guides, games (GTA 8?), and mobile map apps.  

Amazon’s E-Reader Kindle DX is shipping this summer in the US. It probably doesn’t spell the end for the Lite or Metro just yet, as it has an unspecified UK release

• 9.7-inch E-Ink screen (1200 x 824 with 16 shades of grey)
• 1/3 of an inch thick (10.4″ x 7.2″ x 0.38″)
• 4GB Storage for 3,500 books (a bump from 1,500)
• Native PDF support through built-in reader
• Automatic landscape/portrait text rotation
• Line length adjustments (determine the width of text on the screen)
• Navigation buttons moved to right side of screen only

from : http://gizmodo.com/5242310/kindle-dx-offers-97-inches-of-e+ink-for-489

Following on from previous postings about new interfaces on the web, this Papervision site uses more than mouse clicks to navigate its content.

http://www.iamunique.com.au/

What better way to Spark things off than by taking a look at some inspiring and ridiculously clever future technologies which have the potential to enhance the way we live our lives.

First off is a paradigm challenger. Why do all computer desktops work in pretty much the same way? Website navigation is adapting to how we use the internet (check out the experimental ‘Don’t click it’), however desktops have remained pretty constant.

‘Bumptop’ is an ingenious approach to desktop management built for the way we organise our real work spaces (i.e. desks) in real life.

Moving through the digital world, mobile especially is inspiring radical new ideas, opening up ways to access information wherever we need it. ‘Nru’ (pronounced near you) is the latest mobile innovation from lastminute.com’s labs team. Using GPS the application (available on the G1 Andriod device) can show you things to do near you on a radar, and also send information directly to you when you point the camera at a place or object.

Taking a glimpse further ahead, we find Pattie Maes, developer of the Sixth Sense mobile. We challenge you to not utter ‘no way’ to yourself when you watch the demonstration.

We’ve picked up on a few brands taking an interesting approach to leveraging activity on social networks and using brand advocacy to their benefit of late.  

One which stands out is Skittles, who have launched the online application ‘Transplant the Rainbow’ which takes a user around the various sites where people are talking about the brand, including YouTube, Flickr and Twitter. Pretty interesting and new idea, considering people will be going to these sites to find information on products pre-purchase. So why not facilitate them on their journey?

There is real potential in this approach. Word of mouth a pretty powerful tool, just be confident your customers will have good things to say about you. We would like to see how this approach would do for a higher consideration purchase like a car, where people will be doing extensive online research. 

Augmented Reality (AR) has been getting a fair bit of attention in the digital world recently. In a nutshell, AR combines real world and computer generated data in real time. Not actually as complicated as it sounds - here’s a nice example from the BBC.

This stuff is pretty exciting, especially for brands who are looking to take online user engagement to the next level. BMW for example have extended their latest Z4 campaign online, inviting users to recreate the ATL TV execution at home. Check out the dedicated microsite or the demo below.

It’s safe to expect this technology to keep on growing in popularity. Just have a look at Microsofts interpretation of the future, a completely new way of looking at how we interact with and organise digital content around us.

I saw James Jarvis present this piece at the 2009 Pictoplasma conference in Berlin earlier this year. It is a fantastic example of how to combine traditional illustration with 3d animation and motion capture. James Jarvis is a keen jogger and it was his movements that Richard Kenworthy from Shynola captured to create the movement of the character.