‘My Tracks’ is a very cool T-Mobile G1 android app to help track your training using GPS - be it hiking, cycling, jogging or pretty much anything outdoors. It provides detailed info on your journey like elevation, speed, moving time, distance traveled etc. Once you have a track laid down, you can share the data online. Check out my route to work on the bike! Max speed -  29.70 km/h (18.5 mi/h).

I haven’t explored the google docs training aspect of this app yet (I only have a couple of journeys under my belt), but it looks to be a valuable tool in managing a training regime. Here is the official google app page - http://mytracks.appspot.com/

When was the last time you paid attention to a display ad? Today? Last week? Last month? Don’t remember? Stats suggest it’s probably one of the latter, with average click through rates (ctr) in low single percentage figures at best.

The concept of ‘banner blindness’ seems to be very much alive. The constant presence of advertising in standard page locations coupled with short attention spans has led to the significant reduction in likelihood of engaging people through display ads.

Depsite this the online display ad market is already up 21% in the first four months of 2009, with the majority of spend coming from the retail and financial services sectors.

So how do you ensure clicks are valuable?

Firstly be relevant, e.g. after Mike changed my relationship status on facebook to ‘engaged’ (congrats by the way mate), banners about wedding photographers started appearing. Cloud computing will also help targeting take hold. Gmail for example scans your emails and serves ads based on the content.

Be more engaging, less ‘in your face’ about selling, by providing experiences that are rewarding or enjoyable; create conversation topics. Rich media banners are good way forward with interactive expandable banners, especially – exploiting the available technology and beginning to understand the mindset of the web user.

Take this very clever 3D “Spot the Bull” ad for Orange. It’s interactive, engaging and raises a smile: the selling message isn’t blatant – but it’s got a curiosity to it and packs a promotional mechanic into engaging content.

‘Playable’ banners like this show what you can do if you understand the medium and the user better and use the technology to engage with them in a more interesting way.

(Thanks to Georgia B for this post)

An amazing data visualisation of London real estate. The site isn’t live to the public yet but the video of the process is fantastic. Check out Mapumental.

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.

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.

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.  

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.

Scientists are working on a device which works like a car navigation system to help elderly shoppers baffled by changing layouts in aisles.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/scienceandtechnology/technology/technologynews/5241034/Elderly-shoppers-to-get-sat-nav-gadget-to-find-their-way-around-supermarkets.html

This is totally new from Dell. Dell, in collabration with Intel, will be launching a brand new way of Group Buy called Dell Swarm. It integrates the social network, group buy into a very interactive, real time experience of online buying.

Originally from :http://techielobang.com/blog/2009/04/25/dell-swarm-72hrs-15-buyers-sneak-preview-video-within/

Using geotag data attached to 35 million photos uploaded to Flickr, David Crandall
and colleagues at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, created
accurate global and city maps and identified popular snapping sites.

Many digital photos are now geotagged – stamped with the latitude and longitude coordinates for the location where they were taken. David Crandall
and colleagues at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, have analysed
this data, using 35 million photographs uploaded to the Flickr website.

Crandall’s team found that the data offered a simple way to organise
millions of photos on a global scale. Simply plotting that raw data
onto an empty canvas revealed accurate maps, like this one of the 48
lower states of the US.