Publicis Digital NZ

A Visa card is a pretty abstract thing, so what better way to make it useful and relevant than linking it to New Zealanders favourite auction website?

Souls, Beckhams dinner leftovers, and a Virgin Mary pebble are just some of the bizaare items that show up every day on TradeMe.

The GoVisa site highlights these auctions, as well as most expensive cars and rugby souvenirs, top 10 job searches, strange charity sales, and much more.

What I like about the site is how clever it is but still very friendly and easy to use. A live ticker shows you can buy 477,473 items right now on TradeMe. Icons rearrange beautifully to form the shape of kites, rugby balls or whatever the auction item is. Interested in that infamous Tana Umanga handbag? Go Visa gives you a link to checkout all handbags on sale on TradeMe right now. Want to show the site to your friends on Facebook? GoVisa lets you do it with one click.

Behind the scenes I’m guessing Go Visa is powered by RSS feeds, the ‘glue’ that allows you to get the current Wellington weather, NZ herald headlines, and top 10 YouTube clips in one standard format. Smart and simple.

Go Visa

Fiat calls their car-to-computer interface "eco:drive"

“They’re everywhere” is my favourite catch-cry from a people-vs-aliens
computer game called Marathon, which we used to play back in the good old
days when computers were powered by frogs (like, way back in 1994).

Computers have come a long way since then. And, yep, they’re everywhere.

Nike even puts them in your shoes, and – with Apple – lets you find out how
far you’ve run, how fast. You can even have someone famous tell you you’re
doing great – or tell you to run faster, you lazy bugger (sorry, Nana, I
forgot you’re a bit out of touch — see http://nikeplus.nike.com/nikeplus/).

But that was aaaaages ago. These days, there are computers… IN YOUR CAR!
Yes. In your car. Helping you drive. Seriously.

Like, in my car, the computer figures out that I’ve stopped at the lights –
and switches my wipers from FAST to INTERMITTENT. Cool, huh?

But Fiat… Well, they’re doing something else altogether.

Yep, Today’s Digital Thing Of The Day is from Fiat - which used to be an
acronym for “Fix it again, Tony!”, but now might stand for “First
interactive automotive toy!”. Or something less lame, but this’ll do for
now.

You see, allegedly my car will tell the car doctor where it hurts, when
asked in the right way (although I suspect that’s just a very, very clever
way of extracting incremental revenue…). The new Fiats, however, can tell
*you* things – how much they like to drink, whether they think they’re
drinking too much, and whether you’re being a bit rough when you take them
home. Ahem.

I know some cars can tell you this on the fly, in a limited way. But this
prototypical car-computer interaction setup – whereby you can download
performance data via a USB slot in the centre console and upload it to your
computer – lets you visualise your driving performance in all sorts of ways.

Fiat is using it as an excuse to show off the incredible frugality of their
range. Watch the intro and get an idea:

http://www.fiat.co.uk/ecodrive/#ecodrive/intro

Racing teams (and sports shows, starting with the Bathurst 1000) have been
doing this for years, with telemetrics showing all kinds of parameters. And
as first out of the blocks, Fiat’s version is missing all sorts of things -
GPS, for one; real-time feedback, for another; and integration with traffic
flow control… but it is a fundamental breakthrough in the way we interact
with our cars. Look out for a huge pile of this kind of thing coming very
soon from all car manufacturers, and some independents.

The Digital Thing Of The Day started life way back in late ‘08 as a once-a-day sift through the digital haystack to find a shining, pointy-sharp example of digital goodness. It carried on intermittently throughout the year, although its regularity has depended on the number of pitches in the agency, the kitchen duty roster, the weather, babies, workload, hangovers, the state of the coffee machine…

Despite all that, the Digital Thing Of The Day continues to this day. It’s just not, you know, “Daily”.

Whatever the calendularity, you’ll find many a Digital Thing Of The Day posted here; shiny and pointed, just waiting for you to prick yourself. It won’t always be a website; sometimes it’ll be a piece of jargon. Or a simple, delicious email — or the emailing tool that delivered the email. Or a widget, or a desktop application. Or a piece of software that helps us make such things. Or a device, or a way of communicating. Or something completely and utterly new.

Enjoy!

Whilst today’s Digital Thing Of The Day is amusing, it can also be very, very frightening – but either way, it is a clever development of a set of existing techniques into something that has an idea behind it.

You see, VW in the US reckons their new People Mover – the Routan – will definitely move people.

Move them to make babies, that is. Because VW think this is such a great family car that people will actually want to make a family so they’ll have an excuse to buy the damned thing.

Personally, I think the only thing uglier than the Routan would be the bastard lovechild of, say, [shudder] Andre Louis and Jeremy Clark.

What’s that, Nana? No – luckily, we don’t have to wait for science to catch up with billions of years of reproduction in order for us to find out just what that bastard lovechild would look like. We can simply use VW’s new BabyMaker3000!

VW's Routan lets you make a baby without "making a baby"

http://www.vw.com/vwhype/babymaker/en/us/

Why not make a baby with someone you know? You don’t even have to love them.

Today’s Digital Thing of The Day just goes to show that whilst YouTube might in fact be populated by a bunch of semi-talented loners with webcams uploading contextually indistinct glimpses of their day-to-day efforts to become famous, there are people who manage to pinpoint the occasional needle of genius in the haystack of mediocrity.

In this case, Kutiman found that the entire haystack could actually be
actually made of needles — and (to mangle the metaphor two or three steps
too far) he’s used that epiphany to sew hundreds of disparate clips together
into a magic carpet of music.

Apart from switching on the credits and discovering the source material, this DTOTD is not spectacularly interactive — rather, it just goes to show
that getting into user-generated content sometimes requires nothing more
than clicking and enjoying.

In fact, there’s a theory in Digital Land that when it comes to this kind of
User Generated Content (”UGC”, we like to call it, usually when protecting
our patch by using TLAs to try and look all cool and “with it”), one person
uploads something, nine people comment on it, and 90 people just sit back
and watch.

I’d say the results of this experiment prove that Kutiman is one in a
million.

Here, then, is ThruYou. Click, and enjoy.

http://thru-you.com/#

Same-same, only different...

…so I’ve been looking for a great Digital Thing Of The Day to share, as a way of reintroducing the concept for the new year.

Sadly, everything I’ve been seeing recently seems to look just like something else we’ve already seen, or done… And then I walked in this morning and saw that Creative Smartie Guy and I are both wearing Summer Creative Uniform (black shorts, a t-shirt, and sandshoes with no socks – hey brother!).

Which brings me to this: http://www.exactitudes.com/

“They call their series Exactitudes: a contraction of exact and attitude. By registering their subjects in an identical framework, with similar poses and a strictly observed dress code, Versluis and Uyttenbroek provide an almost scientific, anthropological record of people’s attempts to distinguish themselves from others by assuming a group identity.”

Who do you recognise? Find the best match to someone at Publicis, email it to us and win big*!

(I tried to find me and Guy, but this is as close as I could get: http://www.exactitudes.com/serie.php?nr=21 — although Steve Goldie will be thrilled to know I did manage to find Nana: http://www.exactitudes.com/serie.php?nr=25)

*Not absolutely 100% true

For some companies, MySpace is just too much Their space - the advertising, aesthetics, and focus controlled too much by someone else. Social networks like Facebook, Bebo, and YouTube allow companies and organisations to create channels and profile pages, which can work well. But for those who want more independence, a host of new tools makes it easier.

Clip-Share gets you half way there with an out of the box solution. Their live demo provides features like ‘recently viewed’, ratings, comments, sharing, friends, and channels in a white label style version. Of course features aren’t everything. The few really successful users of the script have ventured far from the generic in terms of look/feel and content (Godtube anyone?).

On a different tack, the new version of the respected JW media player (now dubbed LongTail) features Addons that give your videos the same features as the big boys. Functionality like:

• Longtail ad plug-in allowing pre and post-roll ads to generate revenue
• Google Analytics add on allowing tracking of play/pause, etc
• Tipjar addon allowing instant donations via PayPal
• Rate It addon letting users give star ratings on your videos

Again heaps of features very easily, but with everyone creating a social video site, you’ll need to differentiate yourself from the pack. The new crop of niche sites all revolve around a single idea or community. 12 Seconds gives its users exactly that much time to create something watchable and interesting. Engage Media attempts to take the high road with videos on social justic and human rights.  AniBoom tweaks the winning formula with a tight community of animators and a quirky visual style.

The new kid on the digital music player block has been released and looks to directly take on the iTunes app. Songbird, like all decent software is completely opensource and even better seems to work with pretty much all portable digital music players. The real strength of this program is it allows you to stream and access music from anywhere on the web, great for those frequenting music blogs.
Other goodies include mashTape , a feature which pulls artist bios from last.fm, videos from YouTube and photos from Flickr.

If you like, you can get it here:
http://getsongbird.com/

Back again for 2009 the event takes place down in Wellington and boasts a wide range of guest speakers, the likes of Matt Jones (Designer, former CD at BBC and Director of UX Design at Nokia, lead designer at Dopplr), Heather Champ (Flickr community manager), Derek Powazek (named one of the top 40 “Industry Influencers” of 2007) and our very own Russell Brown. It also hosts a bunch of useful workshops over 4 days.

” it’s nice to come away from a presentation with half a dozen things that you can apply immediately to the things you’re working on… ” Rowan Simpson (webstock 08)

Don’t be put off if you’re a complete techtard*.
You can register now or just check it out at:

http://www.webstock.org.nz/

In an increasingly complex, dense web, some sites are taking ‘less is more’ to a new extreme. These so called ’single-serve’ websites consist of just one short page or one strong idea. What color is the Empire State Building is a gorgeous, singleminded interactive that serves as a subtle advertisement for the lighting company responsible for the New York icon. Many, like Will Diet Coke kill us? use their web address as the question, while the page itself delivers the three letter punchline, “YES”. Some seem simply born from a real-life frustration (d-e-f-i-n-i-t-e-l-y) and fuckinggoogleit.com.

One of the standouts has to be Dear Adobe, a plea to the software developer that retains it’s single minded focus while going beyond the typical simplistic chuckle of many single serve sites. The site is a directory of user submitted comments, or ‘gripes’, with the ability to reply to a gripe, agree or disagree with it, or even mark it ‘inaccurate’. The top 100 gripes provides a bellwether of feedback - issues around the speed and reliability of Adobe’s software surface frequently. The large type, simple interface, and short comment box work well, and all help to create gripes that are short, punchy, and often very funny.