T-Moblie Trafalgar Square Event

Here's a great look behind the scenes of the recent T-Moblie Trafalgar Square Event, by Campaign.tv. The event, produced by Saatchi and Saatchi, is the latest T-Moblie ad and features a mass karaoke in Trafalgar Square of over 13k people.

i-Mashup Vodafone

It's become fairly regular to see individuals or even small companies posting blogs or Tweeting to find developers to work on iPhone apps (or java etc.), but this has to be one of the largest companies I've seen to date using a competition mechanic to drive development.

Vodafone Malta have just launched their i-Mashup competition, which calls on developers to submit innovative and useable applications that offer real customer value. Although the prize structure isn't huge (1st place €2,500, 2nd place €1,000 and 3rd place €500) it's bound to drive interest. Considering the current economic climate, I'm sure there are plenty of developers who'd be willing to spend a bit of their own time to try and win two and a half grand. Of course on Vodafone's end, they spent €4,000 on prizes and perhaps another €500/€1,00 on admin and advertising, and they potentially have hundreds of mobile apps at their disposal.

Will it be long before we see similar here in Ireland?

VW Jetta: Too Fast?

I posted recently about a great ad featuring an in-banner slider. You just don't see people using this functionality to great effect. So when I saw this VW ad I thought it was worth sharing as another example of how a simple interaction can make an ad.

Digital Round-Up

Congratulations to the Digital Enterprise Research Institute (DERI) who took second place at Elsevier Grand Challenge. The international competition pushes the development of new and innovative tools to deal with the increasing amounts of life sciences information online. Competing against over 65 groups from research companies and universities, from around the world, DERI's project, 'CORAAL - Dive into Publications, Bathe in the Knowledge', is a prototype system to bring together information representation and artificial reasoning technologies in life science publications to allow better integration, search and retrieval of life sciences information. DERI is a research organisation based at NUI Galway who focus on developing semantic web technologies.

During the week Facebook was hit by a major phishing scam. Through the use of a very convincing fake log-in page, users were tricked into revealing their facebook passwords. The people behind the scam then used this information to access profuiles and trick further numbers of people to the fake log-in page. Facebook has said that the link at the center of the scam is now blocked and that there will be an increase of the security services provided by MarkMonitor to prevent future scams of this nature.

Twitter announced that every public update sent to Twitter is now instantly indexed and made searchable through their new real-time search. Further to this, if you search for the same word or phrase regularly, you can now save your search with the "save this search" tickbox. This will then place those keywords as links into your home page just under the search box, giving you one-click access to your regular searches.

SEO Consultant Ireland

Check out this great article on everything Google, by Jonathan Darling.