A Truely Ice Cold Beer!

Budweiser has launched what may be the coldest beer in the world, and we in Ireland are the first people in Europe to enjoy it. Budweiser's new Ice Cold Bottle is a new innovative aluminium bottle that keeps your Budweiser colder for 17 minutes longer then any other beer bottle. Chilled in special fridges, called "chillchambers", Budweiser's Ice Cold Bottle is dropped to a very chilly -5°C without the beer actually freezing.

The eye-catching striking red bottles can be found through out the country in all your favourite bars and clubs, and have enjoyed a great summer start with at a host of cool gigs including both the U2 and Take That concerts.

Budweiser Brand Manager, Sarah Spain said “ Budweiser Ice Cold bottle is a completely new way to experience the ultimate in cold beer. We know beer drinkers love their beer served really chilled so we wanted to offer them the coldest beer possible, in a slick new aluminium bottle”.

Social Media Round Up

I was doing a some research today, updating a Social Media presentation, and I came across a great post by Jake Hird over on eConsultancy.com. Jake scoured the web and collect 20 brilliant Social Media stats:

• Social networks and blogs are the 4th most popular online activities online, including beating personal email. 67% of global users visit member communities and 10% of all time spent on the internet is on social media sites.
• If Facebook were a country, it would be the fourth most populated place in the world. This means it easily beats the likes of Brazil, Russia and Japan in terms of size.
• 80% of companies use, (or are planning to use), LinkedIn as their primary tool to find employees during the course of this year. The site has just celebrated reaching its 45-millionth membership.
• Around 64% of marketers are using social media for 5 hours or more each week during campaigns, with 39% using it for 10 or more hours per week.
• It took radio 38 years to reach 50 million listeners. Terrestrial TV took 13 years to reach 50 million users. The internet took four years to reach 50 million people... In less than nine months, Facebook added 100 million users.
• Wikipedia currently has more than 13 million articles in more than 260 different languages. The site attracts over 60 million unique users a month and it’s often hotly debated that the information it contains is more reliable than any printed Encyclopaedia.
• The most recent figure of blogs being indexed by Technorati currently stands at 133 million. The same report into the Blogosphere also revealed that on average, 900,000 blog posts are created within a single 24-hour period.
• It’s been suggested that YouTube is likely to serve over 75 billion video streams to around 375 million unique visitors during this year.
• The top three people on Twitter (Ashton Kutcher, Ellen DeGeneres and Britney Spears) have more combined followers than the entire population of Austria.
• According to Socialnomics, if you were paid $1 for every time an article was posted on Wikipedia, you would earn $156.23 per hour.
• The online bookmarking service, Delicious, has more than five million users and over 150 million unique bookmarked URLs.
• Since April this year, Twitter has been receiving around 20 million unique visitors to the site each month, according to some analytical sources.
• Formed in 2004, Flickr now hosts more than 3.6 billion user images.
• Universal McCann reports that 77% of all active internet users regularly read blogs.

As Jake points out, these stats are extremely impressive but the simple fact is that in the time it's taken to collect them and report on them, they are probably already out of date.

Data Visualisation: SMS Messages

I've posted before about Data Visualisation and this is one of the best I've seen. This is a video by Aaron Koblin from Google Creative Lab, showing a visualisation of SMS messages in Amsterdam on New Years Eve.



Hat tip to Tony Effik

iBurgh

It seemed that for so long there were few practical, useful iPhone Apps available. iPhone users were stuck with gimmicky apps that did little except show off the iPhone's motion and graphic capabilities. Thankfully all that has changed and there are more and more really useful apps coming through the Apple iTunes Store.

iBurgh is a new app that not allows residents' of Pittsburgh (US) to lodge complaints straight through to the city with geo-tagged pictures of potholes, graffiti and other public maintenance issues. iBurgh is part of a new breed of app described by Pittsburgh councillors as "changing the democratic process", through "e-democracy".

The app utilises the iPhone's GPS functionality and lets users pinpoint their exact location on a map while also including a picture of what it is they want to notify about. Their complaint is then delivered directly to the city's 311, or helpline department, with a short description, and time and date.

iBurgh was developed by YinzCam, already famous in Pittsburgh for their impresses iPhone NHL applications, and is available for free download from iTunes.

Bill Peduto, a Pittsburgh city councilman, told the Pittsburgh Business Times: "We want to establish Pittsburgh as the home of e-democracy. Since the invention of the printing press, there really hasn't been a development that gives us the ability to change the democratic process. This is a way for government to be directly responsive to people, instead of waiting for complaints to pile up."

Lance Armstrong Organises a Twitter-Cycle

Lance Armstrong, well known for his love of Twitter, surprised a lot of followers with a tweet last Sunday:

"Hey Glasgow, Scotland!! I'm coming your way tomorrow. Who wants to go for a bike ride??"

And with that the seven-time Tour de France winner invited his fans for an afternoon cycle in Paisley in Scotland. Little did Armstrong realise that his follow up tweet on Monday, "Hey Glasgow - ride's at 12 noon. Location tbd. Stay tuned! Still dialling it in. And yes, I have my raincoat!", would see over 200 fans turn up in Paisley outside the Ashtree House hotel (as well as a huge following on foot!).

Armstrong admitted he hadn't planned a route and just ended up cycling around the town for a couple of hours. After the tour, Armstrong thanked everyone there, saying "Thanks to everyone who turned up to ride in Paisley! I figured we'd have a nice ride for a dozen or so. But 100's came. Haha! Awesome!", adding, "And hope great was it that the Flying Scotsman Graeme Obree came out?? Legend."

Armstrong is a prolific Tweeterer and even went as as far during this year's Tour de France as to cut out all journalists and use Twitter for all his public addresses.