Red Dwarf is Back!

This weekend Red Dwarf is coming back to TV on Dave with the backing of a kickass digital marketing campaign. Red Bee Media have created an online treasure hunt inviting fans to find the crews landing location on Google Earth. The game started with an email sent to 55,000 fans, which contained codes and hidden links. The game also utilised a number of ARG style elements; including a personal ad for ‘The Cat' on Gumtree, an ad for two of the crew to rent a flat in Mayfair, and two websites: Lister's Coming Home and Scanning Jupiter.

Along side this, there were also a series of 'subliminal messages' featured on Dave and its website. Flashes of an image of the Red Dwarf spacecraft with the logo ‘Red Dwarf has landed' were run at several key times during the last couple of weeks, resulting in 438,492 site visitors in just four days.

Unexpected Star Trek World Premiere

A cinema full of Star Trek fans were in for quite a surprise when 10 minutes into the showing of "The Wrath of Khan" the film mysteriously "broke". Suddenly out walked Leonard Nimoy and suggested that the cinema show the new Star Trek film. As it turned out, the hard core fans were the there for an unexpected world premier. Pretty cool.

Visual Complexity

I've posted several times about data visualisation, but you can't possibly imagine how excited I was to find VisualComplexity. I know, I know; I sound like such a geek, but it is so ool to see the different ways that people interprit information, and visualise it.

I think it's an art form. No question. To take some sterile and analytical, and transform it into a visual representation that tells you everything in a single glance, what took pages of words and numbers to do the same.

VisualComplexity describes itself as "a unified resource space for anyone interested in the visualization of complex networks. The project's main goal is to leverage a critical understanding of different visualization methods, across a series of disciplines, as diverse as Biology, Social Networks or the World Wide Web. I truly hope this space can inspire, motivate and enlighten any person doing research on this field".

If you ever have to report on statistical data, be it marketing reports or something else, go take a look at the site. Really impressive stuff.

Central Station Antwerp Flash Mob

Just in case you missed it, this is the latest Flash Mob to get serious attention. No wonder, the choreography is excellent. The group gradually grows as bystanders seem to just 'decide' to have a go. Really seemless stuff.

Economist Turns to Mobile Marketing

In a bit to increase readership, sales and overall awareness, the Economist in India has turned to mobile marketing. With a dedicated mobile channel and a number of strategic sponsorship partnerships, the publication has achieved significant inroads. However, considering the recent explosion of the Indian mobile market this may just be common sense. Anyways, the case study is here.

cheers to Paul for this one, and Tomi whom he got it from

Double Aspect Ratio HDTV

I spotted this and had to share. It's a personal pet hate of mine when you watch tv and get any black barring. I mean come on, there is no reason why we can't operate to a universal standard (cinema wide-screen aspect ratio being my personal preference). Well it looks like finally someone has a solution to deal with two of the formats in use. Paris based company Studio FRST, has developed this Double Aspect Ratio 16943 concept, which can handle two viewing formats: a 16:9 format for cinema and 4:3 for television with zero black barring. Sweet.

Twitter Graffiti

cheers to Nick for this