I’m holding off getting my new all singing, all dancing phone until I know a) which one is actually going to be the best and b) when an acceptable deal comes along that doesn’t make me feel like I’m getting ripped off.
The fact that we don’t get the latest handsets straight away, there’s no unlimited data plans and they love 24 month contracts in Aus doesn’t actually help much on either account. But when I see things like this I’m optimistic that I’m doing the right thing and not jumping on the iPhone band wagon.
It’s an augmented reality app for the android. Wikitude, developed by Mobilizy is a…”AR travel guide with functionality based on Wikipedia and Panoramio. You search landmarks in your surroundings and view them on a map, list, and on an augmented reality (AR) camera view. You’ll see an annotated landscape, mountain names, landmark descriptions”.
Vlingo the innovator in voice recognition for the Yahoo Mobile Onesearch has recently launched a new beta giving BlackBerry smart phone users control over mobile information and tasks with the power of their voice. Vlingo is currently a free download and available on the BlackBerry Pearl, Curve, & 88xx series.
Bottom line you can send a friend a text message without typing. Just speak, verify and send. Basically your phone figures out what you want, finds it and shows you how to get there. No tapping, no thumbs, just good old speaking which is suitable to avoid the no text/driving laws.
Furthermore here is what Vlingo can do…
Send and reply to emails and text messages
Search the Web
Dial the phone
Look up contacts
Send a “note to self”
Voice updates to Facebook & Twitter status updates
Tell A Friend
Read-back of the full text or email message that was spoken
The ability to launch built in programs:
Address Book
Alarm
BrickBreaker
Calculator
Calendar
Camera
Maps
Media
MemoPad
Messages
Options
Tasks
The ability to launch third party programs:
Facebook
Google Maps
Opera
Viigo
Over the next few quarters we are looking to see added support for Symbian, Blackberry, Windows Mobile, and Palm devices over time, on separate schedules.
Google’s personalized home page, iGoogle, is getting an update this Friday. Widgets on the page can support a new “canvas view,” which expands the widget to the full iGoogle window.
The new iGoogle also moves user navigation from tabs at the top of the page to a bar down the left side. This enables more pages and elements in the navigation, and I found that it made navigating iGoogle faster, since it provided a de facto table of contents for each page.
Like many of Google’s services, iGoogle is platform-aware. On a mobile phone, like on an iPhone or Android phone, when you log in to iGoogle, you’ll get a view of your page suited to the constraints of the device.
Rather than be tied down to any one carrier, why not keep changing carriers in real time based on whomever’s going to give you the best deal?
A new patent filed by Mountain View’s finest proposes exactly that, bringing together heterogeneous technologies — "community-wide" networks like WiFi and WiMAX along with GSM, CDMA, and so on — and an "auction system" that would let the user select (or allow the phone to automatically select) the best deal at the moment depending on their needs (available features or minimum speeds, time limits, and so on).
I doubt it will ever be released but the idea is brilliant.
Virgin do more than just care about their customers, they love them. They love them so much they want to help them in any way, in any situation. They have an SOS service which gets you out of a sticky situation, when you need help the most.
Stuck in a disastrous date? Small talk and uncomfortable silences galore? Wish you were anywhere but there? Don’t want to make a scene? Fear not – now you can dial 767 (SOS) and hang up without saying a word and then Virgin Mobile will call you back a minute later with a perfect excuse to get you out of there. We’ll even talk you through what to say.
Although this is about 4 months old I thought this campaign was worth blogging because it is by far the best digital led campaign I’ve seen by a traditional agency – in this case Saatchi & Saatchi. A lot of people in adland obviously did not ‘get it’ – questions around why would someone bother to take a photo are easy to find, but we would argue that putting a measurable element in an Outdoor is gutsy and that the campaign was a great conversations starter packed with emotion – which is what digital is all about.
The Outdoor ads.
How it worked: Take a photo (outdoor billboard) with your phone and the audio story is sent for you to listen to. The website is also very well constructed even though the UG comments feature deserved to be more prominent.
Whilst Saatchis did claim at launch that this was new technology, we would argue this was not true. Companies such as Mobot (here) have been offering these services for several years and they have been used by companies such as Ministry of Sound and MX magazine in campaigns. We’ll forgive Saatchi’s on this occasion because this is a beautiful campaign.
Nokia appear to be taking a big bash at the dominance of iTunes in the local market. With high hopes I tested it out by attempting to download the free single of the week. Unfortunately It didn’t go quite to plan. I’m quite a Nokia fan (since getting an N95) as most people in here know so this held some promise, I’ve also been waiting for a challenger to iTunes (even though I do mostly like iTunes) but I’m afraid it’s not good news…
First you have to register then install the ‘Nokia Media Bar’ – which is not the best experience. I did not really like the intimidating message below “To Play or Buy music you need to install the Nokia Media Bar”
Here’s the deal. I don’t want any more plugins. I don’t want proprietary players and I don’t need any more music player software… I just want to download my tracks and use them how I want with the software I want! Especially when what I’m installing does not work…
It took ages to download the track and when I finally got it – this is what I saw…
Then this…
Sorry Nokia – although it looked promising …20 minutes later and I still haven’t been able to listen to anything…you just lost me.
Amnesia Razorfish is a digital marketing agency headquartered in Sydney, Australia. It is the Australian arm of Razorfish, one of the largest digital agencies in the world.
We live and breathe digital and provide a range of services from strategy, media, creative, tech, social media, analytics and more.
