There’s not much more to add. Start creating your own bars, and send out a message that makes sense!

Visit YouBars
Thanks, Dave

Speaker List:

• Niku Banaie, Naked Communications
• Mike Butcher, TBites
• Russell Davies, Open Intelligence Agency
• Regine Debatty, We Make Money Not Art
• Jeremy Ettinghausen, Penguin Books
• Karen Fraser, Ethical Index
• Santiago Gowland, Unilever
• John Grant, BrandTarot
• Tamara Giltsoff, OZOlab brand
• Jessica Greenwood, Contagious Magazine
• Hugh MacLeod, GapingVoid
• Beeker Northam, Bloom
• Steven Overman, Lowe Worldwide
• George Parker, Madscam
• Simon Sinek, Sinek Partners
• Stan Stalnaker, Hub
• Iain Tait, Poke
• Diana Verde Nieto, Clownfish
• Timo Veikkola, Nokia
• Johnny Vulkan, Anomaly
• Faris Yakob, Naked Communications

Check out the site for the full program and the list of attendees that have signed up so far.

Product Details:

• Scratch card creators can email their scratch card link to other people or use a code snippet provided to embed the scratch card on their Web site.
• Scratchers move their mouse over the scratch area to reveal the message underneath.
• Every day, Scratchyourself chooses two winning times. The first person to scratch after each winning time wins an Instant Prize of US$10, and the scratch card creator wins a Bonus Instant Prize of US$10. Scratchers may reveal a message entering them into a Daily Draw for US$50. Users can scratch multiple times to win an Instant Prize but can only enter the Daily Draw once per scratch card per day.
• Winners can choose to be paid via PayPal, check or Amazon gift certificate.
• The current Scratchyourself promotion runs until June 7, 2007. Scratchyourself intends to run a second promotion from June 8, 2007, with bigger prizes.

Example (unscaled version – click here) :

The setup is very easy. First you provide the name of the ticket (the blueprint stamp you see before you scratch) – Next you upload an image (300k limit) and write the caption (text in the bottom left corner), then you pick a color panel and then you login or register for free, to send it off. (took me 20 seconds). Simple, cool and very nifty.

Get your own at: Scratch Yourself

Video Link

Video Link: one & two

Thanks, Arnaud!

• Identity Flux

  Gender-neutrality goes mainstream. People list skills on their business cards rather than title, and dress up in various costumes depending on who they feel like being that day.

• Liquid Brands

  Chameleon-like brands focus less on communicating a static message and more on being the right thing for the right persona at the right time. Constantly morphing retailers carry products until they sell out and never restock.

• Virtual Immortality

  While some let their avatars drift away to online purgatory, many more leave behind specific instructions on how their virtual selves should proceed. Services offering avatar surrogates flourish, and we bequeath avatars to friends and family in our wills.

• EnvironMENTAL Movement

  Companies are expected to reduce the amount of damage they are doing to our minds. Savvy companies sponsor marketing-free white spaces in lieu of polluting the environment with models and logos.

• Product PLACEment

  Enviro-biographies are attached to just about everything, letting consumers know the entire life story of a product: where the materials were harvested, where it was constructed, how far it traveled, and where it ended up after being thrown away or recycled.

• Brand-Aides

  Socially responsible brands make a buck while providing desperately needed services. Communities are revived by Target daycare, Starbucks learning centers, and Avis transportation services for the elderly.

• Moral Status Anxiety

  A person’s net worth is no longer measured by dollars earned, but by improvements made. Families compete with each other on how many people they fed while on vacation, and the most envied house on the block is not the biggest, but the most sustainable.

• Oldies but Goodies

  Respect for elders makes a comeback in the form of Ask Your Grandma hotlines and the proliferation of online video clips by seniors showing us how to tie knots and concoct home remedies.

Yes, in come the media. Reuters and BigBrother have made their moves, now it’s time for the another tabloids to follow. Axel Springer, the publisher of Germany’s top-selling Bild newspaper, is poised to launch a weekly paper designed to sate the virtual population’s appetite for news and gossip.

Due to be launched in December, the paper will be written in English and is estimated to cost between 10 and 15 Linden dollars. It will likely be sold by subscription – posted into mailboxes across the virtual parallel universe. Mr Springer plans to construct an online editorial office for SL News. A real editor-in-chief will then recruit a team of roving reporters from among the avatar community.

It’s a good thing they’ll be scouting for stories within the community and that in fact a lot of the news will be produced by residents. It’ll be only a matter of filtering out the junk. Oh no wait. That’s exactly what a tabloid is going to publish. How long ’til we have paparazzi that’ll be stalking ‘famous’ avatars to take snapshots as they enter nudie bars?

“It will be a colourful tabloid, with snippets about showbusiness and human interest tales from the avatar world,” explained Dirk Meyer-Bosse, a spokesman for the German publishing giant.

Read more on The Guardian | via SmartMobs

Check out the “BigBrother in Second Life” site

Crayon is the realization of almost 5 years of evangelism, passion and thought leadership designed around the central premise that the world has changed; the consumer has changed; but marketing has not. Judging by the general consensus and response to Jaffe’s book, together with countless conversations with senior marketers, not to mention the level of discourse on marketing blogs, it became readily apparent that now was the time to scale and staff up to accommodate the acute lack of clarity and mass confusion regarding what to do next…

Enter crayon…

In short, crayon is a shape-shifter; a mash-up; a company that integrates the best of the consulting, agency, advisory, thought leadership and education worlds. crayon’s goal is to help our clients:

• Amplify, extend and enhance relevance, experience and value through bold, alternative and non-traditional approaches
• Join the conversation
• Create disproportionate positive business impact

Think of it as the marketing services embodiment of “Life after the 30-second spot” and then some.

I’ll work myself up the guest list and maybe do some live-blogging from within Second Life, if possible. By the way if you want to find me in Second Life, look for Coolz0r Courier ;-)

Check out the CrayonVille website for more info (online on the 26th of October, at the launch day) and stay tuned to see what Jaffe, Shel Holtz and Neville Hobson and CC Chapman and the others are cooking up in Second Life.

Check out the commercial:

Tune in for some episodes on Meetordelete.com

Commercial credits: T-Viral

Tune in for their first episode
Check out The Property Panel | Thanks, Asi

After a bit more research I’ve found some other remarkable facts about this trend. It’s not the first time this is happening in Hong Kong. Back in 1999, Cora Tse, a secretary at a construction company sent to represent her boss, tittered nervously and made a winning bid, the equivalent of about $45,000. All for a piece of plastic labeled “HY1″ to be placed on the rear of her boss’ car. His company is called Hop Yuen. And he, of course, is No. 1.

Vanity license plates are one thing. Many countries and U.S. states allow their citizens to advertise themselves, their true loves or their fantasies on their cars, usually for a modest fee. But Hong Kong has taken the licence plate game to a new level by auctioning off requested or desirable plates to raise money for government-approved charities. In 1994, for instance, a wealthy man named Albert Yeung Sau-shing paid nearly $4 million (13 million HK dollars) for the right to a single-digit plate: “9.” That number nine sounds like “ever lasting” in Cantonese.

In February 2006, actor and Hong Kong action hero Jackie Chan paid 1.5 million dollars (192,000 US) for a lucky car license plate, marking one of the highest prices reached at auction this year. The plate digits were ‘123′. Money well spent.

A mysterious man in a mask drove off with the most expensive vehicle license plate sold in Hong Kong since 1997, shelling out HK$7.1 million (US$910,000) at a weekend auction, a Hong Kong newspaper reported on Monday. The man, who wore a surgical mask and would not identify himself, left the auction immediately after winning the bid for license plate number 12, which sounds like “certainly easy” in Cantonese, the South China Morning Post said in February 2005.

Quote viZoo : “We are an advertising film company, developing and producing new media with ‘edge’. “— And that, dear readers, is [an understatement] I think.

 

The nifty EMH, or Dr. Twain,
has nothing to do with viZoo.
It’s just my bench mark for a hologram.

Check out the viZoo profile throught the [PromoSamples] or visit [viZoo].

Giant advertisement films are to be beamed on to London Underground platform walls.

Replacing posters on the walls opposite the platforms from the start of next year, the advertisements will be shot across from projectors installed above passengers’ heads.

Full colour and even high-definition, the “cross-track projection” system will be installed at an initial 24 stations in Zone One.

Fully computer-controlled, in addition to advertisements, it will also be able to beam across everything from football scores to lottery results.

The technology, part of a £25m digital investment programme that is also seeing LCD television screens installed up and down escalators, is being introduced by advertising giant Viacom Outdoor.

Awesome!

Notice how zero out of 4 people are checking out the LCD screens on the escalator. I wonder how that comes. I’m also thinking the original ’soap’ stories might come back to live with short (sponsored) 5-minute episodes that are being broadcasted during morning or evening rush hours while people are waiting for their rides. Since mobisodes (soap episodes for mobile devices) are already being made, it would be a small effort to extend the line to these media channels. We’ll see where this is going. Cool trend though.

Read more on BBC News

Jay McDonald: The secret is that it’s using Flash (the “F” in Fjax) to act as a speedy little XML parsing engine, instead of handling all of that in JavaScript. But Fjax’s use of Flash is a pretty significant departure from how Flash has historically been used. In fact, this is a critical point — because Fjax isn’t geared specifically at Flash developers who are used to building things where the user interface is Flash. It’s really a whole new way of using Flash that will appeal to folks who are not “Flash people” and don’t want to make a “Flash site.”

The approach can be characterized like this: try to go to the Fjax site and point to the Flash. You can’t. It’s not visible anywhere. That’s completely different than how people are used to using Flash.

Read more at WebMonkey

And so it happened that all of the sudden he sent me an email with some stuff he did. And all you can say is: wow!

What follows are some links, unfortunately for Dutch speaking/reading people only (unless he’s going to translate it) of nice things he’s been up to.

The new thing that I hadn’t heard of was that he made a screencast. Not just a screencast, but a special screencast intended to be used as a viral. And that was something I haven’t seen before. This is a nice way to grab the viewer’s attention. It’s sort of like the BRTV commercials I wrote about last year. Branded screencasts not only cause the consumer to change the idea he/she intentionally had, it’ll make it more natural for the consumer to accept your product as being ‘needed’. It gives you a whole window of opportunities to reach out and explain everything there is to be said. And that’s really great. A new medium, combined with an existing brand building tool. Quite innovative.

Because Hans sort of unwantedly crowned himself as the king of screencasting of The Netherlands and Belgium, Webwereld – a Dutch magazine – recently interviewed him about the possibilities of screencasting. An interesting read if you haven’t seen the possibilities yet, and certainly worth checking out as well.

Another nice thing Hans was involved in (he wrote page 7) is the online/offline news magazine: A Great Place To Live, which is a brochure about The Netherlands that talks about ‘what lives amongst the people’. Yeah. Hans has been quite busy. Just so you know.

Check out HansOnExperience

Meet the Genpets | Thanks, Ben

It’s a bit weird to actually have your users create two different profiles I think. On the one hand it’ll generate truly dedicated users, on the other hand it’s not really user-friendly. Perhaps that’ll change too in the future. It’s the first time I hear about creating a new profile for mobile content for a service you’re already using. Suppose Hotmail or Yahoo would do that too… you’ll lose your overview and the data would become unmanagable, unless you can merge the data afterwards, but that would make it needlessly complicated.

You can now upload videos directly from your phone or PDA to YouTube. All you need is a mobile device that can take video and send MMS messages, and an Internet access or data plan from your service provider. We currently support uploads from Cingular, Sprint, T-Mobile, and Verizon.

To get started, click on “Create Mobile Profile.” Login, or create an account if you don’t already have one. Once you’re logged in, you’ll create a mobile profile to set up the default information for your videos, and then our system will generate the email address where you should send them. This address will be unique to you and your profile, and you can have up to two profiles.

And what about downloading videos to your mobile device? Are the videos going to be ’slimmed’? YouTube doesn’t say anything about that (yet). It would also recquire your mobile device to have a recent Flash player and I can imagine that it might take a while for some videos to be downloaded. Nice move though. If the networks can support the traffic and can offer a smooth and continuous service, I think YouTube might have another boom in content. Citizen Journalism has been taken to the next level, let’s hope it generates some usable content.

On a sidenote, a project called YouTubeTalk (not affiliated with YouTube) is gaining momentum. It looks like an ordinary community forum that adds to the comment function of YouTube. All links from their homepage go directly to YouTube. In 10 days (it launched on May 1st) they gathered 1239 Posts in 118 Topics by 132 Members. Not bad, but I don’t think it’s that useful.

Copy: “Got Greasy Hair? Discover the new Head&Shoulders Citrus Fresh. A cool breeze through your hair.”

“I became a freelance copywriter, after working 4 years at Publicis and 5 years at Germaine. Since a freelance is like a mercenary, I decided to launch myself via E-bay. I’ll work three days for the highest bidder.”

Check it out on eBay

Sometime in the next few weeks, French billboards will be able to speak to your mobile phone – but only with your permission . The IHT reports.

"People with certain kinds of phones who download a special software program and say they want to participate will receive digital advertising – when the phone is near the billboards. [...]

Advertisements most common on mobile phones now are self- promotional text messages sent by phone companies to subscribers. The difference with the new project is that consumers consent to receive alerts about digital advertising as they move through the city"

Kameleon Technologies is taking the lead with the smart tag networks for billboards, cinemas and stores. Visit the site and see the Flash animation for more details about this new trend.

Cross-posted on i-wisdom