Become a Starbucks Barista with FourSquare

The inevitable has happened: Starbucks has teamed up with FourSquare to provide a Barista badge to those customers who check-in to 5 or more Starbucks. At the moment, this doesn't actually get you anything - but Starbucks are saying that they are deciding what to give back to FourSquare Baristas.
FourSquare will also be providing businesses with stats about their customers soon.

Read more:
http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/03/11/starbucks-fans-can-become-a-barista-on-foursquare/

French Connection Run First Chatroulette Competition

Chatroulette has been gripping the online world for the past few weeks. It has a simple style and concept, Chatroulette randomly connects users from around the world, enabling them to communicate using webcam, text and images. It’s been received with mixed reviews; “surreal”, “addictive”, “voyeuristic”, “explicit”, “a great trip around the world”.

Some may loathe it some may love it but either way, once you try it you’re pretty addicted and guaranteed to waste away a good while.

French Connection is the first brand to pick up and try to harness the craze by running a competition using the controversial site.

They’ve set up a challenge on the Mens Blog to set up a real date with a girl they’ve found on the site. The first one to do so, and prove it, will receive £250 to spend at French Connection.

I’m interested to see how successful this will be…You have 2.9 seconds to make a good first impression on chatroulette. In the interests of research we conducted an hour long experiment, clicking through to about 30 people. Here are the results:

naked men grabbing there crotch = 18

men with their penis out = 10

couples having sex = 1

Girl with breasts out = 1

Women or girls actually chatting normally = 0

We did see a couple of girls in the hour one quickly clicked away, the other just wanted to show us her packet of cigarettes and type random words.

Will girls online really agree to a date with a random stranger? Are there that many girls on chatroulette? Either way it’s definitely given French Connection a PR boost

The Guardian – Online Voyeurs flock to the random thrills of Chatroulette

New Media Age - French Connection runs competition on controversial site Chatroulette

Crowdsourcing aka Cocreation

As was mentioned in this blog's Thoughts and Predictions for 2010, crowdsourcing (or cocreation as it is also known) is increasingly being used in everything from helping in the case of the Haitian disaster to a new platform, Grogger for crowdsourcing contents for your blog. Pepsi is even using crowdsourcing in place of ads at this year's Super Bowl with their Refresh Everything initiative.

So it looks like crowdsourcing is becoming a popular trend. Why are so many people using it? Well advantages include the fact that you are getting all your design work and customer research done for free. Pepsi's prizes of $250,000 might sound like a lot, but they are a drop in the ocean compared to the budgets that an advertising campaign might usually have for the campaign design and research. (Although it could be claimed that the Refresh Everything campaign is itself a campaign and any cost saved used crowdsourcing would be have been made up for with the development of this campaign.)
A crowdsourced idea is going to be popular with the public by its very definition - well they did choose it. This should mean that the campaign or idea will have a head-start when it does go live. Also any target audience research will be minimal, although it shouldn't be assumed that everyone has taken part in the campaign - remember it could have just been the digital geeks who took part in the campaign and then you'll have a product aimed at digital geeks - most of whom will already know about the campaign.

It looks like brands are embracing the idea of getting the public to do the work for them and it's going to be popular for a while. Will we start to see film posters designed by the public? What about ads or trailers? Or entire outdoor campaigns? We'll have to wait and see how far this is taken.

http://www.nma.co.uk/news/unilever-to-use-social-media-to-aid-product-development/3010319.article

EDIT:
Crowdsourcing is even being used to find the next bestseller!
http://springwise.com/weekly/2010-03-03.htm#tenpages

Augmented Reality – Is it all just a gimmick?

I’ve been addicted to augmented reality for months now and following the developments closely. It’s definitely got the wow factor but every now and again I have to bring myself back to earth and ask – What is the point? Is it all just a gimmick?

At the moment, the technology is being developed quickly, and I can’t help but feel people are getting carried away with what they can do rather than how can this be useful. There are a few shining examples out there where augmented reality has been used because it’s useful not just for the sake of augmented reality.

USPS developed a postage pricing system, this was one of the first AR apps I saw that had more to it than just holding a marker up and watching animation.
When you’re not sure how much your packet should cost to post. You can use this virtual box simulator to check if it fits in the boxes they ship. It still remains top of my list of AR applications due to how useful this is.

Zugara’s Online Shopping Augmented Dressing Room hit my shopaholic gene.
According to this video 3.57% of visitors to online retail sites make a purchase, could virtually trying clothing on help to boost this percentage? Will the clothes really look like they do on screen? We’ll have to wait for a retailer to adopt this and see just how successful it really is. Not knowing how something will look definitely effects my online purchasing decisions. The really nice part of this is that you can control the application and buy the items through hand gestures.

In a similar try before you buy vein, Ray Ban created the virtual mirror but as soon as you ask a user to download a desktop application, as you’ll see in these stats you’re drastically reducing the number of people willing to interact with your app to somewhere between 35 and 60%.

Of course sometimes the point needs to be just to have fun and be entertained but I think it’s still important here that it’s in a way that we couldn’t before AR.
Animated Lego, AR drumkits, AR magic and Rock Paper Scissor T-Shirts are brilliant examples of this.

Mobile AR applications are also plentiful, while ‘thankfully’ we’re not quite at the stages of Nude It there is a lot of progress been made for the iPhone and other mobile platforms, with apps such as Nearest Tube and Junaio allowing you to interact and discover information about your environment. To browsers like Layar and Wikitude, allowing you to augment your reality with a variety of different types of information that you need. But none of these are an integrated part of our every day life and of course pose hazards; I don’t want to step in dog poo just because I’m staring at my phone walking towards the nearest bar.
Finally of course there are some great looking AR games out there, and using your trainers as a game controller, not the ones you ruined earlier. Is a really nice idea.

Lots of big brands have used Augmented Reality recently to market products, films or their brand. We’ve seen examples from Transformers, Oasis (Rubberduckzilla), Adidas. But how successful were they? How many users have interacted with their content? And bought the product, seen the movie, talked about the brand as a result? This all comes down to does your audience understand AR? Are the only people excited about this and using it AR geeks like us? How many people have a webcam? Or a machine powerful enough to run intensive flash? These are all questions that I’m waiting eagerly to hear the answer to, all of which will answer my opening question, is it all just a gimmick?

FdF