Corelle China

This plate brand wanted to highlight that their products were 100% chip free but nobody seemed to be believing them so they placed vending machines with the plates for sale in prominent city center locations. There is no better way of highlighting the strengths of the product than this.

Rugby Beer Machine

This beer company was having a tough time getting cut through among rugby fans in a country obsessed with football so they decided to create an innovative way of getting your beer out of the machine. Although it looks fun we are not sure this would get approved over here from a health and safety perspective.

According to AdAge, Amazon is pitching ads on the device’s welcome screen and telling ad agencies execs that they must spend around $600,000 for any package that includes such an ad. The campaigns would run for two months and would also include inventory from Amazon’s “Special Offers” product. For $1 million, advertisers would get more ad inventory and be included in Amazon’s public-relations push, according to two different agency executives.

This isn’t the first time that Amazon has introduced ads on their Kindle range. Other models display full-screen ads that the company calles ‘sponsored screensavers’ when users power down the device. Whether ads on the Kindle Fire will appear in a similar way when the devices are powered on or woken up is unclear.

However, the agencies that have spoken to AdAge had declined Amazon’s offer for several reasons. For one, Amazon isn’t guaranteeing the number of devices that the welcome-screen ads will reach, telling agencies that it hasn’t decided whether the ads will start popping up on devices that have already been purchased or just on new devices.

Also, disrupting the consumer experience is a concern, especially if the ads start showing up on devices that have already been purchased. The idea of turning on your Kindle Fire and finding that ads now appear on your device could upset users who are used to an ad-free experience.

Despite this, the ad pitch is still very much in its infancy and if Amazon decide that the ads will only appear in new devices, they could take a different approach and sell cheaper Kindle Fire devices with ads while leaving the more expensive devices ad-free. The second generation Kindle Fire is expected to be released later this year so it could be a case that we’ll see two similar devices being sold when winter arrives.

Once the car drives past the building, the Fiat begins to follow the car for a few more shots before it mysteriously disappears into thin air. Chances are the car drove into the car park located beside it or took the road to its right. The street view shot changes from one side of the road to the other so it’s possible that the car drove off at this point.

If Fiat’s car was driving past Volkswagen HQ the same time Google did, you could pass it off as coincidence, but the fact that it was parked at the front door (you have to wonder how long it was parked there before anyone at Volkswagen noticed) means that they knew Google’s street view car was going to arrive that day.

Fiat’s Swedish HQ is located 45 minutes away from Volkswagen’s so if it caught wind that Google would be capturing the streets of Södertälje, it wouldn’t have taken too long to take advantage, but Volkswagen will have to live with the fact that Street View has made its HQ a place to show off Fiat’s new model. That is until Google updates its Street View images which it does every year or two years.

[Via Yahoo! news]

Twitter is now launching a number of experimental features on the site with tailored suggestions. Taking place in a number of countries around the world, certain users will be able to see a list of accounts that Twitter will recommend you can follow. The tailored suggestions are based on accounts followed by other Twitter users and visits to websites in the Twitter ecosystem. The reason that Twitter is able to do the latter is because the site receives visit information when sites have integrated Twitter buttons or widgets, similar to what many other social media sites like Facebook and LinkedIn already do.

So by identifying accounts that are frequently followed by those who visit popular sites, Twitter can recommend those accounts to others who have visited those sites within the last ten days.

If you’re the type of person who doesn’t want your Twitter activity to be tracked, you can disable it through the second experimental feature: A personalisation section in account settings. Users will be able to tailor Twitter based on their recent website visits and disable these features, which in turn will stop the collection of information for tailored suggestions.

The director of growth and international at Twitter Othman Laraki wrote on Twitter’s blog that: “Today’s experiment in providing tailored suggestions lets novice users go from zero to pro faster and more easily than ever before…we hope this experiment immediately makes Twitter yours, and you can start getting closer to the things you care about with a few clicks or taps.” The last line hints that this feature will also be extended to Twitter’s official app on iOS and Android devices over time.

Also, Twitter recently announced its support for the Federal Trade Commission’s Do Not Track (DNT) and said that those who have DNT enabled in their browsers will not have any personal information collected and won’t see any tailored suggestion.

As soon as you spot somebody illegally parked in the street, you fire up the app and take a picture of the offender. The app then uses your IP address, taps into a database of license plates and creates an online banner featuring the illegally parked car. The really smart part is that the car is turned into a banner advert that blocks users screens completely and is only shown to people in the local area using their IP address to target them. To remove the offensive banner from the screen, you are requested to share the picture of the car with your social network.

The thinking behind this is absolutely brilliant because it guilts people into thinking about their actions and because the campaign targets such a local area, there’s a very good chance that the offenders will see the ads. Possibly the smartest and best thought out campaign we’ve seen this year.

For a group of young people in Silicon Valley working for Facebook, that is about to happen today and what did they choose to do? Work all night and make their company even better. Facebook gathered all their staff for an all night hackathon to celebrate their upcoming IPO by building new products for the site and it shows the one reason why I would invest in the company for the long term: The culture.

Despite all the praise that has been heaped onto Mark Zuckerberg for being a genius and connecting people all over the world, it is his work on forming a unique culture at the company that impresses me most. See trends come and go, products go out of fashion, markets change, technology improves, but the one thing that makes sure you will be around for a long time is culture.

Google has a great culture. Like it or loath it, Apple has a culture that works. People are totally bought into the vision of the founder and that is what keeps them up working all night and on the one day they should be kicking back with a beer. Mark Zuckerberg has convinced them that they are changing the world and people live for stuff like that far more than they do for money.

I personally wouldn’t invest today because I think the markets are a little wild and the IPO overhyped (I’d still expect the stock to fly today) but I would put my money in to the company over the next 10 years. The culture is in place for them to deliver time and time again and to grow the company in to something special. Culture is about making people love coming in to work rather than dreading it. It’s probably the hardest thing you have to nail as a company and Facebook have it hands down which is why they are around for the long term. You only have to read this quote from one of their engineers said over on his account to see what a unique company it is…

Facebook’s 31st hackathon will kick off from this spot in just a few hours. Thousands of people from across the company will stay up all night long to build brand new Facebook products. Then, at 6:30AM, Mark will open the NASDAQ from this spot and Facebook will begin trading on the public stock markets. What should we work on tonight? What features or fixes would you most like to see in Facebook?

It’s a simple code printed on to the side of a Guinness glass, but the real beauty is that it only works when you fill it up with beer. Not just any beer either because as the creative says if you fill it with a normal larger or any other inferior product, it just won’t scan.

Try and scan it when the glass is empty and it won’t work either. The code itself takes you through to special Guinness content on Facebook and Twitter, giving you the ability to download vouchers and to invite your friends along to the bar where you are at.

Don’t expect QR codes to start taking off in a big way just because of this campaign, but it is refreshing to see a campaign where the product is put at the very center of the marketing. If you want to see how it works have a look at the handy chart that Guinness have produced for you here although we are not sure what Guinness drinking purists here in Ireland will think about this new design.

However, that doesn’t mean that you should focus solely on just the one site. It’s important to broaden your range as you can practically generate leads from anywhere and have at least two or three different sites to help you reach as large an audience as possible.

Unbounce and Bop Design have created a new infographic that shows the strengths of both social media sites. Facebook is the most popular site, but Linkedin is more focused on professional content.

Each site has its own benefits, but one useful piece of information to take away from this is that 41 per cent of B2B companies that use Facebook for marketing has acquired a customer through this channel. While not as high as LinkedIn, it should be enough to make B2B marketers realise that there are benefits to having a presence on Facebook and other sites too.

Now the service has gotten a redesign which makes navigation easier and gives it the look and feel of a magazine app. The first thing you will notice is that the display is a lot more visual. Virtually every news piece on display has an image to accompany it which makes the magazine much easier on the eye. The further you scroll down, the more news items will load up so you’re able to look up at least 50+ articles at any given time.

Also, if you want a more traditional layout, you can customise it so that all news pieces are presented as a list. Each piece is accompanied by a ‘share’ and ‘save’ function, the latter is the handier function as you can quickly gloss through the different articles and bookmark them for reading later.

More importantly, the customisation features available have been tweaked to allow greater input as to what content you want to appear. Following the same principles as the main page, each category is represented by an image and its follower count. Alongside the option of following over 340 different media outlets, you’re also given the choice of following specific topics and industries so that you can keep up with all the latest news in those sectors.

On the LinkedIn blog, Joann Wu writes: “One of the key design principles that drove the approach for the visual change was to simplify the experience; creating an elegant, delightful and customized experience for news consumption.” The style wouldn’t look out of place if it was an iPad app (the mobile apps have gotten a redesign as well with LinkedIn Today given prominence) as the magazine style is reminiscent of the numerous iPad magazine apps out there.

I don’t think this is the start of a bigger decline for Apple but it is interesting to see how many of the Apple fan boys are now quiet despite writing stories about the stock while it was on the up and breaking milestone and record after record. For what it is worth we are fast approaching a great buying opportunity and if the markets continue to trend downwards getting in around the $500 mark in the next couple of months would be good business in the long run given the products coming down the track (iPhone 5 and Apple TV) and the strong numbers Apple continue to post. What do you think? Are we getting back towards a fair valuation or is there plenty of upside left in Apple yet?