Nitmesh

Tim Royes

Rest in Peace and Dance in Paradise.

25th December 1964 - 13th August 2007

Games, Education and Branding

The Perfect Educational Storm?
How do we educate through the use of new technology, making it fun in the process and generating brand awareness? Games. Is this even ethical as it no doubt would be aimed at an impressionable age?

One example is the game of tetris which has been transposed into American States and another version using European countries. Is this an educational tool? Would children learn where nation states were and what and where their capital cities were? Is it right that a travel company, airline or even a map company subtly brand the game?

In New Zealand they have taken it a step further. The advertising agency Rivet has developed a mini version of the game sim city called electrocity where you build a little city of a grid and manage it’s power and environmental needs. Watch the explanation web video here. This game is subtly branded by an electricity company. It was seeded out through primary school teachers into classroooms using it as a teaching aid and it has spread beyond the classroom and been a huge success. Is this a glimpse of the future? An educational system that is sponsored by business branding? Here's the game itself.

Onoffing - Onoff(line) Experiences

This, I think is a taste of how we will mesh online and offline shopping and lead to all other meshing  'onoff' 'experiences' in the very near future. There's google earth but here's the newest user-friendly example upnext.com. We sign up, we see NYC as a 3D map with a built in search engine to guide you to anything you want in the city. You could and will take it so much further making a much deeper, more satisfying experience, leading to a detailed virtual 3D interpretation of a street or mall of shops.

Onoff Shopping or Onoffing?
Through a search engine (say google) you will be able to see every shop that sells a product and list of instore prices rising above the location. You would then virtually walk, I mean fly or zoom instantly around that street, mall, shopping district, whole city, having a choice then of going into any of the 3D 'onoff' stores to browse it or look at a particular product. You will be able to search within the store through the store's online site's search engine. You'll have access to consumer reviews (just look at this emarketer blog piece about the boost in web sales alone from consumer reviews) and this precis sums it all up from the church of the customer blog and here at the idea city blog piece too and of course you'll have access to professional and UGC video of the product too. You will be able to check the product is in stock, order it or reserve it and obviously buy there and then physically going to the store to pick it up.

All relevant useful information will be easily accessed, opening and closing times, directions, their blog, comments, you could write an instore email for queries, even live chat through skype to IM or speak to someone instore (call centre) from one widget. Making life quick and easy for the consumer, so speeding and simplifying our time constrained lives, all visually here, (IBM's Head of Strategy explains) all with a multi-faceted purpose and an ultimate resolution, not quite like Second Life.

Although you can easily buy anything online, people mostly like the shopping experience (It depends on the gender), but it's a day out and ultimately we all want to feel and touch a product before we buy. Especially clothes or shoes so it makes sense that we would want to save time and efficently organize our lives to try, buy and making more time for pleasure. You could plan a whole shopping trip through a virtual 3D map with the options to give you the chance to plan your route around the street, the stores and district, keep a running cost of all the products you would like to buy (live prices?), up to date travel information, parking costs and restrictions, suggestions of where to eat, being able to make restaurant or cinema reservations too, all with reminders (know when a store is about to sell out while you're in the area - a kind of RSS alarm or a tweet?) and all linked and manipulated through your mobile.

Mobiles will seemlessly mesh our offline and online lives. Where accessing any information will give you all the extra linking tools mentioned above to enhance all our buying or all our offline 'experiences', so seeing trends; what others are doing and buying like thisnext.com twitter/flickrvision like site - or through GPS, so the whole process becomes a fun, pleasurable (and nosey, like Facebook or med.ium) experience that will bring us back again and again, generating the effect of a sticky (branded?) utility. This will lead to as yet unimaginable 'onoff' tools. Any ideas?

via the great PSFK trend blog.

Sound Football

This is Aleksei R. Stevens' Soundball and it's no ordinary soccer ball. 'It's embedded with a motion sensor that can detect being thrown, hit, kicked, and spun, then via Bluetooth sends the info to a computer that plays sounds and music that correspond to its movements. Stevens is a New York-based musician and teacher; the video below was shot at Sony Wonder Labs in NYC.' PSFK

Word of Mouth Slideshare

This is a slideshare  of all there is to know about Word of Mouth from Sean Moffitt's Buzz Canuck blog. Sean Moffit is a WOM specialist and runs Agent Wildfire and he calls this the WOM cheap sheet 'also known as the 167 facts and stats about word of mouth that make you go hmmm and other facets of the conversation economy'.

The City Wall - The web video

Live Earth Animation

Did you know 2.0?

A thought provoking web video. As I say to all, what's going on in the world of online you just can't educate for, it's a world of self discovery and self education. This gives you some idea of how our world is changing and how fast. via crackunit. This is an official update to the original "Shift Happens" video from Karl Fisch and Scott McLeod, this June 2007 update includes new and updated statistics, thought-provoking questions and a fresh design. For more information or to join the conversation, go and visit shifthappens.

Simple, funny, great piece of TV advertising

 

Find more videos like this on AdGabber

Real 3D Video

It's coming, 3D video. Concerts, trade shows, our living rooms?