With over three billion mobile phones in use globally, the mobile space is three times as large as television and twice as large as PCs and it is the most personal device.

Success in mobile marketing will require that marketers think differently. It is not a web experience that we transfer into a mobile neither another digital channel we push content to.

To be right, we will have to offer useful information, tools and services at the right moment and in the right place to enrich lives, better enable consumers to make decisions and help them to save time and money.

Nokia recently announced the winners in the annual 'Mobile Rules!' competition, the world's leading awards for innovative mobile business plans and cutting-edge applications, services and technologies from developers and entrepreneurs from around the globe.

For me, a very good overview of the mobile space today. One of my favourite is NiiMee, a package of projects developed in Python that exploits the accelerometer present in some high-end mobile phones.



With NiiMe you can move the mouse, drive a car using the phone as a steering wheel, play drums in the air, play Mario Bros and more games with the phone in the trouser pocket, and soon much more. There are a lot of funny and useful projects under development.

Uniqlo UT find its unique way again to promote their latest series of tshirts. I couldn't resist to post the widget.

For the fans of Soulwax, I was yesterday at the film premiere of Part of the Weekend Never Dies at the Royal Festival Hall in London. The editing was amazing and the sound will probably give me energy for the whole weekend.

Pangea Day taps the power of film to strengthen tolerance and compassion while uniting millions of people to build a better future.

In a world where people are often divided by borders, difference, and conflict, it's easy to lose sight of what we all have in common. Pangea Day seeks to overcome that - to help people see themselves in others - through the power of film.

On May 10, 2008 - Pangea Day - sites in Cairo, Kigali, London, Los Angeles, Mumbai and Rio de Janeiro will be linked live to produce a program of powerful films, visionary speakers, and uplifting music.



The program will be broadcast live to the world through the Internet, television, digital cinemas, and mobile phones.

Of course, movies alone can't change the world. But the people who watch them can. So following May 10, 2008, Pangea Day organizers will facilitate community-building activities around the world by connecting inspired viewers with numerous organizations which are already doing groundbreaking work.

More on Pangeaday.org

It is not a new trend but it is still largely untapped and misunderstood by organizations and I thought it was a great talk with nice stories. Then, as I'm too busy to blog these days, I thought it was an easy option too. The rise of the amateur professional is a casual talk from Charles Leadbeater that weaves a tight argument that innovation isn't just for professionals anymore. Passionate amateurs, using new tools, are creating products and paradigms that companies can't. He describes the rising role of serious amateurs ("Pro-Ams," as he calls them) through the story of the mountain bike.

I guess it will be one of the best crowdsourced projects of 2008.

As a fan of Daft Punk, I was disappointed when they confirmed that there will be no official Alive 2007 DVD. I bought the tracks on iTunes but no videos were included. On the other hand, you had thousands of small mobile video extracts taken from the concert that you could find on Youtube.

Mathieu decided to use this legion of fans and these thousands of extracts to create a fan DVD. “The World Is Daft” is to be a full length film of the Bercy, Paris homecoming gig. This is the same performance where they recorded the show for the Alive 2007 CD. The editors are piecing together bits of fan mobile filmed footage to create a seamless film of the entire performance including the glow in the dark encore that we all love. The footage is synced to the live audio recording to ensure proper sound quality.



This is totaly unofficial. The final goal of this project is to create an unofficial DVD, viewable and downloadable for free, of the Paris Bercy live show the Daft Punk produced on June the 14th 2007. At anytime, if the Daft Punk wants to stop this project, it will be stopped, no questions asked, no regrets. It is only the gift of a Fan, with the Fans and for the Daft Punk. Mathieu collected about 15 GB of good videos from many fans.

Thanks to my mother who sent me the info.

It's Friday and at the end of the week, let's forget about business... For those who didn't hear about it, I wanted to show Absolut machines. “In early 2008 Absolut are launching a project that explores what happens when cutting-edge technology meets the creativity of art, music and design. To emphasize its deep commitment to the subject, Absolut turned to some of the greatest technology visionary teams of our time, and asked them to create the Absolut machines.



The result is two artificially creative and highly interactive music-making machines, as visually stunning as they are technologically pioneering”.

ABSOLUT QUARTET

“Created by Dan Paluska and Jeff Lieberman, the main component is a marimba played by an array of rubber balls shot by robotic cannons. Imagine the visual effect of balls flying almost six feet in the air before hitting the marimba keys with perfect precision. When a chord is played, several balls will be launched simultaneously. As they pass the top of their trajectory, their brief pause highlights the imminent notes.



The second timbre is based on “the finger on the wine glass trick”. The series of glasses, turned to various pitches, are all spinning at the same time - and they are played by small “robotic fingers”. The “Wino” will be able to play almost 40 notes at a time. The final sound source will be an array of robotic percussive instruments.

The mechanical movement of the machine will be obvious, but the cutting-edge technology, or the brain of the machine, is hidden. The degree of artificial intelligence will make the machine be perceived as highly creative, responding differently depending on the input it receives from its users”.

ABSOLUT CHOIR

“Created by Swedish studio Teenage Engineering, it looks and sounds like no choir you are likely to have ever experienced before. In setting up an advanced framework of speech synthesizers, Teenage Engineering has created a multi-channel robotic choir, comprising of 10 singing characters in various shapes and sizes.



The Absolut Choir is an architectural installation, showcasing the unmistakable design talent of Teenage Engineering. It consists of 10 colorful wooden characters - varying in size and styles with the smallest being four inches and the largest almost eight feet tall. There are men, women, tenors and sopranos in the Absolut Choir, each member with a unique and synthetically produced voice. The mother character holds a master clock - and each character contains a small, embedded Linux device, a DA converter and a speaker, making it possible to distribute sounds and to virtually conduct the members of the choir.”

I'm fighting in the agency world to demonstrate that technology can be creative too. Here is I think a good example. If you go visit the site, I also recommend you to go through all the content they have around the project itself. I'd love to see that at This Happened...

Jonathan Rosenberg, SVP of Product Management at Google

Yesterday I was at This Happened with a couple of creative technologists. If I’m going to a lot of conferences in London, I haven’t been enjoying a conference like this one for a while. I can’t really tell where it comes from yet but I guess it is the fact that they focus on stories behind projects that did happen and as it is interaction design projects, the audience tends to include more different backgrounds (architect, designer, developer, artist…).

As they say, “having ideas is easier than making them happen. We delve into projects that exist today, how their concepts and production process can help inform future work.” It’s funny how we often come back to the same problem of the agency world. We speak too much and don’t experiment enough. As a result we limit our creativity. I guess it is probably why we see more and more “agencies” with different approaches and broader skills.


Credit: This Happened

Anyway, let’s get back to the conference. I really liked the animal superpowers project and here is their pitch: "Animals have senses beyond human experience and curiosity and exploration is one of the major desires of children. How would kids feel if they could transform themselves to the same eye-level as adults or can you even create an experience of being tiny, even as small as an ant."

This is their series of toys transforming the self and extending and enhancing our sensory range:

• Ant - feeling 50x smaller
• Bird - creates a new relationship the environment
• Giraffe - child to adult converter

Credit: Kenichi Okada

New animals will be created so stay tuned. Then, even though it was not digital I really liked Snug & Outdoor. They are artists who design innovative, imaginative and modular playgrounds. Hattie Coppard discussed how modular environments allowed children to create their own dynamic play landscapes. I thought it was very insightful to understand the power of modular spaces and how they affect behaviors.

You can also check other presentations on this happened archives. Thanks you to the This Happened team. It was great talks, good ambiance in a nice venue. What else can you ask for?

The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) opened its “Design and the Elastic Mind” exhibit, which explores the relationship between scientific breakthroughs and design. Their introduction states that "In the past few decades, individuals have experienced dramatic changes in some of the most established dimensions of human life: time, space, matter, and individuality. Working across several time zones, traveling with relative ease between satellite maps and nanoscale images, gleefully drowning in information, acting fast in order to preserve some slow downtime, people cope daily with dozens of changes in scale. Minds adapt and acquire enough elasticity to be able to synthesize such abundance.



One of design's most fundamental tasks is to stand between revolutions and life, and to help people deal with change. Designers have coped with these displacements by contributing thoughtful concepts that can provide guidance and ease as science and technology evolve. Several of them—the Mosaic graphic user's interface for the Internet, for instance—have truly changed the world. Design and the Elastic Mind is a survey of the latest developments in the field. It focuses on designers' ability to grasp momentous changes in technology, science, and social mores, changes that will demand or reflect major adjustments in human behavior, and convert them into objects and systems that people understand and use.

The exhibition will highlight examples of successful translation of disruptive innovation, examples based on ongoing research, as well as reflections on the future responsibilities of design. Of particular interest will be the exploration of the relationship between design and science and the approach to scale. The exhibition will include objects, projects, and concepts offered by teams of designers, scientists, and engineers from all over the world, ranging from the nanoscale to the cosmological scale. The objects range from nanodevices to vehicles, from appliances to interfaces, and from pragmatic solutions for everyday use to provocative ideas meant to influence our future choices. The exhibition will be accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue."

If you can't go to NYC, you can still check the online exhibition.

During my world tour, I’ve been lucky enough to meet some VCs to speak about their new landscape and get their views on how marketers, entrepreneurs and VCs could work closer together to create better marketing (not just communication) ideas. It was also the purpose of my last paper: Will agencies be at the centre of the new venture capital landscape?



I’m therefore interested in the recent initiative that Havas is initiating. According to Adweek: Havas media lab is a research and development unit to partner with clients and start-ups to find new ad models.

Umair Haque will lead the Havas Media Lab, which has a charter to develop experiments with venture capitalists, start-ups and clients to find new ways of reach consumers in digital channels.

The effort is the latest in a string of efforts by ad holding companies to establish separate units to determine the future of digital media. The Interpublic Group set up a Futures Marketing Group, which houses its IPG Emerging Media Lab. WPP Group has WPP Digital, which handles its investments in emerging media companies like Spot Runner, Jumptap and others. Publicis Groupe has Denuo, a new-media consultancy that advises start-ups on ad models in exchange for equity positions in them.

Haque, an economist by training and author the blog Bubblegeneration, said the Havas effort would differ from other holding companies' initiatives by focusing on experimentation. He points out that the ad industry is peculiar in that it spends relatively little on research and development.

"We all have a deeply felt interest in reinventing media, marketing and brand," Haque wrote this week on his blog "The Lab happened because I don't think any of the standard models -- venture funds, corporates, firms, etc. -- can really make it happen."

You might also want to have a look to the last Forrester report, the connected agency. The report says that today's agencies fail to help marketers engage with consumers, who as a result are becoming less brand loyal and more trusting of each other. To turn the tide, marketers will move to the connected agency: one that shifts from making messages to nurturing consumer connections; from delivering push to creating pull interactions; and from orchestrating campaigns to facilitating conversations. Over the next five years, traditional agencies will make this shift, starting by connecting with consumer communities, to eventually actually becoming an integral part of them.

By the way, I’ll be going to Minibar on Friday so if you are working in a VC firm, I’d love to chat with you about these topics and exchange opinions.

TED recently published a presentation from Howard Rheingold called "Way-New Collaboration". He talks about the coming world of collaboration, participatory media and collective action and how Wikipedia is really an outgrowth of our natural human instinct to work as a group. As he points out, humans have been banding together to work collectively since our days of hunting mastodons. He connects his story with social dilemma’s like Prisoners Dilemma and Tragedy of the Commons.



As a bonus, you can read the interview of Mozilla's Mitchell Baker about open-source innovation. The company’s chairman and former CEO explains the power of the participatory, open-source model of collaboration.

I usually don't use my blog to speak about my company’s work. I’ll do an exception this time as this project has been a huge part of Tribal London's work and worth being known.



I remember back in October 2006, I had my interview with Matt Dyke and Chris Wood to work at Tribal DDB and more precisely on the Volkswagen project. I’ve been lucky to work with very talented people and learn a lot in many ways. When the project kicked off, I remember this little room full of drawings, pictures, screenshots, matrix and mission statement. It was a great experience and a real team work.

Today it's live and I'm very proud of the work that the team has accomplished and would like to congratulate them for this huge piece of work. As it's always hard to speak about something you've worked on, here is the press release. Then, I would be happy to get feedbacks.

Volkswagen.co.uk, A New Age of Marketing Cars Online

Today, Tribal launches the brand new site for Volkswagen.co.uk, providing customers with the most life-like experience of sitting in and walking round a new car without having to leave the comfort of their own homes.



The launch of this site is the fruition of 18 months’ work by a dedicated full-time team of 50, and is one of the biggest website projects currently being worked on in London.

Teams across creative, design, account management, technical and Flex have built this site from scratch in response to demand from consumers and the increasing importance of the internet in relation to how people now reach key buying decisions when searching for a car.

Tom Roberts, the Volkswagen site Account Director at Tribal, comments: “Buying a new car can be a confusing process. Using clean white space and featuring the most progressive car configurator currently available online, we built this site to be the most simple yet most comprehensive, intuitive and engaging experience in this market.”



The highly sophisticated car configurator features 3D models of the Volkswagen range. Additionally, every option that visually changes the appearance of each model has been included. As such, visitors can see first hand how changing and including additional options will enhance the car of their choice.

In the near future, visitors to the site will also be able to book test drives, in real time, by directly accessing retailers’ booking systems. They will be able to see which models are available at a specific time and retailer, and reserve a time slot on line.

Volkswagen’s Relationship Marketing Manager, Marianne Nicholas, explains: “Our research shows that people looking for a new car now do the majority of their research on the internet, with visits to showrooms more than halved, down from five to two on average.



“The challenge for us was to respond to this change and ensure our website is equipped to give buyers and owners the information they need at the touch of a button. The old site has seen a massive rise in visits over the past three years – up from 500,000 in November 2004 to 1.4 million in November 2007, which clearly indicates the importance of the web in a customer’s buying process. Our new site offers the most realistic experience on the web of what it’s like to sit in and walk around a Volkswagen car – it’s a richer, more responsive experience and heralds a new approach in the web’s role in selling cars.”

Key site facts:

• This site is the result of 18 months’ work with a dedicated team of 50 people
• It is one of the largest websites to be built in Flex, providing a richer experience – in fact, the 15 strong Flex team hired by Tribal to build this site is thought to be one of the largest and most advanced Flex teams in the world
• The site uses dynamic feedback, which allows car buyers to search and modify their preferred car in ‘real time’, which is more responsive and provides a much richer customer experience
• It will allow people to book test drives directly on line
• Taking into consideration all the different options customers can configure their car with, the site offers well over one million different combinations of Volkswagen

For more information please contact
Anna Vickerstaff
Head of Marketing
Tel: 020 7258 4654
Email: anna@tribalddb.co.uk

I've just arrived in San Francisco this morning. It is the last stop of a fantastic experience that have changed my perspectives and here is a picture that could represent how I'm feeling right now.

That's it, I'm leaving for my trip around the world. I leave you with this map where I'll try to post some pictures from my Flickr set and comments on the go. Happy holidays to all of you and see you next year.


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