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Molly – The Desktop Robot That Turns Your Retweets Into Sweets

Murat — Wed, 01 Feb 2012 01:42:24 +0000

Came across this fun little project that’s looking for funding on Kickstarter.

Molly is a tiny robot that sits on your desk and counts how many times you get retweeted, then once you’ve reached your set number it does some magic and pops out a sweet.

The same company is also trying to fund Olly, another robot which turns your online notifications into smells.

Both these projects are by a team called Foundry at the agency Mint Digital in London.

Great to see this kind of experimentation with physical and online stuff coming out of a agency in London.

Check out the video below:

Which One Of These Advertisements Would Be Better Understood By The Average Consumer?

Murat — Thu, 19 Jan 2012 23:44:41 +0000

Marketers – which one of these billboards do you think would get more responses?

If the point of putting a mobile call-to-action on a advert is to get the consumer to do something with their phone, why is the industry continuing to use a fucking cryptic graphic that less people understand than a URL?

(Updated) The common argument is that mobile users save a handful of seconds by scanning a QR code. Back in 2005 when I first started playing around with the codes, URL’s looked a bit like this:

www.vodafone.com/offers/uk/xsi282$3wudydcjjssover

Now they look a bit like this:

is.gd/goto4

So is that single-digit time saving really worth excluding 69% of UK consumers?

I read a great post by Rachel Beer which pretty much sums up what’s happening right now:

“Yet, as with any new technology, QR codes are merely a means to an end for marketers. They are enablers to big ideas. They aren’t the big ideas themselves. Some brands are merely riding the novelty of QR codes, rather than doing anything interesting with them.”

…and Sean Cummings in the post called “Why the QR Code is failing“:

People will not adopt a technical solution that serves to replace a manual task, if that solution is less efficient than the manual task it replaces. How could we think that QR codes for marketing would work any better than CueCat? Did we not learn the first time?

Even John Gruber weighs in:

QR codes are built for machines, not humans. And they’re ugly.

Please make it stop.

No related posts.

Spare Time Project! The InstaBAM! iPhone App – Find Instagram Photos Around The World

Murat — Thu, 08 Dec 2011 02:08:25 +0000

At the beginning of 2011 the popular photo-sharing network Instagram announced they would be opening up their platform to allow developers to create their own funky applications and tools.

I hooked up with expert dev Brendan (@fraislocht) and got right on the case to create a mobile website called InstaBAM (works on desktop too) which uses the location information attached to photos uploaded on Instagram to enable people to view pictures around where they are standing.

It was a very simple site for a simple concept – ‘View the world around you through the eyes of others’ . We knocked it together one Sunday evening and launched. The site was surprisingly popular and still is to this day, it should pass 60,000 view by the end of the year.

This led to a conversation with my iOS dev homeboy Jonathan about what we could do next. We decided to use some of Brendan’s hard work and quickly create a iPhone App version of InstaBAM.

In May InstaBAM hit the App Store, available to download for free, it was pretty much a replica of the mobile site and after a initial burst of downloads, they dropped heavily and we left the app unloved, languishing in the depths of the store.

I never blogged about the app or told many people because I always knew it needed more work to get it to a point where it could be used regularly.

Towards the end of the summer we decided to give InstaBAM a refresh, add some new features and a whole new design. We’ve both managed to nick a few hours here and there each week and get something out which is pretty interesting tool to explore photos.

All of the credit has to go to both Jonathan and Brendan, two insanely busy developers that are still willing to take time out and stay up late to work on my crackpot ideas.

So if you have a iPhone click the button below (or click here) and download InstaBAM, it’s completely free and you don’t need a Instagram account to browse local photos.

Credit for the photo donation goes to Chris Constantine, photographer and head of design at Sponge.

Amnesia In Ibiza Using BBM For Marketing

Murat — Mon, 26 Sep 2011 00:31:45 +0000

Spotted this in Ibiza this week as I was walking into Amnesia.

Blackberry are sponsoring the club this year and it looks like they’re taking advantage of BBM for news, ticket info and promotions. UPDATE: BBM users can get queue jumps and 1 in every 100 BBM users who show a barcode on their screen scanned gets in for free.

It’s the first time I’ve seen any sort of BBM marketing since I wrote a post on it a while back.

There’s definitely been more interest from clients wanting to use BBM over the last few months, but nothing solid as yet.

It doesn’t help that the BBM API is pretty crap, seems like RIM are a bit clueless when it comes to leveraging the only good thing they have going for them.

Why Is No One Using BBM (Blackberry Messenger) In Mobile Marketing?

Can The Next Instagram/Hipstamatic/Klout/Angry Birds Be Born Within An Agency?

Murat — Tue, 30 Aug 2011 01:15:37 +0000

This is post I’ve been meaning to write for a quite some time now, it’s spawned from a number of conversations I’ve had with people in several digital and mobile agencies around London.

Aside from an odd 14-months at Nokia, I’ve spent all of my professional working life within agencies and it’s always felt like the right fit. The combination of creative and technical minds plus big brands has always had that lure and promise of creating amazing work. The process of getting a bit of paper containing a brief and turning it into a real life experience is pretty great.

So with all the right ingredients, creative juice and technical ability on tap I posed the question - Can The Next Instagram/Hipstamatic/Klout/Angry Birds Be Born Within An Agency?

Actually my question was more like why hasn’t this already happened? Why aren’t more agencies making bets and try to build products and services that would make venture capitalists in Silicon Valley jealous?

I’m not just talking about internal projects that agencies do in spare time (or better still, dedicated time) but for client work too.

In my opinion it comes down to a mixture of two things – clients themselves and agency culture.

The sad truth is that if you’re expecting a client to drop a brief and a lump of cash in your hand that sparks off The Next Big Thing™ then you’ll be waiting a long time. It’s rare to see a ‘big idea’ digital or mobile brief from a client that isn’t suffocated by its own bullshit.

Instead of spending the time to create a 50 page deck containing arrows and buzzwords, why doesn’t the client ever take the time to step back and think ‘Who the fuck is going to do this and why?’

Brands need to realise that the available hours and minutes of the people they are trying to reach are being eaten up by Facebook, IM, Twitter, Foursquare, Angry Birds and browsing the web. What makes them think that people are going to spend time interacting with yet another augmented reality app for any longer than a couple of minutes before getting back to flinging birds and reading tweets?

Adam Glickman makes the fantastic point on Fast Company:

Startups and agencies alike always ask themselves, “What is the problem we’re solving?” If agencies want to think more like tech startups, they might focus less on clever storytelling and more on utility. In today’s media rich, attention-poor world, offering people something of use is the best way to cut through the noise.

Nike’s “Write the Future” and the Old Spice guy were the year’s best ad campaigns. I loved them as much as anyone. But I didn’t spend more than a few minutes with either–I was too busy devoting my spare moments to a relationship with Angry Birds and Foursquare.

I get that not every brief needs to turn into the next Facebook and I totally agree that there’s is nothing wrong with 1 million people using your app once as part of a short-term campaign.

But we can do better surely. How about 1 million people using your app every day? How bout every hour? Year after year?

Do clients and agencies want to keep creating branded fluff or do they want to build temples?

There’s no reason Hipstamatic couldn’t have come from Kodak’s agency. Or a global agency build something like Klout or CoTweet and have brands and rival agencies eating out of their hands paying to use it.

Agencies are just as guilty as clients, we pander too much for their insistence of ‘new’. Too happy to take their cash in return for some bollocks app that might get your client a couple of pats on the back in the boardroom but ultimately will be forgotten by the 5000 people who used it for a week or less.

I keep thinking back to another quote from the article on Fast Company:

Tech startups begin with the big idea, then seek to monetize.
Agencies start with a budget, then seek the big idea.

Two guys on a limited budget can get together and build Instagram, getting 7 million users in less than a year, a couple of guys at Odeo can start a side project called Twitter and become one of the biggest things ever. But at agencies we are consistently unable to turn a app costing 5 or 6 figures into something that can engage people for longer than a campaign (if that).

There are realities of course, I’m no account manager but I know that calling out your client for lack of sense and ambition isn’t the best way to keep people paid and the lights kept on.

So why aren’t more agencies (mobile epecially) creating stuff off their own backs? I know first hand how many amazing ideas get binned in pitches and projects, why not take a punt and prototype one that could benefit the agency (or brand)?

In my personal experience there is a extreme fear of failure and lack of desire to do anything innovative outside of paid client work which stems from the very top of the organisation. There must be 15-20 mobile agencies in London at the moment, how many of them have created apps that were part of side-projects or R&D initiatives?

It’s not like there’s a lack of will. Here’s a little secret – creatives and developers are ITCHING to do cool, innovative stuff and have great ideas every day. Some of these ideas might just be your agencies ticket to new clients, press, talent or revenue.

Try this test – if you’re reading this whilst working in an agency, when was the last time the creative and tech team all got together to launch something fun and interesting outside of client work?

The majority of the time the answer is either ‘a long time ago’ or worst ‘never’.

How are agencies meant to stay relevant and keep staff engaged without exploring technology and ideas in this way?

There are some agencies leading the charge – ustwo (@ustwo) based in Shoreditch have a portfolio filled with a mixture of client work and in-house projects.

They have heavily invested in their own IP and openly talk about the risks they’ve taken, one app called MouthOff has made them £123,456 through sales and licensing to brands, whereas another cost £80,000 of studio time and “utterly bombed”. Did this failure deter them from trying again? Nope! They currently have another big project in the works. Remember that Twitter spawned from the failure of Odeo…

I think I’m slowly finding where I sit within this industry. In the past I use to think that winning a award was the ultimate recognition of great work and aspired to produce campaigns that might get a sniff of a D&AD or Cannes Lion.

But fuck that. I’d rather have users who love and regularly use my app/service than any advertising award out there.

I want to build great products that people love and want to use. I want to solve problems by combining awesome experiences with technology and data.

Can that happen at a agency? Or is the only place for this sort of desire at a start-up or going it alone?

I think Don Draper sums up how I feel in this epic quote:

Son Tells 81 Year-Old Dad That Twitter Is Google, Revealing His Searches To The World

Murat — Wed, 18 May 2011 15:07:10 +0000

“My dad is 81 years old. I’m teaching him how to use the internet. I told him twitter was how to search things on Google. These tweets are what he’s searching.”

Either this is brilliant insight into the online world of a 81 year-old man or someone trying to become the next ‘Shit My Dad Says‘ (along with a book/tv deal).

Lots of banter going on at Twitter right now with people debating whether it’s real or not, either way it’s genius.

diane sawyer swimsuit pictures

May 13, 2011 12:47 am via webReply RetweetFavorite

@oldmansearch

Norman N.

Check it out for yourself here.

Rome Interactive Music Video By Google Is Absolutely Amazing

Murat — Thu, 12 May 2011 21:43:31 +0000

Check out this stunning interactive film/music video by Google showcasing the creative potential of WebGL.

WebGL allows hardware-accelerated 3D graphics in the web browser without any plug-ins. So it means you don’t need Flash, Silverlight or anything else to watch amazing animation.

Creative Director Daniel Ilic explains it best:

“Most of what you see during the experience is not video, it’s real time rendering and visual modeling”

It’s hard to describe how good it is, click here to see for yourself.

Read more about the technology here and even create your own dream (brilliant).

Here’s the making of video:

Interesting Behaviour On Instagram Reveals The Potential Of Hashtags

Murat — Tue, 10 May 2011 03:07:35 +0000

A couple of hours ago I carried out my regular check of the Instagram popular photos page hoping it’ll inspire me to design something decent before I go to bed.

I noticed something odd, several pictures on the page were of people (mostly girls) holding up handwritten signs like the one below:

After checking out the #iamnotfake hashtag, there were nearly 50 pictures of other people doing the same thing. It’s been a few hours since I first checked number is now at 150 with new photos added every few minutes.

The cool thing to note here is how creative everyone is being with their message. Check out the one with the feet!

After digging a bit deeper, I found the source for the hashtag. As you probably guessed it’s the typical MySpace-style “I’m me, I’m real, stop hatin, impersonatin” etc zzz.

I’ve been using hashtags on my Instagram photos for a while and it I never really thought much of it until seeing this. I mostly use pretty generic terms such as #sky, #london, #sunset etc but never considered it could be used to generate and participate in mini-movements.

Whilst 150 people might not seem like much compared to a trending topic on Twitter, the photography makes Instagram’s version much more compelling and engaging. Users are generally quite creative and it’s brilliant to see how one concept can be executed in so many different styles.

I’d love to see how this could be utilised by a brand. Think about how many tired campaigns you see with brands urging customers to do some contrived user generated content like ‘do something funny with our product and take a picture!’ or ‘tell us your best joke!”.

Sod that.

Why not put your UGC idea in a environment where people are already generating great content on a daily basis?

Starbucks and Levi’s have already dipped their toe into Instagram, how long before we see competitions, exclusive content, discounts and offers on the service? The potential of Instagram as a marketing tool is huge.

New Look M-Commerce Site Launched!

Murat — Fri, 06 May 2011 03:02:52 +0000

It gives me great pleasure to announce that one of my last major projects at MIG has finally launched – introducing the New Look M-Commerce site!

It was a huge, exciting project, involving lots of collaboration and hard work (I began drinking coffee for the first time in my life as a result). My role was to lead the UX and visual design.

In the UX process I gained some valuable insights into mobile commerce, having spent some time in the past reviewing data and trends on previous MIG M-Commerce projects such as Marks & Spencers, I had built up a pretty solid understanding of how consumers shop on their phones (and what phones generate the most revenue). Once I added data from New Look it really helped shape many of the design and content decisions.

Retailers are starting to see significant amounts of traffic coming from mobile devices and allocating budget for M-Commerce sites and apps. With the current influx of new mobile shopping sites, two things have always bugged me about the majority of them which I wanted to address when designing the site:

1) Treating every phone the same

You often see a ‘one size fits all’ approach where the same site is served to high-end and low-end devices, with no effort being taken to give devices like the iPhone and Android a enhanced experience.

These high-end phones have capabilities that can create a superior purchase experience and get the user to checkout quicker and easier. You need to treat these guys like your VIP customers.

Whether that’s using HTML5, Ajax or even the Gyroscope, it makes sense to play to their strengths because they’ll make up the majority of mobile traffic (and what’s the point of the user having such a great device if you’re going to treat them like a Nokia N95 user?)

Here’s a couple of examples of how the New Look design adapted to high-end devices and improved the mobile shopping experience by using simple Ajax elements:

Reducing page loads:

Easier browsing:

2) Replicating crap online experiences on mobile

I never understand why retailers take problems with their online shopping sites such as checkout bottle necks, poor performing features, cryptic wording, forced registration before purchase etc and replicate them on mobile. If certain aspects of your site are causing drop off, why move them onto your mobile site? This will only amplify your problems.

In my mind there’s no reason why you shouldn’t attempt to make the mobile site better than the online version. We were lucky to have a client like New Look who were extremely flexible and allowed us to get rid of many of the barriers that existed in their online checkout process. If you really want to increase conversions then it’s more than just porting a online store to a smaller screen.

That’s why I think it will be interesting to see the battle pan out between screen-scraped mobile shopping sites vs ones built using APIs. Most people in the industry have no idea about this fight happening behind the scenes and it’s something I’ll cover in another blog post soon (drop me a line if you have any thoughts).

Anyway, enough from me, try it for yourself!

Head to www.newlook.com on your mobile phone or check my portfolio for more images [/alert-green]

Instabam Gets Updated, New Design, Search Slider Thingy Added

Murat — Sat, 09 Apr 2011 07:54:49 +0000

Me and @fraislocht decided to give Instabam a little update after receiving some positive responses from friends and on Twitter.

One of the problems with the last version is that people in rural areas couldn’t find many pictures within 1000m of their location. We have now added a Jquery slider which increases the distance of the image search up to 5000m.

We’ve also changed the way the pagination to a ‘Load More’ style rather than pages upon pages of photos.

Since the new version went live Instabam is now getting around 300-400 uniques a day, around 70 of those are returning users.

Spurred on by this we have decided to update Instabam with new features each month, here are some things in the pipeline:

Ability to follow users and Like photos
View all photos from a user
Photo sorting options
View photo comments
Separate online interface (you currently get the mobile site if you view in the browser, although it works the same)

This little project has made me realise how much I love doing small, quick, prototypes and messing around with APIs, just for the fun of it.

So try it for yourself! Point your HTML5 friendly mobile browser to www.instabam.com [/alert-green]