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FOI 2011 Conveyor

Mirco Pasqualini — Mon, 06 Jun 2011 15:29:08 +0000

At an event on 20 and 21 June, the iMagazine and The House of Mouse in collaboration with Frontiers of Interaction 2011 will present the FOI Conveyor. The console will monitor and analyze the account of each guest as well as posted tweets, the degree of everyone’s expectation, the ability to influence the digital community, the volume of their online activity, and other factors (only during the event).

The project is more than just an experiment to see which (if any were still needed) other social networking service like Twitter appears to be the “Nervous system” of the information and opinions of the Net.

Anyone can contribute by clicking on the Twitter tab of each host or quoting #foi11 and the name of the host to feed and change each parameter.
Thanks again to everyone who contributed to this experiment.

FOI Conveyor

NY Subway Interactive String

Mirco Pasqualini — Mon, 31 Jan 2011 23:07:43 +0000

At www.mta.me, Conductor turns the New York subway system into an interactive string instrument. Using the MTA’s actual subway schedule, the piece begins in realtime by spawning trains which departed in the last minute, then continues accelerating through a 24 hour loop. The visuals are based on Massimo Vignelli’s 1972 diagram.

Subway Details

The piece follows some rules. Every minute, it checks for new trains launched from their end stations. The train then moves towards the end of the line, with its speed set by the schedule’s estimated trip duration. Some decisions were made for musical, aesthetic, and technical reasons, such as fading out routes over time, the gradual time acceleration, and limiting the number of concurrent trains. Also, I used the weekday schedule. Some of these limitations result in subtle variations, as different trains are chosen during each 24-hour loop.

Qwiki and the Future of Knowledge Method Search

Mirco Pasqualini — Sat, 08 Jan 2011 16:49:53 +0000

Qwiki’s goal is to forever improve the way people experience information.

Whether you’re planning a vacation using the web, evaluating restaurants on your phone, or helping with homework in front of the family AppleTV, Qwiki is working to deliver information in a format that’s quintessentially human – via storytelling instead of search.

We are the first to turn information into an experience. We believe that just because data is stored by machines doesn’t mean it should be presented as a machine-readable list. Let’s try harder.

Think of asking your favorite teacher about Leonardo Da Vinci, or your most well-traveled friend about Buenos Aires: this is the experience Qwiki will eventually deliver, on demand, wherever you are in the world… on whatever device you’re using.

We’ve all seen science fiction films (or read novels) where computers are able to collect data on behalf of humans, and present the most important details. This is our goal at Qwiki – to advance information technology to the point it acts human.

Currently, Qwiki’s technology has been applied to describe millions of popular topics – but soon we’ll do much more. Our team needs your help in reaching our goal: join our private alpha now to help test Qwiki and shape the future.

Digital under the Xmas Tree: Bing2 & GoogleMap5

Mirco Pasqualini — Thu, 16 Dec 2010 21:11:57 +0000

Microsoft just released — or should we say, Apple just approved — version 2.0 of the Bing search app for iOS devices. In addition to several other new features including integrated in-app checkins to Facebook and Foursquare, Bing now comes packing Streetside, something that first blew us away as Street Slide when it was still in the labs at Microsoft Research. read more

Google’s never been afraid to “blow it out” with Google Maps, most famously with its inclusion of Navigation, which knocked the legs out from under a lot of the GPS device and navigation app market. Google Maps 5.0 for Android might seem similarly earth shattering, but it marks a significant change to the basic technology of Google Maps. Most importantly, Google is now using vector graphics for its maps, which are scalable and much lighter weight than the traditional stitched together images used in most Google Maps incarnations. Read more

Journalism: Strange love… and Buzzing

Mirco Pasqualini — Tue, 30 Nov 2010 15:53:57 +0000

In December 2010 Rupert Murdoch will introduce a new iPad magazine available only on this device. The project called “Daily” will be the first magazine created for the iPad, with a new approach of editorial content strategy and navigation. Rumors have it that Rupert Murdoch is working very closely with Steve Jobs in redefining this market. The investment of $30 million to hire the 100 great journalist will be offer for a weekly subscription at $0.99 payable directly using your iTunes account.

At the same time, Richard Branson (Aka Mr. Virgin) is ready to publish an iPad-specific magazine dubbed Project. The magazine will cover entertainment, travel, business, design, and international culture. It’s hard to tell if these two announcements are somehow related to each other, or if they imply some sort of shift in Apple’s treatment of publications, but either way they do indeed seem to be happening.

Why big players like as these invest in this over populated market ? The reason is sample: Buzz of Breaking News

Buzz of Breaking News

That is probably the evil of the last couple of years of our digital lives. The internet and all the device are over populated with short message, breaking news, alerts, notifications … a huge BUZZ NOISE.

People share and auto-share messages from Twitter to their other accounts like Facebook, LinkedIn and GoogleWave, without any behavior code and/or strategy. Share without logical action is not sign of modern-technology or Web2.0 trend but only a poor method to pollute the information market.

Murdoch, Jobs and Branson understand this, and understand the value of having clear and top quality content to deliver to the network. The key of success of this can be exactly the great opportunity to be a huge stone inside a sea of pebbles.

A Great Example from ABC about Interactive Eco-Systems

Mirco Pasqualini — Sun, 19 Sep 2010 08:25:33 +0000

The provider of TV ratings Nielsen has just found another way to monitor your home – an official ABC app that uses the iPad’s microphone to figure out exactly what you’re watching (whether live or recorded) and offer interactive content on the fly. Pop-Up Video, anyone? Nielsen says the app uses the same audio watermarks embedded in almost every US television show to do its thing (and thus doesn’t, say, record your household conversations) so there’s some serious potential for the concept to spread beyond My Generation, the single show it’s been announced for so far. We’ll just kick back and wait for the responsible parties to figure out we’d rather play interactive Jeopardy than figure out the size of that salacious margarita. Because, like, OMG, right? Video and press release after the break, app available free at our source link.

Facebook Places: Now Marketers Can Track Where You Are

Mirco Pasqualini — Thu, 19 Aug 2010 08:16:38 +0000

At an invite-only press event at the company’s headquarters, Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg unveiled a new service called “Places” that will let users share their location with one another and more easily discover what’s around them from within the social network.

Interesting Experiment of the Social Network Function in Real Life

Mirco Pasqualini — Wed, 18 Aug 2010 15:52:39 +0000

If you’ve been wondering how to seamlessly integrate an experiential event with Facebook, here is how to do it, in real time! Again, the guys over in Israel are doing some amazing work, this time it was an experiential agency called Promarket who created an innovative experiential event for Coca Cola Israel that synced everyone who participated live with their friends on Facebook.

The Coca Cola Village is a special summer experiential event in Israel. In 2010, they decided to run the event through Facebook, with teenagers needing to collect 10 Coca Cola caps each, gather eight friends who did the same and then register online through Facebook to gain exclusive entry. When they got to the Coca Cola Village, they were asked to setup a special wrist band that would securely hold their Facebook login / password to swipe when starting each activity.

Every time you swiped, it instantly updated your status with what you were doing at the event, keeping your friends up to date in real time. Plus, the wrist band also allowed for automatic tagging of all the photos taken at the Coca Cola Village. The event held 650 teenagers a day, and with the seamless Facebook integration, they generated 35,000+ posts every day for the three days, totaling over 100,000 posts for the event!

Explosive Interview with Sly on Expendables

Mirco Pasqualini — Mon, 09 Aug 2010 11:59:52 +0000

This is the latest campaign element for the launch of The Expendables movie, a YouTube takeover that features as an interrupted interview with Sylvester Stallone. While I love YouTube takeovers, I felt a little let down by this one (I’ve got high standards!), but only because they played it a little safe, for such an action packed movie, with so many big name stars (including Arnie!) I thought they could have had more fun with it.

But lets not let that take away from a great campaign piece, it worked well within the interview style and I thought the share piece at the end was a nice touch.

View YouTube page >

Starbucks Social Strategy Keynote

Mirco Pasqualini — Mon, 26 Jul 2010 13:42:15 +0000

A keynote presentation by Alexandra Wheeler (Digital Director of Starbucks) opened the recent Social Media Influence 2010 conference in London. And for those of you who don’t know, Starbucks was the first consumer brand to reach 10 million fans on Facebook… you thought it was Coke right?

Social Media Influence 2010: Alexandra Wheeler, Digital Director, Starbucks (SLIDE)

View more presentations from Social Media Influence.