As part of Lance Armstrong’s comeback and Livestrong campaign, Nike has created a way for you to get personally involved in the Tour. The robot, known as Chalkbot, prints user submitted messages on the streets of the Tour de France.
If your message is accepted you will receive a picture of the printed message as well as the location so you can figure out when the riders will be passing it. You can submit your message online or via text message to get in on the action!
The crunchiest cereal in the history of cereal, has a new angle they’re using to market their whole grain goodness. I just came across this site, obviously targeted at men, more specifically, middle-aged regular working Joes.
It’s actually pretty cool, and they’ve done a pretty good job making some web videos that are fun, and make you want to eat Grape Nuts (the make me want to them at least). Will this angle work? I haven’t had Grape Nuts in forever, but I’m definitely jonesin’ for a bowl now.
Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the past 6 months (which may not have been a bad idea for some industries; cut overhead at least) you’ve heard of the new social networking website Twitter. Twitter simply asks the question “what are you doing?” and then chronologically tracks status updates.
Many are singing (or tweeting) praises for the simplicity and ease of using twitter to connect with friends, and the proof of the pudding is in the traffic. Twitter has grown to 8 million users in the U.S., doubling in size in the past 4 months!
I’m not completely sold on Twitter just yet. Maybe I’m a cynic, but it seems like an old product in a shiny new wrapper. I could have updated my status on instant messenger, facebook, linkedin, or blogger and it would essentially accomplish the same thing. I could communicate with friends and generate followers just the same on any of these other time-tested services. As Twitter climbs the Top 100 sites I have to ask one question:
Does Twitter revolutionize social networking or it is just 15 minutes of fame in 140 character increments?
Adweek released some previews of the upcoming Super Bowl Sunday commercials. With ads going for upwards of 3 million dollars for a 30 second clip, you be the judge if it was worth it for the big hitters of business.
Two MIT students have created a stock market for sports tickets. The site features a real-time exchange where prices fluctuate just like on the New York Stock Exchange. The idea is that you can buy tickets to the big game, for less than face value, months before the game.
The site is designed for hardcore fans to get tickets to see their team in the big game. However, just like the NYSE there is also a trading aspect to the ticket market. Pretty impressive, right?
Gamblers and underdog (Cubs) fans beware: If your team does not make it, you lose your investment.
…Hyundai first introduced cars here in the US? They were tiny, egg shaped, econo cars that, if I remember correctly, you could get for $5k or $6k. Apparently they’ve come a long way in 15 years or so. They’ve got their new Genesis that they’re advertising, and they’ve got a pretty slick microsite for that model.
I’m pretty impressed. Makes good use of video, some cool pseudo 3D stuff, and… I got there by clicking on a banner ad, so their ads are good too. Pretty nice campaign altogether.
I was just reading a SearchEngineLand article stating that Google has rolled out audio indexing (GAudio) for YouTube videos on the YouTube political channel and will soon roll it out to all YouTube. That’s very exciting stuff, as it presents a great opportunity for companies who publish great content videos to start seeing their videos rank for important keyword phrases, and increases the relevancy of video rankings. It’s a necessary advancement beyond using meta data to rank vidoes.
Granted, it also presents the opportunity for keyword spam in video content, ie “Governor Palin, we need you to mention ‘Maverick’ 3 times in this speech, and put strong emphasis on it once at the beginning.”
