Introduction

Welcome to the fourth edition of the Vizeum digital newsletter.

This month China embraces a new revolution, RFID tag tracking creates some ethical concerns and Derek goes on a rampage in a field for Glastonbury, presumably not wearing Nike+ trainers...

Inspiration #1:

Virtual China:
As Russia declares cyber war on Estonia, China joins the Internet revolution. Housing the second largest broadband community in the world (150m users) and set to overtake the US into the number 1 slot by the end of the year, 2007 has seen a flurry of companies launch into this potentially lucrative marketplace.

Google launched a censored version at the start of 2006, to the dismay of proponents of free speech. Myspace launched a Chinese service, licencing it’s technology to a Chinese company to manage the service locally, with Rupert Murdoch’s Chinese born wife, 1 of the 3 news corp board members.

Social networking is still yet to take off fully in China, hosting 200-300 existing sites. Despite that companies are rushing to launch second life equivalents. Shanda Interactive Entertainment and HiPiHi are developing and testing Chinese versions of the Virtual world. Both companies, however, have been given until mid-jul to install software limiting the amount of time young players can spend online.

Inspiration #2:

Critical measures:
May saw Pandora shut it’s doors to any users sneakily accessing it’s radio service from outside the US; CDWOW being ordered to pay £41m to the British Phonographic Industry for breaching it’s 2004 agreement to stop importing CD’s from Hong Kong and Last.fm being snapped up by CBS for £141m.

The next wave of music applications have hit our PC’s, putting the user firmly in control of their entertainment escapades.

Gigs:
-last.fm launch their events service, recommending gigs according to the music you’ve ‘scrobbled’ and similar artists
- manually upload the artists you’d like to follow onto Tourfilter and receive an email of any upcoming gigs
- or search your music library automatically with Tourbus; Sonicliving or iconcertcal to track events from the bands you’re listening to

Too lazy to create your own playlists, let The Filter do it for you

In a market where reviews are still crucial at making or breaking a release, Critical measures aggregates album reviews from multiple sources and ranks according to their ratings to create the ultimate chart.. Add in a community based element and allow to sort by musical type and similar artists and consumers have the ultimate in exploratory tools.

Innovation #1:

Care in the Community…:
May saw the UK exam board announce their intention to use RFID (radio-frequency identification) technology to counteract cheating to track bundles of exam papers. The tags will keep a record of how many papers are in each bundle and enable them to track them down if they go missing.

There’s been discussion for several months about using RFID tags to track the elderly, hold important medical information and monitor that they’re taking their medication. Raising questions about it’s ethicalness.

More recently, a care home in Florida has been criticised for it’s intention to implant RFID tags onto Alzheimer’s sufferers, calling into question the ethics of implanting individuals who aren’t able to consent to the procedure or implications.

Visit wikipedia to find out more about RFID technology, it’s current uses (oyster cards, mini customer loyalty campaigns in the US and passports) and potential uses.

Innovation #2:

What are you doing?:
Social networking has long been an accepted part of Internet user’s lives as increasingly use to live their lives very publicly online and manage their social communities. Facebook’s exponential growth over the past couple months has shown that the nosey neighbour isn’t dead and in actual fact more virulent than ever in this digital age

In May everybody who wasn’t busy looking at what their friend’s were up to in facebook were seeing what their friends or indeed total strangers were up to in twitter, or putting twitter widgets into their facebook.

Update via web or mobile to let your friends now exactly what you’re up to at all times, or visit a google maps mash-up, twittervision to see what people are doing around the globe.

Creativity #1:

Nike+:
Using an obvious consumer insight, that people listen to their ipods whilst running, Nike have developed a global consumer proposition enabling runners to track the distance, pace, calories and time of their runs, users are able to revisit the information for each run and set it against goals and challenges. With a pair of nike+ ready trainers, a nike+ ipod sport kit and an ipod nano, the user can base their run against a number of criteria, set the playlist to run to and start running.

The community features allow groups to be created where runners challenge each other and track progress; a global aggregation of the total distance run by all users and recommended routes by postcode, city or state.

The community of runners have voted the ultimate work list playlist; there are coaching audio files for various types of training activities and now they’re commissioning bespoke tracks from top artists like LCD soundsystem to fully connect up all the points.
If only they could also run it for me…

Creativity #2:

Where’s Derek?:
Orange find an interesting and innovative way to promote their Glastonbury credentials and subsequent content, through a game of spot the bull.

Every day over 4 weeks, users can go and guess which grid Derek the bull will end up at by 3 pm. His coordinates are taken from the GPS tracker on his collar and the person guessing the correct grid square wins the tickets!

This is an interesting expansion of their entertainment content for younger audiences as they start to truly integrate their mobile and broadband content and develop more interested propositions for their audience.

Just For Fun:

Own your own football club:
First there were open source collaborative projects for film and books, now you can own your own part of a football club and be part of the decision making process.