NTT Docomo from February 28th has released "Minna No Engei Hiroba TM" (Everyone's Gardening Plaza), a social network service for enjoying home gardening.
"Everyone's Gardening Plaza" is a new SNS for gardening enthusiasts, who can record a daily cultivation log while raising plants, connect with peers, and share information. By entering the type of plant or the cultivation starting date, explanations about essential thinning, fertilizing, and other such tasks are sent by mail at appropriate times. In addition, you connect with other users raising the same plants and reference skillful gardeners' methods, and since you can give each other advice when you run into trouble, beginner gardeners can tend their greenery in a carefree spirit.
Also, from April 1st (scheduled), a paid membership service will be implemented, for a monthly fee of 157 Yen (incl. tax), allowing users to receive cultivation advice from a horticultural specialist advisor.
The Walgreens mobile app lets customers scan their mobile devices at the register to earn points and redeem awards without the need to carry a physical card.
The app allows us to integrate Balance Rewards with other great mobile features, including in-store aisle maps so you can find the school supply or Band-Aid you need, and photo print services so you can send your pictures direct from a mobile device to our store for copies.
LoyalBlocks, customers sign up through the app with their favorite stores that participate with the program. When they visit the store, the app communicates with the merchant's tablet, which automatically checks the customer in and sends them token rewards and deals.
Twitter + Instagram for tweens.
[Users] either insert their own text or choose from a library of celebrity quotes from the likes of Adele and Effie Trinket of "The Hunger Games."
Mr. Broyles noted that he built the feature that lets users pick out quotes after noticing that many young users had a tendency to replace the filler text he used when delivering a new theme with "Bored" and other brief phrases.
"When you're a 12-year-old, what do you really have to say?"
"While at least Life-magazine-killer TV has served as a platform for the creation of some great artworks (HBO's "The Wire," created by newspaperman-turned-TV-auteur David Simon, comes to mind) and inspired the creation of new art forms (see the upcoming Smithsonian retrospective of the work of "father of video art" Nam June Paik), it's hard to imagine what of lasting value hot web-native media brands like Gawker and BuzzFeed are contributing to visual culture and art history.
Which brings me to an email I got last Wednesday from Gawker promoting its "top story" of Dec. 5., titled "The 13 Most Powerful Images of Naked Celebrities of 2012," which quickly racked up more than a million page views. It was a sequel to a Gawker post from the previous day titled "The 19 Most Powerful Images of 2012," which was mostly a shameless, edited-down rip-off of a BuzzFeed post titled "The 45 Most Powerful Images Of 2012," consisting of intense wire-service photojournalism from Reuters, the AP, Getty and others, which derive most of their support from old-school print-centric publications around the world. Gawker's excuse for its act of, uh, curation: "Who has time to scroll through 45 pictures?""
"Sam Glassenberg, CEO of Funtactix, which develops social games for major motion pictures like The Hunger Games, said the in-game ad market presents both huge opportunities and new risks for brands and agencies. He cited statistics from NPD and said that there are almost 200 million online gamers out there who play games for an average of 13 hours a week. Yet, the majority of ad spend still goes to TV or banner ads and only a fraction to games, he noted. "How are we going to close that gap?" he asked.
The discussion was organized by SponsorPay, a Berlin-based engagement advertising company whose application rewards users that watch an ad with virtual currency and other goodies. SponsorPay is one of a handful of companies out there including SocialVibe, Flurry and WildTangent seeking to help games developers monetize their product and brand advertisers engage consumers with such ads.
Games entrepreneur Wilson Kriegel, formerly with Zynga, addressed this potential by discussing his involvement with mega-hit Draw Something, an online drawing game developed at his former company OMGPop, which Zynga acquired in March.
The game allows people to draw things and share them with their friends. Since its launch early in 2012, it has seen over 90 million installs, 10 billion drawings created and was a top trending topic on Twitter.
Companies including McDonald's, Disney and Sprint have incorporated their ads into the game. Kriegel said that ad features including in-game banners, game features and in-game call to actions seen a clickthrough rate of 1 percent to 10 percent-unheard of in an industry where average CTRs are 0.7 percent."
"Sources tell The Hollywood Reporter that the NBCUniversal-owned cable network has closed a deal with Esquire parent Hearst Corporation to shift the former gaming network to a destination more in line with the modern male. The effort is designed to capture a growing, upscale demographic that isn't being reached through other male networks, including adrenaline-heavy Spike and History. "
"Ingress, the Alternate/Augmented Reality (AR) game from Google's Niantic Labs, is a major evolution of mobile gaming. Apparently, it's also a good way to get arrested.
According to a post on Reddit (I know, I know - but stay with me on this), an Ingress player in Ohio was detained by police for his in-game actions. Specifically, he was "hacking a portal" near a police station. His phone had technical difficulties, which led him to linger by the portal/police station for a bit, catching the eye of local law enforcement and leading to the detention.
After the original post, other Ingress players responded with similar stories. One aroused suspicions by wandering around an empty parking lot at night. Another, trying to hack a portal next to an air traffic control station, had to run from the local sheriff. A third was called in for questioning after hacking a portal outside of a "high-traffic drug area.""
"Here are five lessons in the art and science of storytelling I learned by studying the pros ...
1) Adopt a newsroom mentality
Make content development a core part of the way you do business - just as it is in journalism. Embed it in every department. Hire journalists just as LinkedIn, Qualcomm and others have done. Curate voices like we do on edelman.com.
2) Hand-craft your content for each venue
Some companies try desperately to create singular pieces of content that can be simply be dumped in different places. That no longer works. Instead, hand-craft your content for each venue. Jonah Peretti, Buzzfeed's co-founder, summed it up best when he said: "Twitter is for your head, while Facebook is for your heart."
3) Cultivate superstars who have a POV
News and information, to some degree, is commodity content - it's everywhere. Deep, thoughtful analysis, however, is in high demand. Just as the New York Times has Nate Silver and ESPN has Bill SImmons, you too can grow and cultivate rock stars who create thoughtful content with unique analytical point of view.
4) Be relentlessly data driven
Speaking of Mr. Silver, if there's one thing he taught us this year it's that data rules. Follow in his footsteps in not only how you use data to inform and deliver your storytelling but also in how you measure your results. Many newsrooms, for example, now have real-time dashboards that help shape their decisions.
5) Let constraints fuel creativity
Finally, it's often hard to convince management to put resources behind content until there's proven ROI. However, constraints can breed creativity. The Wall Street Journal's daytime video network, for example, was challenged to cover the Olympics without footage. So instead it creatively turned to using puppetry - and with great success. Be creative to get around constraints."
"Instead of other sites where every place gets 3.5 stars, we come up with our scores using the same Foursquare magic that powers Explore. We look at signals like tips, likes, dislikes, popularity, loyalty, local expertise, and nearly 3 billion check-ins from over 25 million people worldwide. And, with every check-in and Explore search, our scores will get smarter and better."
"Mr. Denton got some solace for the lost ad revenue: State Farm opted to sponsor the Tumblr blogs with the tag line "Backup Site Covered By State Farm" as well as information on how to file a claim. Insurers such as State Farm, Geico, Allstate and others are some of the advertisers that buy into disasters and have emergency funds set up to do so."
"Citi piloted LinkedIn's first branded community in April, erecting Connect: Professional Women's Network as a sponsored group for members to discuss topics online, such as women-on-women bullying in the workplace. Then in late summer something unexpected happened: Members began taking things offline.
One New York-based member posted a question, asking if others would like to meet in person. That has spawned nine different meet-ups in not just New York but Seattle and Miami. "That's not necessarily behavior we could have predicted from an online social network," said Citi's managing director and head of North American marketing Vanessa Colella."
Bravo today announced a Connected TV app to unite viewers and advertisers with "Top Chef" and other popular shows on the second screen.
Features include:
Videos (Discovery, Playlist)
Show Schedule
Episode Descriptions
Photo Galleries
Polls & Games
"Bravolebrities" Profiles
New Content Inbox
Social Sharing
Looks like a house arrest bracelet. Is pointless considering mobile GPS tech, but uhhh this could be useful in the future when combined with other types of technology, especially for disabled or blind people.
In order to compete with Twitter's popular Vine app, Viddy is endeavoring to become more social by facilitating links to YouTube videos and introducing an Explore tab where users can see popular videos shared by others. User can already share videos to Facebook or Twitter.
4 million users
Springpad today announced a redesign of its personal assistant app that includes a socially powered search bar
For brands and publishers, the notebooks are a way to make content marketing more mobile. The notebooks can be filled with how-tos, articles, and pictures for others to follow or embed on their own sites.
People can now follow these user-generated magazines they like, just as they can follow other content on Flipboards. When people interact with their magazines, the magazine creator will get notifications. Flipboard will also highlight these user magazines in its content guide of topics that it curates.