TED is a great opportunity to experience insight from a (very) wide range of thinkers and doers – they’re also available as an iPhone app now.
We’ve embedded our favourite videos below. The line-up includes John Maeda, Rory Sutherland, Tim Brown, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and Golan Levin.
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi on flow
We thought we’d make this list business a bit easier for everyone – so here is our definitive list of the year…
Tech Crunch’s The Top 10 MobileCrunch Posts of 2009
http://bit.ly/6eZyLx
Mashable’s Top 10 Mobile Social Apps
http://bit.ly/7C2AEA
Campaign’s Top 10 Digital Ads of 2009
http://bit.ly/82b3×0/
Creative Applications.Net’s 15 (We know) Best and Must Have iPhone Apps of 2009
http://bit.ly/6SdNEk
Rough Trade’s Top Ten Albums of 2009
http://bit.ly/7L18of
Mashable’s 10 Amazing Augmented Reality iPhone Apps
http://bit.ly/6XvAKa
Gizomodo’s Top 10 most popular articles of 2009
http://bit.ly/50DpHt
Digg’s Top 10 most popular stories of 2009
http://bit.ly/5oBdGk
Quentin Tarantino’s Top 8(!) Films of 2009
http://bit.ly/7ksuLG
Lifehacker’s Top 10 Mind Hacks for Making Your Resolutions Stick
http://bit.ly/698ZuI
We took a holiday visit to Decode at the Victoria and Albert Museum http://www.vam.ac.uk/microsites/decode/. The exhibition covered a range of digital and interactive design, from new and established names. The exhibition was broken down into the categories of Code, Interactivity and Network. As interactive art often demonstrates, the tech is less important than the idea behind it, and the most compelling installations are those borne of one simple, innovative concept.
Most of the generative work showed it’s age and failed to keep the attention, however special mentions go to…
Ross Philips, Videogrid – simple, emotional, engaging
Interactive agency, New Toy, has been appointed by O2 to deliver ‘SnapBooth’ interactive installations which will enable thousands of fans, attending gigs at the O2 Academy venues located in major cities throughout the UK, to be part of an engaging experience and a unique online community to share their experiences with friends and family post event.
![snapbooth_final[1]](http://www.newtoylondon.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2009/12/snapbooth_final11.jpg "snapbooth_final[1]")
There’s nothing more distracting than a new baby for taking your eye off the ball, hence no posts for over a month.
However, things move on apace in the world of mobile apps. Perhaps the biggest mover has been O2, whose myO2 app has finally been released to the App Store, meaning the getting on for 2 million UK iPhone users can now manage their accounts efficiently. While I have to declare an interest as we at MIG did the design and build, I have to admire its nice design and simple interface. Now that O2 have a really firm foothold in the App Store, it will be interesting to see how they go on to develop this: with such a raft of content and sponsorship opportunities just crying out for an iPhone execution, and the brand looking as good as ever, I would hope to see some updates to the app very soon.
A journalist called me the other day as he was writing a piece on whether brands are better off using their existing agency set-up to deliver mobile services, or to use the services of a mobile specialist instead. While I would have an obvious natural bias towards the specialists, having been in that field for nearly 10 years now, it’s not an open-and-shut case.
The argument for the specialists goes as follows:
Nokia’s R & D team are a reliable source of conversation-starting predictions, like Phillips they put a serious amount of effort into visualising and prototyping their glimpses of the future.
This video shows a future controlled by augmented reality (or a variant of), but with handset that looks suspiciously like the old Nokia Communicator…
At New Toy towers we’re seriously digging data visualisation. It’s more exciting than it sounds – check out the Information Is Beautiful site and Good Magazine’s Transparency.
A part of our business at MIG is in the area of Premium Rate SMS – you know – the kind of stuff you see day in, day out on TV – “Text us your answer” and the user pays £1 to enter the competition. The scale of this type of messaging in the UK is monumental, and it’s often this, and people’s misunderstanding of it, that creates some concern about running mobile activity.
While going over a mobile application brief from a prospective client the other day with a technical designer, we were assessing the feasibility of the job on both iPhone and standard java phones. Unfortunately many of the features required just aren’t possible on one or both of the platforms. After stripping out all the unworkable elements we were left with a proposition that delivered much less than originally envisaged.
“If we deliver this, it’s an act of futility,” wailed the project manager. “Yes”, I replied instinctively, “but it’s an act of branded futility”.
Mobile Interactive Group (MIG), the fast growing privately owned technology company serving the global mobile and digital interactive markets, has launched two new businesses: Kilrush, a next generation mobile internet business and Mobile Interactive Technology, the new operating technology business within MIG.
Since 2005 MIG’s separate businesses including 4th Screen Advertising, Jigsaw and New Toy have been at the forefront of a broad set of mobile and digital markets, serving a blue-chip client base with mobile messaging,, mobile billing, mobile advertising and mobile and digital marketing solutions. Along the way MIG has gained a well deserved reputation as a innovation led, customer focussed business.
While this blog, as with pretty much anyone dealing in mobile apps, is likely to be diverted for much of the time by the wonder of the iPhone, it’s well worth remembering that there is another 99% of the mobile market which is, frankly, non-iPhone.
So how do we address this market through mobile apps, and who out there is going to receive them?
For our friends at Five and Upper Street Events – New Toy ran a Studio installation at Gadget Show Live at the NEC. Lots of fun at a packed out show – we created a studio for the creation of unique personalised content for Gadget Show fans.
Check out the slideshow…
New Toy deliver innovative ways for brands to communicate with their customers using mobile, digital and emerging technologies. New Toy is part of Mobile Interactive Group.
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