Nike seem to be on a crest of wave with their digital efforts at the moment. Nike Football and their Bootcamp mobile training application was the hit of last year – built by AKQA. (Link Here). They have done some other great local activation work as well. It seems like Grid is their next best application.
The simpleness and inventiveness of Grid is what makes it brilliant. Take multiple red London telephone boxes (current object), a group of people that run away (current habit), and create a game around this. Each runner is given a unique ID which they tap into London phoneboxes thus creating a new version of geo-location.
I think the social aspect of this could become really interesting. Challenge your mates, running partners, to see who can do the quickest point to point time and then get prizes (virtual) for the one that does it quickest, the ones that do it best. Its essentially a much cooler version of the dreaded “beep test”
An idea from Northeastern University here, but one I think can be taken into two UK sports: Football and Rugby. To give you some background, Northeastern University have developed a baseball shirt which allows the wearer’s performance, action and health to be transmitted to a computer system for instant analysis.
Its a really fascinating development in health technology and can help ease the pain pitchers feel when pitching. Identifying areas of weakness is where it comes to the fore and I think this could be really interesting to understand how impacts affect the body. This is particular interest to me given my love of rugby.
Jonny Wilkinson and other great players have always been troubled by the new, fast, heavyweight impacts that rugby puts on their body. Jonny was the personification of this with an injury which he described as “stingers” a deadening of the nerves in the shoulder by a fierce contact, caused by his brutal tackling. However, I think a potentially interesting use of this technology is to develop into something that focuses on the different pressures put on the body for people like Jonny Wilkinson on his shoulders, but other players on their backs.
Another interesting deployment could be in football boots to understand how football players feet react to different type of impacts, and thus how boots can be developed to prevent injury and increase performance.
Featured first in Wired Magazine, this pretty cool mesh of real-life camera click plus internet based real-time image search. Real Life, Real Time is a lovely description of this camera which allows you to press a red button to take a photo as you would like any other camera. The neat twist on this is the fact that the camera will then present you with an image which has been uploaded by someone else at that moment in time on the web.
I absolutely love the idea of this although slightly freaked by whatever photo could end up being delivered to your phone. I am presuming there is some filter, I pray there is some filter.
By the way, the review and article from Wired is superb. Have a read here.
A really nice piece of work this one. The Fab40 Online is the online version (its all in the naming!) of the Fab40 which appears in print. The Fab40 is Wallpaper’s guide to the best of the US, UK, Spain etc. The Fab40 is the online version highlighting the really interesting things about the web segmented into hardware, retail, innovations, inspiration, blogs and downloads.
Well worth spending some time playing around with it.
Pivot seems to be raising some eyebrows amongst the technical industry, but as a slightly creative person I can see where the technology could become applicable on a huge scale.
For those that don’t know what Pivot is there are a couple of loose definitions. The first from Microsoft found here is that it is a way of categorising, organising and interpreting data on a very visual, large scale. The second, potentially my definition, is that its a cross-breed between a content and personal organiser tool, and the visual, large scale data tool. This becomes very clear when you watch the presentation from Gary Flake on TED. Link here.
On a personal level and for my clients (current and future), I see Pivot acting as a beautiful resource for housing, segmenting, tagging, and tracking, a clients content. The visual aspect shown in Gary’s presentation clearly highlights the ease of use if you were looking for content you owned around one or two particular topics.
Imagine if you will that you had a vast range of TV-based content; long-form and short-form, imagine then being able to search by who, when, how, what the content contains. Imagine then being able to do this within 20-30secs and setting it up for distribution so you can truly respond in real-time to consumer discussions. To me, this could be an extremely powerful way of using Pivot…I want it. Now.
