Games & Interactive Digital
I Feel London
This is one of the best combinations of Google Maps and UCG. Choose from the 6 emotions and see different London locations to help fulfill your needs! All locations have been submitted by users, so why not join in?

Neave Anaglyph
Got an old set of Red and Green lens 3D glasses? Then step up and create your own 3D images.

Wordle
Wordle is a fantastic site that allows you to enter a block of text and see it’s corresponding word cloud. Great for any bloggers out there as a means to indentify how to Tag your articles.

Park Seasons
A sweet piece of interactive flash. The potential to expand and detail this is almost limitless.

Sitting Ducks
Bad weather getting to you? Co-worker used your last paperclip? Don’t let life’s little annoyances get you down, enjoy some good old fashioned fairground fun!

Online Advertising
Coke Tags
The easy way for non-technical folks to create their own widget and share links with the world. Really nice idea, and they work on any OpenSocial sites.

On Monday, the New York Times reported on the expected launch of the Google AdPlanner system. They predicted that Google would unveil their new ad-planning tool with the start of the Advertising Research Foundation’s New York media conference. Using search engine and third-party data to asecrtain a sites demographics, the system will allow planners/buyers to determine which sites are attracting their target audience.

The big news is that upon its launch, AdPlanner will be available at no cost.

In reference to some fears that the new tool would remove the need for certain human interaction, Google exec Henrique de Castro said, “The best results are when we work together with agencies. We are not going to replace people [in the] advertising world”. Further to this he added, “We don’t have the strategic relationship [with clients]. We don’t have the capability, we don’t want to be there.”

The specifics of the new system are best seen at the Google AdWords Blog, where a thorough breakdown and analysis are provided.

Q1 2008 data published last Thursday by comReg shows that mobile internet has grown by 45% in Q1 2008 and accounts for 18.7% of total Internet connections.

Broadband connectivity continues to improve – (12% growth in Q1) and broadband penetration is now at 22.9%.

Cybercom Market Overview June 2008

Last Friday, Meglena Kuneva, EU consumer protection commissioner, announced a European Commission strategy to break down national borders in online retailing. The strategy aims to create a single set of rights and obligations to cover returns and guarantees, so it is safer and easier for consumers to buy and sell products across borders.

In conjunction with the EC strategy, eBay has announced it’s to head a coalition of online traders that will further lobby the European Parliament for the reform of all laws that restrict cross-border trading online. It is understood that eBay has the full support of Kuneva.

Specifically, eBay wants the EU to revise the regulatory framework for distribution agreements, trademark rules and service & consumer provision. They are arguing that the current legislation prevents retailers from accessing non-domestic markets while consequentially also preventing consumers from benefitting from lower prices outside their own locale.

eBay has stated that “[eBay] has found four regulatory “bottlenecks” which allow manufacturers to maintain a policy of market segmentation – essentially different pricing models for different regions”. This is a situation we’ve seen for many years in Ireland. Either between our domestic market and the US, or closer to home between the North and South. The modern shopper knows that there are savings to be made abroad even when benefits aren’t exaggerated with the fluctuations of exchange rates. Hopefully this new EU initiative will ultimately help bring down all prices!

Over the past four weeks, four videos have found their way around the net with surprising speed. The videos, each one showing phones popping popcorn, have fuelled a huge amount of speculation and talk, and between them have scored over 2 million views on YouTube!

Who’s behind them? Cardo Systems, a manufacturer of Bluetooth headsets. A brilliant viral campaign, our hats come off to LastFools, the Parisian marketing firm responsible.

Games & Interactive Digital
Moodstream
Moodstream is the new interface of Getty Images. Choose the mood and feeling you’re looking for, and a slide show of images and video are played over complimentary music. How nice!

Fairies and Dragons
Created for McDonalds, this mystical site is bursting with magic and mystery (and very entertaining games during loading times!).

HBO Voyeur – Winner of a Gold Cannes Cyber Lion
An oldie but goodie, with fantastic use of 3D/video and graphics. Grab your binoculars!

Get the Girl
An interactive non-linear love-story with lovely full-screen video and humour, can you help the guy get the girl?

Online Advertising
Mini-clubman: Ad One Ad Two Ad Three
Launched to promote the new MINI Clubman, GLUE London again use first class video and Flash techniques to deliver MINI’s classic use of humour.

Firefox don’t do things in halves and, with the launch of Firefox3, they decided to go all the way and break a Guinness World Record!

The challenge: create the most single day downloads of a single program in history.

Day one ended yesterday with a gigantic 8.2 million downloads of the Firefox 3 browser. The goal to beat? The number of first-day downloads of Firefox 2 (1.6 million)!

Today, the music sharing community site Last.fm added more than 12,000 full-length music videos. This follows a deal with Universal Music covering the group’s artists, which include Amy Winehouse, Jay-Z, Nirvana and Kanye West.

This is a major development for Last.fm, with co-founder Martin Stiksel suggesting the deal was a major step towards providing a comprehensive, personalised video service for it’s users.

Last.fm claims to have 100,000 unique users in Ireland. More interestingly for media buyers, its registered user profile is very strong; 68% male with 47% aged 18-24.

Adobe’s trial version of Photoshop Express is a great example of functional online design. Express allows you to perform common image edits and manipulations to stock photos or uploaded pictures in a slick flex coded environment with the option of sharing your albums on Flickr, facebook and others.

While native Photoshop users may find it does not measure up in functionality, the average user can crop, colour-touch and rotate like a pro with everything functioning surprisingly fast, sometimes with only a mouse hover.

You can find the trial version here.

Running at approximately 21 minutes long and housed in a shiny plastic VHS cassette, we present Apple’s 1996 Internet strategy. We can safely say things have come along way!

It’s week three in the Cybercom Blog and Friday’s Best of the Web is on fire! Don’t worry, we haven’t gone crazy, we’re just really excited about the great content that we have for you this week. Cool Designs, great interactives and even an impressive widget. Read on folks!

Our favourite digital piece this week is the Common Wealth of Diverse Cultures site. This is an excellent bilingual site with a slick nav and some really nice animation. Plus, to top it all off, we love their loader. Have a nose around and let us know what you think.

Games & Interactive Digital

• “Mentos Kiss Fight parodies traditional fighting games. Instead of inflicting pain on your opponent, you give them pleasure by kissing them into submission”.
• To celebrate the launch of Orange’s Animals packages to their Pay As You Go customers, they have launched this virtual balloon race.
• Brilliant Pre-Loader and awesome animation, after that we don’t know what to say about this ‘dancing sushi’ site except, “Turn on your sound!”

Cool Designs

• Size isn’t everything, and as we’re sure you agree, small agencies have the abilityto really impress. These guys have some really nice work, on a pretty impressive site.
• The Eco Zoo is one of the best examples of 3D flash we’ve seen. It’s fun, vibrant and very interactive. Go forth and learn about nature.

Digital Advertising

• We spotted this cool creative from Saatchi & Saatchi, Brazil. Great interactivity with an impactful message. Really nice!
• Most of you should be familiar with the Cadbury’s Gorilla, but have you seen his remixes?

Widgets and Gadgets

• We were lucky to recently have an internal presentation all about widgets and gadgets. The small embedded app is a must for all digital campaigns going forward, and this widget is a great example of the potential they have.

Remember, we’re always looking for what’s new and cool, so if you’ve seen it then send it over to info@cybercom.ie