Another day, another use of Twitter. Today it’s being used to report the levels of snow falls around the UK.
All very useful individually, but the power of a mass of people reporting this information is when it’s brought together.
Search results for: “mashup”
#uksnow Twitter Map Mashup & Skiing To Work!
Monoface Mashup: Hilarious
We’ve just been pointed to a great site with a face mashup generator. What’s that you’re asking?
(more…)When Corporate Mashups Go Wrong: Chevy Tahoe
Companies are now starting to dip their toe into the world of Mashups/user-generated content – but when the user is generating it, the results might not always be what they expect or desire. We’ve seen a few examples of this today.Uber-car maker Chevrolet – or their agencies – came up with a great wheeze. They’ve put tools on the Web to allow the worlds users remix and mash-up their latest Chevy Tahoe adverts.
It’s not hard to imagine the scene. The agency person, having hear from his ‘Geek’ source that mashups were ‘The Latest Thing’, over-enthusiasticly pitching it to Chevy
Amazingly the thing that they don’t appear to have noticed is that many people see Chevy as Uber in a couple of sense – the sheer size of their company and, importantly for this piece, in the sheer size of the cars on the road and fuel-guzzling nature.Some witty wags have used the Chevy tools to create adverts mocking the over-sized cars, the nature of their advertising and the company generally.
Selection of spoof ads
Roll-up, roll-up get them while they’re fresh (and before they get taken down by those that be).Where’s My Helicopter? – This mocks the unreachable locations that car companies put their cars in for adverts, then proceeds to question if a 4×4 car of this size is really needed when they are, on the whole, only used to drive to the shopping mall.
Global Warming – The sights of this spoof are a little more ambitious – asking why the USA reaction to the threat of Global Warming is to make and sell cars like the Chevy Tahoe.
Flowers – This one addresses the over-sized, aggressive nature of the car. Summary – Where have all of the flower gone? Who cares? My truck’s bigger than yours and I’ll crush you.
We love the idea of corporate tools being used against those who are paying for they development, hosting and bandwidth, but suspect that corporate number two who approaches this may take a different approach. This won’t of course stop those who are angered by this type of thing using their own footage to the same affect.Expect people in the marketing department to get fired over this one. People who run companies like Chevrolet don’t like to be made to looks foolish. Perhaps if they moved to destroy the planet a little less they’d get a better reception from the world.
Thanks to Holy-Moly! for the pointer to the videos on this one.
TheyWorkForYou: Now with Video!
TheyWorkForYou, the Web site that takes what is said in the UK Parliament and makes it accessible to the citizens of the Web, has added a new feature, synchronising the video broadcast with the MP’s speech.Jolly good it is too.
Pet Shop Boys Integral: Anti ID Card Song, With QR Codes!
Those krazy kids, The Pet Shop Boys, have released their new single.Why are we interested? Two reasons, it’s drawing attention to UK ID Card – which we think are are serious blow for the future of civil liberties in the UK – plus the video has also got QR codes in it – letting people find out further info just by point their camera phone at it.
(more…)VideoIPO: Video Stock Exchange: Trade On YouTube Popularity
A nifty mashup reaches us via Perry Aulie, co-founder of VideoIPO.It’s a service that is hoping to make a success out of the enormous and growing interest in watching videos online, specifically YouTube – but not by following the same now-overdone model of serving videos.
VideoIPO lets you trade on the popularity of YouTube Videos by mashing up YouTube video and the Hollywood Stock Exchange (HSX) trading engine.
(more…)Gmaps Pedometer For Walkers
We’re big fans of walking and cycling, so when we heard about gmap pedometer we donned our virtual Goretex walking boots and hiked straight over to the site.Like many of the best Web apps, this one is dead simple to use, and uses Google’s superb mapping application to help record how far you’ve travelled.
(more…)Google Developer Day Announced
All of you budding code-aholics take note, Google is hosting ten Google Developer Days in their various offices around the world on 31 May.
They’re going to have workshops, keynotes and breakout discussions on Google’s APIs and developer tools.
Google have been running a few of these already with much smaller capacity. A few have happened in Silicon Valley and a couple in London that we’re aware of, but this is on a much bigger scale.
The program is being headed up by code-fan pin-up girl Marissa Mayer, who’s Google’s Vice President of Search Products and User Experience. She was one of the first 20 people to join Google (just imagine her stock options!) and the first female engineer hired by them.They’re rolling out some of their top talent to get the code-kids hot under the collar. Get ready for this …
Guido Van Rossum, Google software engineer and creator of the Python programming language (Beijing); Chris DiBona, Google open source programs manager (London); Mark Stahl, Google data APIs tech lead (Madrid); Bruce Johnson and Joel Webber, co-creators of the Google Web Toolkit (Mountain View); Bret Taylor, group product manager for Google developer products (Mountain View); Lars Rasmussen, Google Maps senior engineer (Sydney); and Greg Stein, Google engineering manager and chairman of the Apache Software Foundation (Tokyo).
The subjects they’ll be covering also sound pretty enticing. Here’s a cross section, “Developing with Geo: Google Maps, Google Earth and SketchUp,” “Tools for Better Web Development: The Google Web Toolkit, Open Source and Other Developer Initiatives” and “Mashups and More: AJAX, Google Gadgets and the Google Data APIs.”
What does Google get out of this?
Google’s going to be lashing all of their cash, time and resources on this, so what’s driving them?
Well, people become more familiar with how to write programs to use their applications via the published API’s, which means the potential for extra advertising income for Google.That’s all well a good but more importantly, Google get to spot the hottest programming talent around the world and can in turn try to persuade that talent to join the Google gang. Meaning Google ends up with the best programmers, not their competition.
Smart, eh?
Locations
- Mountain View, California
- São Paulo, Brasil
- London, United Kingdom
- Paris, France
- Madrid, España
- Hamburg, Deutschland
- Москва, Россия (That’s Russia to you)
- Tokyo – Japan
- Sydney, Australia
- Beijing,China
Those who can’t make it don’t need to be left out, Google will offer live streaming webcasts from its Mountain View office and provide a YouTube™ channel with videos of Google Developer Day sessions around the world.
PICNIC06 Review: A Very Biased Report
So, there I was at the first ever PICNIC – a cross media conference taking place in Amsterdam last week…Highlights included John Underkoffler, Minority Report advisor, demonstrating his gestural interface technology. You had to be there to appreciate it…
Craig(slist) Newmark came across as really caring about his users and not wanting to sell out. He answers customer service emails and takes down unwanted content. He’s more interested in making his website run faster than Web 2 point doh!…
Marc Canter told us about OpenID – an open standard that will enable Net users to have one login account for all the websites that use OpenID. Cool! He also vigorously pushed his new, open source, Digital Lifestyle Aggregator software. He’s a performer.
In a break, Marc and I talked around my (Kendra like) pet subjects of ‘service clouds’ and ‘user-centric computing’. If you can have an open API for IDs then why not have one for dating or addresses or photos or anything? Hence we see more ‘mashups’ using these open APIs. Doesn’t it seem that many websites will end up being portals to these ‘service clouds’?The ‘Web 2.0’ travel session promised much but was really a ‘let’s save the posterior of KLM’, the sponsor (ahem). If we add a blog, wiki, forum or whatever Web 2.0 thingy to our site, will you buy more tickets from us? I proposed that people just wanted the best deal and are using price comparison websites to find them and, oh, that brands were dead. I think that last part was the hardest bit for the panel to swallow – the Dutch are very loyal to their national airline.
Tune in for PICNIC06 Review: concluding part on Friday.
As you know, we love the