iPhone

How mindless is charging your phone?  Answer, completely…or at least it was!  Not anymore though as Toyota have just launched the ‘Plug-in World Championship‘, a surprisingly fun game based around charging your iPhone.  The app and game launch has been designed to raise awareness of Toyotas new Prius PHV and help shift peoples perceptions of charging from ‘must charge for use’ to ‘must charge for good’.  It’s innovative, simple and well worth playing.

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Watkins Books, a London bookshop specialising in mind, body and spirit, has released Fenopalm, the world’s first interactive video palm reading iPhoe app powered by a social network. As well as scanning the user’s hand, Fenopalm takes a look at the user’s Facebook data on social and work life, relationships and friendships. The outcome of the analysis is a bespoke interactive video featuring renowned palm reader Swami Krishna. The app, online at Fenopalm.com, will also recommend books and events based on a user’s profile.

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You’ve made a tough decision and ditched you better half. It made sense at the time but the longer you are left on your own the more you want to take those heartbreaking words back ‘It’s over’. Luckily this cool new app out of Brazil will help you stand by your convictions enlisting your closest friends and complete Facebook shame as your incentives. The mechanic is simple. You enter your now ex-lovers number, add a few friends and connect to Facebook and if you ever try to call her then your buddies are alerted and can come to the rescue. If you choose to ignore their pragmatic pleadings then prepare for some Facebook payback!

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I love this, Deportivo Independiente Medellín (the oldest Columbian football team) apparently has the most passionate fans in the country.  To measure that passion and turn it into a social currency this nifty little iPhone app was developed.  Using the phones microphone and accelerometer the app can measure movement and noise aka jumping and cheering and turn it into a passion score.  The score helps the club find their most passionate fans and also acts as a badge of honor and commitment through social channels!

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This is a great idea from Canadian advertising agency Taxi.  Apparently there is a particular time of year when Montreal experiences really bad potholes, unsurprisingly this is called Pothole Season.  To help Montreal residents Taxi built this awesome app that automatically recognises a pot hole when you drive over (thanks to the iPhone’s accelerometer) maps it and shares it with other users in real time so they can avoid the pesky road craters! Effing genius!

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Sweet little animation from Mike Ko I stumbled upon on Adverblog which shows an animated 3D experience popping out of an iPhone.  Who knows with a company like Apple, this could end up being a reality sooner than we think!

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Winter in the Northern Hemisphere can be pretty brutal at times especially for iPhone users whose little fingers can get awfully cold.  Enter Ikea who created 12,000 “BERÖRA” kits that let you sew in special conductive thread to your gloves so your iPinkies never need be exposed again!

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When you think of Jeep what springs to mind?  For me its the great outdoors and the spirit of adventure.  But how do you make that relevant today?  How about a completely mobile location based game!  It”s a perfect fit from a brand perspective, harness the power of the smartphone and leverage the GPS/location based capabilities to get people out of urban environments and into the wilderness.  Very Jeep!  What I love about this campaign though is that Jeep didn’t sacrifice the essence of the brand for participation.  It would have been easy to place the rewards (explained in the video) in easy to reach places to increase the numbers but that wouldn’t have been very Jeep would it.

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The world has been waiting for a killer location based service and I think we’ve found it.  Its called Crash Corsage and essentially the app pulls in publicly available data from wedding planning sites such as The Knot and eWedding creating an ever changing list of nuptials just begging to be crashed!  Produced by R/GA’s Eric Schlakman the app is equal parts ingenius and devious and is bound to cause some mild panic amongst brides everywhere…especially with the added encouragement to ‘get involved’!

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We’ve looked back at 2011 through the eyes of search via Bing and Google so now its time to have a looksie at the world of mobile over the last 12 months.  As always this year was finally the year of mobile…although I’ve lived through at least 8 ‘this is the year of mobile’ years, so who knows what that really means anymore!  Some great stats to think about include;

• The human race sending over 8 trillion texts! (up 1.1 trillion)
• 103 million mobile tweets being sent each day
• Over 1 billion Foursquare check-ins taking place (I account for about 600 million of those)
• And my favourite, 26 photos were made “hipstery” on Instagram every second!

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