Play Russian Roulette with Your Virtual Social Life

A Miami ad school concept campaign lets you play Russian roulette with your Facebook account.

Sort of a reverse Whopper Sacrifice for higher stakes.  Interesting strategy capitalizing on the growing importance of one’s virtual life.

You have to wonder though, if this was a real concept how would it be spread if it keeps zapping people’s profiles, the very place where their friends would learn about it?  :)

http://mashable.com/2011/05/11/facebook-russian-roulette/

An App to Connect You with Your Neighbors

Home Elephant is an app that connects you to your neighbors.

Okay, this app seems a little whitebread but the underlying idea is interesting.

When is an app going to come out that connects you with the people that are immediately around you?

Imagine a sort of virtual billboard that populated based on your location – being able to poll the people nearby to find out where the best lunch deals are, asking to carpool, alerting to gas leaks, and to ask, “what happened on Kearny street this morning with all the firetrucks?”

Facial Recognition Software Can Determine Gender/Age of a Person

Facial recognition on a billboard that can determine the gender, age and race of the people looking at it. Alongside the consumer’s information, the software customizes ads by pulling in local data including the weather and social media updates from sites like Twitter.

Apparently, this is not new technology, but what is new is that the information pulled is being used to target the audience with an appropriate ad.  Minority Report, anyone?

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/04/25/immersive-labs_n_853555.html

Contributed by Andrew Lee

Lynx Stream – A Mobile App That Captures Your Night Out

This is a clever idea.
Introducing The Lynx Stream — A Mobile App to capture and record unforgettable nights out. The Lynx Stream collects every video, picture, text, tweet, check-in and status update a group of friends makes to produce an automatic Stream of the night and highlight video, which can be watched and shared online.

Find out more and download Lynx Stream for free

http://multivu.prnewswire.com/mnr/prne/unilever/48911/

Contributed by Joshua Spanier

Inspiration for the Creative Process

Justin Gignac, artist and advertising art director, talks at PSFK about the inspiration behind some of his wonderful web-based ideas.

http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2011/05/10/justin-gignac-psfk/

Google’s Web-Only Laptop, the Chromebook

Google has unveiled a new product, the Chromebook, a web-only laptop-like computer.

Read about it:http://www.google.com/chromebook/

Or watch the cutey-cute video that gives the Chromebook a voice made of plucked strings:

Next Step for Digital Payments

Visa is working on a product coming in Fall of this year to make digital payments easier, using an “e-wallet”.

How this will actually work is somewhat mysterious at the moment, but it will simplify online payments with a single click, and will also support NFC (Near Field Communications) payments for in-person transactions by allowing people to wave their NFC-enabled phones over a PayWave station.

http://www.fastcompany.com/1752776/visa-is-making-the-e-wallet-a-real-thing

Self-Driving Robot Cars

Google has acknowledged that they have been working on self-driving cars for at least a year now, racking up over 140,000 miles in California tests alone.

http://gawker.com/5800949/

More Mobile, Please

Here’s some more data on mobile trends from Google.  A little “salesy” but some good stats.

Contributed by Collin Whitehead

Pictionary Photobooth

Ogilvy & Mather, Colombia, created a live interactive experience to promote the game of Pictionary.

People stepped into a free photobooth set up in a mall, took “pictures”, and 10 seconds later, received cartoons of themselves as scribbled by a hidden cartoonist.

A clever immersive idea to promote a fun product.

Contributed by Jonathan Graham