A Source Of Inspiration

What a bummer. I realized that i just missed the shooting of the latest work by FarFar and HobbyFilm here in Portugal, downtown Lisbon.


URL: http://www.get-out-and-play.com/

The first time i saw the video at Adverblog it felt somehow familiar, and as i browsed the website it became clear that the real-life snake game was indeed shot in the always beautiful and sunny Lisbon.

The Get Out and Play website features the full HD frame-by-frame video and a impressive behind the scenes involving 1000 people playing life-size Snake at a popular Lisbon square, Martim Moniz.
The mobile gaming concept is further brought to life with a chance to also play Blocks with real people and highlighting the Nokia N-Gage game service for models N81, N82 and N95.

Now i have no excuse to miss Improv Everywhere’s Portuguese mission, even it isn’t done by some wacky Swedish folks (*).

(*) I wonder if any of them is coming to OFFF ?

Great news: finally Interactive Advertising Bureau Portugal kicks off, with an ambitious installing committee .

Ricardo from Elemento Digital did most of the hard work (along with Alain Heureux, from IAB Europe) and got great feedback from the major Portuguese online media players, that are finally agreeing on the urgent need of a reliable institution heading the interactive marketing industry.

In the next few months, IAB Portugal intends to discuss the main goals and business plan, inviting all the players to the table (remember my comment?).
So, if you’re in Portugal and concerned about the future of advertising, have your say at IABPortugal.com.

At least in Portugal. They better not be, since Craigslist has just opened their portuguese version and Google is starting to take local search and location based services more seriously in Portugal.

Anyway, PAI (Portuguese Internet Yellow Pages) released a new set of features that are so web 2.0 that they even have round corners and gradients. Here’s what we can do now:

Ratings and Comments

Now users can leave their ratings and comments, supposedly to improve the service quality. I wonder how long will it take until spammers and ruthless SEOs start flooding the system.

Maps

Nice one. Not Google maps, but at least they know the local market, so a tailored experience might be enough to convince portuguese users. The service is provided by Local Matters.

Search Widget

You can take the search service and embed it in your site as a widget. Unlike Google custom search, no revenue is distributed to publishers.

Things are eating up, and after web 1.5, it seems that some portuguese services are entering the 2.0 bandgwagon. Better late than never. Someday we might even ditch Microsoft government agreements and choose reliable OSS solutions (I wish …).

Meanwhile, all minor efforts are welcome. Nice work, PAI and Truvo.

If you want to learn a thing or two about word-of-mouth, you’d better talk with Ze Frank. Despite ending his popular show, he knows how to stir things up, judging by how the Color Wars meme spread among the twitterati (did i just wrote that?) in less than a day.

UPDATE(20/03/08): ZeFrank explains the whole thing on a blog post.
Keeping truthful to ZeFrank spirit, the thing doesn’t make any sense at all, and basically invites you to follow a Twitter user with an alias @colorteam, and change your avatar according to the selected color. At the moment, you can join the teams:

• @greenredteam
• @redteam
• @purpleteam
• @blueteam
• @orangeteam
• @yellowteam
• @verygreenteam
• @pinkteam
• @goldteam
• @plaidteam
• @noteam
• @clearteam
• @whiteteam
• @stripeteam
• @FF1CAEteam
• @blackngoldTeam
• @tartanteam
• @PussyPinkTeam
• @rainbowteam
• @offwhiteteam
• @noteam
• @redandwhite

Update: Gary Vaynerchuck is all excited (as usual) about the whole thing, and shot a video explaining why he joined the @verygreenteam.

I’m not even bothering counting how many followers each team has.
Do i find this useless? Absolutely. But then again i do browse occasionally at icanhascheezburger.com.

As i’m bit curious how big Twitter is in Portugal, I’d like to challenge the portuguese twitters to follow the @greennredteam

On other Twitter trivia, you can use Tweet Scan to your advanced search needs, a feature the application is in desperate need, just like FriendFeed did.

Perhaps this has been around for longer, but it’s a first for me. Alexa, an Amazon company, now lists the top 100 Portuguese sites. A few patterns emerge:

• Hi5 ranks nr 1

  Besides user base, i simply don’t get it why it got so popular around here, specially when it’s way behind Facebook or MySpace in terms of features. Well, at least they announced their support for OpenSocial, by the end of this month. Curious how Orkut is ahead of MySpace (Brazilian emigration might not be the only reason).

• Google domains

  Google.pt + google.com + YouTube + Blogger = all your base belongs to us.

• Travian is #10?!?!

  I always made fun of Travian as being WoW for dummies. In several trips to my hometown in the countryside, it amazed me the dozens of teenagers gathering around in the local cofee shop to play this online strategy game. Now i fully respect it, though i still haven’t figured out the whole etnography. Another contender is Hattrick, a football manager that’s killing productivity in Portuguese offices. (Hey boss, if you’re reading this, keep in mind I play neither of them).

• The ISP / media conglomerate pack

  Sapo, IOL, AEIOU do their best to take advantage of being a default start page. With agressive content agreements and new service launches they try to hold on to a good slice of the market.

• Sports

  Football, mostly. With 3 daily sports newspaper (odd, isn’t it?), no wonder the online versions of Record, A Bola and O Jogo rank in the top 30.

• Leechers

  Oh boy, where should i start? Emule, private servers, Usenet … As if it wasn’t enough illegal downloads, Portuguese leechers are coming to the web to use services like MegaUpload, RapidShare, BtNext or Mininova. You think that’s funny? You should try to get a Cable connection to work decently on peak traffic hours.

• Portuguese do it better

  Keeping this blog Safe-For-Work, you probably can figure out what is the subject in matter. Although it seems we have to see a lot of “instructional materials” to keep in shape, as 8 in 100 sites seem to point out.

• The birth of social media

  Besides Hi5 and Blogger, several user publishing plataforms are getting big enough to believe we’ll see a sustainable growth in social media tools in the near future. Wordpress.com, Flickr, Fotolog and Imeem (where’s last.fm ???) have some impressive figures, a promising sign for User Generated Content.

• Web 1.5

  My biggest disappointment was not founding a single decent “Web 2.0″ (there, i said it) portuguese service. From the great list at Bloguite, none is featured on Alexa’s top 100.

Alexa’s ranking system, while extremely biased by those who have their toolbar, is the best free choice we have until compete.com becomes less US centric.

But i guess it’s our own market’s fault, that keeps feeding a monopoly like the one that Marktest has with their closed metrics solution Netpanel. Ah, if only comScore was here ….

Last year, on the balance of the e-Mkt 2007 conference, there was hope in bringing forward our national digital marketing industry, perhaps by becoming part of of EIAA or creating local IAB offices. Maybe that was not a feasible solution, but the reality of having poor industry metrics is a huge problem that needs to be addressed.
Better yet, let’s all have a true conversation about it. Your turn.

Finally Common Craft published one of their most expected videos.

Now you can easily explain what’s Twitter all about. And follow me on Twitter, of course.

Youtube link to feed readers

Things have been quite busy lately here at the office (besides the moving and remodeling works). One of the things that lowered my usual rate of shared inspirations is Chevrolet Tattoo, a tactical website developed in the last month.

Last year i spent my reasonable share of time showcasing Papervision. Unfortunately, no suitable project or briefing came that was adequate to apply the framework. As you shouldn’t t use a new technology just because it’s there, the right amount of relevance to use Papervision came with a campaign for Matiz Tattoo.

The main objective was to showcase a catalog of vehicles, with 15 available patterns. With few resources available, the idea came: what if we used Papervision3D and allowed users to customize their own model online?

So, there you have it, my perfect excuse to use the Flash 3d framework on a online campaign (in Portuguese only):

Have fun and create your own Tattoo (Cria a tua Tatoo).

URL: http://www.chevrolettattoo.com/
Client: Chevrolet Portugal (GM)
Agency: Draftfcb Portugal
Interactive Team: Armando Alves, Bruno Duarte, Hugo Cervantes and Luis Castro.