To celebrate May as National Bike Month, Colle + McVoy is encouraging folks to put Facebook to rest, at least for a little bit, with the Out Biking app, which hijacks users' profile pics and photos and replaces them with the Out Biking icon – App
Imagine a Gym Membership That Charges You for Not Exercising!? This is the idea behind Gym-Pact, a model aimed at incentivizing members to attend the gym multiple times a week – Website
Orange's #myroyalplate Twitter Campaign - This fun little campaign takes advantage of the hype surrounding the pending Royal Wedding. The campaign invites users to Tweet a special un-royal moment that they would like to remember to the hash tag #MyRoyalPlate – More
AT&T's Augmented Reality (AR) Facebook App - lets users experience the latest smartphone features with a layer of seamlessly integrated social content, like friend’s photos and status updates as part of the Augmented Reality experience – More
Save As WWF? The World Wildlife Fund has taken paper conservation to a new level with its free WWF software. The software allows you to save a document without printing capabilities, promoting responsible paper use by avoiding the unnecessary printing of digital documents. The idea is compelling – a brilliant example of how a simple call to action can translate a cause into a movement – Website
PepsiCo's 'Social Vending Machine' - lets users send free soda to their friends. Consumers can personalize the message with a short video recorded by the machine. There’s also an option to send a free beverage to a stranger – More
Lexus CT Hybrid's 3D Projection Mapping - Using state-of-the-art projection, lighting, shadows and 3D animation, the imagery popped from the walls and windows of the hotel to animate the landmark—all without the need for 3D glasses – Video
Hyundai Projection Mapping – Video
Getting Creative with Data - Leo Burnett released a study this week about agencies becoming more creative with data, a call to arms for strategists to play close attention to “behavioral archetypes” - Report
VW Projection Mapping – Video
Uniqlooks by Uniqlo - The popularity of street fashion blogs has inspired the Japanese H&M rival Uniqlo to start an international online community called “Uniqlooks”. Users can submit their own photos with Uniqlo-inspired looks, link directly to items in the store, and compete to be crowned the Look of the Week - Website
Intelligent Billboards Starting to Learn Who You Are - Immersive Labs in New York City has created billboards and in-store displays that use facial-recognition software to determine the age and gender of the people looking at them and can change the ad that's displayed based on locational and environmental information – More
VoyURL - Fast Company Design profiled a new startup site, VoyURL, that can’t help but provoke a gut reaction. In its current beta version, the site let’s you spy on your friends’ web activity and present it in a clickstream, a kind of web history visualization - Website
Hitting The App Wall – with well over 350,000 apps – how much is enough? – Report
Task Rabbit -The existence of Task Rabbit serves as proof that there is no end to unique web services. The site allows you to let "runners" bid on your day-to-day tasks (i.e. dog walking), and organizes the meet up, drop off and payment to make sure your task is dealt with in a secure, timely way - Website
South Africa’s Mobile Banking impressed us this week with the Mahala Free Banking Platform—a system that allows customers to make ATM withdrawals with their mobile phones - More
Posterous Events - Posterous has always been a player in the user-friendly blogger realm and their new feature might be enough to separate them from the pack. Posterous’s events feature is a neat and easy way to make an event come to life. Geo-locate your event and invite your buddies – More
Votizen's Social Lobbying Platform - the world’s first “social lobbying platform”, Votizen tracks down your voting history and keeps track of all your polling activity – More
Xerox “Business of Your Brain” desktop app analyzes your Microsoft Outlook to provide a snapshot of the things standing between you and your mind's ability to focus on real business - More
Closing the Mobile Loops with Whereads - eBay is upgrading its Paypal service with the acquisition of a geo-location ad service called Where this week. Whereads, which already run on over 350 apps, have the unique ability to geo-target consumers. By adding Where to Paypal, ebay aims to “close the mobile loop” by allowing people to access deals and products using their phones on location- More
Tweetland’s Twitter Game - We’ve seen some pretty innovative games lately—and we hope Tweetland can come out with proper funding. Tweetland aims to break down the fourth wall of twitter and gaming interaction by adjusting game play according to tweets in real time – Website
Ben & Jerry's has launched an inventive promotion called Fair Tweets, which invites users to donate their unused Twitter space to their cause. Created out of Amalgamated, Fair Tweets invites visitors to compose their tweets on a dedicated site or via a browser plug-in, which will transform all the unused character space into a message promoting World Fair Trade Day – Website
With the help of five friends, and in three easy steps, you could be entered in Expedia‘s FriendTrips contest; 224,567 fans have helped the cheap airfare service’s social networking page land in the top spot - More
Thor hits theaters this Friday, and the anticipation is growing on Facebook; 127,638 social networkers “liked” the film’s Facebook home for clips and other updates – More.
Home Elephant: The New Neighborhood Watch - Home Elephant is a new micro-social network that lets you stay in touch with your immediate circle of neighbors straight from the app. Similar to Path, it lets you post pictures and updates to a finite loop of people in your hood. Practical localization is key here—but the quick crossover from the digital to the physical realm makes this app’s functionally really interesting – More
Hyundai's clever use of RFID and Facebook aggregated over 10,000 Facebook “Likes” at one event – Video
Levi’s Mission for grassroots relevancy - Levi's workshops were originally designed to localize the brand and eventually change people’s perception, both within the organization and externally – Overview
Visa Invests in Square - technology that gives mobility to payment options as well. Square is a tiny peripheral that attaches to the iPhone and receives credit card payments with a swipe. The receipt is sent to the customer via e-mail, and all the transaction information is saved for the vendor to analyze. You can get a Square for free but its user-friendliness comes with a hitch: Square takes almost 3% of every purchase - More
Frito-Lay's Guinness World Record Attempt for Facebook Fans. Bribery? Sure. But the Page added more than 1.5 million Likes in 24 hours, then gave away 24,000 bags of Frito-Lay chips – More
"The New Mobile Shopper" - OgilvyOne and OgilvyAction's research Shoppers are becoming increasingly sophisticated in their use of mobile phones to inform retail buying decisions and facilitate purchases – Video
Mobile Patterns.com—an interactive library of screen caps from some of today’s most popular apps lets you side scroll through activity feeds, check-in screens, lists and user profiles—the differences are subtle. It’s a valuable presentation of user experience, and a good template for future projects - More
Marketing Sherpa’s Report ranks Social Media tactics by effectiveness, difficultly and usage. You’ll notice a clear and positive correlation between a tactics’ level of difficulty and its level of effectiveness – Report
UX designer, and founder of Foodspotting.com Alexa Andrzejewski shares her experience with a UX-driven startup in this smart and easily digestible slideshare – Presentation
They're nondogmatic and willing to scrap conventional ideas. They are the World’s 50 Most Innovative Companies – Report
Is Payment is a Form of Communication? According to Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey it is. His solution? Create a simpler way for merchants to aggregate data from their most basic daily purchases using Google Analytics-like systems – More
How Demand Media Works: Infographic
‘Meaning’ is the New ‘Money’ - the modern business landscape is changing. Gone are the days when you can use salary as your employee's only incentive—the new money is in fostering ideas and creating platforms on which they can proliferate – Article
An Equation for Reverberating Success: The branding mathematicians behind the equation maintain that the “amplification” of a product leads to success, only after the “verb” (what you do) and the “reverb” (release and impact) take place – More
Visualization: How did Twitter see the Royal wedding? Visualization
For more articles and posts from the last week please visit both @goodbuzz and@disruptbureau. If you have info, articles, case studies or other examples of participatory marketing bliss - please feel free to either post via Facebook or send via e-mail and we’ll take care of it for you.
