It’s an application that allows Fiat drivers to monitor their driving technique and gives recommendations on how to drive more efficiently, Bastholm noted that the project reflected the deepening relationship between client and agency, another growing trend obvious in this year’s awarded work. “This is one of the few things that really sends out a message to clients as well as creatives and agencies,” added juror Iain Tait, creative director at Poke London. “I can only imagine the number of people that had to be involved in that project to make it happen, and I think it takes someone really brave at a senior level to get all those people working in that way to deliver a project like that.”

Great work although I personally would have put SIM cards into the cars to automate the data exchange rather than use fairly awkward and manual USB sticks.

Regardless, the campaign only happened as AKQA persuaded Fiat to get hardware installed into the car. Really spells home the fact that work like this is only made possible if a client trusts its agency throughout its business.

140 Mafia’, launched by social media gaming firm Lolplaying, is completely text-based and users can form a “mob” by recruiting other players from among their followers.

Users pay real cash to acquire virtual currency from a platform called Super Rewards, which has already proved successful at generating revenue from Facebook and MySpace, as well as the iPhone.

http://140mafia.com/

Via

Conceptually a nice example of how augmented reality can be employed to aid the decision making process during product purchase:

Lots of potential for ARG within the functional / utility space.

playingforchange.com - From the award-winning documentary, “Playing For Change: Peace Through Music”, comes the first of many “songs around the world” being released independently. Featured is a cover of the Ben E. King classic by musicians around the world adding their part to the song as it travelled the globe.

View on Vimeo.

Via Mark D’s link

Via Rob Mc

I was lucky enough to be invited onto this years judging panel. Some great work was viewed. Here’s the shortlist in no particular order:

All rights of footage remain with owners.

Two great projects from Aaron Koblin - both harnessing Amazon’s Mechanical Turk (The mechanical turk is a network of people that solve problems that can’t be automated ie the one’s that do and will always need human intervention).

For both these project people are recruited to do a particular task in return for $0.01.

Bicycle built for 2 thousand

2,088 voice recordings collected from online workers assembled into the song “Daisy Bell” - the first example of computer synthesized vocals. Each individual was prompted to listen to a short sound clip, then record themselves imitating what they heard without knowledge of the final task.

View it here

Ten thousand cents

Ten Thousand Cents is a digital artwork that creates a representation of a $100 bill. Using a custom drawing tool, thousands of individuals working in isolation from one another painted a tiny part of the bill without knowledge of the overall task. Workers were paid one cent each via Amazon’s Mechanical Turk distributed labor tool. The total labor cost to create the bill, the artwork being created, and the reproductions available for purchase are all $100. The work is presented as an interactive/video piece with all 10,000 parts being drawn simultaneously. The project explores the circumstances we live in, a new and uncharted combination of digital labor markets, “crowdsourcing,” “virtual economies,” and digital reproduction.

View it here

Conceptually love it. Recruit individual content which in sum creates an experience for a wider community to share.