There’s no doubt about it, Apple is an amazing company when it comes to marketing its products. The two new Siri TV ads are a perfect example of how the company can show the human side of otherwise hard-to-understand technology.

One of our favorite sites to read is Scoopertino, which makes fun of Apple with fake news in a very Onion-esque way. This week, with all of the talk about retina displays coming to new iPad 3, the satirical site had its own spin on the news by “announcing” the iBalls.

The silly, yet witty, faux story states:

With its new iBalls technology, Apple has created superior eyes. Once installed, iBalls allow you to choose between five different modes of vision: normal, microscope, telescope, wide-angle and sepia.

Even better, iBalls allow you to take 8-megapixel still photos with one eye, 3D photos using two eyes, and upload a 24/7* video record of your life to iCloud in glorious 1080p.

The site even went so far as to mockup an Apple style webpage for the iBalls:

Click here for full-size goodness.

The story continues with this hilarious poke at Apple’s subscription services:

Those who default on their iBalls subscription will lose all functionality, including basic vision. However, in these cases, Apple will provide iBraille training at no additional cost.

This leads me to a slightly serious question, even though this is a far-fetched humorous look at Apple technology, if something like this were available would you be interested? We’ve seen these types of things in movies like The Terminator and Mission: Impossible, but you have to believe that it will be a reality some day. And hey, if something like this ever does come to fruition, I’m sure Apple will be right there as a major player.

Until then, I’ll stick to the eyes I have.

At the end of last year, we told you about a new project by YouTube called the “YouTube Slam“. The project pits two videos against one another in a “hot or not” style competition. The site lets you watch two videos and decide which one is better, or in the case of comedy, funnier.

That project alone wasn’t scientific or geeky enough for Google, so the company decided to delve deeper into what makes videos funnier and how the company can detect that you enjoyed it more than any other old video.

One place the company decided to go was within the comments on all of the videos that participated in the YouTube Slam. By looking at the content of the comments, it found that many people would leave a quick “hahaha” or “LOL”. Comments that display the humor you found in the video can help the company rank the popularity of a video in a slightly different way. This data on top of what it was already collecting with your votes, might just tell us which videos are actually funnier.

Surprisingly, the company found that the more o’s you put in your LOL comments on the video, the funnier you thought it was. It was a pattern it picked up time and time again, so Google has decided to build it in to an algorithm which ranks the funniest videos:

Next we needed an algorithm to rank these funny videos by comedic potential, e.g. is “Charlie bit my finger” funnier than “David after dentist”? Raw viewcount on its own is insufficient as a ranking metric since it is biased by video age and exposure. We noticed that viewers emphasize their reaction to funny videos in several ways: e.g. capitalization (LOL), elongation (loooooool), repetition (lolololol), exclamation (lolllll!!!!!), and combinations thereof. If a user uses an “loooooool” vs an “loool”, does it mean they were more amused? We designed features to quantify the degree of emphasis on words associated with amusement in viewer comments. We then trained a passive-aggressive ranking algorithm using human-annotated pairwise ground truth and a combination of text and audiovisual features. Similar to Music Slam, we used this ranker to populate candidates for human voting for our Comedy Slam.

How scientific is it exactly? Your guess is as good as mine, but the minds at Google always come up with a way to quantify huge amounts of data so the “LOLSignal” sounds just as good as any other.

If you haven’t participated in the YouTube Slam project yet, it’s a fun way to kill boredom for hours on end.

Designed by Milos Paripovic, the iPoo concept is a mockery with a finger pointed directly at you… Yes you… You Apple ifan you.

I do think Paripovic is missing a trick though.

No Apple scented air freshener immediately after you’re ‘done’? How about Steve Jobs yelling”boom”! after you’ve landed a floater? :) TMI?

The best one of the lot might be by comedy team Rooster Teeth. It’s called “Siri: The Holiday Horror Movie (Trailer)”, and has all of the fake gore and cheesiness you’d expect from a really crappy Horror movie. The only difference is that the evil force that stars in it is none other than Apple’s Siri.

Enjoy!

Thinking about this now, he could just be barking out of pure excitement.

As the video below explains, the technology behind this uses sound from the event that is converted into energy that charges one phone over the course of the weekend. This won’t be available to all but Orange will be “testing” a limited number of the T Shirts around one of their stages and effectively turning punters into walking billboards for them in return for providing a useful service. I wouldn’t expect this tech to catch on anytime soon in the mainstream because the cynic in me says this is a “technology breakthrough” dressed up as a marketing stunt but it is a very good one and it’s bound to get plenty of attention both at the festival itself and online. A smart marketing campaign indeed…