Written on 3rd June 2009
13 COMMENTS 
Zee, Editor in Chief at The Next Web, Principal at WeDoCreative.
via Hacker News
Written on 12th May 2009
9 COMMENTS
Zee, Editor in Chief at The Next Web, Principal at WeDoCreative.
French music group Make The Girl Dance have released the music video to their song “Baby, Baby, Baby” and whoever thought of this is a complete and utter genius.
Aside from Baby, Baby, Baby I haven’t got the foggiest what the lyrics are saying, does it matter? No. Will I share it? Yes. Will you? You know it.
Written on 27th March 2009
5 COMMENTS
David Petherick, Contributing Editor, United Kingdom
On the day Barack Obama was inaugurated in January, 200 mobile phones were lost on the Washington DC Metro alone. A free lost-and-found service for your objects, called simply SendMeHome.com plans to reunite you with your precious objects by allowing you to register them, label them, and have the finder easily contact you to return the object. Great, and a must for any portable device. But there’s more…
What is more intriguing about SendMeHome.com is that it also invites you to send your objects on journeys, track their progress on a map, and have each person who encounters the object tell their story. This section of their site is simply called ‘Stories’.
The site has simple, well written descriptions and instructions:—
Stories gives you a rich multimedia, multi-author blog for any item that you register with SendMeHome.com. This gives you a way to track and share the life or journey of your item. You can tell the story of any item, you can even register yourself!
Stories helps you to promote a cause, promote yourself, connect with others who share your interests, or just create a cool story. We hope you’ll be able to collaborate with new, interesting, and like-minded people who you would have otherwise never met.
Some examples include:—
Joining the service, aside from letting you register your objects, also allows you to follow stories, and get updates when there’s a new chapter in a story you are following.
Sendmehome has just announced a Facebook Application, Friend Connect integration, and has a $1000 prize for the best SendMeHome Story.
SendMeHome.com is fun, viral, creative, useful, and sets a smile on the face of everyone who comes across it. The design’s a little clunky, but the essential ingredients are there for growth, because of the simple utility value, and the huge fun element.
World Peace through Wandering Items.
Written on 16th March 2009
6 COMMENTS
Zee, Editor in Chief at The Next Web, Principal at WeDoCreative.
Recently released to the app store is “Pin Up Weather”, an absolutely hilarious take on the daily weather report.
Veteran iPhone/Android app developers, Visuamobile, describe their app:
“A beautiful girl will tease you until you get today’s forecast with your sky condition and the temperature you’ll feel.”
Just like John Mahoney at Gizmodo, I thought that David Lynch’s daily weather report had viral potential…Sorry Mr Lynch, consider yourself defeated.
You can download the app via the appstore here for £1.19/$2.
Written on 13th March 2009
9 COMMENTS
Zee, Editor in Chief at The Next Web, Principal at WeDoCreative.
All you Daft Punk and electronica fans out there, iDaft is your new homepage. Strangely addictive.
Written on 16th January 2009
1 COMMENT
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
Igor Asselbergs, CEO of Amsterdam-based software development company Colorjinn, just mailed me a little secret. He told me how to pain the White House Purple. Colorjinn produces software for color visualization, and with this inauguration thing coming up, a White House-related viral is quite a good idea.
So envision the change: paint the White House purple on Colorjinn.com/Whitehouse. Yes, we – uh – can!
Written on 1st December 2008
22 COMMENTS
Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten, Serial Internet Entrepreneur
I never liked the term Viral Marketing. It just sounds like bad karma. Viruses are associated with diseases and death. Do you want to associate your product or service with that?
It also sounds too easy. All these marketeers being asked for, or offering, a quick ‘Viral Campaign’ by clients. That is like asking for a quick number one music hit or a quick successful start-up. Wishing for it doesn’t make it so.
Anyway. I have found a better word: Reverberate
Reverberating, according to my dictionary, means: To resound in a succession of echoes; reecho
I like that! This is exactly what a good marketing campaign does. It reverberates through the blogosphere, on Twitter and offline. With every reecho of your message a new echo is born. You can hear the whispering bouncing off the walls in dark alleys. Your message, reverberating from individual to individual. Constantly changing in form, just like a real echo. The underlying message, the concept, always strong and carrying your echo, but maturing as it passes along.
Just like an echo your marketing campaign will die out, eventually. That isn’t bad. It will be replaced by your actual product or service. People will be prepared for it because they have heard the echo. Maybe not even conscientiously. They might not even know they heard the echo. But they did, and they recognize it.
Forget Viral. Aim for a message that will reverberate.
Written on 28th November 2008
2 COMMENTS
Zee, Editor in Chief at The Next Web, Principal at WeDoCreative.
“Pomegranate??” you’re thinking.
“Yes, Pomegranate” I reply.
The Pomegranate is a phone which puts the iPhone in it’s place, shows the blackberry what emailing is all about and makes Nokia’s Vertu shameful of it’s looks. The Pomegranate NS08 Phone, shaped like a the most beautiful tear from one’s eye yet carries features and design we can only smile about…
It’s the ultimate emailing device, web browser, photo/video camera, media player, navigation device, PowerPoint projector and – wait for it- it will even brew you your coffee!
If I sound like i’m really laying it on thick here and there’s no way you wouldn’t have already heard of the device…well, it’s true.
The Pomegranate NS08 phone unfortunately doesn’t exist and if you’ve visited the site already you’ll find it’s all a whacky viral campaign for Nova Scotia (the Canadian province!).
How they’re related? Well the first line says it all…”Having everything you want in a phone, may be a stretch…But a place that has everything, definitely exists.”
I personally think it’s a wonderful piece of viral marketing. It’s a piece that’s bound to cause a stir across the web and with any luck, it’ll have people visiting Nova Scotia not only for what it has to offer but also to find out who could have created such an innovative piece of viral marketing! :)
(Thanks to Dave Pook on Friendfeed for the heads up.)
Written on 7th October 2008
2 COMMENTS
Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten, Serial Internet Entrepreneur
That is what it looks like when you watch this amazing Wii Experience at Youtube:
Well done but it doesn’t beat Dutch convenient store Hema with their pinball effects site that was launched in March 2008.
Written on 4th September 2008
2 COMMENTS
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
One of the first 2.0 entrepreneurs that really made an impression on me was Scott Heiferman, CEO and co-founder of MeetUp. When I attended one of my classes at New York University in 2006, he gave a guest lecture. He told us that online services should be all about helping people. The goal of his start-up was to connect people in real life by using the web. Well, that obviously worked out fine.
But now Heiferman and his team feel like there’s the need for a second campaign. The avalanche of Twitter-like services made us screen addicts again. This awesome video says it all:
Meetup has built a funny site around this video, giving you the opportunity to unplug one of your friends with a pre-written email (you can choose from several sentences though):
It’s an epidemic. It can strike anyone. It begins harmlessly enough… maybe with a cell phone, an online social network profile, or an IM. But before long, the electronic screens invade every corner of your life.
There’s a name for this tragic and extremely annoying condition: Screen Addiction.
But there is hope. Send an intervention to someone you care about! Help them take the first step towards recovery.
I’ve always digged Meetup’s mission to connect people offline via an online service. Now they’re giving it an ever better twist by launching this (soon to be viral) campaign. It’s not boring, it’s not cheesy, it absolutely rocks.
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