Traffic Digital

We are currently working on a new project to allow Cash Converters the ability to offer a range of financial services online - these include payday advances and pawnbroker services.

Expected to be available later in the summer, this would be a major move forward for Cash Converters - currently these services are only available in store over the counter - and increase the availabilty of these servces to the whole of the UK. You can read more about their range of financial services here.

Colonel Black’s weekly message to the CIA.

Next episode of Clone is Monday 1st December at 8:30 on BBC3

There are some great stats for social media sties at: http://socialmediastatistics.wikidot.com/. Check the site out for lots of interesting (and amazingly large) figures - here are a few:

For Facebook:

8.4 million UK users of which

o 3 million men
o 3.5 million women (the rest are unspecified)
o 1 million 13 - 18
o 3.8 million 18 – 24
o 2.8 million 24- 30
o 2.2 million 30 – 50
o 0.3 million 50 – 65

Staggeringly - there are close to 4 billion photos on Facebook (taken from talk by Facebook - March 2008) and 14 million photos uploaded daily on Facebook (Worldwide, Universal McCann, 2008).

For MySpace:

300 million accounts
110 million monthly active users
In the UK it is as common to have a MySpace page as it is a dog
14 Billion comments on the site
20 Billion mails on the site total
50 Million mails per day (more than Yahoo, Hotmail,
or Google)
10 Billion friend relationships
1.5 Billion images
8 Million images being uploaded per day
60,000 new videos being upload to MySpaceTV each day
More than 8 million artists and bands on MySpace Music

We’re going to be working a lot with the peagoose, racupine, pelicabear, and paracat over the next 2 months, to produce a great new site for Evolutions Television London’s leading post production house. Evolutions’ shows include Top Gear, The Apprentice and Gladiators

As the proud winners of Broadcast Magazine’s Best Post Production House Award in 2007, Evolutions is the most popular post production facility in Soho - at one of our four locations; Berners Street, Soho Square, Wells Street and Oxford House.

YouTube streamed its first live event featuring a mix of celebrities, musicians and a number of YouTube favourites. Surprisingly, considering the massive infrastructure that Google and YouTube have, they worked with CDN partner Akamai (who also support the BBC iPlayer) to deliver the streaming video, and achieved up to 700,000 simultaneous streams. The player was built by the digital agency digitaria.

Akamai have some interesting visualization tools, for showing internet paths, and number of streams which are all updated in real time.

4IP - Making a Difference

Great event at Channel 4 on Thursday night, Delivering Public Service in a Digital Age organised by Glasshouse, to launch the 4IP fund.

They had a great panel comprising Eric Auchard (Reuters), Saul Klein (Index Ventures/The Accelerator Group), Zenna Atkins (Chair of Ofsted), Tom Loosemore (Head of 4iP) & Ryan Regan (Last.fm). There was some good debate - Zenna Atkins being particularly forthright about her views on working with government, and some awkward questions from the audience (thanks to Stefan from Moo!)

They talked about the fund which is in the region of £50 million, of which Channel 4 for are putting in approximately £30 million. It’s aim is to commission non-television projects which fulfill  Channel 4’s public service remit (no one seemed exactly sure what this meant - Saul Klein’s definition was “Public services are stuff we pay for from our taxes”, which sounded reasonable, although I don’t know how you apply this to getting an idea commissioned).

You can find out more about 4IP here.

Yesterday (Monday the 17th November) was the excellent Future of Mobile conference.

Lots of mobile types there (like us), and some good speakers - stand outs of the day were Doug Richard, Tomi T Ahonen (apparently Tomi has a book out - no really!), Andrew Grill, Tom Hume, Jonathan MacDonald, Ewen MacLeod, and Andrew Scott

Ryan Carson was ill unfortunately, so hosting duties were taken over by the irrepressible James ‘Change the World or Go Home’ Whatleydude

General (and recurring) themes of the day were: the mobile industry is fragmented, there are a lot of handsets in the world (3 billion and counting), this is the year of mobile (© 2001) and the user experience offered by the operators and handset manufacturers is shit (thanks Ewen McCloud for the quote of the day)

…and a lot of speakers like the work of Hugh Macleod (and rightly so) - using this slide at least 3 times, as well as several others by him.

©Hugh Macleod

Also - unsurprisingly - mobile people like twitter. Alan Patrick wrote up the event from the #fom channel twitter stream (and he wasn’t even there).  His review is based on the discussion. Cool…

Some more coverage of the event:

• Andrew Grill’s “The Future of Mobile is…”
• Geir Freysson

Google have helpfully (finally) published a starter guide to SEO.

Read more about it here.

Do you Oohgle?

We have been working with Out of Home (OOH) specialists Posterscope, to demonstrate the effectiveness of display advertising in driving search.

When you see an Out-of-Home ad (posters and screens) and then follow it up online, you’re Oohgling. Out-of-Home advertising is great at creating interest and intrigue and that’s often followed up with an on-line search to find out more.

Posterscope’s Prism Search tool helps advertisers understand how well their OOH campaign achieved this, and which bits worked the best.

So, go on - Oohgle!

By visiting the site and signing up there are some prizes on offer, thanks to Coke.

Colonel Black’s weekly message to the CIA #2

Mark Gatiss as Colonel Black in the BBC3 comedy, Clone - Mondays at 8:30pm