The Copenhagen Wheel

A post on Make's blog features a wheel that, when attached to your bicycle, can generate and store braking energy. What caught my eye was its integration with the iPhone. The "Copenhagen Wheel" can lock and unlock your bicycle via iPhone, but thats just the beginning. It also utilizes the iPhone's location aware technology to assess upcoming traffic, distance traveled and even pollution levels! By generating "green miles," it reminds the cyclist just how many mother nature karma points they've racked up.

A couple of years ago "The Copenhagen Wheel" would have simply been a product aimed to enhance an already green activity. Now, with the integration of the iPhone, it becomes your "personal trainer" and "a natural extension of your everyday life." By integrating smartphone technology and social networking into the product, "The Copenhagen Wheel" is able to have a far more robust and appealing marketing campaign; whether or not it sells more units is another question. Speaking of questions - what happens if at the end of the day your phone dies and you need to get home?

Week 13 Overview: The Social Strip

Just this las week the APOC class had the pleasure of hearing two local online community heroes, Alf Lamont (Director of Marketing and Development for the Comedy Store) and Majorie Kase (Co-founder of MarKyr Media), discuss how "The Social Strip" came to be what it is today. Here are some key points I gleaned from their discussion:

Marketing Chatroulette

Chatroulette’s creator, 17 year-old Andrey Ternovskiy, has received offers from web industry giants like Facebook and Google for his site but is shopping around before saying yes to anyone. Ternovskiy could easily sell Chatroulette today for $1 million if he so desired. Since its inception, Chatroulette has spawned dozens of similar anonymous video chat sites but in Jennifer Van Grove’s post, “Why Chatroulette Is More than Just Penises,” she touches upon several reasons why companies like Facebook and Google have their eyes specifically on Chatroulette:

Viral Suicide?

Have you seen the one with the Ford Sport Ka (Evil Twin campaign, 2004) and that poor little cat? What an interesting way to engrain the “Ford” brand into our minds. If you haven’t seen it, check out the youtube video. (Disclaimer, do NOT click if you LOVE cats.)

The New Rules of Marketing and PR - Meerman is Dearman for Beginners

David Meerman Scott’s book, “The New Rules of Marketing & PR” is a good beginner’s “how to” guide to navigating through the digital media marketing and public relations arena. In his book, Scott describes how the Web has essentially fused marketing and public relations roles into one. With emerging media tools made available on the Web, not only can a marketer or Public Relations person more effectively and efficiently reach its buyers, but can now do it on a much smaller budget.