Bluejacking

Bluejacking is the name for the activity of sending unsolicited messages to people via bluetooth devices. This is usually done via mobile phones, with one user sending messages in the form of a phonebook contact to another, unsuspecting user. The technology is similar to that which would be used by the bluetooth nodes for the promotion part of the E-vent idea. The nodes would detect any suitable bluetooth devices in range, and would attempt to push audio or video clips of the artist being promoted out to those devices.

This could also be connected to the media sharing. For example, as the images were being uploaded by E-vent users, they could be moderated and rated, either by other people using the service who aren't at the event, or by someone employed at the venue, and then the best of the bunch could be automatically sent out to E-vent users as they were leaving the venue.

Of Gigs and Mobiles

Live 8 was one of the biggest musical events ever, seen by an estimated 3 billion people worldwide. As part of the experience, they had a number that you could text your name to in order for it to be displayed on a screen above the stage in Philadelphia. This used very traditional phone technology (SMS messaging), but it still encouraged people to use their mobile phones in new ways at large social events.

Mobile Interfaces and Applications

Mobiface is another blog style site containing links to sites and articles about designing interfaces and applications for mobile devices.

This link shows a user interface which is very intuitive. From what the user inputs at the start screen, it works out what they might be attempting to do and narrows down the options available to them in the context menu. It is a very simple way to make a lot of options available to the user, without having to organise and categorise them in universal ways, and it eliminates the need for the user to remember where all the tools and applications are on their device. It also gives the device a very clean look, as the options presented at each stage of the navigation are only those which make sense to the user.

This highlights the usefulness of making things easy to use for everybody. If something is hard to use, then you will lose a lot of your potential audience. For a community project such as E-vent this could be disastrous, as without a lot of user contributed content, there is no incentive for anyone to sign up.





PingMag has an interesting piece on flash for mobile devices being created as art as well as being functional. They mostly focus on the aesthetic side, with things such as animated screen savers, and interactive wallpapers, rather than applications which are innovative with their functions.










Remember The Milk is a website designed for mobile devices which serves as a sort of personal organiser, as well as syncing up with other applications, such as google calendar. One of the most innovative things about it is the reminder service. You can be reminded of events in your organiser either by SMS, or via one of the many supported instant messaging systems. While it seems like common sense, for an external system such as a website, it is a nice little feature, especially with the inclusion of IM support.

The BenQ Black Box UIC is a fantastic interface concept, which is extremely flexible to fit in with the needs of just about anyone.

The design of the object itself may be nothing special, just a shiny black box (like so many other pieces of technology these days), but the interface is projected onto the surface in real time, and can be changed to suit the users needs for different tasks and applications on the fly. This makes it the perfect device to be used with new pieces of software that will not necessarily have been possible with a standard keypad.

Small Surfaces

Small Surfaces is a site dedicated to mobile user interface design. It contains links to sites all over the internet which talk about designing interactive applications and interfaces for mobile devices.

This first link talks about how people like to fiddle with their mobile devices. Whether it be productive, or simply for the fun of it, people are always fiddling with the settings on their mobile phones. The article suggests having two user interfaces on the phone, one for serious, productive functions, and another for playing around with. Why not go the whole way and have a fully customisable operating system on mobile phones, with user defined controls, the ultimate in fiddling.

This essay is about mobile television, and the circumstances under which people will use it. The most interesting part is the ten points towards the end. It is surprising in many ways, for example it says that people using their mobile phones around the home make up a large portion of mobile TV viewers. This is because mobile technology affords a certain amount of control, 'micro control', as to where and how the user can enjoy the experience. This creates a very personal scenario in which the user is fully in charge of whatever they are doing.

E-vent

The service has a name. E-vent represents the online component of the project, combined with the ultimate purpose, getting people to share their media from entertainment events.


Draft logos/idents:

Shozu and Location Tags

Shozu is an image uploading service created for mobile devices. The idea is that when you take photos on your camera phone, as most people do these days, they can be uploaded straight away to a site such as flickr and with all the relevant tags put in place by you on your phone. At the moment, the application is only available for certain models of mobile phone, but the number is increasing all the time. An application like this would be the kind of thing that people would use to upload their photographs of events that they were at. The photos could either be sent to a website, or they could be sent locally to a sever at the venue, and the venue could then provide the service of making them available to the public. This would also enable for easy tagging, as the people running the event would be able to tag all incoming photos of that night with the relevant event name. It would also allow for moderation, with people browsing the incoming images for inappropriate content.

flickr also have another useful piece of technology on their site with location tagging. When a user uploads a photo, they can also input the location at which it was taken. This makes it possible for users to search for a location, and then browse all the photos taken there. This combined with some sort of date/time searching would be how users could find images of their events.

Research

When thinking about the possibility of venues using small clips of the audio to promote the artists, Amazon came to mind. The online retailer uses short audio previews on the product pages to try and sell the album to more people. This seems to happen more on the Amazon.com website than the Amazon.co.uk site. It is available for quite a lot of the albums on sale, so Amazon must see it as a good way to intrigue people.

I also looked into whether people were uploading a lot of media that they recorded themselves, or whether it was just for personal use, using a gig that took place in the last week as an example. Looking around, there was a lot of media uploaded, but as I suspected, it was all over the internet.

Finally, I checked to see whether there were any solutions similar to mine on the internet already. The closest thing i could really find were groups on places like flickr where people were uploading photos of gigs by certain artists or in certain locations. These weren't very widely used either, as images from the gigs were also available elsewhere on the web.

The Idea

Just writing down the basic outline of my idea so it's out there. I think there are still a few creases to iron out here and there.

Gigs are a great place for targetted marketing. Upwards of 10,000 people at larger venues, all in a single building who all share a common interest through the music they have chosen to see. This could be used to great effect if there were an easy way to get information out to those people, say via bluetooth nodes to their mobile devices. The information sent to them could vary from reviews of other gigs on the tour, to clips of the band they are going to see, to adverts for their new albums, or the albums of similar artists. This could all link up to an iTunes like store where these purchases could be made.

The people who would be providing this service would be the people running the venue. The benefit for them is that they could use this service as a great form of targetted advertising, sending information about upcoming gigs to a large group of people who they know have similar interests, and who they know are willing to travel the distance to the venue. This part of the idea could link up to the venue's box office website, so that people can order the tickets there and then.

From a slightly less companies-trying-to-get-as-much-money-from-you-as-they-can point of view, there is another way that digital devices could be used, and to some extent are. People are always using cameraphones at gigs. These photos and videos are then uploaded to the internet via flickr or photobucket or youtube or any other of the dozens of media hosting sites out there mere hours after the event. The only problem with this is consistency. The photos and videos are all over the web, all with different tags, descriptions, titles, and with varying quality. Using GPS technology, it should be possible to work out what venue someone is in when they take a photo, and based on the time, what event they are currently watching. This information could then be used to automatically upload all the media taken by people at the event to one consistent place, ordering them by time and with user added tags. These could then be rated by the viewers of the site, in a similar way to how the videos on youtube are rated, making it a lot easier for people to find images and clips of the event they were at, as soon as they get home.

Blog Gone Wrong

Not particularly relevant, but it seemed like an appropriate thing to blog about. This links leads to a page of Jodi.org mimicking and corrupting the typical blogger layout. The rest of the site can be found at http://wwwwwwwww.jodi.org/ (looks like page of corrupt nonsense? Check the source code...), while http://www.jodi.org will take you to some newly added videos of video game hacks created by the collective.

Links and Things

These are just a few links I have found while looking for information on viral marketing and designing for mobile phones while surfing the web.

Viral Marketing
This is a link to an article on generating interest in a product or event using viral marketing techniques. It has some good strategies on how to manage a viral campaign, such as how to keep track of what people are saying about you (good or bad) by keeping an eye on blog comments and messageboards via RSS feeds. It also goes into some detail on the technique of link baiting, the proccess of assessing how link-worthy your content is and attracting the right kind of people who will link to you, thus maximising traffic through using your audience.

The second link is a blog post on what it means for something to be viral. One of the main things I drew from this was that the ideas behind a lot of viral adverts are quite shallow, most of the time out of necessity, as things which are easy to understand and instantly entertaining are going to be much quicker to spread around that something thought provoking which takes time to sink in.

Designing for Mobile Devices
These two links focus mostly on the technical side of designing for small screens such as those of mobile phones. The first is a link to Mike Davidson's blog, where he suggests four easy steps that will create a mobile version of your site. I found the image comparisons half way through the article quite interesting. They were from sites which I would have expected to already have used mobile friendly technology, especially Gizmodo, but I guess that goes to show how under-developed and underused this technology is. The second link deals with compatibility, and shows how certain tags and page elements are displayed on verious devices. It has some pretty useful tips on how to make your site easy to use on a mobile device.

The Six Principles of Viral Marketing

This article is about the main principles of viral marketing. It provides good guidelines for creating a viral marketing campaign, along with information about what you can hope to achieve from doing so.

Among the information given in the article are useful things such as:

Viral marketers practice delayed gratification. They may not profit today, or tomorrow, but if they can generate a groundswell of interest from something free, they know they will profit "soon and for the rest of their lives"...

which explains that the payoff of a viral marketing campaign will not be short term thing, but when it finally comes around, it will be more than worth the effort put in.

I found the article useful when considering how to go about creating a viral marketing campaign, as it clearly highlights the differences between viral and ordinary campaigns.

ilovebees: An Example of Viral Marketing

ilovebees was a marketing campaign for the release of 'Halo 2' a highly anticipated video game. It took the form of an Alternate Reality Game, or 'ARG'. Typically these games see people from all over the world working together to harvest information from fake websites. They generate an unbelievable amount of publicity, and really draw the participants into the world of the product that they are publicising.

ilovebees was a cross-media experience that drew on the internet for the production of fake websites, as well as emailing, and even phone communication with characters from the game world. The game sparked interest when the url 'www.ilovebees.com' was displayed at the end of an early trailer for Halo 2. From here, players of the game unravelled the secrets held within that site and many others to reveal a complicated story full of twists and turns. The ultimate payoff of the game is that participants were invited to special locations to play the game before it was released to the public.