Brazil vs Argentina: Latin America Creativity

You got to love Latin American humor! Some background … The Argentinan and Brazilian soccer / football / futbol rivalry is highly competitive as well as their respective sets of fans. Games between the two teams, even those that are only friendly matches, are often marked by notable and sometimes controversial incidents. Historically, it’s been pretty even (out of 93 matches there were 24 draws, Argentina won 34, and Brazil won 35, … though Argentina only has 2 World Cup titles and Brazil has 5!

The 32 Freakiest Ads Of 2008

The gory/comic spot for Evil Dead the Musical, by Saatchi & Saatchi in Toronto won the title of AdFreak’s Freakiest Ad of 2008, after collecting 49 percent of the votes at AdFreak… check out all the ads in alphabetical order… which one is your favorite?

YouTube as a discussion destination

Guitar virtuoso Joe Satriani has sued Coldplay for copyright infringement over claims that their hit single, Viva La Vida, used “substantial original portions” of his song If I Could Fly from 2004, seeking damages for “any and all profits.” The lawsuit has been filed in Los Angeles federal court.

Chris Martin has said: “We’re definitely good, but I don’t think you can say we’re that original. I regard us as being incredibly good plagiarists.” I bet he wishes he hadn’t said that now…

Information Everywhere: 2d Visual and Audio Barcodes

Consumers want information everywhere and at all times: from access to their service accounts on phone IVRs, main portals, social networks, and mobile devices, to identifying music with programs such as Verizon’s V Cast Song ID, or iPhone apps such as midomi and shazam. The latest trend is to allow the consumer to easily retrieve additional information on anything they want, lately commercialized using Matrix codes, also known as two-dimensional bar codes.

The most popular matrix code is a QR Code , created by Japanese corporation Denso-Wave in 1994. The “QR” is derived from “Quick Response”, as the creator intended the code to allow its contents to be decoded at high speed. QR Codes are common in Japan, where they are currently the most popular type of two dimensional codes.

QR Codes are used in a broad context, including both commercial tracking applications and convenience-oriented applications aimed at mobile phone users (known as mobile tagging). QR Codes storing addresses and URLs may appear in magazines, on signs, buses, business cards or just about any object that users might need information about. Users with a camera phone equipped with the correct reader software can scan the image of the QR Code causing the phone’s browser to launch and redirect to the programmed URL. This act of linking from physical world objects is known as a hardlink or physical world hyperlinks. Users can also generate and print their own QR Code for others to scan and use by visiting one of several free QR Code generating sites.

Akamai Behavioral Targeting

Akamai, the largest CDN with access to more information than you can imagine, announced a new service called Advertising Decision Solutions (ADS), a new division in the company that will work with its clients to apply behavioral-targeting layers to ad campaigns; it has also acquired Acerno, a company that has built itself on the notion of “predictive modeling” for $95 million.

Akamai has access to anonymous traffic from all over the world on all type of sites, and has access to track user paths and determine behavior. For example, they can know that a user has been looking at specific cars across multiple sites and suggest a targeted ad on a totally different publisher. The best of all, is that Akamai has access to this data without requiring any integration from publishers, no pixel images, no scripts, just raw data from their content networks.

Adobe Max Day 1: Keynote

First big announcement is that there’s a new emphasis on the Flash Platform – as originally called by Macromedia in 2005. Flash, Flex, AIR, and Thermo are just tools to develop experiences using the Flash Runtime, and apparently all these names are just confusing people. Adobe decided to consolidate everything into one platform and market it accordingly. Thermo was officially renamed to Flash Catalyst, and for those of you not familiar with Thermo, it’s a new tool still on early stages of development, targeted to designers or more specifically interactive designers, and allows them to convert a PSD or AI file into a RIA with all events, motions, states, animations, and data… and the best part is that it generates mxml and as3 code so a developer can extend and continue the development using Flex Builder.