Digital Innovation

It's been a while since I took a broad look at what’s happening in the digital world. Conveniently enough the Webby awards was a wonderful conglomeration of many of the great innovations happening on the web and on mobile devices. Here are some of the big trends:

• Interactive Storytelling: Many companies are merging digital and traditional narrative storytelling. Touching Stories allows you to affect a movie in a number of ways. For example shaking the iPad makes the room shake – and the people in the movie fall down. Another great interactive video is A Hunter Shoots a Bear in which a hunter is about to shoot a bear but chickens out and allows you to substitute something else for him to do. It's really well done and is a great job of aligning with the sponsor Tipp-Ex which produces correction tape. On a slightly different note, the band Sour does some great videos on how people interact with social media. Sour’s big video last year sparked a very similar Pepsi Refresh commercial. This year's video is even better. The first person to copy it well in the US market will be heralded as a social marketing genius. 
• Leveraging Multiple Devices: One of the coolest things we're starting to see is how applications can coordinate across multiple different devices. Apple’s Airplay is a simple example of the how you can take music or video from your iPhone and throw it on to your Apple TV. Collabacam leverages multiple iPhones together to direct a multi camera movie. It syncs all of the different raw footage and allows the director to piece the movie together in real time. Another application is Remote Palette in which the iPad is your canvas and you can choose your colors from a palette on your iPhone. 
• Mixing Virtual and Real World: One of the most interesting trends is combining the real world with the virtual world. In Toronto, M&Ms ran a “digital treasure hunt” where they secretly hid 30 large red M&M men while the Google Street View cameras were filming. 3 of them ended up in the final map and customers were challenged to find them inside Google Street View. In another digital / reality mash up, Yahoo set up digital bus stops in San Francisco that allowed riders to challenge other bus stops in games of skill. And for those of you that like limited edition sneakers, Airwalk sold a small set of limited edition shoes at “invisible pop up stores.” To buy the shoes you had to download an app and go to a specific location in order to purchase the shoe. 
• Reality Tagging: Neer is an application that allows consumers to tag their real life behavior to that of their digital world. It lets you automatically notify family members when you leave work and even remind you that you’re out of milk when you pass the grocery store. I’ve wanted something like this for a long time. It’s not available on my phone yet but I’m a bit skeptical about how well it will work. The problem is that GPS uses an enormous amount of battery power so figuring out when to turn on and off is a big challenge. Another really cool use of reality tagging that I’ve heard about (but haven’t figured out how to do) is through Foursquare. The app allows you to tag locations that were reviewed in the New York Times so you could be reminded about them when you are nearby. 
• Nike: For years Nike has dominated the mobile and social space. Nike’s original Nike+ virtual running club was the first innovative use of social media and they haven’t stopped yet. Nike has an interesting take on augmented reality this year. Almost every version of augmented reality I’ve seen involves adding a graphic element to a real world scene. But with Nike+ or Nike Boom they do augmented reality with sound. You can link these apps to your Facebook account and start playing your music through their apps while you exercise. If somebody likes or comments on your post you'll hear cheering during your run. In Europe they’ve done quite a bit more. In Amsterdam Nike allowed runners to draw running tracks making what looks like graffiti. In London they even created a game which involves getting a team together to run to different locations to win prizes. Not to mention renting the side of a giant skyscraper and posting people’s social media messages on it during the World Cup.