Thank you for visiting our 4D blog. Here you’ll find thoughts and comments from our global colleagues about the digital world. From a campaign that inspires us to how we see the digital world changing to a new gadget we just love, you’ll find it here!

Archive for April, 2007

Big in Japan: QR codes

The more we read about QR codes and their uses here at Rants the more sense they make. Essentially, small barcode-like squares of information that can be read by the camera on the back of your mobile phone, these things are huge in Japan. What’s great about the codes is that they allow you to store information, be it text, a URL, GPS coordinates. So, rather than relying on a user visiting the mobile version of your site after they’ve just seen one of your posters on the tube (definitely not likely), they can whip out their phone, hold it over the code for a couple of seconds and be redirected to the site. Of course the possibilities for what the marketer sends them from there are virtually endless: a film trailer, ringtones, wallpapers and beyond.

Posted April 30, 2007 10:58 am by Alex Horner 0 Comments

Filed under: Innovations | Tags: ,,

Geotagging: it’s only a matter of time

Any flickr users out there in readerland who are yet to try out the geotagging feature of the site are missing out. As is typical of flickr they make a seemingly complex feature as simple as dragging your photos onto a map. Nice. What’s really going to see the feature take off though is the first wave of cameras with GPS built in as standard. You take a snap of the London Eye, upload it wirelessly via Wifi and it gets automatically plotted onto a map on flickr. In fact, it will give users a whole new way to browse photos: instead of meandering through swathes of files and folders looking for those snaps you took in Brighton you’ll be able to navigate there on the map. Current solutions do exist but it’s going to be a little while for this to become standard. And when it does, you’ll be able to tell your friends “I read about this on Rants years ago my good fellow”.

Posted April 26, 2007 4:46 pm by Alex Horner 0 Comments

Filed under: Innovations | Tags: ,

28 weeks later

Whilst ambling along Great Portland Street the other day we stumbled across this stencil work for upcoming film 28 Weeks Later on the pavement. What we always wonder when we see guerilla marketing is who’s behind it? Is an agency arming its work experience students with spray cans and stencils? Surely a recipe for disaster.

Posted April 23, 2007 12:41 pm by Alex Horner 0 Comments

Filed under: Campaigns | Tags: ,

The big players’ search sandboxes

Alpha and searchmash have recently been launched by Yahoo and Google respectively. Both engines share a similar premise: draw in a variety of different search results ranging from images to Wikipedia entries but all on a single, unrefreshed page. It’s possible to expand and collapse the different categories so if for example you’re only interested in video, you can minimize other results and expand only video ones. With searchmash it’s even possible to play videos within the search results page as embedded YouTube files – a nice touch. Owing to Yahoo’s other ventures they have the advantage of Flickr and Yahoo Answers results too.

Posted April 10, 2007 3:52 pm by Alex Horner 0 Comments

Filed under: Innovations | Tags: ,,

Yahoo offers unlimited email storage

Yahoo Mail announced last week that they are to begin offering their users unlimited email storage come May. This places them ahead of their closest rivals Gmail (2.8gb and growing) and Live.com Mail (2gb) and should further secure their lead in the webmail race. For those of you who haven’t given it a go, the beta of the new Yahoo Mail is Ajax-tastic.

Posted April 5, 2007 11:18 am by Alex Horner 0 Comments

Filed under: Innovations | Tags: ,,,