Royal Navy marketing

The Royal Navy commissioned some excellent work from Glue London to market themselves online. Visitors can send messages to friends that are delivered by Royal Navy divers, submariners, jet pilots, marines or helicopter pilots. The Flash videos are just awesome and they're a ton of fun too.

Here's a message we sent...err, received:

http://www.getthemessage.net/index.php?id=MTAxMTg=

Send your own at Get The Message

Digital Talanoa : Virtually Unstoppable

Geni (geni.com) is a four-month old start-up in the United States that received a $100 million valuation two months after starting. That’s always nice.

The company has been developing a social network website aimed at families and the building of family trees. Unlike MySpace or Facebook, which are websites geared more towards contacts, friends and other aquaintances, Geni’s angle is all about genealogy (tracing lines of descent from ancestors). It’s extremely addictive too. I started my Geni family tree last Friday by inputting eight members of my immediate family. An extremely simple-to-use, Flash interface allows users to add new family members in one single step. Those family members are then notified by email to keep it going (and growing). Five days later, there were 104 people in my family tree. Some of the people on my sister-in-law’s side are complete unknowns to me, as well. It’s interesting to watch this expand. Within our virtual family tree, we can share pictures, have discussions and maintain birthday and anniversary calendars.

Bringo - Easy. Free. Genius.

Pure genius is the only way I can describe Bringo, a new web app that tackles the hassles of "phone trees" head on. Phone trees are the maze of buttons we need to press in order to reach a real, live person on the phone. Although it has less utility here for people in Fiji, I think, I will find the site useful for the handful of organisations I still deal with back in the United States.

Basically, the service will telephone a big company for you (neatly organised up by industry). I tried American Airlines as an example. I typed in my phone number and waited a few seconds for the system to initiative the call and navigate to a live person. Once they reach a real live operator, Bringo calls me back and I'm good to go. It will only work with a US-based telephone number (VoIP numbers work fine).

It's the equivalent of having a personal secretary manage telephone calls that you know will be a pain in the ass and a timewaster for you to do yourself. I love stuff like this.
The simplest of ideas, executed perfectly. It's also completely free.

Guide to Piracy

The Essential Guide to Piracy

Very nicely written...this is not intended to support piracy but it is an excellent overview of the topic and methods used to "pirate". Besides, I couldn't resist this dog.

**image from CrunchGear**

Digital Talanoa : Productive Twittering

I remember an experience I had shortly after I first moved to Fiji. The landlord of the house I moved into arranged for a group of workers to come and fix a leaking roof. They arrived just a bit behind schedule (about two and a half days) and proceeded to set up their equipment and work area. That took another few hours. When they appeared to be “all ready”, they sat down for morning tea. Two of them stretched out on mats and fell asleep. I didn’t understand very much at all at that point.