We’ll finish this post with a quote from Revolver’s Managing Director Iain S Bruce:

“Steve Jobs’ major accomplishment wasn’t in business and his legacy won’t lie in the designs he left behind. What he did that was truly great was tune ordinary consumers into the technology dream – opening up the public imagination to the infinite possibilities the computing universe offers in a manner few could equal.”

“He was an innovator rather than an inventor, and it’s fair to say that he stood on the shoulders of giants, but without him the dot.communist revolution would be several years further behind.”

You may have heard the terrible news from Mumbai last week of three bomb blasts in congested areas during the evening rush hour which killed at least 21 people and injured more than 100 others.
Nitin Sagar was following news developments on twitter from his office in New Delhi. Noticing the amount of people tweeting to offer help to victims and their families, and aware of the power that twitter has to quickly reach an incredible amount of people Sagar created a Google docs spreadsheet to act as a collective hub of contact details from those offering assistance in the hope that they could help an injured person on the street or a relative desperately searching for a loved one.
He inserted the details of five people and posted a link to twitter inviting people to add to it before he left work at 8 p.m

Just half hour later, the spreadsheet had grown to include the names of hundreds of people who wanted to donate blood, provide shelter, help transport people or help in any way possible. By the end of the night, the spreadsheet had been viewed by thousands and re-tweeted by even more. Most importantly, it had been successfully used by people who needed help.

Anirubh Sharma, a technology worker from Bangalore, saw the link on Twitter. A friend of his was killed when the Taj Mahal Palace Tower hotel came under attack in 2008. Sharma offered an airline coupon for a free ticket to anyone who needed to travel in or out of Mumbai to reach an injured friend or family member.
His soon received a call from a man who was desperately trying to reach his injured daughter.
“It’s easy to make noise,” he said. “But instead of just ranting on Facebook and Twitter, why not do something good?”

Sagar took the spreadsheet down once the need for emergency help dissipated, but has said that he plans to keep working on establishing more databases, so that if and when the need arises again, there will already be a relief database in place.
Clearly not one to bask under the ‘Good Samaritan’ banner that has been put upon him, Sagar this week tweeted: “Dear new followers gained in the wake of a truly delusional momentary Twitter glory, good luck. I am genuinely annoying on most days.”

A fantastic story that highlights the massive reach of digital communications.

Here’s a small selection of the ad pictures which were published in print media across the USA :

More of the images can be found here.

The artwork which was done by Guido Daniele of Milan, Italy can take up to a full day to create. The video below gives a behind the scenes glimpse of the making of the award-winning campaign.

The eye catching and innovative campaign from AT&T is just one from a company who regularly use digital communications as part of their overall strategy.

Have a great weekend everyone!

Famed Pocky creators, the Japanese confectionary company Ezaki Gilco, enlisted the help of AKB 48 to promote their newest sugary snack to front for their advertising campaign.

The advert featured six of the most recognisable faces from the group and one of the newest members to the fold, the fresh faced Eguchi Aimi.

When it launched, fans assembled across social media channels and forums, growing ever more curious as to who she was and resulting in her online profile and the advert itself gaining thousands of views and fans. Suspicion arose though when fans noticed she shared the same birthday as Ezaki Gilco, 11th February, and the company’s slogan ‘Hitotsubu 300 meter’ also sounded like Aimi’s favourite track and field sport, the 300 metres.

In response to these suspicions, Elzaki Gilco revealed that though Aimi may be the newest member, certainly parts of her should have been familiar to the thousands of fans. A video released detailed how they Aimi was a CGI composite, made up of the other members who starred alongside her in the advert. Nose, mouth, eyes, hair and body combined the perfect popstar to front their new campaign.

Why do this and risk angering fans? The campaign went digital, crossing media, creating discussion on social networks and causing the reveal video to go viral across the world.

Brand awareness for Ezaki Gilco increased and, in another smart move, the company released a ‘create-your-own Aimi’ tool to soften the blow felt by fans who felt duped by the stunt. It worked and I’m sure the AKB 48 gained a few more single downloads in the process.

While we don’t have an arsenal of 58 singing J-pop superstars to hand, Revolver does know how to use them.

Remember this advert from all the way back in 2005? (That long ago?!)

The ad was for the arrival of the Sony BRAVIA LCD range, with a short film featuring coloured bouncing balls (in real time) bouncing down the streets of San Francisco. The message conveyed? That the colour from the Sony screens was to be like nothing ever seen before!

Fast forward to the super advanced technological heights of 2011, and Sony have re-created a version of the ad to announce that four key matches from the Wimbledon finals will be transmitted live in HD 3-D to 3D-capable cinemas around the world.

The digital campaign created by Disqo accompanies the T.V ad with rich banners on sport and news sites showing tennis action sequences with the tennis ball appearing to come out of the screen, and a 3D zoom-in of the crowd on ‘Murray Mound’.

Have a great weekend! We’re off to watch the tennis…in 3D…with some strawberries!

Top prize in the media category went to a campaign from South Korean agency Cheil Worldwide with their campaign for Homeplus, the Korean wing of Tesco.

The “Homeplus Subway Virtual Store” idea was devised by Cheil to help the retailer gain an edge over its rival, E-mart. The plan was to bring the store to the busy Korean people. Interactive images of store aisles were created in subway stations allowed people to shop from the store simply by taking pictures of QR codes beside the products with their mobile phones. Orders were then delivered to consumers homes.
The campaign captured the trend for use of innovative media within advertising.

American agency JWT won a gold lion in the direct marketing category for their ’2100 in 2010′ campaign. A public outreach project to raise awareness about Burma’s 2,100 political prisoners. The campaign involved an instalation in Grand Central Station of a mock prison of 200 miniature cells, each framing a photograph of a Burmese political prisoner inside a prison cell of detachable pens. Supporters could remove the pens, removing the bars of the cell, and sign a petition calling upon Burma’s military rulers to free the political prisoners.

A touching and effective campaign. More information is available here

Finally…on a lighter note, there was a win for the Scottish Leith Agency for their work for Irn Bru.
The Bruzil campaign showed how Scotland could create a winning football team fit for the 2034 World Cup if Scots had children with Brazilians! Sure this one has given some long suffering Scottish football fans a few ideas!

Three deserving winners that highlight the importance of digital media within campaigns. We’ll keep you updated with more winners as the festival draws to a close!

So, we’ve decided to start a weekly game of iSpy with the intelligent and well travelled who follow us on our blog and twitter.

Each week we will post a snippet taken by a member of the team and call on you to hark back to your travels and see if you can guess which corner of the globe it was taken.

All you’ve got to do to take part is tweet your guess followed by #RevolverPR or add your comment to the blog.

It goes without saying that the invisible prize is still very much up for grabs!

Here’s this week’s photo for your perusal:

And the winner is… *Drumroll* @Native_Flowers for guessing correctly that the image above is in fact the Oslo Opera House, Norway. A jetsetter after our own heart! Yet fear not intrepid followers, this was a tester to break you in easily and next week will have a whole new social element to it. Stay tuned!

Follow the instructions on this Carlsberg ad, and you can use a piece of paper to open a bottle of Carlsberg. Useful for those beer shaped emergencies!

The ad was originally printed in Menzo, a Dutch men’s magazine. For those of us not residing in the Netherlands however, Carlseberg have provided a handy download of the ad to print and try!

The ad reinforces the importance of media interaction for customers and that getting the customer to to engage with your brand is very important. Something important to Revolver PR.

Enjoy the weekend folks!

Credits: Duval Guillaume

The event brings together start-up tech companies, angel investors, venture capitalists and a variety of interesting new people from across the online, digital media and emerging new technology sectors.

It’s always good to see innovation, creativity and entrepreneurial flair being showcased and celebrated in Scotland and this year’s event was no exception. The combination of exhibition and conference lets you meet the companies, get up close and personal with tech demos and network to your heart’s content – before heading into the conference and hear from some seriously clever people.

The 2011 EIE highlighted a number of intriguing new areas and technologies. First up was a gratifyingly large proportion of companies working on new areas of gaming. From the creation of new online, multiplayer virtual worlds – tied into social newtworks (Huzutech) , through to a new AI-driven solution which allows game developers to increase the emotional engagement with their games (Musemantik) , location-based gaming (Tigatag) and an interesting new technology I can only really describe as ‘reverse augmented reality’ (Peekabu) .

Similarly, a raft of companies were taking the concepts of social media and making it work in a variety of new ways. One company has created collaborative online platform which allows collections of data to be accessed and manipulated by specified groups of users (Zendit) , another was using social channels to create a new way for users to find other people to car pool with.

The mobile side was also well represented, with companies offering new technology to increase the image quality and introduce new capabilities into phone cameras (Rikatek) and use mobile cameras in a variety of ways for input, search, image recognition and a variety of consumer apps (Mobile Acuity).

Plus there was a company demonstrating holograms. HOLOGRAMS (Holoxica) . Forget the 3D thing – this is the future! OK, current technology is focusing on static displays for advertising and venues, but the company had a technology demonstrator runnign on screen, which shows how the technology can move forward and be used on screens – as active holograms.

I love living in the future.

The conference side of EIE didn’t disappoint either. Investors and analysts pointed out that the investment sector in Scotland is widely misunderstood, ignored or generally considered non-existent, irrelevant or insignificant. While I did make notes of a sort, they were all tweeted live (hey, it’s the 21st century…) Search for the hashtag #EIE2011 if you’d like to see what people in the audience were saying.

We contacted a number of the exhibitors and asked them for their thoughts on the EIE experience…

Stephen Shepherd (SourceRail)
Revolver – What does SourceRail do?
Stephen Shepherd: SourceRail is an advanced media monitoring tool with the capability to monitor the online press for specific mentions of companies, clients, competitors, products, services or topics. It allows you to promote the very best coverage to your intranet, website or even social networks. That gives you a competitive advantage in managing your brand, turning a resource-consuming need to monitor the press into an efficient, active solution which frees you to capitalise on the good coverage and deal effectively with the bad.

R – Why were you at EIE, what did you hope to achieve?
SS – I was at EIE11 to raise awareness of SourceRail, meet potential partners as well as drum up some interest from the investment community.

R – Did it work?
SS – I think one of the biggest surprises for me is the ongoing collaborative and support network startups have in Edinburgh. It’s a small community but we are very keen to help each other out and the EIE event really reiterated that. I found quiet a few potential partners, was inundated with contacts, product suggestions and even met a few potential customers.

R – Any feedback on the event itself?
SS – It is a long day so be prepared for it.

R – Sum your EIE experience up for us.
SS – EIE is one of those rare events where everyone you want to meet is in one place. If your a start up you need be there and if your an investor you have to be.

Alexander Cole (Peekabu)
Revolver – What does Peekabu do?
Alex Cole – Peekabu is simple and cheap motion control that can reach anyone. With a wave of the hand in mid air, people can control and interact with dynamic media without expensive hardware. Online content comes to live, games get more physical, your own hand becomes the controller, and you don’t have to spend a penny to make it happen.

R – Why were you at EIE, what did you hope to achieve?
AC – EIE is a great chance to meet people on both sides of the market – the potential clients with business and projects that Peekabu can help transform, and the investors who have the funding and connection to make that happen. Peekabu is looking for both to make sure this is a market-driven technology with the resources to succeed.

R – Did it work?
AC – There were several new contacts I made over the course of the fair in R&D, PR, mobile carriers, analytics, game development, and investment. It’s a mountain of leads to follow up on, but that’s always a sign of success.

R – Any feedback on the event itself?
AC – EIE is about putting a public face on a business that’s often stuck in meeting rooms and at desks, It’s a great chance to stumble on unexpected people whose interests dovetail with yours. Even people in wildly different fields can have great feedback and unexpected opportunities for you. It’s also great to catch up with other entrepreneurs and compare notes – there’s a kind of extended family of start-ups in Edinburgh, and these fairs always feel like a reunion.

Ioannis Nousias (RICAtec)
Revolver – In your own words, what does Rikatek do?
Ioannis Nousias – RICAtek enables a promising future for mobile photography. We are developing hardware for inclusion in the application processor or camera sensor of future mobile phones, bringing next-generation image processing and camera systems to reality. This helps phone manufacturers improve the level of image quality and add new capabilities that make it easier to take great pictures first time.

R – Why were you at EIE, what did you hope to achieve?
IN – Our presence at this year’s EIE was mainly to seek investment in order to scale our business to service potential customers. At the same time we were looking for companies to partner with, especially ones specialising in imaging algorithms.

R – Did it work?
IN – The event was quite successful. Our presentation seemed to attract attention and we made a few useful investor contacts and met some interesting people.

R: Any feedback on the event?
IN – EIE is a unique opportunity for young companies for networking and early exposure to the investment community. It is well organised and put together. If asked about areas for improvement, the only thing that comes to mind is helping people to identify affiliations: colour-coded name tags to distinguish between exhibitors, company scouts, attorneys/advisors, and investors would have been very helpful.

R – Sum it all up for us…
IN – “The best camera is the one you have with you. We want to make it even better.”

Jonathan Millin (Zoomatelo)
Revolver – In your own words, what does Zoomatelo do?
Jonnathan Millin – This depends on how many words I’m allowed to use! :p As you can imagine, I’m happy to talk for hours on the subject. But in about 60 words: At Zoomatelo, we help the world commute better. Our flagship product, Zoom2work, is an easy-to-use and customisable carpooling solution. It’s built for businesses which want to improve employee benefits, reduce parking costs and cut carbon emissions. Using a proprietary route matching solution Zoom2work uncovers connections between people, geographically and socially, and uses this information to make creating and managing a carpool easy. Find out more at Zoom2Work.co.uk.

Revolver – Why were you at EIE, what did you hope to achieve?
JM – In short – Clients, Contacts, Partners and Advice. EIE was a fantastic arena to meet innovative individuals in large organisations – exactly the kind of clients we are looking for. Further, there were a number of entrepreneurial individuals connected to these large organisations, who have become valuable contacts. We also found a number of green companies, particularly those involved in carbon accounting and reducing emissions within organisations. It was great to chat to these companies as we could add value to their proposition and strike a strong partnership. Finally we always welcome advice from the seasoned veterans of entrepreneurship. Although we’ve been in this for two years – we have a lot to learn and are ready to learn it!

Revolver – Did it work?
JM – EIE exceeded our expectations in all of the above. It attracted people who are passionate about entrepreneurship, and almost everyone we spoke to wanted to help us out regardless of their position or proposition.

Revolver – Any feedback on the event?
JM – We found EIE well organised, in a stunning location and with spectacular food. The guests were of the highest calibre, and the diversity of the exhibitors shows the true innovative nature of the startups. I’ll be sure to apply for next year’s event!

Revolver – Sum it all up for us…
JM – Very rarely does one get the opportunity to pitch and talk to so many people of such a high calibre. I recommend every startup attend EIE next year, they’re bound to find something useful!

Le Zhang (TriVault)

Revolver – In your own words, what does TriVault do?
Le Zhang – TriVault is the next-gen backup and recovery technology that enables managed service providers to deliver a complete cloud backup solution with up to 40% cost saving compared to others.

R – Why were you at EIE, what did you hope to achieve?
LZ – I’m there to meet potential investors and paying customers in order to gauge interest in seed investment.

R – Did it work?
LZ – A handful of people are interested in TriVault with follow-up meetings planned for next week, which is great!

R – Any feedback on the event?
LZ – A great time to see many different high-tech projects in one day.

R – Sum it all up for us…
It’s a fun day presenting TriVault at this year’s EIE. And even more exciting is that I actually met people who were genuinely interested in TriVault, which hopefully will lead to seed investment in the future.

Ben Panter (Blackford Analysis)
Revolver – What does Blackford Analysis do?
Ben Panter – We make radiologists lives easier by presenting them with data in the right orientation so they can get straight to work.

R – Why were you at EIE, what did you hope to achieve?
BP – We were there to update future investors on our progress, and to look for talented new employees.

R – Did it work?
BP – Absolutely!

R – Any feedback on the event?
BP – We’ve exhibited at the event for the past three years, and really value the opportunity to meet investors and network with other young technology companies to help each other grow.

R – Sum it all up for us…
BP – EIE ’11 demonstrated, yet again, the value of bringing together so many tech companies, investors and supporting organisations under one roof. Blackford Analysis had an extremely productive day, and we look forward to following up on many conversations.

Bruno Panara (TigaTag)
Revolver – What does Tigatag do?
Bruno Panara – Tigatag is a way of making checkins fun. Instead of repetitively trying to become a foursquare mayor, you check-in as part of playing games with your friends. This way you can have fun, discover new places in your city, and land some nice deals and prizes. Companies can use Tigatag to promote their brand and venues, as well as to engage with the local community.

R – Why were you at EIE, what did you hope to achieve?
BP – EIE was a great opportunity for a small company like ours to show off our product to a new crowd. We went in looking mainly to receive feedback from people new to Tigatag, but also to hopefully start some conversations with potential investors and partners. Last, but not the least, we wanted to interact with some of the other local startups: this is our first company, we have loads to learn from people who have been through it already!

R – Did it work?
BP – We did get some nice feedback and collected quite a stack of cards! The other companies there all had really interesting things to show, so that was fun as well. Sadly, we didn’t get the chance to really engage with investors, it felt like no one was interested in our kind of product.

R – Any feedback on the event?
BP – I found the event to be positive overall. I attended the first and third day, and there were delegates from a variety of different backgrounds that made the networking very interesting. Some of the sessions on the third day could’ve been more useful or engaging for startup founders, but I do understand that the event has to cater to entrepreneurs and investors alike.

R – Sum it all up for us…
BP – EIE was a fun event for us, and we were able to show Tigatag to investors, corporates and other entrepreneurs. Feedback from multiple sources was exactly what we were after!”