To promote the BMW 1 Series in South Africa, digital agency iLogic projected an interactive racing game onto buildings and scaffolding’s in major cities over eight nights and let consumers take part in playing on the huge, 108 square meter screen. Promoters on the ground helped participants enter their Facebook details via a Galaxy Pad, used afterwards as a steering wheel to race with. Results were posted to the BMW1 Series fan page on Facebook, as well as the racer’s personal profile.

Veuve Clicquot officially launched today its multimedia, crowd-sourced platform, Wish You Were Here. This new platform is part of the luxury house’s expanded effort to centralize and showcase its 100+ global programs, events and initiatives. Wish You Were Here visually captures inspiring moments from around the world and celebrates the spirit and lifestyle of Veuve Clicquot through travel, fashion, food, sport and design, via photos and videos submitted by the brand, official contributors and the public.

Key Site Features:
- Infinite Wall: showcases all submissions and permits visitors to readily navigate and interact through liking, sharing and commenting on media.
- Contributors: features tastemakers from the worlds of art, design, fashion, travel and food, selected to contribute their own “Wish You Were Here” moments with the Clicquot community.
- Places / Events: navigable map allows visitors to search and view content tagged by location, and major events from around the world, such as the Veuve Clicquot Polo Classic, Milan Design Week and Yelloween. 40 cities are featured at launch, with more to come.
- Popular: features and highlights images receiving highest number of “favorites” on the site.

Signal Snowboards regular feature ‘Every Third Thursday’ sees the team put their design and engineering skills to the test by crafting a unique snowboard. In the past, they have made one with a paintball gun, one with a boombox, one that doubled as an electric guitar and one using LEGO. This time they celebrated Steve Jobs with an Apple-inspired snowboard. The iShred has an aluminum unibody with a cut-out illuminated Signal logo and space to slide in an iPad. Watch the video below to see them making the iShred, testing it out on the slopes and then using the iPad for a bit of FaceTime afterwards:

A|X Armani Exchange unveiled the grand finale to its year-long 20th anniversary celebration with the A|X VIDEOMIX – an interactive, create-your-own music video fashion show application, for the iPad and iPhone, that merges fashion and technology.

The A|X VIDEOMIX puts you in the director’s chair, allowing users to select their “run of show,” choosing from a selection of music tracks, backgrounds, A|X 20th Anniversary Collection looks and models including Alessandra Ambrosio, Marlon Teixeira, Francisco Lachowski, Milou Sluis and more. iPhone and iPad users will then be able to shop and share their A|X VIDEOMIX with friends via email and social networks. After the show has been viewed, users can “like,” comment and rate A|X VIDEOMIX creations, which will permit special access to behind the scenes videos, footage of models preparing for the show, and more.

To mark this special occasion, Mr. Giorgio Armani has created his own A|X VIDEOMIX, “SuperShow.” You can view it here.

Fashion seen in A|X VIDEOMIX will feature looks from the A|XX 20th Anniversary Fall Collection. The Fall Line will be available through October, then A|X VIDEOMIX will be updated to incorporate looks from the Armani Exchange holiday collection, with a special focus on gift giving for the holiday season.

Go to the iTunes App Store to download A|X VIDEOMIX.

Publishers, don’t start skimping on your iPad editions now. Magazine and newspaper apps’ quality seems to be the most important factor in their success with consumers, according to the first annual “The State of the App” report from McPheters & Company’s iMonitor service, drawing on iMonitor’s evaluations of 3,000 apps from publishers around the world.

Quality has a higher correlation with the magazine and newspaper-app revenue than a wide variety of other variables including price, subscription availability and audience demographics like age and income, the report says.

IMonitor gauges quality by rating how well apps work, whether they crash, how long they take to download, the presence of video or audio, design, navigability, interactivity, social-media capabilities and other factors. Apps’ total ratings also reflect the quality of the ads they carry.

“People who have iPads are pretty sophisticated and tech-savvy consumers, and there are a wide variety of options available to them on the iPad,” said Rebecca McPheters, CEO at McPheters & Co. “So apps are competing not only with other apps, but websites, games and news applications that are not publication-related. And to compete effectively they need to provide a high quality of experience.”

The last couple of weeks have seen an influx of apps, however, with rather low production values and few enhancements. “They skew heavily toward replicas, much more than they have in the past, so that’s kind of disturbing,” Ms. McPheters said.

The best apps reformat their content as users turn the iPad from a horizontal to vertical orientation, Ms. McPheters added. “But because this takes resources, we’re seeing a move toward fixed orientation,” she said.

The report found that 82% of North American magazine and newspaper apps include links, while 69% include social media, 34% include video, 28% include animation, 16% include transaction capabilities, 14% include audio and 2% include localization.

Most advertising is also presented only in straight PDF format, according to the report, which found that 68% of ads in North American apps include links but only 18% include video, 17% include social media, 15% include transaction capabilities and 13% include navigation.

via AdAge

Sir Richard Branson aims to introduce a “green aviation fuel” on Virgin Atlantic aircraft within three years claiming “one of the most exciting developments of our lifetime and a major breakthrough in the war on carbon”.

His company hopes to help convert waste gases from industrial steel production into a jet propuslion that could ultimately account for nearly a fifth of the present annual global consumption of aviation fuel. A demonstration flight is planned within 12-18 months, the airline announced on Tuesday.

The plan to recycle gases that would otherwise be burnt into the atmosphere as carbon dioxide caught environmental campaigners by surprise but Friends of the Earth (FoE) gave the idea a cautious welcome since it would not raise the same land use problems as a Virgin biofuel experiment using coconut oil more than three years ago.

Branson said: “With oil running out, it is important that new fuel solutions are sustainable and, with the steel industry alone able to deliver over 15bn gallons of jet fuel annually, the potential is very exciting.

“This new technology is scalable, sustainable and can be commercially produced at a cost comparable to conventional jet fuel.”

He announced the plans to partner with low-carbon development firm LanzaTech at a press conference in London. Plane-making company Boeing and Swedish Fuels are also involved. The Roundtable for Sustainable Biofuels, an international initiative monitoring standards for alternative fuels, will guide the experiment.

On his blog, Branson claimed: “This could turn aviation from a dirty industry to one of the cleanest … Within three years we aim to fly Virgin Atlantic planes with the new fuel on flights from Shanghai to London and Delhi to London, and to follow this with operations in the UK and the rest of the world.”

The technology is being trialled in New Zealand with a larger demonstration plant being commissioned in Shanghai and the first commercial operation expected in China in 2014.

Virgin has admitted that the coconut experiment was never likely to be developed commercially and had been done to prove to sceptics that it was possible to develop alternatives to aviation fuel.

LanzaTech estimates the new recyling process could apply to 65% of the world’s steel mills and could also be used in other metal processing and chemical industries. “We are confident that we will have a facility with the capacity to produce fuel for commercial use by 2014,” said Jennifer Holmgren, its chief executive.

FoE’s transport campaigner, Richard Dyer, said: “On the face of it, it does look promising in that they are getting round the issues of biofuels and land use. It is a very long way from commercial use. It has got to be very safe and cheap enough for airlines to be interested in using it.”

He also pointed out Virgin had lobbied for airport expansion and against air passenger duty, an environmental levy.

Bracketron announces the North American availability of the iRoom iDock, the first powered and motorized in-wall mounting solution for iPad on the market today. Available in portrait and landscape models, the iDock can be flush-mounted to seamlessly and stylishly integrate the iPad into any room. A patented motorized docking system opens and closes the iDock to securely store the iPad, and the dock also includes both power and composite audio internal connections. The mount’s faceplate (bezel) comes in three colors including brushed aluminum, piano black and opal white, or can be color customized so that the bezel perfectly matches your unique interior design. Compatible with both iPad and iPad 2.

The iDock features a unique powered opening mechanism with a one-touch proximity sensor. When activated, the sensor recognizes when you are nearby and switches the iDock to the open position allowing you to insert your iPad. After ten seconds the iPad door closes again automatically. The proximity sensor can also be disabled to lock the iPad permanently in place. When the iPad is inserted into the dock, you have total control of smart home applications on the device while it is also being charged. The iDock also automatically charges the iPad battery when mounted. If you experience a power outage, the iDock simply opens automatically and releases the iPad for removal.

Analysts disagree about Apple’s intentions when it comes to capturing the vast prepaid (pay-as-you-go) market with the next iPhone. But there’s a simple clue that will tell you.

This article titled “Will there be one or two iPhone 5s in September? Here’s how to tell” was written by Charles Arthur, for guardian.co.uk on Tuesday 28th June 2011 15.03 UTC

Call it the battle of the analysts, because only one group can be correct. At issue: will Apple unveil one new iPhone in September – or two?

At issue may be the reputations of some of the finance industry’s biggest names.

First, the predictions of two iPhones. Chris Whitmore of Deutsche Bank suggested in a note to clients on Monday morning that he understood that Apple was to launch both a high-end “iPhone 5″ and a low-end “iPhone 4S” (our money’s still on 4G): “With Nokia and RIMM struggling,” he writes, “the time is right for Apple to aggressively penetrate the mid range smart-phone market (i.e. 0-500 category) to dramatically expand its [total addressable market] and market share.” (First reported at Fortune.)

Whitmore’s argument is that an unlocked, lower-priced iPhone 4S with a prepaid voice plan would “drive significantly greater penetration” into the countries where Apple already has distribution.

Pre-paid: where the customers are

It’s the pre-paid market that is potentially so valuable, as everyone acknowledges. Over at Asymco, Horace Dediu has crunched some of the numbers (though he doesn’t express any opinion on how many phones Apple might announce, or even when):

the global split between pre-/post-paid subscribers as of 2010…[shows that] roughly 1.5 billion are post-paid and 3.7 billion are pre-paid. That means that nearly 70% of the world is not being addressed by the iPhone as it currently stands. Put another way, a shift in positioning might result in a 250% increase in addressable market.

Dediu also points out that “most pre-paid subs see a full price for the iPhone (retail around 0 to 00) vs. post-paid customers seeing a price of 0 or below. The 0 happens to be an important psychological price inflection point where volumes increase dramatically.”

So the logical thing in that case, if Apple is going for market share – which it certainly did with the iPod, segmenting the market from top to bottom – is to come up with at least two different phones, one for the high-end contract market, and another for the lower-end prepaid market. If you don’t think that the iPhone remains an object of desire, you haven’t been reading the reports of people having their phones stolen which then end up in distant lands (in this case, Vietnam).

Obviously, providing a 0 iPhone wouldn’t stop theft. There might be the smidgen of a chance it would slightly reduce it, though.

Fortune has a graphic showing the breakdown between prepaid (no contract) in red and postpaid/contract (in blue) by geographic region, which graphically demonstrates how valuable the prepaid market is – if, that is, you can price your product to sell there.

So, a priced-to-sell prepay iPhone? No, says Keith Bachman of BMO Capital, who has slapped the idea down. He favours the single phone approach: an iPhone 4S (4G! We keep telling you!) On the Barrons blog, he’s quoted insisting that there won’t be a second new iPhone; “we believe that the 3GS will be the low-end iPhone,” he said in a research note. This is, of course, pretty much what already happens – but the fact that the 3GS doesn’t have SHINY NEW attached to it limits its appeal in some markets. Those are the places where sales of Android handsets, built and priced to shift, are rocketing.

No second iPhone?

Richard Windsor of Nomura is also in the “no second iPhone” camp: he has said on more than one occasion that his sources in the Far East see no signs of the sort of ramping up and extra supply chain recruitment that would imply a second iPhone. He does, though, agree with the view put forward by Whitmore and Dediu that if Apple were to go after the prepaid market with a less expensive phone, that it could have a dramatic effect on the market; his analysis is that next year Android will take a commanding lead – except that “if Apple does a cheap iPhone, all bets are off.”

Also in the “one iPhone” camp is Katy Huberty of Morgan Stanley, who came back from a week of meetings in Taiwan (reports Fortune) saying that she expects iPhone and iPad production to “begin ramping up aggressively” from August. To which one replies: well, yes, because that’s when you’re heading into the peak Christmas period. Obviously you’d do that. Huberty thinks there will only be the one iPhone, and that the launch might not be until late September – in which case she’s reducing her estimate for iPhones sold by 2m for the quarter. If there’s an early September launch, then she’s putting those 2m back into the July-September quarter. (There’s more detail on her estimates in this screenshot from Fortune.)

Can’t (iPod) Touch this

Finally, one idea which pushes us back towards the “two iPhones” argument: the iPod Touch is not included in Apple’s Back-to-School promotion in the US. In previous years, this has included a free iPod Touch; this year it’s going to be a 0 iTunes Gift Card. That in itself is most intriguing, because Apple has updated the iPod Touch over the past two years; if it’s leaving it out of the promotion… why? Could it be because it’s got a phone coming (and secondary school kids pretty much all have phones now, after all) that will be at a price to tempt school kids?

Only one question then remains: how, exactly, could Apple build a phone down to that key 0-0 price tag? It’s not true to say that Apple doesn’t know how to build for low prices – there’s nobody challenging the iPad for quality at the price it goes at. (Though stay tuned for developments this week…)

What would it be like?

The possibilities that have been aired are that it will have a smaller screen (unlikely) or less storage (much more likely) and slower processor (likely). Another possibility that few seem to have considered is that the high-end phone could have a larger screen (perhaps like the Galaxy II?) and more storage – so that any new “cheaper” iPhone would, in specification, resemble previous iPhones, but have a new look (and hence street cred) while costing Apple nothing more in terms of raw components as the 3GS it presently sells.

To figure out whether there’s really a second iPhone coming, therefore, watch for signs of the 3GS supplies drying up in the next couple of months. Since that’s the most likely low-end configuration, any slowing in supplies would mean they’re being diverted to the “new” low-end iPhone.

And if that happens then as Nomura’s Windsor says, it really is going to get interesting.

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Incase announced yesterday that it will expand its product offering to include a new audio collection starting with a line of headphones to be released in Fall 2011. A complementary extension of the Incase product offering, the new headphones will reflect the brandʼs expertise in designing and developing products that provide enhanced mobility and user experiences. Employing an integrated development approach called Incase Soundesign, the audio collection reflects a synthesis of precision sound engineering and minimal design.

“With Soundesign as our guiding ethos, we are focused on delivering headphones that bring together design simplicity and intuitive functionality with precision sound and maximum performance,” stated Markus Diebel, Incase VP of Design. “We are working to carefully balance form and function in the new audio collection because in the end, we want users to enjoy an audio experience with headphones that sound and feel as great as they look.”

The audio collection for Fall 2011 will comprise of four headphone models: Sonic Over Ear, Reflex On Ear, Pivot On Ear and Capsule In Ear. Each model features custom-tuned audio drivers that have been engineered to accurately reproduce the source audio for a natural, balanced response across the entire audio spectrum.

Apple’s new cloud service is coming this autumn, but what’s the point? Will it work on Windows, what happens to your storage … and other questions answered.

This article titled “iCloud and iTunes Match: everything we know so far” was written by Charles Arthur, for guardian.co.uk on Tuesday 7th June 2011 14.20 UTC

Steve Jobs took the stage to announce iCloud on Monday at Apple’s Worldwide Developer Conference. Cloud computing? From Apple?

iCloud also encompasses iTunes Match, which is in effect an amnesty – 10 years after the original file-sharing Napster was ground into the dust – for people who have illicitly downloaded music from filesharing networks, and marks a way for music labels to get some money back from them.

The simplest way to deal with what iCloud and iTunes Match do (apart from reading Apple’s press release, linked there) is to deal with all the questions we’ve been asked via Twitter. So here you go.

• Why? Because whereas 10 years ago Steve Jobs talked about the personal computer being the “digital hub”, Apple now thinks that cloud computing is going to be the hub, because it has diversified its product range – iPhone, iPad, Mac, iPod Touch – so that you don’t necessarily need a “PC” to do the tasks that previously needed the power of a CPU on your desk. We live in a world of multiple devices – PC, smartphone, tablet, music player – where you want to be on top of your calendar, contacts and music, as well as being able to edit and save documents on the go wherever you have internet connectivity. The storage – and, more importantly, synchronisation – of those shouldn’t need to wait for you to get to one canonical device (the PC). All you should need is a reliable internet connection.

• Is the iTunes bit US only? For now, yes. No date has been given for a UK or rest-of-world release for iTunes Match (where the songs in your iTunes library can be synchronised with a list in the cloud, for .99 per year). That was in fact the very first question we asked Apple after the keynote finished. “No date has been given,” came the reply.

However, as MobileMe will officially die on 30 June 2012 (and you can no longer sign up), and the explanatory email from Apple says that it’s going to be replaced with iCloud, it’s clear that it’s going to be rolled out to the rest of the world in time. Apple’s given itself a year to get the other music labels in other territories on board, it seems.

• Can I give my friend access to my account so they can have all my music? Well, think about it. You’ll have to let them log in as you. They’ll also have to log in as you on any and all devices that they want to use. The music will get downloaded – but it’s not clear quite how accessible that will be to pull off your iPhone, say. And when your friend logs off, perhaps the music goes. You might be able to do this – but the chances are the deal with the music labels is going to make it extremely difficult to do easily.

• Are iTunes syncs included in the 5GB limit? As we understand it, that only the songs that have to be uploaded from your collection because they’re not found on the iTunes Music Store will count against your limit of 5GB of free storage.

• 5GB is really small … is that just so the next announcement of “we’re now giving you 20GB” seems generous? iCloud’s free allocation of 5GB of storage is only 2GB less than you get with Google’s free Gmail account, and Google is usually thought of as the king of cloud computing. Then again, Microsoft’s Skydrive is 25GB, and is free. It doesn’t offer the push syncing between devices, though. By limiting who can access it (people who are using iOS5 or OSX Lion) Apple is taking a cautious approach: it doesn’t want another MobileMe disaster.

• What’s the cost of extra storage? Not known at the moment.

• Does it stream music or do you download, or both? Will it stream effectively over 3G? It’s a download for the free element (music that you previously purchased on the iTunes Music Store). iTunes Match is also a download, not streaming.

• Where are the server farms? How green will they be? Apple don’t have a great record … Maiden, North Carolina and two other locations. The Maiden one is near a major source of hydroelectric power. Server farms of that sort often are as it’s one of the most reliable.

• Will it sync seamlessly with my PC & Linux netbook? Will it have version control? Shareable URLs to send photos to Gran? (a) iTunes Match will work on Windows Vista and Windows 7, as well as Mac OSX, as will iCloud. (b) No signs of version control that we’ve seen, though Lion does have that built in – so you may get it on that platform. (c) Logically there must be a URL for a photo, but whether you’ll be able to share that directly is still unclear. It might be that you’ll either have to send it via Twitter, or embed it in an email. Gran might like to get an email– it’s been too long since you got in touch.

• Will iOS 5 & iCloud improve management of Podcasts? Auto download new episodes? Notifications of new episodes? That would be an iTunes improvement, so you’d need to look at that.

• What/how much integration will there be on the non-iOS side – ie, on Lion? On Lion, as much as on iOS. On earlier versions of Mac OS X (and on versions of iOS before iOS 5), it’s much less clear. Our best guess would be that, since iOS 5 will work on the iPhone 3GS and up – which makes the majority of iPhones sold – that it won’t be very backward-compatible at all, by contrast with Windows, where it will work with Vista and Windows 7. (Outlook 2010 is recommended for calendars.)

• Will it enable easy group sharing of photos and docs? Neither Jobs nor Apple said so, but since it wasn’t shown off doing this, and since Apple isn’t an enterprise-oriented company (where group sharing like this would be a big feature), our guess is that for documents and photos, you’ll be using email again.

You will however be able to share calendars.

• 1 – why no streaming? 2 – is iCloud music US only? 3 – why no video? 1 – because streaming is more expensive and harder to cache than a download: you can’t just dump a load of data on the line, but have to keep it flowing. 2 – see above. 3 – video takes up far more storage, and Apple doesn’t have the deals with film and TV studios for this. Baby steps.

• Will the interface still be iTunes, or will it be new? You don’t specify which interface on what device. It’s iTunes-like in iOS devices, but iCloud covers a lot of different applications, including documents. iTunes Match will, yes, work through iTunes.

• Will it put Dropbox out of business? We doubt it, because Dropbox is cross-platform in a way that iCloud’s document service isn’t trying to be. The aim of Dropbox is broad: get people to use it to sync content between diverse systems. iCloud is trying much more to tie people into using iOS devices; working on Windows is necessary because the majority of iPhone/iPad owners are on Windows. Dropbox also lets large groups of people share files. Apple isn’t into that at all.

• Can you upload any doc? Encrypted all the way? Other security? From our reading, only documents that are readable across all iOS devices can be uploaded (that’s why Pages was shown – though Pages can open Microsoft Word documents). Encryption will be there, but obviously only as good as your password. If you’re worried about encryption in transit, that’s already the case with MobileMe, so it won’t change with iCloud.

• what will the UX [user experience] be like on Windows? Will it be a viable solution for backups, file management, etc? We don’t know what the UX will be like. (Windows-y?) It’s not going to be your first port of call for version management. Apple is making something for the average user, not the computer expert. The whole point is that you shouldn’t need to be an expert to use it. If you’re looking for version management, there are plenty of free Unix solutions out there – starting with Github.

• What happens to those of us with MobileMe subs between its end in June and iCloud’s availability in Autumn? Great question. No obvious answer. Sign up for another year and hope for a refund, or watch as your email and stored data vanishes in a puff of cloud, seems to be the initial response. All MobileMe accounts are being extended free for another year to June 2012. (Thanks @spikediswhack.)

• What happens if you stop paying for your iCloud match service per month – what do I lose and what do I keep? First, it’s annual: .99 (which will probably translate to £20 in the UK). If you stop paying, you’ll still be able to access your purchased iTunes Music Store music on any iOS device, but your uploaded music, and the rest of your library, will revert to living only in one place – a hard drive somewhere at home or work.

• How do you think Apple will identify music for iTunes Match, and if it’s file-signature based, could they identify pirated music? And, should they not carry that track on iTunes, could they be legally compelled to identify users with those files? It will probably work initially on ID3 tags, and possibly an MD5 hash if that’s available (but ID3 tags are going to be more likely to be right, since you’d have named your music, where the MD5 hash will vary depending on how long the song is and its sample rate.) As for piracy, stop fretting. Apple can’t possibly have every song, and it could argue that people might have written their own songs.

• Is iTunes Match not a licence to get music cheap? Leech the album illegally, match it to iTunes and claim under the account? You’ve got it the wrong way round. Previously if you leeched it, the record label would never have gotten any money before. Now it’ll get a cut of that . It’s about as much as it would get through Spotify. (Update: this may be a 70/30 music labels/Apple split, as happens with app sales. Ironically, this sort of split between service provider and music supplier is exactly what some US music publishers wanted with the original Napster. It’s taken 10 years for the record labels to come round to it.)

• I have one AppleID tied to iTunes content. Another ID for MobileMe mail. Which does iCloud need? Oooh, tricky. MobileMe comes after iTunes, so that will be the disposable one. Your MobileMe identity will shift to iCloud, but the iTunes accounts are tied to that ID, so you’ll need to keep that one.

• iTunes Match, Amazon Cloud Music, Google Music – will any of them ever work in the UK? Will Spotify ever launch in US? Yes, Probably, Probably, Yes. Just don’t ask us about timescales.

We’re sure you’ll have some more and we’ll see if we can bug Apple to give us more information. In the meantime, keep the questions coming.

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