So the first outdoor AR game was launched in 2000 at the charmingly named International Symposium of Wearable Computers (known in the trade as "Izwic"). By 2011 AR navigation, travel guides and games are quite common. 

The numbers are in, and Hidden Creative Ltd. have presented them in this smart infographic. 

From Hidden Creative Ltd.

They're a bunch of kerrazy cats at Skittles. Okay, so the Twitter-as-homepage experiment wasn't 100% successful, and could well be regarded as a case study in what happens when you allow the lunatics to takeover the asylum. For those unfamiliar with the story, a couple of years ago  Skittles replaced its homepage with a Twitter stream. An unmoderated Twitter stream. Give a monkey control of its own environment and it'll fill the world with bananas = give web users an unmoderated social media feed and they'll turn the air blue. Two days of profanity later, Skittles quietly abandoned the experiment.

Still, you've got to appreciate lofty ambitions, and if on that occasion Skittles overestimated the maturity of the collective web user, its latest social media venture is definitely on the money. 

Frat-boy humour is the order of the day with this latest collection of YouTube clips from BBDO Toronto. In the digital equivalent of the schoolboy favourite "pull my finger" joke, viewers are invited to touch the screen where indicated, and enjoy the wierd humour that follows on screen as a result. If you're blissfully unaware what the "pull my finger" joke actually entails, you're unlikely to appreciate the humour on offer here. 

The different clips range from the insane (Cat) to the deranged (Hitchhiker), and in the case of 'Skittles Girl', the slightly gross. 

It's a fun idea, although frankly not as much fun as being able to post rude messages on a completely unmoderated Twitter stream being used as a homepage, but I doubt Skittles will make that mistake again. 

Check out the rest of the videos here, although you will feel slightly ridiculous touching your screen if you are in a public place. Some pleasures are best enjoyed in private. 

Boot Tetris | DDB Sydney & PLAY | Australia

Volkswagen was launching the Golf Wagon in a tough climate. After the worst of the global financial crisis appeared to be over, most car manufacturers were still suffering from sluggish sales. VW chose to adapt the famous puzzle game Tetris, and use it to showcase the size of the Golf Wagon boot. In showrooms and shopping centres across Australia, consumers were challenged to pack the Golf Wagon boot with giant sized Tetris pieces in the quickest time possible.

This fun brand activation has been short listed in two categories in the upcoming Festival of Media Awards, that take place at the end of the Festival of Media Global event in Montreux.

[Extract from "Cross-culture thinking", in which Brian Elliott, CEO of Amsterdam Worldwide discusses cultural intelligence, and how brands should go global, and fast!]

"Cultural Intelligence: About 10 years ago we gave advice to a small outsider in the mobile handset market about how to launch their product in Europe.  Its devices were supremely useful and did one thing exceptionally well: Secure e-mail access anywhere.  The device looked like a pager and was designed to clip on to your belt. Recognise it yet? The Blackberry by Research-in-Motion. And at that time no self-respecting European executive would be seen with it.  It turns out that in the home of the Savile Row bespoke suit or Italian fashion - the look of a mobile phone matters as much as a power suit or a watch. Even to investment bankers. So we took the team on a cultural journey through the design capitals of Europe, and played a modest role in influencing the future design journey of the Blackberry. Cultural intelligence matters. Awareness of global design trends matters."

Today brands can be as global as they choose to be. Fast.  Yet even a brand like Facebook has been slow to maximise its global footprint. Competing brands in markets as diverse as Russia, The Netherlands, and China, have stolen a march on the master of the social media universe, and they now hold the leadership positions. No mean feat considering the stakes. Fast followers have been present in fashion for ages, yet technology and social media fast followers can do great damage to the international hopes of innovators.

Read the rest of Brian Elliott's article here. 

The news that the Government is now planning to ban the display of cigarettes in-store, whilst a natural progression from the plain packaging it has demanded, is further proof that they do not understand the dynamics at play here.

The introduction of plain packaging removes the ability of consumers to make an informed choice. The removal of the packages from sight altogether is, to be frank, ridiculous and is likely to cost the economy more than it saves.

Tobacco has been a consistent force in the UK economy over the past fifty years. Removing branding from the packaging and trying to remove the product from the public conscious could dramatically impact on our ability to export tobacco goods and, therefore, the economy.

In addition to cutting potential export revenues, the Government’s proposals could see UK retailers having to pay for custom made drawers to store cigarettes away from the public eye. This will see retailers incur huge costs and, for many of the smaller independent stores, potential loses that cannot be recovered elsewhere. Tobacconists may well disappear from the UK and yet, because of duty free, smoking levels could remain high.

The Government has clearly not done their homework. Putting products you are trying to defer attention from below the counter in bland packaging only serves to make them appear illicit and, therefore, more appealing. If you need a proof-point here, you only need to look at drug popularity; illegal drugs are never branded, or indeed packaged in many cases, and are not on display but they are still desired and seen as ‘cool’ by many young people.

The saying actions speak louder than words couldn’t be further from the truth here. If the Government continues to invest in educating consumers here, they would not need to take this extreme action. Isn’t it time the Government stopped thinking of restrictions to put in place and started spearheading the innovative thinking that will solve problems such as this?

SEE ALSO: The cigarette brand blackout

Latest statistics suggest attempts to kick new life into MySpace have probably failed. ComScore figures show MySpace shed more than 10 million unique users between January and February.

Year on year the site has lost somewhere in the region of 50 million users.

This must be causing some frustration back at News Corps HQ where the site has undergone several substantial changes and refits in a collection of futile attempts to stem the exodus of users. All, apparently, to no avail.

This may have been the site that launched the careers of Lily Allen and Kate Nash, but in recent times the likes of Justin Beiber and Grayson Chance have stolen much of the musical thunder that was once the specialism of MySpace.

But News Corp. Digital Media are nothing if not persistent, perhaps understandably so given that Murdoch is probably keen to see some kind of return on Fox’s US$327 million investment.

Regardless of your opinion of Facebook, its privacy issues or even Zuckerberg himself, it is hard to deny that The Social Network’s social network has properly beaten MySpace into submission.

Mike Jones, the man in charge of MySpace was recently quoted by the BBC as saying that MySpace was no longer a social network, but was in fact an ‘entertainment destination’.

This might seem like a face saving exercise, but there is a strong logic to this. Despite its falling user activity levels, MySpace in the UK still clocked up 2.3 million visitors, which is a figure not to be sniffed at. As a social network competing with Facebook, this is pretty dismal, but when compared to another entertainment destination, like MTV, MySpace seems in much better shape. Alexa analytics puts Myspace some 600 places above MTV in terms of traffic ranking.

Film buffs might recognise the title of this post from an oft-quoted aphorism: "When a director dies, he becomes a cameraman". This doesn't really translate as praise, but it serves to illustrate the predicament in which MySpace now finds itself. MySpace’s challenge appears to be less a case of dwindling user interest, and more that of getting the media to understand the new role it has attempted to forge for itself.

From Simpliflying

The app that has taken the world by storm shows no signs of slowing down. Last month, the grumpy feathered ones made it onto the front cover of Wired magazine in the UK, and no doubt a feature film - or at the very least a Pokemon-style global animation franchise - is being discussed by studio executives as we speak.

You may very well wonder what a live-action version of Angry Birds might look like, perhaps directed by a blockbuster director like Michael Bay. 

Wonder no more, thanks to this pretend trailer from Rooster Teeth. A film based on an app?  It actually isn't as daft an idea as it first sounds. It can't be any worse than Street Fighter...