How do you get people off the Tube and onto London’s cycle lanes and pedestrian footpaths during the London 2012 Olympic Games?

According to TfL, it’s as simple as pointing people to the re:route iPhone app which rewards individuals every time they choose to walk or cycle around London. Whether your route is quicker, better for the environment or gets you burning more calories, you’ll earn points towards all sorts of treats – from haircuts and hotels, to shopping and spa days.

Recyclebank, the company behind the app is formed of a group of passionate people who’ve made it their mission to inspire others to take action – small to big – that will have a positive impact on our planet.

According to Recyclebank website:

We trade the actions you make that have a positive impact on your home by saving energy, community by recycling and the environment by conserving natural resources for points that you can use for rewards you choose. Those rewards come in a variety of flavours: Products, discounts and coupons from the world’s leading brands (think: Kashi, Footlocker, Dunkin Donuts), or you can pay the good deed forward by donating your points to support environmental education in schools.

TfL have already flirted with the idea of gamification with their Chromorama app which disappointingly has struggled to gain momentum with mainstream commuters. The game connects people’s Oyster cards with an online world where points are earned based on journey challenges that are completed. Chromorama adds a layer of adventure to the otherwise dull and often painful daily trudge faced by millions of Londoners.

Where Chromorama was let down was it didn’t allow players to convert points into tangible rewards – something that re:route obviously has as a key selling-point central to its proposition.

Will you be downloading the app? For us Androiders, we’ll have to wait a few more months, by which time the Olympic crowds may well be a distant memory…

Last year Google introduced Hangouts On Air to a limited number of broadcasters, enabling them to go live with friends and fans, for all the world to see. Since then, this small community has grown the feature in lots of creative ways.

As of today, Hangouts On Air is now available to all users across 40 countries (including the UK) who are 18+ and who have a YouTube account in good standing without any strikes (you will only have a strike on your YouTube account if you have previously posted content to YouTube which violates the YouTube policies).

So if you have something to say—as an aspiring artist, a global celebrity, or a concerned citizen—you can now go live in front of a global audience. With just a few clicks, you’ll be able to:

• Broadcast publicly. By checking “Enable Hangouts On Air,” you can broadcast your live hangout—from the Google+ stream, your YouTube channel or your website—to the entire world.
• See how many viewers you’ve got. During your broadcast, you can look inside the hangout to see how many people are watching live.
• Record and re-share. Once you’re off the air, we’ll upload a public recording to your YouTube channel, and to your original Google+ post. This way it’s easy to share and discuss your broadcast after it’s over.

I see this as an incredibly smart move by Google to force the hand of millions of YouTube account holders to join Google+. Also, how long before brands begin to climb over each other to launch their own live channels (events, product launches, Q&As, crisis management, etc.)?

Cadbury UK is already planning an Olympics Hangout on Air this Friday live from the Royal Albert Hall.

Sign in to Google+ to see what’s live right now, or find inspiration in the many broadcasts that have already aired.

I’ve just been forwarded-on a PDF of the International Olympic Committee’s  Guidelines for Social Media which were posted on the British Columbia Athletes website by Canadian writer Kalie McCrystal.

Whilst the guidelines are published for Canadian readers of the BCA’s website, they were originally drawn up for the 2010 Vancouver Winter Olympic Games by the IOC to control material that was posted on social media websites by accredited personnel.

The current Guidelines were published by the IOC in August 2011.  They establish the dos and don’ts of social media during the 2012 Olympic Games in London and apply to all accredited individuals, including athletes, coaches, sport medicine personnel, volunteers etc.  The Guidelines are valid for the duration of the London Games (July 16-August 15, 2012).

The raison d’être of the Guidelines are to stamp out any implied unauthorised association of a third party to the Olympics (primarily for commercial profit). In what is being dubbed as the most monetised event in the history of the Games, violations of the IOC’s strict sponsorship rules are likely to be enforced by the letter.

Anything to do with the Olympics, including the rings, mascots, the word ‘Olympic’ etc. are part of the Olympic brand, and are copyrighted and owned by the IOC.  Official sponsors of the Olympics essentially buy the exclusive right to link themselves with the Olympic brand for the duration of the Games.  Understandably, these companies pay a lot of money for this right but what are the specific boundaries of these sponsors’ privileges?

Kalie McCrystal writes on BCathletevoice.ca:

To ensure the value of these sponsorships, companies that are not official sponsors may not be linked in any way to the Olympic brand.  For example, a tweet reading: “thank you Company X for sponsoring me at the Olympics!” links Company X, who is not an official Olympic sponsor, with the Olympic brand.  This takes away from the exclusivity that official sponsors pay for, and the athlete that wrote it will be held accountable.

Similarly, companies that are not Olympic sponsors cannot link themselves with the Olympics.  For example, Company X cannot tweet: “Good luck to Jane and John at the Olympic Games!”, because it links their brand with the Olympics and Olympic athletes.

This is important for sponsors to be aware of, as they could face legal action and Take Down Notices for violations.

This is pretty clear but in reality what lengths will the IOC actually go to in enforcing these rules?

Let’s put this into some kind of context. This year’s Superbowl final in the US attracted a record number of tweets per second. Twitter reaction reached 12,233 tweets per second (TPS) at the end of the Giants vs. Patriots game and 10,245 TPS during Madonna’s halftime performance. To physically trawl through all of these tweets would a) be a mammoth task and b) would be impossible to sift out brand tweets from those of spectators.

Now let’s fast –forward to this Summer’s London 2012 Games – the largest sporting event ever hosted in the history of the world. If the Superbowl attracted over 10k TPS, imagine the buzz that is likely to accumulate on Twitter and Facebook surrounding this year’s men’s 100m sprint finals or the 4×4 relays…

For years we’ve been telling brands to use social media with a human-voice, and nothing could be more natural than a home-grown business wishing team GB good luck at the Games – whether or not they were an official sponsor. Is the IOC realistically saying that it will put its might behind taking these companies to court for its well-wishes?

The IOC needs to tread carefully when monitoring social media for mentions around the terms Olympics and Olympic Games. Social media audiences are fiercely protective over what they see as being their native stomping ground and any attempts to legislate against the content of social updates could be met with cries of censorship and foul play – certainly not terms that the IOC would knowingly want to be aligned with.

If one of my clients wishes to tweet “Good luck Rebecca Adlington – we’re 100% behind you!” – should I advise them against doing so? Probably. But if we want to tap into the rich stream of  conversations that will be dominating this Summer’s social media, how can we avoid referencing the Games altogether? Or should we even try?

Here are the official Guidelines from the IOC on written  social media posts (including blogs, Twitter, Facebook etc.)

• DO post your experiences! Posts written in first person (using “I”), diary format are encouraged.
• DO follow principles of Olympism.  Keep in mind the Olympic spirit and fundamental principle of Olympism in the
• Olympic Charter.
• DO use the word “Olympic” factually.  As an accredited individual, you are permitted to use words related to the Olympics as long as it is a factual reference (ex. “I am en route to the Olympics!”), and doesn’t associate any 3^rd party or service with the Games.
• DO link official sites to your posts.  You are free (and encouraged) to provide links to official Olympic sites in social media.  This includes official sites of the Olympics, Olympic Games, and National Olympic Committee.
• DON’T act like a journalist. Only accredited media personnel may report on the Olympics.  Unless you have media accreditation, reporting on competition/results or commenting on the activities of athletes or accredited personnel is not permitted.  Make it clear that what you are writing is a personal account of your experience, or is your personal opinion.
• DON’T badmouth your NSO.  If your Athlete Agreement says you cannot speak badly about your National Sport Organization, the same goes for what you post on social media.
• DON’T defame people.  Defamation is when you make false and offensive comments that negatively impact a person’s reputation.  For a comment to be defamatory, it has to be about a specific person.  For example, “those refs made us lose the game!”, is not defamation, but “Referee Joe Smith favoured the other team and made us lose the game” might be.  This is a legal issue for which you can be sued, and you should be careful to avoid any potentially defamatory comments.

I’d love to hear your thoughts on this. Do you have non-Olympic affiliated clients who are wating to get into the spirit of the Games via social media?

What will you be advising them?

The folk at YouTube got into the spirit of April’s Fool this year with its YouTube Collection – the chance to get all of your favourite YouTube videos sent to you by post, on DVDs.

Check out the “official” video: http://www.youtube.com/theyoutubecollection

If you try and order…

and then….

But the BEST quote has to be this one from the video:

“If you live on a steep grade or in an are with low over-passes, your DVDs will be delivered by pack-mule!“

Happy April 1st, guys!

Need an excuse to stand that little bit taller today? Here’s one: YOU are actively involved in helping digitise the world’s books (via Google Books) and the entire newspaper archive of the New York Times, making the printed word eventually accessible to billions of people online. I bet you weren’t even aware that you were involved in this noble pursuit of epic proportions?
If like me, you spend a lot of time online, you probably need no introduction to the item below.

reCAPTCHA

It’s a reCAPTCHA code. A CAPTCHA (Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Human Apart) is a program that can tell whether its user is a human or a computer. You’ve probably seen them — colourful images with distorted text at the bottom of Web registration forms. CAPTCHAs are used by many websites to prevent abuse from bots, or automated programs usually written to generate spam. No computer program can read distorted text as well as humans can, so bots cannot navigate sites protected by CAPTCHAs.

Sure, they can be incredibly annoying, but probably not as annoying as it would be for website-owners to be bombarded by automated bot spammers who could potentially bring about malicious denial of service attacks which could easily bring down entire online services within minutes.

It soon became apparent that the necessary chore of typing in random words to authenticate one’s membership to the Human Club could actually be used to solve wider problems that could, if solved, benefit the larger web community. Here’s the thinking:

200 million CAPTCHAs are solved by humans around the world every day. In each case, roughly ten seconds of human time are being spent. Individually, that’s not a lot of time, but in aggregate these little puzzles consume more than 150,000 hours of work each day.

CAPTCHA’s co-inventor Luis von Ahn repurposed the program into what is today known as reCAPTCHA and the security system is now used to get people typing in scanned words from books two at a time, to help translate printed text into something that can be recognised by computers.
reCAPTCHA improves the process of digitizing books by sending words that cannot be read by computers to the Web in the form of CAPTCHAs for humans to decipher. More specifically, each word that cannot be read correctly by OCR (optical Character Recognition software) is placed on an image and used as a CAPTCHA. This is possible because most OCR programs alert you when a word cannot be read correctly.

The following video from Sciencentral shows how the reCAPTCHA system actually works:

But if a computer can’t read such a CAPTCHA, how does the system know the correct answer to the puzzle?

Here’s how: Each new word that cannot be read correctly by OCR is given to a user in conjunction with another word for which the answer is already known. The user is then asked to read both words. If they solve the one for which the answer is known, the system assumes their answer is correct for the new one. The system then gives the new image to a number of other people to determine, with higher confidence, whether the original answer was correct.

Now that’s pretty smart, right?
So every time you buy tickets on Ticketmaster, add a friend on Facebook, sign-up to a new Twitter account or create a profile on 350,000 other sites on the internet, you’re also helping to digitise an actual book. The number of sites that are using reCAPTCHA is so high that the amount of words that we’re collectively digitising per day is really, really large. It’s about 100 million a day, which is the equivalent of about two and a half million books a year.

And this is all being done one word at a time by just people like you and I typing CAPTCHAs on the Internet.

Whatever next?

Luis von Ahn’s next project is equally, if not even more ambitious in setting out goals for his crowdsourcing vision. He now wants to get the world to translate the web into other languages whilst learning a different language for themselves.

Duolingo is a free language-learning website and crowdsourced text translation platform. The service is designed so that as users progress through the lessons, they simultaneously help to translate websites and other documents. Currently, the site offers only Spanish and German courses for English speakers, though it has plans to expand to French, Italian and Chinese in the future.

Duolingo launched in private beta on November 30, 2011, and has accumulated a waiting list of more than 100,000 users. As of January 19, 2012, the service has translated over 45,000 sentences.

[Click here if you cannot view the Duolingo Intro video above]
Personally, I think that this kind of crowdsourcing micro-tasks for a common goal is a genius idea – particularly when the larger outcome is often a secondary by-product of what drives individuals to use services like reCAPTCHA or Duolingo.
However, there are some cynics out there who criticise the Duolingo model for being naively simplistic in its readiness to motivate people to take up a new language. Writing in the Guardian, Maurice Claypole – no stranger to people-powered translation services, claims:

“Translation can play an important part in language learning, but a methodology constructed specifically around the translation by learners of decontextualised text snippets reveals a view of language learning which is simplistic in the extreme.”

However, I doubt that the team behind Duolingo would commit time and resource to such a large project without factoring in the drivers required for individuals to actively benefit from the learning experience. I’m signed up for the site’s Spanish beta study programme and am currently awaiting the green light from the invite team. Or as they say in Spainsh… luz verde.
If you want to know more about Luis von Ahn’s journey from CAPTCHA to Duolingo, I urge you to check out his brilliant TED talk that he gave towards the end of 2011. Truly inspiring.

So next time you’re feeling undervalued, think about your role in bringing classic works of literature to the digital masses*.

*(Shakespeare would shake your hand in person if he could)

I just spotted a great new messaging app (courtesy of PSFK) called Duet that encourages you to “do things with people you love.”

Heard it all before? Perhaps. But what I like about this new service is that you have the ability to pair yourself with another individual (spouse, colleague, sibling, friend…) and then share activities with them. You get the option to store messages and share photos with your significant other

Duet goes beyond Facebook and Google+ by focusing purely on circles of two which makes sense for people who don’t want to share their thoughts, photos, videos… with their wider social network. Sometimes it’s just nice to share things with someone special.

This intimate one-to-one messaging service is quite sweet and whilst it goes against the current paradigm of the one-to-many broadcast model, I think that it certainly fills a gap that email, MMS and SMS has collectively failed to satiate.

This is how Duet works:

• A duet begins by proposing something you want to do with someone near and dear.
• You can propose duet ideas privately to your favourite people, and create an evolving collaborative life list of all the things you want to do.
• Once each duet is paired, it becomes a private conversation that you can enrich with notes, photos and video messages.
• Your conversations are saved forever and Duet becomes a digital lockbox for the people and memories you cherish most.

As usual, the app is iPhone only (something which is starting to really frustrate me) and can be downloaded directly from the links on Duet’s website: http://duet.me/

Check out the following video for more insight into the world of Duet:

Introducing Duet from Crush + Lovely on Vimeo.

Facebook: what’s not to LIKE? Quite a lot if you consider this list of Zucker-balls-ups created by WordStream.com:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/i/b0150p90/

Click image to play Between The Tweets

First in a series of specially commissioned short stories from Radio4 inspired by the social networking phenomenon, Twitter.

A daytime TV star’s reputation hangs in the balance when an anonymous woman accuses him on Twitter of having an affair with her. Who is the mysterious tweeter and why is she so determined to destroy the celebrity’s career? ‘Reputation manager’ Bella is called in to handle the situation and, using her I.T. contacts, makes a surprising discovery.

Jojo Moyes is an award-winning author, former newspaper journalist and a regular Tweeter (@jojomoyes). Her story title was suggested by one of her Twitter followers.

Click the image above to listen to the story (only 15 mins)*.

*only available to BBC listeners in the UK

I received an email reminder today from Issy Hart from CoSkill about an event that is taking place this Thursday in London.

For those of you who are unaware of CoSkill, it is a really smart business consultancy which has technology at its heart of operations. CoSkill is a big advocate of what it calls ‘future prep’ – preparing their clients for the future and protecting against the ‘surprise factor’ of new and emerging technology – especially within consumer marketing.

Fast Forward to 2012 is a light but insight-packed session, to be held at City Hall (the home of Mayor Boris) on 29th September.

Designed as a trend prediction and inspiration session, attendees will be examining the key advances that CoSkill expects to affect you, your brand and your company in the next year. Speakers will be discussing business, consumer and technology expectations for 2012 and will be joined by a great guest panel.

From consumer marketing to business intelligence, this event promises to set the tone for 2012 and is one not to miss. I’ll be going along with the lovely and talented Shannon Boudjema – if you’re attending, come over and say hi.

Tickets are free, subject to availability. Email issy@coskill.com to apply.