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On watching the Gadget Show (Ch5) last night I became quite interested in the idea of Augmented Reality. The idea being you can do some very clever image recognition techniques to bring the virtual world into the real world. Already this concept is very promising for the video games industry, but it has also been used successfully in other ways, including the new smart phone G1, powered by Google Android.

Swift was created by 2ergo, a smart little company that makes mobile marketing products used by big name brands.

Here is an excerpt from there website:

“From mobile Internet sites to SMS messaging campaigns to entertainment content storefronts, our products help companies create innovative marketing initiatives, drive additional revenue and build their brands. At 2ergo, we pride ourselves on providing premier mobile marketing applications, and we’re thrilled to offer Swift as a free product to help bloggers, content publishers and other individuals create a mobile presence. Read more about us at www.2ergo.com.”

The three things that pulled me in to try-it-out were….

“Is Swift free?
Yes! It is free for you to create a Swift site. It is also free for anyone to access it, although some mobile operators may charge for data access, depending on the user’s data plan. We are able to offer the product for free by serving targeted, third-party ads through Swift sites. This ad revenue supports our development, hosting and marketing costs and allows us to keep making it better and better.

We offer a “Pro” version for $10/month if you’d like to remove the advertising from your site. Log in to your account, and click on “Account Info” to upgrade.

What phones does Swift support?
Swift features an advanced device detection capability that will render your Swift site properly on almost any phone in the market today.

Does Swift create an iPhone-friendly version of my site?
Swift formats your mobile Internet site to look great on the iPhone (and iPod Touch!). Our advanced device detection technology serves up the proper logo and styles to make your site look its best on almost any phone in the market today.

Are Swift sites optimized for mobile search engines like Google?
They sure are. Once your site is live, it will be searchable by bots from Google and other search engines. Depending on the type of content or text you include in your site, your site will show up in mobile search results for relevant keywords.”

http://regionaltraffic.co.uk/

Regional Traffic is one of the better and more useful Google Maps API mashups I’ve seen. When(if) I get an iPhone, I could actually see myself using this. That’s an improvement from most ‘tools’ where you think ‘yeah, that’s nice, but I’ll never use it in real life’.  Kudos to the chaps behind the site!

This is a fantastic viral (sorry, P2P marketing) campaign to promote the new Terminator TV series on Virgin 1 in the UK.

You can send a friend a personalized video message, similar to the campaign FX did for Dexter last year, insinuating that the Terminator is coming for them.

What’s really nice here is the option of personalized mobile video messaging as well as email. The video you receive on your phone has you name and number on the screen as well as a map of you current location (although this didn’t seem to be fantastically accurate in our experience) and can be saved to you phone to keep.

The web version features the ability to make the Terminator say any message you type by using a voice simulator, which is great fun.

Here’s a little personalized message from us (skip to the end of the video if your the impatient type).

You can now view our blog on your phone. Simply click that button underneath the right-hand navigation, or here.