digitallblog.com

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.”

New look SilverStripe websites launched

SilverStripe is both the name for our free software as well as our company, so we’ve recently relaunched our website to make it easier to learn about the two different interests.

silverstripe.com is now the home for the company, and silverstripe.org is the new home for our software and the open source community! We did this because you asked us to - read Brian’s blog post to learn more.

This website makes great use of Google Maps to associate places by feelings. I think it’s a nice idea and will be interesting to see how it develops, once more social features are added to it.

This is great, a LIVE experiment by Heinz to see if a tomato plant that has encouraging messages from users will do better than a normal plant. Pop some headphone on and hear what people are saying to the little fella.

Now this is a really nice example of a flash website. Sour Sally’s frozen yogurt is a flash website with a lovely hand-drawn art style and charming music. You can navigate by using the mouse to fly Sally around on her ballon or click to pop it and walk using the arrow keys. There are also hidden ingredients to find around the site which reward you with a gift if you find them all.

Unfortunately the site is a little low on content, but it’s engaging and intuitive and actually fun to use.

Great promotion by Slim Jim

Not original as it has been done before by Red Interactive, and Cravendale, but absolutely brilliant, and more interactive than those before it. Great use of sound too. Could be used for things like Pot Noodle.

A very bizarre series of mini-sites from Converse. Start here. I don’t know whether to love it or hate it. Beware of the Kissing with Ross site. You have been told.

A really nice site. One of the sections took me to a dark place where I had to throw flames so I could read the text, and lighten the whole area, brilliant. The main menu interface isn’t too bad either.

Lovely micro-site from Fosters that actually lets you control a little mini sub in a tank of water.