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In fact, we all are.
The New Marketing just got superceded by a new blogging platform that is more integrated with the Metia web site and provides a platform to a bigger group of the experts in the company to talk about what we do and what interests us.
You'll find me here.
You can see everyone else who blogs at Metia here.
We'll leave The New Marketing live but don't expect any updates, so come and find out what we are up to over at the new site.
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Here's the formal release:
Metia creates a ‘Rough Guide to the World’ web site for leading travel publisher
· Interactive site uses Windows Internet Explorer 9, HTML5 and Flickr to allow travellers to participate, contribute and share their unique travel experiences online
· Global launch of Windows Internet Explorer 9 showcases the Rough Guide to the World
September 16th 2010 – Metia today announced the launch of the ‘Rough Guide to the World’, an interactive web site designed and developed for leading travel publisher Rough Guides. The new site, selected as a showcase for both the Global and UK Microsoft Corp. launch of Windows Internet Explorer 9, allows visitors to browse hundreds of travel experiences from Rough Guides’ inspirational book, Make the Most of Your Time on Earth. Rough Guides is challenging travellers to help complete this ‘Rough Guide to the World’ by contributing images of their own experiences via Flickr.
The site uses the latest web technologies available in Windows Internet Explorer 9, the latest version of the web’s most used browser, including support for HTML5 (the latest mark-up language for the web), to deliver a faster and more immersive experience for users. In addition, the site integrates with the Flickr photo sharing service through its API to serve geo-tagged images and is hosted on the Windows Azure platform.
Visitors to the site use a compass control to navigate an interactive map of the world and explore destinations based on their favourite activities from extreme sports to high art. Search functionality allows users to display image sets (including their own Flickr photos) as a layer on the map.
Users can build a list of their favourite experiences, drawn from the Rough Guides book, Make the Most of Your Time on Earth, and share them with friends using Facebook, Twitter or email.
Steve Ellis, CEO, Metia, says: “All organisations are seeking to create rich interactive experiences that engage their audiences. Rough Guides has a great brand and loyal customers, who are united by a mutual commitment to authentic travel experiences. Our brief was to use the very best of new technology and popular web services to create an interactive experience that would resonate for Rough Guides’ readership and other like-minded travellers.”
Peter Buckley, Digital Publisher, Rough Guides, says, “It has been genuinely exciting to work on this project at such a pivotal moment in the evolution of web functionality and design. New technologies are now allowing web creatives to define the way we use the Internet, rather than fitting design around clunky web page structures.”
Buckley continues: “The Rough Guide to the World brings together the best of new web technologies, standards and services with the use of Internet Explorer 9, HTML5 and the Flickr API. Effectively, these and other technologies offer a palette of tools through which we can now engineer amazing web experiences.”
“With Windows Internet Explorer 9, companies like Metia can extend the power of Windows into their websites and turn them into fast and interactive applications that are just as familiar as other Windows software-based applications,” said Dean Hachamovitch, corporate vice president for Windows Internet Explorer at Microsoft.
Key Facts
· The site includes over 500 experiences from the Rough Guides’ Make the Most of Your Time on Earth book
· The map is based on the Mercator Projection of the World
· At its starting point, the map displays approximately 600 tiles. At this zoom level each tile equals approximately 700km2
· At its highest magnification, the map of the world is composed of more than 90,000 individual tiles, of which 1,800 are in view at any one time. At this zoom level each tile represents a 40km2 area.
· The site supports several IE9 specific features including Favicon pinning and jump lists.
Technology
Windows Azure platform
· Microsoft SQL Azure (using spatial queries)
· Flickr API
· Bit.ly API
· CSS 3 (W3C Validated)
o Box shadows
o RGBA colours
· HTML 5
o Canvas tag
o SVG (W3C Validated)
o WOFF (Web Open Font Format)
o Semantic Structure
Notes for Editors
You can view the experience at http://makethemost.roughguides.com.
The Rough Guide experience site will be showcased within the HTML5 section of Internet Explorer 9 Microsoft, please see the link www.thebeautyoftheweb.com
The site is best experienced using Microsoft Internet Explorer 9 – which can be downloaded free – but also works with other modern browsers which use HTML5 standards. HTML5 consists of a series of web standards, which enable modern browsers to provide more interactivity and a richer user experience without the need for plug-in technology.
Experiences are from Make The Most Of Your Time on Earth, 2nd Edition, Published 1st September 2010, ISBN: 9781848365247, $29.99.
About Metia
Metia is a digital marketing agency with annual revenues of £16 million and operations in London, New York, Seattle, Singapore and Sydney. Employing over 230 professionals, Metia delivers experiences, solutions, services and tools that are focused, smart and repeatable – and that generate measurable value.
For more information: www.metia.com
Media contact:
Melanie Hesketh, Metia
+44 203 100 3584
melanie.hesketh@metia.com
About Rough Guides
Rough Guides is a leading travel content provider with more than 700 travel guides, gift-books, maps, phrasebooks, bespoke custom publishing guides and digital products, including eBooks and mobile applications. From country guidebooks to city guides and inspirational travel specials to Round the World planners, there’s a Rough Guide to suit everyone with accurate, up-to-date information and informed, contemporary writing. Make The Most Of Your Time On Earth™
For more information visit: www.roughguides.com
Media Contact:
Rachel Sprackett, Rough Guides
press@roughguides.com
Tags: Microsoft, Rough Guides, Internet Explorer 9, HTML5, Metia, Make The Most Of Your Time On Earth
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Some time round about now in San Francisco and London, Microsoft is formally taking the wrappers off IE9. Which means our NDA and embargoes time out and we can shout about the Rough Guide to the World.
I suspect the launch will grab a bunch of coverage, because despite a lot more competition being out there these days, Internet Explorer is still the planet's most popular browser. Consequently, a new version gets noticed and talked about, so I'll leave it to other posts to review the features and capabilities of IE9.
Our interest is that we have just completed a project with Rough Guides the travel publisher - the Rough Guide to the World - that uses the best of IE9 and the HTML5 standards within it. In fact, for good measure, it also uses Flickr's API, shares via Facebook and Twitter, and just to complete our tech buzzword bingo, it is hosted in 'the cloud' on Microsoft's Azure platform.
The site has been quietly live on Azure at makethemost.roughguides.com for a couple of days now. But now that the global launch of IE9 is underway, we can talk about our role in building the site. In fact, the Metia and Rough Guides teams will be in the keynotes at both the San Francisco and London launch events.
If you want to take a look the site you'll need to download IE9 (do, it's worth it), or be using another HTML5 capable browser.
If you want a teaser there are some screen grabs below. The more formal press release, which describes the site, will be linked as a post here from 10.00am tomorrow.
If you are a marketer who wants to know how to create experiences like this for your brand, or you need to understand the implications and opportunities of these new technologies, then get in touch.
If you are a developer and interested in the story of how we built the site, well we built it in just six weeks, so there is a satisfied but tired team here. In the next few days and weeks we'll share some insight into the technical story, here and on some developer channels too. Stay tuned.
   
Tags: Microsoft, Rough Guides, Internet Explorer 9, HTML5, Metia, Make The Most Of Your Time On Earth
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Posts have been few and far between recently. The old fashioned paradigm of work (doing lots of it, offline) has been crashing into the new one (talk about doing it, online). Which is great and gives us many new projects to talk about in the next few weeks.
To spread the growing load of projects and clients, a new face joined Metia in London on Monday. Darren Gerry started this week as the new Managing Partner, Digital.
Darren will own the digital business for Metia London and, with his experience from Sapient-Nitro and LBi, he will be a great addition to lead the team.
Darren joined in an exciting week, the story of which begins to unfold tomorrow as the NDAs and embargoes begin to unravel and we take the wraps off the first of several wicked little pieces of innovation. More of which we can share tomorrow.
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After Cloud, Cloud, CLOUD yesterday (ok, ok we believe you), today we got the consumer angle.
The connectedness of the Microsoft 'Personal Cloud' story worked for me. In the office, IT make sure everything works, but at home I'm my own support desk and my community of end users is growing (the two year old isn't there yet, but the other three and my wife definitely are), their devices are proliferating, their use of different services is unfettered and their understanding of where data resides and how they access or protect it, is limited to non-existent.
The connectedness of the Microsoft three screens plus the Cloud proposition makes a lot of sense in terms of offering a great experience and fixing those practical painpoints. If Microsoft can make sure it all simply 'just works', and they trade on the strengths of their big platforms like IM and Hotmail, then it is a good story to take to market.
But the scene stealer today was the Kinect for Xbox 360 demo. It wasn't so much the technology on display but the engagement of Molly and her young assistant in the game. Aside from being a great demo - watch it on the Digital WPC site - every Microsoft marketer must be drooling at the prospect.
Microsoft doesn't have a great track record in connecting with the consumer but Kinect definitely hits that sweet spot. And it connects to the consumer through the compelling nature of the product itself, rather than trying to buy an emotional connection with an ad campaign.
I'm not sure that Microsoft's revenues have ever benefited significantly from the impact of 'pester power' (not with Barney, surely??) but as a parent, I for one can easily see Kinect sweeping through suburbia like the Wii and iPod before it.
I know I'll need to order one for my family.
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Not everything goes to plan. My World Cup journey ended in a bar in Washington DC, rather than Johannesburg.
While neither England or the USA exactly set the competition alight. Metia came away with more than a few extra fans.
- Metia's Mobile Keepy Uppy game has now been downloaded over 25,000 times and continues to get over 1,500 downloads each day.
- The Youtube video has been viewed over 7,500 times.
- The World Cup Pivot has had over 15,000 people use the site to interactively interrogate the player stats.
Football fever aside, each of these projects was conducted as a Proof of Concept (PoC), designed to explore aspects of mobility, social, and data analytics respectively. Aside from the obvious output, each PoC generated learnings about the different technologies, channels and social outreach techniques employed. All of which will now get fed back into our client's projects.
If any of this stuff interests you, or you are curious about how it can be applied to real campaigns and projects, get in touch and we'll share the inside track.
Tags: Mobile, World Cup, Keep Uppy World Cup, Metia Labs, Microsoft Live Labs, Pivot, Seadragon, World Cup, Metia
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The development team in Metia Seattle has been exploring uses for Pivot, a software application from Microsoft Live Labs that let's users interact with large volumes of data.
To bring Pivot to life, the team tipped in all the player stats for all the teams in the World Cup to create World Cup Pivot.
Filter the different criteria through the lefthand column options. Change the view with the top line nav bar. Pivot is made to be simple to shuffle through large volumes of data, trying out different permutations and options to sift for meaning, so have a play here.
We are already building Pivot into a number of external web sites and services for clients who want to give users the ability to get interactive with data. Bearing in mind the way Infographics seem to have taken a grip on the web, it'll be interesting to see Pivot's progress.
My World Cup Pivot insight: Lionel Messi, 30 shots, 0 goals. He might as well be English.
Tags: Microsoft Live Labs, Pivot, Seadragon, World Cup, Metia   
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This week we have had a team over at the Beach Break Live student festival in Wales. Our role was to build and sustain a virtual experience that gave a flavour for the live events happening at the festival.
Live streaming wasn't an option, so instead we created a site that used Microsoft Silverlight 4 to mash Photosynth images and Spotify playlists related to what's on around the different festival stages.
Aside from a few local bandwidth issues caused by thousands of students simultaneously nudging, poking and checking-in with each other, everything worked just great.
Take a look below or check out the site to get the full Photosynth experience.
  
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As England switches off from work and switches on the telly for tonight's match, here's a latest score from World Cup Keepy Uppy.
In just one week the 'patently silly football juggling game for mobile phone users' aka Mobile Keepy Uppy has been downloaded an astounding 6,330 times (that's 5,201 times from our site and 1,129 times from Freeware PocketPC).
Which is one download every 90 seconds since it went live. Don't you wish that was Emile Heskey's goals to seconds on the pitch ratio?
And the dodgy video has been viewed 2,200 times on YouTube.
Tags: Mobile, World Cup, Keep Uppy World Cup, Metia Labs, World Cup of Time Wasting
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 Quick update on our Mobile Keepy Uppy game.
Seems there are a few people out there with time on their hands.
The game is featured here on the Freeware Pocket PC site, and elsewhere on Mobile TopSoft amongst others.
On the Freeware site it has over 800 downloads so far, gets four stars out of five in reviews and has some great feedback.
A few people comment it doesn't work on their phone - which is a shame all round, we agree, but we were pretty upfront about the limited number of phones, HTC mostly, which can run the game.
Here are our favourite comments so far:
"excellent game...good graphics and sound effects...great response to g sensor"
"Nice little app for killing time. My kids will love it. I like how you can see the shadow of the ball as it's coming down. Good job"
Tags: Mobile, World Cup, Keep Uppy World Cup, Metia Labs, World Cup of Time Wasting
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It all seemed plausible enough at the time.
The chaps in Metia Labs said: "We really want to explore the uses for accelerometers in mobile phones, maybe look at the use of physics engines too. Perhaps some kind of a game would be a good vehicle to see how we could use different physical senses to shape a mobile experience."
A week later and this noble intent morphed into a virtual version of football's Keepy Uppy played on mobile phones.
Pretty soon after that and we are having the Mobile Keepy Uppy World Cup in our London office. It is all explained here and you can download the game too.
For the record, however improbable it sounds, England won.
Tags: Mobile, World Cup, Keep Uppy World Cup, Metia Labs, World Cup of Time Wasting
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Yesterday I got a piece of personally targetted direct mail with a proposition specific to my business. Nothing unusual there. But it was sent to me at my home address. In fact the whole creative angle was trading on how clever the sender was to connect the two pieces of data in a piece of personalised DM - a colour photo of our office, with my name on it, sent to me at home.
After a spooky moment, the first thing that popped into my head was, Stalker!
Probably not the effect the DM agency had in mind. Needless to say I'm not buying.
The convergence (confusion?) of social/personal and business worlds has created opportunities for companies to make errors of judgement in how they make use of the data they can gain access to.
Technology is always opening up lots of new possibilities. But just because you can now do something, it doesn't always mean that you should.
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Good post here by Gartner's Richard Fouts on using customer references across the breadth of an organization.
It comes complete with this nifty little quote from Richard:
"Case in point: now that Metia has supercharged Microsoft’s customer reference solution, the sales process moves faster, site traffic has increased and more prospects and customers download Microsoft case studies."
Couldn't agree more with Richard's general sentiment: "when customers migrate to evangelist territory, they are worth 10 great sales people".
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Last week we met up with Charlie Kindel - @ckindel - one of the Microsoft execs driving the Windows Phone 7 Series (WP7) program.
Our interest in WP7 is to use our Silverlight and .Net skills to build mobile experiences and apps for brands. A lot of the detail on WP7 we'd already heard before at MIX10 but a few interesting points emerged.
Charlie was realistic about where Microsoft starting in this race: "We have Last Mover Advantage." Which is a triumph for positive thinking. And, if you can accept you are late, then you can at least start to consider how that might be turned to an advantage.
He was also upfront about cutting features from the first version if they couldn't confidently be delivered in time: "Shipping is an important feature too."
Interestingly, he confirmed all the highly polished WP7 apps demoed at MIX10 were started just three weeks before the show. Which highlights the agility necessary - and possible - for agencies or software companies developing for WP7.
Microsoft's version of the AppStore - the Windows Phone Marketplace - will split app revenue 30% to the network operator & Microsoft, 70% to the app developer. So pretty much the same as Apple, although Microsoft appeared to be trying to be more transparent and more developer friendly about the process of getting apps into the Windows Phone Marketplace.
With a number of small but nonetheless limiting features left out of the first version, it'll be important that the proposed model of smaller and more frequent software update cycles is adhered to.
The first WP7 phones are due for the Christmas 2010 market, but developers will have to sit tight for another few weeks before finding out when they can get their hands on a shiny new device for development purposes. Until then, it is back to the emulator.
Tags: Microsoft, Windows Phone Series 7
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