Steve Ellis : Mobility

World Cup Fever: the final score

Steve — Tue, 13 Jul 2010 21:23:00 GMT

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

Can you spot the eight iconic World Cup moments in our video?

Steve — Wed, 23 Jun 2010 09:19:00 GMT

Here's something to occupy the barren hours before kick off.

The creative team tell me there are a magnificent eight moments of iconic World Cup history recreated in the video we knocked up for our Mobile Keepy Uppy game.

Can you find them?

BTW - we passed 10,000 downloads at the weekend.

Tags: Mobile, World Cup, Keep Uppy World Cup, Metia Labs, World Cup of Time Wasting

Nifty. Latest score from Mobile Keepy Uppy World Cup: 6000+ downloads, 2000+ video views

Steve — Fri, 18 Jun 2010 14:34:00 GMT

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

Mobile Keepy Uppy latest score - four star review and 800+ downloads

Steve — Thu, 17 Jun 2010 16:16:00 GMT

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

Guess who wins the Mobile Keepy Uppy World Cup?

Steve — Sun, 13 Jun 2010 08:27:00 GMT

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

Chatting with @ckindel about Windows Phone 7 and Last Mover Advantage

Steve — Tue, 20 Apr 2010 15:09:00 GMT

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

Near.me allows Foursquare users to find the places their friends visit using Bing Maps

Steve — Thu, 25 Mar 2010 09:31:00 GMT

Having just returned from SXSW and MIX10, where geo-location, social technologies and user experience were all big topics of conversation, I arrived back in London to find Metia Labs has just finished the Near.me project.

Near.me uses the Foursquare and Bing Maps APIs, and presents them within any Silverlight enabled browser - if you are a Foursquare user take a look at the Near.me site to sign in, experience the service and give us your feedback.

Near.me shows Foursquare users where your friends are, places nearby and your recent history. It also allows you to search Foursquare, or visually scan through your friends, with the results mapped onto Bing Maps using their Silverlight control. It can also be viewed on your desktop using the Out of Browser features of Silverlight, to try this right click and choose: install Near.me onto this computer. Or, if you don't use Foursquare, take a look at the demo video.

An obvious next step would be to create a slinky little mobile client but until Silverlight is available on a mobile device - in a few months or so - we'll just have to wait.

To measure the usage of Near.me, we jumped onto Microsoft's Silverlight Analytics Framework, announced just a few days ago at MIX10. This allows us to analyse the effectiveness of the site and particularly the elements of the service that measure depth of engagement within this sort of rich user experience. The Labs team said this took ten minutes to set up, more or less straight out of the box. When we have some data to share, we'll report back.

Near.me is a great example of a Metia Labs project.

It was motivated by the desire to explore the possibilities around geo-location and available data services. Projects like this help us to guide and inform our clients' digital experience strategies based upon firsthand knowledge of API handling and referencing a body of analytical data.

From our perspective, Near.me immediately crystalizes the opportunities geo-location offers to many types of businesses, and it has helped advance conversations with a number of organizations looking at deploying such services.

We are genuinely keen for feedback, so please do take a look at Near.me and contribute any feedback or ideas for other APIs that would enrich the service, via the comments on this post.

Tags: Foursquare, Bing, Near.me, Metia