Pepsi turns VC & mentor with the PepsiCo10

This is a very smart idea. Pepsi are teaming up with Mashable and Highland Capital Partners to select and mentor 10 new companies.

I've written before about the benefits of working with new companies and start-ups. Brands and agencies can do cool cutting edge projects, and build relationships with really interesting new companies in their very early days. Don't forget that Twitter is only 3 years old, and Foursquare is only one. Try getting in touch with them; it's pretty hard!

Pepsi are going to select 10 companies in total across 4 areas -

The Social Media & Marketing Revolution
Mobile Marketing: On the Phone and Beyond
Place-Based and Retail Experiential Marketing: Be Where Your Customers Are
Digital Video and Gaming

The winners get to be mentored by experienced experts, Pepsi get early access to their technologies for future campaigns.

Keep an eye out for cool stuff in about 9 months, I reckon.

Via Forbes

adidas Football World Cup video 2010

This is the official film for adidas football for this year's World Cup - featuring Zidane, Kaka, Messi, Nakamura, Gerrard, Pienaar, Villa, Guardado De Rossi, Ballack & the Jabulani ball.



Lots of players; blink & you'll miss 'em. Or watch it twice!

Full disclosure - adidas is one of the clients that my agency works with.

CNN & Foursquare partner for the World Cup

I wondered who was going to be first off the blocks with a Foursquare World Cup promotion!

It's CNN; check in at a number of venues in South Africa, Australia, the US and the UK, and get a special badge. Users who go to South Africa will get a 'South Africa Explorer' badge (above), users who check in elsewhere will get a 'Super Fan' badge (below).

London venues include The Freemason's Arms (where the FA was founded), and - um - The Walkabout.

Full list here.

Via Mashable

Autonomy, Mastery & Purpose

This is a brilliant, 10 minute video of a talk by Dan Pink, based on his book Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us.



In it he explains academic studies that show that, for non-mechanical tasks, people don't necessarily work better if they're promised more reward.

He goes on to explain that for non mechanical jobs three factors are more important -

Autonomy - being allowed to work the way you want,
Mastery - being able to do soemthing you enjoy to get better at it,
&
Purpose - the feelign that you're doing something for the good of others or the world.

It's very similar to an observation in Ian McEwan's novel The Child In Time, where he says 'no one works more productively than a child at play'.

10 minute video. Well worth your time!

How I accidentally deleted my twitter account

Update - Thanks to the Twitter team I'm @dancall again - phew!

Oh blimey.

I've been on twitter since 2007, I think. I signed up early on to see what the fuss was, tweeted a bit, then stopped for about a year.

Then I got back into it in about mid 2008 , as it seemed to be gathering momentum in the UK, and there were lots of interesting people that I wanted to follow and interact with.

At one point I decided to link it to my Facebook account, so that I wouldn't need to update both. As time went on and I started to tweet more work-related stuff, including posts from this blog, and my stats blog.

Eventually I decided to break the link between my twitter and my Facebook.

So, earlier this morning I went to the twitter app in Facebook, and selected the option at the bottom to 'deactivate my account'. There didn't seem to be any other way to unlink twitter from Facebook.

Anyway, it deleted my entire twitter account - 1,100 or so followers, and 1,300 or so people that I'm following. It's a bit of a nightmare.

So please, if you used to follow me, please re-follow me at my new account @dancall1 (I'm now @dancall again)

It's been a bit of a shocking experience, to be honest. I'm not even going to go into how much I'd potentially pay to reverse the deletion, but I do know that it's less painful than:

Losing my Gmail
Losing my blog archives
Losing my delicious account.

& also it's a lot less painful than losing anyone 'real' if you know what I mean.

But anyway - beware with the twitter Facebook app (don't bother) and please re-follow me on twitter - @dancall1 (I'm now @dancall again)

Nokia N8 table football skills

This is a new series of viral films from Nokia to promote the N8. They show people playing table football in a bar, using the most amazing trick shots, all filmed on the N8.

The best table footballers I ever met were in a backstreet bar in Barcelona - two of us played two of them and we lost 9-nil each time. Eventually we suggested a mixed, Champions League style match (one English, one Spanish per team), and that evened things out a lot. But neither of them could touch the people in this video:



You can also see clips of the individual tricks - for example:



Full disclosure - Nokia is one of the clients of the agency I work for.

Tate Trumps

Tate Trumps is an iPhone app game that you play at the Tate Modern gallery.

Players wander the gallery collecting particular works of art, then play against friends Top Trumps style, to see who has the best hand.

Tate Trumps from Hide and Seek on Vimeo.

More here

adidas Star Wars Cantina

A new film to celebrate the adidas Star Wars collaboration. Lots to enjoy, including Ian Brown and Noel Gallagher chucking beer mats...



A full list of the stars featuring is listed in the tags for the video:

David Beckham Daft Punk Snoop Dogg Franz Beckenbauer Noel Gallagher Ian Brown Ciara Jay Baruchel DJ Neil Armstrong Star Wars Obi-Wan Kenobi ben kenobi Han Solo Cantina Greedo light saber C-3PO R2-D2 Artoo Detoo See-Threepio Droids adidas adidas Originals World Cup FIFA South Africa adidas Soccer soccer footie adidas Football adidas Commercial adidas ad adidas advert adidas advertisement adidas commercial Sneakers Oasis.

Notice how adidas, unlike Nike, are allowed to use the terms 'FIFA' and 'World Cup' as tags.

Full disclosure - Aegis, the company I work for, is one of adidas' agencies.

Buy cinema tickets on Facebook through Tickets Together

Tickets Together is a Facebook app that lets you buy cinema tickets and arrange an event simultaneously.

It's currently being used to sell tickets for Toy Story 3 in the US, but I'm assuming it'll be extended to other titles soon.

Users simply put in their location, select a screening time, and invite friends. It then creates an event, and they can buy tickets directly. You can see in the screengrab that I invited 2 friends. The Toy Story characters are going to be there anyway...

In the US it uses 3rd party ticketing agencies like Fandango to do the transaction; over here there is no similar arrangement, but you'd hope that they'd be able to organise something. Booking cinema tickets through a site like Facebook is such a no brainer, and part of a growing trend of being able to spend money on the site.

More details at Mashable.

Bing's ice cream van in London this summer

As a way of promoting Bing Maps Microsoft are sending out an ice cream van around London this summer. Unlike with the Jimmy Choo game, and even the street food trucks in the US, they're publishing a schedule in advance, so you'll know where to go.

In fact in some ways it's a bit of a tour of agencies around London, with stops at Shorts Garden, Westbourne Terrace, Charlotte Street and Golden Square (but not Parker Street - yet).

See the schedule on a Bing map here.

More at the Microsoft Advertising blog

Amazing 3D building projection for BMW

I've seen quite a few stunts using projections on buildings, but this has to be the best so far.



Very, very well done.

More here

Create your own Heineken

Heineken have created this is a nice feature, enabled by digital media.

Simply select a theme (party, sport, triumph, summer, celebration, 'just to say'), add some words, and get 6 personalised bottles for £29.99 within 15 days.

It's pretty expensive as beer, but still a really nice thing to offer.

On a completely different note, I also love this personalised service by Anya Hindmarch - upload a photo to create your own handbag or washbag.