Vodafone launched a new campaign in Netherlands called: Facebook vs. Hamilton. On September 13, the world’s youngest Formula 1 driver Lewis Hamilton takes on racing against a virtual race car, composed of profile photos of 28,800 Facebook members. The race is organized by Vodafone Netherlands to mark the release of its upgraded mobile data network.

Who is gonna finish earlier: Hamilton, who has to speed over a trail of 2.7 km, or the virtual Facebook car of 288 MB?

You can check out the campaign here.

I remember seeing this as it launched last week and was itching to post it, I held back a few days, because I wanted to showcase it as a video so everyone could get the full visual experience (it only works in Chrome browser, so naturally, the demo was built by Google!).

This is by far, the most powerful HTML 5 demonstration I’ve seen yet, and it’s pretty easy to see why when you look at the serious javascript at work here… The HTML 5 demo has multiple choreographed windows triggered by music points, interactive bird flocking to your mouse and in time with the music , custom rendered Google maps , perfect real-time compositing over the top of maps, some advanced procedural drawing that delivers velocity influenced tree branches from the mouse and even 3D canvas rendering! So, enough of the nerd stuff, this is bloody amazing, check it out, you’ll be glad you did.

Note to everyone. Only 17% of you who read Digital Buzz have chrome, I’m hoping that number will increase to 30% in the coming month! Get Chrome, you know you want to.
Make sure you check out the official experiment page here.

You may remember a video I posted back in Feb, it was called “Augmented Hyper Reality“, Keiichi Matsuda’s vision of what Augmented Reality could become in the future… So, 7 months on and Keiichi Matsuda is back with another Augmented Reality vision, this time, he has blended Augmented Reality into the every day city life that you can view with 3D glasses (I hope, I don’t have any at home to test it actually works!). An amazing production. Very very cool. (thanks Jose)

ATTIK and North Kingdom have just launched a new Augmented Reality game called “Take On The Machine” where you use an AR marker as a steering wheel to steer your car to victory against your Facebook friends or the global leaderboard. Normally AR games show a lot of jagged edges, but because this game is actually controlled by an AR steering wheel, as opposed to displaying a live AR model on screen, the performance, graphics (pre rendered) and steering response are of a much higher quality than you’d usually expect from an AR game. Check it out here for a little fun.

For the last three years, Marta Kagan, has updated her famous SlideShare presentation called “What the F**K is Social Media” and for 2010, the presentation has been updated with some more amazing stats and growth comparisons to 2009. Marta has also collected some of the best quotes on social media, from a few of the worlds brightest people over the last 12 months, to help depict exactly where social media is right NOW. Fittingly, the new presentation makes a point, that it’s no longer “what is social media?” but “what is social media now?”. View all the stats here...

Here is a great Infographic that maps out most of Google acquisitions since they started buying companies back in 2001. Interestingly, Google CEO Eric Schmidt mentioned earlier this year that they were back on the hunt and ramping up acquisitions to just over one per week. For any company, that is a ridiculously tough thing to do, but for Google it must be very painful to maintain the pace of buy-outs, and to actually find enough good tech startups to buy!

The Infographic categorises the acquisitions into three columns; building revenue streams, cutting competitor revenue streams and the ones that do a bit of both. View the infographic...

Sony has been running a pretty cool Facebook app over the last few weeks, called Media Monster Wars, featuring Justin Timberlake. It’s a well integrated social game that utilises the content on your wall to power your monster. The more photos, videos, comments, likes, shares and interaction you have, the bigger, better and meaner your monster will be in battle! Then when you’ve crushed all your friends, you can challenge Justin Timberlake himself…

The idea for the media monsters comes from Sony’s attempt to clean up the piles of media that often clog our computers, through their new Vaio notebook and software.

Apart from a fantastic concept, the app does a great job at leveraging the viral elements of Facebook with status updates, direct posts to friends’ walls, wall to wall views and direct friend to friend battles, challenges and scoring. One really interesting thing though, is there wasn’t a “like” button in sight… Missed opportunity? I’d love to see the campaign stats and exactly where all that engagement went! Great work by 180 LA, and congrats to Sony for pushing the idea.

So we’ve seen how iPad Magazines work, and loved them, but what about text books, that’s the next big progression for education right? Well, this video from new tech startup Inkling, might just showcase the future of iPad learning with their end to end iPad textbook publishing platform.

Inkling looks to have a few great features, all playing off their vision to remove a text books spine and allow you to freely explore the content through search, images, video & hands on interactivity. Not to mention to the possible social elements around asking questions instantly to your peers, viewing teachers sticky notes & probably querying elements against wikipedia in real time…

I’m pretty sure I’d be a whole lot smarter if I’d been able to go through school learning like this!

So everyone who reads Digital Buzz would have heard about Facebook Places by now, but really, unless you’re in the US, you’ve not had an opportunity to experience exactly what Facebook Places is. So here is the demo video from the official Facebook YouTube Channel.

Facebook Places to me, will ultimately kill off Gowalla & Foursquare over the next few years in the looming battle for the GeoSocial Check In world. That’s a pretty big call with all the VC funding those guys have been getting, but what people probably don’t understand right now, is that Facebook Places isn’t just another location based check in service, and I don’t think it’s even meant to compete directly with them, Facebook Places provides the API that will connect the next generation of mobile applications, websites and beyond.

Think of Facebook Places as if it was the “Like Button”, that button, allowed Facebook to become part of every website in the world. So when Click here to read the full article on Facebook Places...

When you realise there are 4.6 billion mobile phones on the planet, it’s easy to see why everyone believes mobile is the elephant in the room, but when you step back a little further and think about the social aspect of that, and indeed now the Geo Social impact that mobile phones have on our every day lives, from friends to networking, it’s a pretty exciting place to be and no wonder that so many startups are vying to control that space right now.

I think we’ll see a whole lot more Geo Social in everything we do over the next few years as our mobile phones, tablet computers and even cameras start to use GPS data to help track and socialise everything we do, at every place we do it. To highlight the current Geo Social potential, Jess3 created an infographic that depicts the size of current players in the Geo Social race. Click here for the full infographic on The Geosocial Universe...

Target launched their Fall 2010 fashion range with a mammoth out door event, the sort of occasion we’ve been seeing some amazing projection mapping come to life at. But this time Mother N.Y and Target managed to create an extravaganza with just as much wow factor, using The Standard Hotel in NYC as the event stage, they synced over 150 rooms with large LED lights and live dancers in windows along with ground level catwalks and a host of celebs to mark the launch.

I think the realness of the dancers mixed with the LED light show was fantastic, Target even streamed it live (via uStream) to their near 2 million Facebook fans with multiple camera angels and other content for the launch through a special Facebook app. (lights start at 40 secs)

4 days and 4+ million views, that’s what you get when you throw Roger Federer into a viral video and seed it to perfection. It’s kind of scary when you take a step back and think about how many of these trick-shot-style viral videos are out there (or have been), and how almost every time, no matter how predictable the content is, they always seem to generate ridiculous levels of interest!

The world will only continue to increase demand for interesting and unique video based content, and that leaves marketers, brands and agencies with huge upside for innovative campaigns with relevantly low budget (think the Sexy CPR campaign) . It’s clearly easier in the pro sports world to generate this kind of hype, but I’ve no doubt it can be done in any category.

This is a beautiful behind the scenes video for IBM’s Data Campaign that was release earlier this year, I don’t think it made it to Australia, so it’s the first time I’ve seen any of the campaign creative (sorry if it’s old?!). What I really love about this video isn’t just the fantastic insights and interviews, but the way they were able to find and create these “Code Artists” who were able to generate the amazing visuals you see, purely through code. The campaign was created by Ogilvy and Motiontheory. (via Chris on Blogilvy)

I didn’t realise anyone was still using Chatroulette since the hype died off, let alone running campaigns through it, but for what it’s worth, this is a pretty cool (but predictable) campaign for “The Last Exorcism” horror movie. It features a girl interacting with people through the web cam, giggling as she looks to unzip her top for the guys on the other end, before her eyes go a little crazy to some provocative sound effects… you check out the movie here.

If you’ve been wondering how to seamlessly integrate an experiential event with Facebook, here is how to do it, in real time! Again, the guys over in Israel are doing some amazing work, this time it was Publicis (E-dologic) and Promarket who have developed an innovative experiential event for Coca Cola Israel that synced everyone who participated, live with their friends on Facebook.

The Coca Cola Village is a special summer experiential event in Israel, in 2010, they decided to run the event through Facebook, with teenagers needing to collect 10 Coca Cola caps each, gather eight friends who did the same and then register online through Facebook to gain exclusive entry. When they got to the Coca Cola Village, they were asked to setup a special wrist band that would securely hold their Facebook login / password Click here to read the full article...

Lynx recently launched a new series of webisodes on Facebook called The Wingman Academy, a new training facility designed to get rid of dating irritations as they put it, in typical lynx style! The webisodes train you on how to become a better wingman by avoiding all the typical advances, irritations, chic chats (as they may now be known!) and thrusting movements that would put almost any good man off his game!

The campaign is being run through a tab on The Lynx Effect Facebook page in the UK, but interestingly, doesn’t seem to utilise any Facebook integration. With content this good (and more on the way), videos that sign-off with Click here to read the full article...

A month or two ago, Sony Pictures released a trailer for the Social Network movie, to which many people were unsure if it was true or not, unfortunately it is, and on the back of that we’ve seen a few great parody’s in the YouTube Movie Trailer and the Twitter Movie Trailer start to appear and gain some traction as viral videos in the last few weeks. Above you’ll see the YouTube Movie Trailer Parody and below you’ll see the Twitter Movie Trailer Parody along with the original “Social Network Movie” trailer. Hope you enjoy them! Click here to watch the videos...

Dentsu Canada recently teamed up with Lollipop to create a digital campaign for Sapporo Beer in Canada, a place where Sapporo was a largely unknown brand. So they built a story around the brands history and brewing process that unfolded online, a place where users would be asked to collect special scrolls across a large interactive world that was designed to bring that story to life, if you could find all 15 scrolls, you were entered into the draw for an exclusive trip to Japan.

While I think this is a great way to take people on a journey with the brand, the campaign lacks the integrated social element they probably needed to get the brand exposure to the degree they were after (they have a massive 26 fans on Facebook). I think it’s really important when planning campaigns like this that you not only create that unique, engaging experience like they have, but also focus on the social strategy and integration requirements from day one, it’s just too valuable to forget. Click here to check out the Legendary Biru Campaign Website. Enjoy!

You probably remember Blu’s last stop motion painted film called COMBO, it was an amazing creative piece. Well this one 12 months on is probably even better, and has almost 3 million combined views between YouTube & Vimeo in just 4 weeks. This time, the animation is BLU’s view on how the world might have been at the the very beginning, through the evolution of life and how it could possibly even end. Inspiring from start to finish.

Your first reaction when watching this game trailer will be something like… how does a Grand Theft Auto style game educate people about banking. Well, when your intended market are teenagers not interested in what banks have to say, it all starts to seem a little simpler, particularly when you combine the best selling Sim City style of game in a more engaging Grand Theft Auto package infused with financial challenges (when you think about it, Grand Theft Auto & Sim City already had a lot of business acumen embedded). Throw that combination online, for free, with complete Facebook connect functionality and you’ve something pretty exciting.

The game is build around a teenager that comes to the city in search of making it big, along with characters like landlords, fraudsters, old ladies, Click here to read the full article...

There has been some action at the Y&R building in Sydney this week, I’m on the 10th floor and noticed posters being put up for a “missing” gnome, yep, pretty weird, but it’s seems it’s not just any gnome, it’s Wunderman’s “Wundergnome”. A few days later, the Wundergnome appeared on Facebook crying out for help, followed shortly on eBay along with ransom posters in the building.

So if you want to help locate the little fella or you work for Wunderman (perhaps even a rival agency!) around the world somewhere, help the Wundergnome get home safely (or just keep him for your self), where ever he is, You can bid for him on eBay here!

Meet Precious, the bike with a brain that’s riding across America to raise funds for Lance Armstrong’s LIVESTRONG charity. So what do I mean by bike with a brain? Well, it’s a bike with all sorts of sensors attached to some pretty cool code and a few silicon chips to bring the bike to life. Precious will be expressing his experiences and feelings through tweets, data and dollars raised.

The sensors track and monitor location, temperature, humidity, speed, cadence, grade, direction, roadkill, dog chases and even how many times Precious has been honked at, while the ‘brain’ turns that into Precious’ feelings that are then tweeted in real time and posted to the site. I love the technology around the bike sensors and more so around how it’s streamed to the website that lets you track Precious day by day as he travels across America. Click here to check out the site.

Well here it is. The Old Spice Social Campaign Case Study from WK. To save the judges some time this year, I’d suggest sending the pencils, lions, grand pix’ and the like straight to the WK head office in an overnight express bag, no need for a tracking code, everyone know’s who those awards will belong to! Check out the video above, the results are just as you’d expect.

The Old Spice Case Study talks us through the insight around targeting men & women at the same time to generate conversation around body wash. When it was launched online for the super bowl weekend (and TV shortly after) the campaign managed to capture 75% of all conversations in the category (although I’m sure that was off a small base) before every man and his dog was talking about the Old Spice ads.

To continue that success Old Spice & WK needed to Click here to read the full article...

Flowtown have released another great social media infographic, this time it’s in the form of The 2010 Social Networking Map that draws the worlds top social networks as country like shapes according to the size of their user base. The map includes things like the land of defunct social networks, the stumbleupon sea and the triangle of YouTube viral videos. Check it out, I’ve linked up a hi-res version for everyone to download.

Click here for the full infographic...

Alternate Reality Gaming (ARG) seems to be growing bigger every year and for the most part, it’s probably driven by events like Comic-Con where in 2010, the fith season of dexter was previewed with an ARG campaign by Showtime to drive hype in the lead up to the season launch. Websites, blogs, forums, videos, twitter riddles, DM’s, voice mails, location challenges and of course, treasure hunts were in order create the ARG

The ARG started with a hunt on SCVNGR (the mobile treasure hunt app platform) leading players to a secret kill room at Comic-Con to look for more clues, those clues eventually lead you to a special sleep analysis website, with clues pointing to a Click here to read the full article...