Never Ending Web Page

Here’s something we just did for Orange. Goodthingsshouldneverend.co.uk

It’s one of my favourite things that we’ve done in a while. It’s a never ending webpage. Crammed full of fun stuff and lots of surprises. Some are online, some are mobile things. But all of them demonstrate the notion of ‘unlimited’.

Not sure I’m supposed to make this public, but people will find out soon enough anyway, there’s hundreds of wind-up phone chargers hidden in the site. I’m not saying what you have to do to find them, that bit is a secret…

I don’t want to say much more because it’s one of those sites which is really about exploration and experience. (We’re hoping that because it’s a never ending page we’ll manage to hit some record-breaking dwell times on the site).

Spot the Bull

Spot the bull

This is one of my favourite projects of recent times. It ticks all of the boxes that get me excited about the work Poke do.

It’s a simple idea, that hasn’t been done before (as far as I can tell). We were basically tasked by Orange to come up with an interesting way to give away a bunch of tickets for Glastonbury. So we came up with the idea of:

  • Putting a GPS enabled cow in a field (it turned out to be a bull later so we could turn the name into a tabloid-friendly pun)
  • Showing it’s position live on the internet, along with webcams
  • Whoever guesses where the bull is going to be at a certain time of day will win tickets

You can play online now for the next 4 weeks:

http://www.orange.co.uk/spotthebull/

I really hope that it gets picked up by the online community. It just feels like the kind of idea that people could get excited about. It’s one of those things that creates an interesting interface between the real world and the web world, and it’s a bit silly too (which often helps).

(In case you’re worried, we were very careful that the activity doesn’t in any way interfere with the Bull’s normal life. The whole thing has been devised in consultation with the farmer and the RSPCA)

Fancy Working For Orange?

Orange are on the lookout for a new Digital Manager.

Obviously the best thing about the job is that you’ll get to work with Poke, and you’ll get to boss us around. And we have to be nice to you. But aside from that it’s a pretty cool role.

It’s got all the things you’d look for in a client side job and a great team to work with. It’s based in Paddington.

They’re looking for someone with:

  • 3-5 years in digital marketing
  • Demonstration of managing digital campaigns (and be able to show some cool stuff you’ve worked on)
  • Experience of media planning online (at a campaign level)
  • All the things associated with running jobs (project management, dealing with agencies, budget management, etc.)

From where I sit this could be a really great opportunity. The team is relatively small and able to ‘get stuff done’. And now that they’re a fully converged mobile/broadband company there’s some pretty cool stuff coming up.

If you want more information get in touch and I’ll hook you up…

Your future could be bright ;-)

Tag-5-things-o-rama

OK! OK! I’m going to do it. I’m gong to succumb to the blog tag 5 things meme. Thanks to the following for tagging me. I might have missed some others (if I have let me know and I’ll add you to my thank you list).

In case you’ve not come across this thing it’s basically like a blog chain letter, only it’s not really. There’s something quite nice about the fact that it creates new links between blogs and their authors. (I only really ‘recognise’ 2 of the people who tagged me – I think).

Anyway, it works like this:

Once you have been tagged, you have to write a blog with 5 facts about yourself. Then choose 5 people you want to tag and list their names. Then leave a comment on their blog letting them know they’ve been tagged.

Actually I had to go and find someone who’d written the rules down, as lots of people seem to be propagating the meme in different ways. I suppose that’s the thing with memes, they get ‘chinese whispered’ as they go around. I’ve even seen some people suggest that their tagees have to write 7 things. How wrong is that!

Anyway, enough waffle, here are 5 ‘interesting’ things about me.

  1. I can fit my fist inside my mouth. I can’t remember how I found this out. But I’ve always been able to do it for as long as I can remember. Sometimes it hurts the edges of my lips, but not normally.
  2. I’ve never eaten meat in my life. Well never intentionally anyway (I once had a British Rail pizza at Kings Cross station that mistakenly had ham on it. I think I ate some. My mum complained to British Rail and they were very sorry, or so they said).
  3. I can’t drive a car. I’ve never really felt the need. Occasionally it’s a pain – on holiday and things like that. And I suppose for moving things around the place. Actually it would be useful quite often, at least to be able to hire a vehicle. But I suppose the real fact is I’m now quite scared of driving (in London anyway), there’s so many nutters on the road and I’m not sure they’d like me getting in their way. Perhaps I’ll take my test in Brighton… But I did used to own an Austin Allegro 1300 Estate. Perhaps more embarrassing than not being able to drive is the fact that I drove one of these for a year (when you were simply allowed to drive with a passenger who’d passed their test sitting in the car). It was voted the worst car ever a couple of years ago. I quite liked it at the time though.
  4. I like dancing. I have done ever since the heady days of breakin’ in the park back in ’84. Culminating in the near legendary uprock outside the Burton-on-Trent branch of WH Smiths. I can’t do that stuff anymore, but there’s an Orange video banner from last year that features me dancing. Thankfully hardly anyone I know has seen it.
  5. I have a secret love of trashy reality TV shows. I watch them and it makes me feel unclean. However, I try to justify it to myself in the name of anthropological research ;-)

Phew, done it. Now who am I going to tag. I pick:

5 fine, upstanding people who I’d like to know 5 interesting things about…

Mod Your Mob for Orange

Here’s a little something that we’ve been working on for Orange. Called Mod Your Mob it’s all about creating freakish versions of mobile phones. I’ve not had much to do with it, and I’m not quite sure if it’s a pisstake or not. I’m not sure anyone else is either.

If I was an independent observer I might be tempted to point at my post below (the one about user generated content). But at the same time there are some quite funny things up there. Go and have a look (if you fancy). And there is decent scooter up for grabs…

It’s only just launched and hasn’t been promoted yet, so it’s a bit quiet for now: Orange – Mod Your Mob

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Webby Awards

This year’s Webby Award winners have just been announced. And I’m chuffed to say that Poke have managed to bag a couple.

One for Talking Point for Orange, and a People’s Voice for Feed Me Better for Jamie Oliver.

I’m personally really happy that Talking Point got awarded as it’s a project that caused me a lot of sleepless nights, and involved a lot of tricky client meetings. [See original blog post here]. As a platform I think we could have done lots more with it, and maybe we still can. Nonetheless it’s nice to see it get commended in this way.

Great to see that the UK is well represented across the board.

Sphere – Blog Search

Sphere: a useful new blog search engine. Seems to index things very fast. My posts from yesterday were already in there. It’s got a particularly nifty ‘custom date range’ function which shows time and volume of posts in a nice way.
Designed by Adaptive Path who’ve posted an account of how they arrived at the design they did.

Thanks to Leisa for the links, her appraisal of the design also makes for interesting reading.

Talking Point for Orange

talkingpoint screengrabHere’s a little something I’ve been working on for a good while now TalkingPoint for Orange. It’s a hybrid between a poll and a discussion forum. The objective being to give people a chance to leave their opinions on issues in an interesting and textured fashion. Allowing people to either just register their agreement with a simple, single-click interaction. Or, if they wish, to go further and leave comments.

So far the results are really promising and we’re seeing high levels of interaction and relatively low levels of abuse (which is nice). The team that worked on it have done a great job – and as usual encountered all kinds of interesting ‘features’ in Flash ;-)