Skin-screens will replace smart phones?

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Pepsi gets emojified for new five-second ads

For Pepsi, short is sweet, which is why the brand will run five-second TV ads to launch their new emoji-designed bottles. Pepsi will roll out more than 100 online and TV ads beginning in mid-May around the world, to amplify their #SayItWithPepsi social media campaign. They’re also seeking to make the ads as contextually relevant as possible. So, an ad running during a cricket game will have a cricket theme, for example. In addition to online, Pepsi is also seeking to bring the emojis to life in a store in Manhattan. The partnership is with Story, a store in Chelsea that puts brands at the centre of rotating store concepts. In Australia, Pepsi will feature emoji creative on outdoor billboards, posters and on buses and trams, as well as in-store, to encourage consumers to “Say it with Pepsi.” Here’s a string of the five-second ads.

Turkish pet store tried to sell customers a ‘gay turtle’

“Give me a normal, non-gay, standard turtle”. Sounds ridiculous right? That’s the point. The Gay Turtle campaign, is an Amnesty International Turkey initiative drawing attention to the nation’s entrenched cultural attitudes towards homosexuality. It serves as an absurd and harrowing reminder that love is love, but hate is a choice. The campaign features the interactions between potential customers and the sales assistant at an Istanbul pet store. Everything is going swell because, well, who doesn’t like turtles right? Until the assistant mentions that the turtles are gay, then things take a turn for the worse. The result is a novel example of how creative, viral media can highlight important social issues.

Game of Thrones frenzy reaches new heights

The Game of Thrones hype has peaked. This week in the UK, Sky Atlantic covered Metro newspapers across the country in a four-page wrap, in the style of a fictional newspaper called ‘The Westeros Gazette’. The hoax newspaper was created to promote the launch of Game of Thrones, season 6, which premiered earlier this week. Content included spoof ads from the Seven Kingdoms, a Westeros weather forecast, and a missing persons notice for some of the show’s most prolific characters.

Facebook developing a Snapchat-like app

Social media giant Facebook is developing a standalone app that puts live-streaming at the centre of users’ devices. The app, like Snapchat, opens directly into a camera interface, allowing users to easily record videos, snap pictures or broadcast in real-time to their friends. This camera app with live-streaming capabilities is reported to allow developers to build the feature into their apps, opening live-streaming capabilities to more kinds of cameras such as drones. Let’s hope this new app succeeds Facebook’s previous standalone camera app attempt, Facebook Camera, which shut down within a few years when it failed to gain traction.

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RIP BlackBerry smart phones?

The news of BlackBerry’s move away from smartphone development may hurt the hearts of die-hard fans. BlackBerry CEO, John Chen has admitted that the company may have to slash or even completely halt smartphone production if its situation doesn’t change. It appears the company will move onto enterprise software. Much of the attention shift to enterprise has to do with BlackBerry’s acquisition of rival company Good, which they plan to use for software development going forward. This strategic move from BlackBerry appears to be in the right direction, following poor sales since Apple’s iPhone launch in 2007.

Skin-screens will replace smart phones?

Sci-fi films are soon to become a reality with recent reports that researchers are taking the concept of wearable technology to a ‘skin-deep’ level.  Researchers from the University of Tokyo published a paper detailing the development of an “ultra flexible organic photonic skin”. Using the combination of polymer light-emitting diodes (PLEDs) and quantum-dot light-emitting diodes (QLEDs), the cling-film thin electronics are laminated on the skin. Instead of looking down at your Apple watches you could soon be looking at these new ‘skin-screens’.