Welcome to April's newsletter. Read on for news about the General Election campaign we produced for the Green Party, our latest collaboration with The International Exchange, a few campaigns and trends that have caught our attention and our new obsession with yoga.
EMMA
The International Exchange
We're thrilled to be working with The International Exchange (TIE) this year, a programme which pairs people who currently work within the communications industry (folk like us) with NGOs in developing countries. Whilst abroad, they work with the NGO on a communication campaign, giving much needed expert assistance whilst using their skills in a unique and positive way.
Turning the tables on the Turing test
A chess-playing machine travels the world, beating famous opponents who accuse it of cheating. You’re probably thinking back to 1997 - Deep Blue vs. Gary Kasparov. But try 1781, when a chess automaton called “The Turk” beat players including Benjamin Franklin and Napoleon Bonaparte, before being exposed as a man in a box, controlling the actions of a dummy above.
Fast-forward 225 years: Amazon launch “Mechanical Turk” – their “artificial artificial intelligence” platform where humans can perform batches of tasks that a brain would find simpler than an AI system (such as choosing suitable images or categorising products).
3 Things To Make You Smarter
**Apple have sold a staggering one million iPads in only 28 days.
Source
**Social networking currently makes up over half of the mobile internet minutes used in the US.
Source
**You can now link your Spotify and Facebook accounts by creating a list of friends on Spotify from your Facebook contacts. This enables you to see what your friends are listening to and send them songs suggestions.
Source
Only Green
At the beginning of April, we produced an integrated General Election campaign for the Green Party, Only Green, which included a personalised party election broadcast, a mobile app and outdoor. Click here to read an article written by our Head of Innovation, Dom O'Brien, which gives an insight into our approach to the campaign.
Adobe Flash Player 10.1
The flash team recently went along to the Adobe Creative Suite 5 launch party to learn about some of the new features we can look forward to in Flash Player 10.1.
One of the common moans users have about Flash Player is the affect it has upon their computer’s processors which results in their laptop battery being drained. Flash Player is based upon a frame rate, and the frame rate determines how many times code is executed per second. Imagine if you have your web browser open with 10 tabs of the same Flash movie running. Even though you can only see one tab, all 10 Flash movies would be running at say 31fps, subsequently draining your laptop battery. Now with Flash Player 10.1 the player automatically detects whether a Flash movie is hidden in a tab and automatically reduces its frame rate to 2fps.
Nike & Gatorade
Over the next few months some of us at glue towers are taking part in a few different sporting events so we felt that it was only right to have a sport fuelled ‘online advertising’ section this edition.
Read on for a couple of really nice ideas from Nike and Gatorade.
Yoga
Work related stresses and strains? In need of team bonding? The female glue gang has found the answer!
Down in the busy streets of Bethnal Green lies yoga sanctuary Yoganesh. The affordable and relaxed school is a cozy, white room bejeweled with candles. Yoga instructor Rita Chohan leads the way in glue’s lunch time classes with an extensive combination of vinyasa and pranayama practices.