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Occasionally, and I mean very occasionally, I put myself through the hell of a London Tube in summertime. This is an experience that I thoroughly recommend against. So whilst I have always maintained that there is a great business opportunity for deodorant and cool water vendors - most people squashed against me tend to be the sweatiest and smelliest on the carriage - I rarely take on any other advertising.

The other day at Piccadilly Circus though I saw a new installation being trialled. A projection display with changing advertising - that also cuts out 30 seconds before the train arrives.

Pretty nifty, eh? Yeah, it’s OK but without sound and animation it looks like one of those crap screensavers. And sure enough, with a bit of development, it will be pretty cool in the future - although we done a better digital installation project for Puma with their brand design agency GBH. But this is not the best tube ad.  That honour (or ‘honor’ for our American readers) is reserved for the station one-stop north on the Bakerloo line: Oxford Circus. I thought this was so great I actually got off the tube to take a photo to show the power of ‘negative space’.

In a world saturated with advertising, sometimes it’s nice to view the same environments ’sans-ads’. Just imagine these same blank sheet spreads with a simple red chocolate bar image, small and in the centre, with those three little words… ‘Take a break’. I’d buy a KitKat that instant - as long as the deodorant and cool water vendor had some in stock.

What do you think about a break from advertising every now and then? Or any other great ads (or technology) you have seen?

Part of the big overhaul coming to Facebook is going to see a wealth of new functionality. Some of this is already trickling through - you may have noticed the very basic chat function on there.

Now you can also have your music added to your message signatures so everyone can see what you are listening too - and even click through to listen themselves. It’s a nice interaction with FoxyTunes - which is one of the best Firefox extensions ever. Not tested if it ties in with Last FM. I love it when technology starts to ‘connect the dots’ like this as it enriches dialog between consumers and makes a richer environment for digital marketing at large.

- Loving the tune? Facebook message with song signature

While on the subject of Firefox, why not help them set a new world record for most software downloads in a day. At the time of writing this, there are still 11 hours to go and currently the UK is third in the world, just behind Canada and way off the US (of course). Interestingly, the UK has delivered more downloads than Russia, Brazil and China!

- Firefox download day world record attempt

Firefox’s true aim is to step up from number two to number one in the browser market, but their current 10-15% of market share is dwarfed by Microsoft’s Internet Explorer at 80-85%. Slowly people are seeing the light and making the switch but Microsoft’s monopoly deal with PC manufacturers means that a huge percentage of users still us the browser that came with their PC. Which sucks for us digital marketing people as Internet Explorer, particularly IE7 is a pile of horse sh*t and requires additional resources to deliver the same display as Firefox.

A great article over at Venture Beat talking about Adobe’s plans to develop an Open Standards Flash Player for use across all digital media channels. This is a great development as by dropping certain license fees it ensures greater take up, which makes it easier to deliver brand experiences coherently across media channels. Shame there is still no news of a decent Flash player on the iPhone but I guess we can live in hope.

“Just in case you think Adobe’s Flash Player (which powers YouTube and an enormous number of other sites) isn’t ubiquitous enough, Adobe is pushing for even greater adoption from developers and designers. Through an initiative the company is calling the Open Screen Project, Adobe will lift a number of restrictions on Flash in the hopes creating even greater usage, especially on web-enabled devices.”

Read the full article here.

August 13th 2008 is the day I turn 30. Yeah, it’s been getting me down  :-(  but the nice thing about a birthday in August is that most of your school friends are older than you - so I get to feel better about turning 30 by watching other people hit it first! It has come to my attention that another ‘old acquaintance’  has just turned 30… that bastard-child of email, SPAM. That’s right, thirty bloody years of spam and we are further from stopping it now than ever before. Definitely one of the ‘hang your head in shame’ points of working in a digital industry. If only it could be more fun - like the Monty Python sketch where it allegedly gets it’s name from. The internet and email would be a much better place.

It’s a dead bloody parrot!

STARTUP DETAILS:

Company Name: Phone.com

Company Website: http://www.phone.com

20 word description: Phone.com offers cool new communications services, with a special focus on the infrastructure and budget needs of small businesses and households.

CEO’s 100 word description: Phone.com offers innovative and affordable communications services. Winner of the 2007 Internet Telephony Product of the Year award, Phone.com Virtual Office offers a local, toll-free or vanity toll-free number with the ability for you to manage it from our popular web interface. In addition, Virtual Office includes more features than you would expect from an expensive business phone system – auto attendant, call forwarding, menus, voicemail notification, schedules, and so much more!

Mashable’s Take: Phone.com has a fairly lengthy history when it comes to its domain name (at least in terms of web history), but the recently relaunched website is focusing on some newer efforts this time around. Obviously the focus is still phone-related, but there’s nothing that says “phone trend” like VoIP services.

Most of the recent talk about VoIP is in regards to its ongoing integration into social media; just look at Jangl. But there’s the other side to VoIP, and that’s business integration. There’s a growing interest for SMBs to find more economic ways in which to have phone systems for their companies, and VoIP services haven’t always been in the picture for viable consideration. Phone.com is hoping to turn this around, with a slew of options and plans for SMBs to utilize in the office.

As the world’s workforce gets smaller (globalization), and the US economy puts a strain on business owners, streamlined virtual services are among those tools that can help an office environment run more smoothly. Similar to the trend we’re seeing in socially integrated and individually-directed VoIP and phone-related services, Phone.com is also offering a virtual office suite to go along with its VoIP service. This is to offer a more complete package for a phone system, giving you custom recordings, scheduling tools, and more.

I’ve noted this trend a few times now, but several specialized phone services have made some major advances in moving towards the actual execution of this concept, and the trend will only gain speed in the coming year, especially for businesses and individuals with business needs.

New research, commissioned by database software company FileMaker, has found that the IT skills of “generation Facebook” are being wasted at work. 1,000 people who have left full-time education within the last three years were surveyed, and it was found that they generally have a strong confidence in their IT skills, but the organisations they are working for don’t always make the most of these.

The research showed that 82% of the 16 to 18 year olds felt confident about their level of IT skills going in to the workplace - a much higher percentage than the 64% who felt confident about their interpersonal skills. 85% of school leavers and university graduates that took part in the survey were taught how to use PowerPoint software while in their education but only around a third are actually using it at work. Similarly, 88% learnt how to use spreadsheet software but only 65% use it in their job. And, just over half said they had actively looked for creative ways to use technology at work.

Tony Speakman, regional manager northern Europe at FileMaker, has stated: “The generation of people coming into the workplace now have had technology round them all of their lives, so whether it’s Facebook or whether it’s MSN or what it might be it’s second nature to them …” “[To a parent it may seem as though] they seem to waste so much time on these social networking sites but actually what this means when they’re put in front of technology in a business sense they’re in no way intimidated by it and it is second nature to them.” Speakman also said that the “much more positive attitude to IT” of these education leavers is good news for business, adding they are “not there to kill things [IT systems]“.

He warned that businesses are failing to make the most of this innate love of technology: “We’ve all got email and we’ve all got access to the internet and so we probably tend to think we’re completely up to date. But what we’ve tended to do in many businesses is we’ve automated a paper process rather than necessarily look at the capability of the technology that you have and ask if there are even more efficient ways to use it”. To overcome this, businesses should consider doing a skills audit of new recruits and updating job responsibilities to ensure roles are aligned with skills. Speakman said: “If you audit the technology that you’ve already invested in, audit the people that you’ve got and the skills that they have then you could really start to drive some additional productivity improvements - and that goes straight to the bottom line of any business.”

However, the research also found that there is reluctance among businesses to invest in training for graduates and school leavers. Only 12% of respondents had received some formal training at work, while 49% said they had had to make do with on-the-job or unstructured training. Speakman said: “We have a culture that does not invest in training. And it is a cost-related thing in my opinion but that is probably a false economy.” He added: “Companies that are using technology to make themselves efficient, to make themselves responsive, to cut costs and control costs will ultimately be the more successful organisations - so technology will be a significant driver so what we’re saying is let’s make sure we’re using the skills of the people we’re employing.”Businesses have a responsibility to drive IT skills forward as “education very much looks to business” when it comes to setting the curriculum, he said. “If we as businesses up the ante then education will follow,” he added.

The European Union is spending 14m Euros to create a standard way to send TV via the Internet. Partners including the BBC and the European Broadcasting Union are also contributing a total of £3.7m. The four-year project ‘P2P Next’ aims to create a peer-t0-peer system that can pipe programmes to set-top boxes and home TV sets, based on the BitTorrent technology which many of us already use to share movies and music. So the system will have no central host handing out the content, but all the machines downloading a show will make parts of it available to all the others that want it - distributing the load across the network.

Jari Ahola from the VTT technical research centre in Finland said that the incentive of the broadcasters is to take their distribution mechanism beyond terrestrial, satellite and cable, and they can use the Internet as a distribution platform for very low cost. Once complete the system will be able to handle stored content for download and stream content from live football matches or concerts.

The first stages of the project are due to be complete this August, and by July 2009 a more complete test version should be released that can pipe programmes to set-top boxes so people can watch on their TV rather than their PC.

Not quite as slick as the IKEA sequence from the movie Fight Club but it shows we’re getting there. Overlay.tv is a new start-up with a great infomercial viral movie (see below), that enables users to overlay content on top of video. This content can be just for fun and games or it can actually link to other pages - ideal for one-click purchase of some shoes in the new Sex and the City film!

OK, so it’s a few steps from movies as currently it only enables video streams from popular video sharing sites like YouTube, MySpace TV, Google Video, Yahoo! Video, and College Humor but that’s pretty impressive to start with (although similar to Ooyala).

Nice, but what about the retailers? Well, they’ve already signed up over 600 including Amazon, iTunes and Wal-Mart. Add in the fact it works in both IE and FireFox (sorry no Safari, Apple peeps) and that users can even turn off overlays means this is one exciting piece of tech. If only it was running on the M&S site that we mentioned a few days ago…

Today we went down to Earls Court for TFM&A. Our good friend Danny Meadows-Klue of Digital Strategy Consulting was there to deliver a keynote on 2.0 and Facebook. His talk was great and for those of you that missed out, the podcast is coming soon…

It is suggested that the government are to publish a consultation document on the creative industries next week. As the number of people in the UK believed to download files illegally has reached 6 million, this Green Paper will highlight the plans that the Government are considering to tackle illegal downloads. Plans propose that Internet service providers will have to take action on users who access pirated materials - first with an e-mail warning, then a suspension and finally terminating the user’s Internet contract - and broadband firms that fail to adhere to these terms could be prosecuted.

Many questions will arise regarding this proposal; what happens when users claim others are ‘piggybacking’ on their internet service, for example - so we are sure the Green Paper will cause a stir when it’s released. Let us know what you think about it…