It’s the morning after an excellent evening at the PM Society Digital Media Awards. Nitro Digital were up for an award for Best Digital Tool in a Clinical Setting for our work on the Stop the Clot electronic risk assessment tool that we developed in partnership with Sanofi and Colchester Hospital University Trust.We were up against some excellent competition, but really pleased, chuffed, happy and excited that we won!

Overall, there was a great selection of work submitted for judgement and the agencies and clients are really showing the industry how far we have all come in terms of using digital as a creative, practical and innovative tool for marketing. We are proud for the recognition from our peers and hope we have many more awards that were as great as last night.

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Imagine what you could do with your body is technology allowed you…well thanks to Google we can go back to using our bodies the way that they were meant to open mail and reply to messages.

Gmail Motion allows you to move your body to perform certain actions, picked up by your computer’s webcam. Imagine the possibilities!

However, considering the date (April 1st) it may be worth considering that this is another Google April Fool’s joke. Very clever guys…

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The idea behind the event, if you have not known about it before, is to learn how to increase sales and raise brand awareness by engaging physicians, patients and payers in the digital space and this is done though a series of workshops, discussions and presentations, from those within the pharma sectors – some client, some agency, some regulation and some technology leaders.

The hope is that we can all learn something from each other through our discussion and example-sharing and leave the conference engaged, taking back what we have learnt to our colleagues and clients.

Nitro Digital were exhibiting sponsors and held court outside the conference hall. We want to thank anyone that made the effort to come and see us over the 2 days. We met some old friends, plus made some new ones too – which is great considering that we have a rapidly growing European client-base!

Although all the speakers throughout the two days were  great, there were a couple of exceptions and I would like to share them with you here. Kicking-off proceedings on the first day was Peter Hinssen, who is one of Europe’s thought leaders on the impact of technology on our society. He gave us all some highlights of his new book, The New Normal – which basically looks at the fact that we are only about halfway there in terms of technological development.

A great start to the day as it really energised us all into thinking about the future and the progression of what we can all do within our own sector. You can find out more about The New Normal below:

Another highlight for me was Mark Peterson, CRD Centre Manager for our friends at Boehringer Ingelheim, who presented BI’s own journey into using serious gaming as a new tool to educate and inform. We saw how serious gaming can help patient adherence and assist with educating patients to cope with long term care plus how to integrate brand messages into gaming platforms without undermining the gaming experience.

Using electronic gaming for non-entertainment purposes is keeping up with the way that we consume media as a society and may be able to help address the reasons as to why patients may not keep up the adherence on a program of treatment they have been given. A well-known example of this in the industry is Bayer’s DIDGET meter which was developed in conjunction with Paul Wessel – the parent of a child with type 1 diabetes.

Paul noticed that although his son Luke was constantly losing his blood glucose meter, he could always find his Nintendo Game Boy. It was this observation that inspired Paul and Bayer to work together to develop the first and only blood glucose meter that connects to the Nintendo DS and Nintendo DS Lite gaming systems to reward children for good testing habits.

BI had focused on how to develop the learnings of HCPs by using serious gaming and it is this push into the unknown (plus developing this independantly) that really energised the room into thinking about what they could achieve themselves if they had the support of their peers and company.

The two days just flew by, but it was really great to meet everyone and hear some great case studies and we look forward to seeing a real progression (especially from Nitro!) in innovation in the pharma sector.

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Those boffins at Google have done it again with the demo of a product on their Google Labs project called Google Body Browser. This aims to do for the human body what Google Earth did for maps – hopefully make users more aware about the world inside of us all and enable leisurely exploration of our own body’s detail in the same way that we pour over the areas we live.

The browser will allow user to peel away the body layer by layer, zooming in and out and navigate through selected areas and no doubt will be a useful aid to doctors, medical professionals and students.

Nitro Digital will be more than curious to see how we can utilise this tool into our clients sites once it is released to the public and we sincerely hope that we’ll be able to integrate it into sites with the ease of Google Maps. Allowing our clients to demonstrate how the body works alongside the various condition awareness, consumer health care and health care professional websites that we are adept at creating will enable the user to have a fuller experience when interacting with your site and we are excited to see the potential of such a release from Google.

You can view it here if you have a browser that has a WebGL implementation. Otherwise you can see it in action viewing the video below:

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Paul Butler is an intern on Facebook’s data infrastructure engineering team and has taken the time this week to publish what he believes is what the world looks like according to the Facebook social graph.

“I began by taking a sample of about ten million pairs of friends from Apache Hive, our data warehouse,” Paul says. I combined that data with each user’s current city and summed the number of friends between each pair of cities. Then I merged the data with the longitude and latitude of each city.”

The results shows an intricate combination of connections from country to country demonstrating how closely we are connected than ever before. What makes the experiment even more intriguing is the way that even political borders show on the map. This visual way of being able to show vast amounts of data is becoming more and more important in these figure-heavy information-overloaded times.

David McCandless is another champion of how to make information meaningful with his ongoing blog and subsequent book Information is Beautiful. His conclusion that the peak break-up time on Facebook was in the spring and just before Christmas may not be as visually engaging to look at, but allows the information to impact in a more insightful way than if just on paper as figures.

In this age of mind-numbingly big stats and figures, they sure both are creative ways of connecting meaning to the vast resource of Facebook.

Source: Mashable

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Has the war against bland stock imagery started? Jakob Nielsen, a Web site consultant about design and user interface wants to try and spruce up some of the less-thought out designs out on the web and this includes trying to address an  unnecessary reliance on stock imagery.
Using eye-tracking software and surveys, he’s been trying to address whether users respond to stock imagery they encounter on a website. He points out that the random or stock images on Web sites are completely ignored by users, add more clutter to the page and don’t necessarily help from a business standpoint.

The New York Times ‘Bits blog detail it further:

His latest eye-tracking survey found that “big feel-good images that are purely decorative” are mostly ignored online, while stock photos or generic people are also intentionally disregarded. In contrast, when users know that a picture of a person is real they will engage with the image for extended periods of time.

More details about his personal mission can be found on his blog.

If you want to get a taste for some of the worst stock images out there check out the very funny www.badstockart.com

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Tired of trying to keep all of your social media channels updated? Running out of ideas and fresh content that will keep your followers coming back on a regular basis? Eos magazine know exactly how you feel…and they have decided to go back to “grass roots” to tackle the problem.

They’ve enlisted the help of a tree…and this tree has an awful lot to say!

Fitted with sensors, a computer, a web-cam and a wi-fi centre (just to name a few of the gadgets), the tree, based in Brussels, outputs all manner of content that can be found on YouTube, Soundcloud and Flickr with a feed on Twitter that makes sense of the data from all of the on-tree gizmos for it’s 3000+ followers.

Tree life finally comes to social media and hopes to highlight the impact of carbon emissions in light of an upcoming campaign run by the magazine. Follow the tree at talking-tree.com.

Maybe it’s time to see if the kettle wants to Tweet…

Creative Review has more detail about the campaign here.

Check out our twitter tree bookmarks on Delicious

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Nitro Digital is pleased to announce that we moved offices over the weekend and are currently unpacking boxes in our new home! We’re now living at the bottom of London’s fashionable Soho region and can’t wait to check out the local bars and coffee shops…

Please note that our address has changed to:

13-14 Archer Street
London
W1D 7BD

You can check out the location on Google Maps.

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Urban Tick have been busy putting togther geospatial data from Twitter in fun and interesting ways. In the case above, they have created a whole new landscape based on the user data throughout London which starts at Soho Mountain – the epicentre of Twitter activity.

Other cities can be viewed on creator Fabian Neuhaus’ Flickr page

Source: Londonist.com

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According to Mashable, last week’s (exceptionally) fun logo by Google, celebrating the 30th anniversay of the cult 80s videogame, ending up costing the world’s productivity $120,483,800 – or 82 million man-hours.

Rescue Time crunched the numbers, but you have to admit that this is a scary yet-exciting use of the Google brand who were effectively able to stop the world from working!

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