This one goes out to all the iPhone cinematographers. It’s a product called Zgrip that turns your iPhone 3GS or iPhone 4 into a handy cam.

There are two Zgrip kits: iPhone Pro and iPhone Jr. The Pro model will set you back a steep $295 and enables multiple adjustments for shooting at unconventional angles, as well as the ability to mount to a tripod. The Jr. model is not adjustable but will save you some cash for only $69.

Images courtesy of Cool Hunting and Zacuto.

ChumpDump on Prezi

Isn’t it about time you cleaned up your following list? If you are like most, chances are you follow a few people that are not worth the time. Working to clean up your timeline can take some serious effort, especially if you auto-follow everyone who follows you because you are a “nice person”. A new app for the iPhone and the Android Market called “ChumpDump” brings a little fun to the table when choosing who to un-follow.

The premise is simple; each day all of your friends on Twitter are thrown in a lottery. ChumpDump then presents you with someone you are following, and you are given the choice whether to “dump” or “save” them. If you choose to dump that person, you gain karma points. After earning enough karma, you can turn the lottery mode off, allowing you to un-follow whomever you may choose on demand. People who have been dumped, appropriately labeled “dumpies”, will go up for adoption in the ChumpDump world, allowing for others to decide if you were too hasty in your dumping.

Oprah once said, “think about any attachments that are depleting your emotional reserves. Consider letting them go”. She was obviously speaking about Twitter. Life is too short to have to read the mind-numbingly boring tweets from your old college buddy. Sometimes, you just need to let go.

If you question the potential popularity of ChumpDump, a quote from their website will alleviate your woes. “We like games and everyone loves the lottery, so we’ve given you a daily lottery game to play every day of the week”. Well said, genius minds behind ChumpDump.

Several weeks ago, members of the Boston sports media received cryptic t-shirts that read: Help Vince!. There was little, to no, explanation. Yesterday, the meaning of the words on the shirt was finally revealed. Vince Wilfork, defensive lineman for the New England Patriots, has had his Super Bowl ring “stolen” by a Jets fan. The Patriots are asking their fans to “Help Vince” find his ring through a series of challenges.

The promotion was launched in conjunction with SCVNGR (based in Cambridge, MA), an up-start, location based game for your iPhone or Android device. On the surface the app sounds similar to other location based applications such as Foursquare or Gowalla. What SCVNGR does better, is to offer more of a game based element in the form of challenges, which can be part of a bigger Trek. By completing these you earn points, the more you explore, the more points you receive. They offer a much better scavenger hunt platform than their more well known location based competitors. Groups are able to customize Treks and users can earn points for checking in, snapping a picture, scanning a QR code, etc.

In the case of the Patriots promotion, fans are asked to complete challenges all over New England. The top scorer will win lunch with a Patriots player, including 3 friends, after the close of the 2010-2011 football season. The Patriots are also using their Twitter feed to push clues out to their followers, as well as traditional media outlets to gain attention.

The result of this effort by the Patriots is renewed buzz & interest about the team leading up to the start of the new football season. They are also able to encourage the rivalry with the Jets, and promote interesting places across New England. Fans will no doubt go crazy trying to complete challenges spreading interest with their friends. Seems like a win win for everyone, especially SCVNGR which is just making a name for itself.

Inside SCVNGR Treks:

Patriots challenges nearby:

Activities by others:

Leader board:

Many thanks to Colleen for taking these screenshots for me. Moving from MA to the south limited my location based ability!

Starting in 2011, you’ll be able to quickly connect your iPod or iPhone for integrated use within a BMW. Using Apple’s iPod Out functionality, together with the next generation iDrive system from BMW, you’ll be able to control all of your music on screen using the interface you’ve grown accustom to. Down the road BMW hopes to offer integrated control for other apps on your device, though one may question the safety hazards involved in doing so. The whole system is an effort by BMW to give you instant access to new technologies as they become available for your chosen Apple device.

State parks aren’t exactly notorious for best practices when it comes to utilizing new technology, so I have to say I was a little impressed when a friend of mine pointed me to this summer’s GeoChallenge Adventure from the State Parks and Historic Sites division of the Georgia DNR.

The Premise

Sealed ammo boxes labeled as a Georgia State Parks & Historic Sites GeoCache are hidden in 42 Georgia State Parks. There is a “First-to-Find” special prize for a certificate for a 1-night camping stay in each cache for the person who gets there first, and 10 of the caches contain an “endangered” gopher stuffed toy which becomes yours to keep and protect.

How To Play

• Download a Georgia State Park GeoChallenge PassPort or just the Grid Sheet.
• Get the GPS coordinates at www.Geocaching.com for the Georgia State Parks Geo-Challenge locations.
• Locate the caches by entering their GPS coordinates into a hand-held GPS unit.

The Payoff

The boxes contain a prize for the first adventurer to locate the cache, and successive adventurers are encouraged to leave a trinket of equal or greater value for the next adventurer. Log your name and any comments to the logbook, stamp your PassPort grid sheet with the unique stamp for that specific park and then share your experiences online. (Unfortunately, no direction is given as to where to share your experience online.)

There also are geo-coin (bronze, silver, and gold) for finding a certain number of caches and stamping your Geocache Passport with the stamps that are unique to each cache.

As I said earlier, I really applaud the effort. We don’t often see innovation like this from state parks and recreational organizations. That said, I think there are a handful of ways the GeoChallenge Adventure could be made even better.

How To Make It Better

• Make each cache a Foursquare/Gowalla location so that gameplay is not limited only to those with handheld GPS devices. They could even partner with these location-based services so that checking-in at a cache automatically earns adventurers a cache-specific badge (an alternative to having to collect physical stamps in the GeoChallenge Passport).
• Develop GeoChallenge Adventure smartphone apps in lieu of Foursquare/Gowalla integration.
• Incorporate StickyBits at each cache location so that user-generated content can be shared easily online.
• Create and link to a Facebook Fan page for the GeoChallenge Adventure so that adventurers have a designated place to share their adventures online.

Click here for more detailed information about the Georgia State Parks GeoChallenge.

7-Eleven, looking to capitalize on Facebook’s social gaming users,  recently launched a major partnership with Zynga, the popular social gaming company. The promotion is in conjunction with the wildly popular games Farmville, MafiaWars, & YoVille. Farmville alone boasts 10% of US Facebook users playing their game & 20% of worldwide users. Zynga also claims that 80% of registered users are playing at least one of these three games daily.

The reach of this promotion is potentially huge for 7-Eleven as players of these games are known to be rabid about collecting special items to gain an advantage over the friends they are playing against.

The concept is simple, purchase a branded item in one of the 7,000 stores in the US get a special item to use with the games. If you collect enough items, 9 to be exact, you would be able to collect an uber item, one for each game. To get credit for the purchase all you have to do is go to the 7-Eleven site “Buy. Earn. Play“, enter your code, and you’ll receive your special item plus a “punch” in your card toward the uber gift. If you purchase a Zynga branded 7-Eleven gift card you’ll get two “punches”. There is also an option to text your code from your mobile phone.

The one problem that I ran into while taking a look at this promotion was that I had to turn on the Instant Personalization feature within my Facebook account before I could poke around on the 7-Eleven site. I’m sure that Farmville users will have no problem allowing this feature access to gather the prizes but with all of the privacy concerns that Facebook has been facing a few might opt to not take advantage of this promotion.

Farmville specific gifts:

The old saying “location, location, location” seems to gain more relevance every week in the digital world and brands finally seem to be taking notice. The reason of course is that location-based ads can be incredibly relevant and effective. According to a study that was released earlier this week, about half of people using location services on their mobile phones respond to ads.

With that in mind, it should come as no surprise that Pepsi is joining the location revolution. As an early brand adopter of Foursquare, they have plans to continue with more programming in that space, along with a tie to a Pepsi rewards program called Pepsi Loot. Their aim is use Foursquare to drive consumers to nearby stores and restaurants that serve Pepsi products.

According to the New York Times:

“Being able to drive foot traffic into our restaurant partners and our retail partners is a huge opportunity, because that’s where our product is sold,” said B. Bonin Bough, director of social and emerging media for PepsiCo. “Ten blocks mean a lot.”

Once at a Pepsi-friendly spot, the Pepsi Loot tie-in will allow people to collect loyalty points that translate to things like free music downloads.

While the linkage of Foursquare to a loyalty program isn’t new (Tasti D-Lite kicked one off earlier this year), it does mark big name brand adoption of the idea. It’s an advanced use of location-based technology. When it comes to Foursquare, the bigger brands currently and recently jumping on board have been committed to custom badges. These badges can be cool and fun to try to acquire but as a longtime Foursquare user, I’m not as excited about badges as I was when I first stared using the tool. These days, I’m much more excited about spotting alerts for a special deal or in this case an alert spotting me.

[Disclosure: Coca-Cola is a BFG client.]

Forget checking-in on Foursquare. How’s an on-the-move runner supposed to check-in at a specific Foursquare location?

Nike has the answer for that, if you’re a runner in London anyway.

Meet Nike GRID, which uses the old London telephone boxes instead of smartphone-based geo-location technology. Once you’re signed up online, the goal is to run between two telephone boxes (where you enter your user id). Players earn points and badges for their runs, speed, stamina and street smarts. The player with the most points in a specific area gets a crown for that postcode.

The fun starts on April 23rd and players get 24 hours to start claiming their streets.

[Via Contagious Magazine]

Have you rushed out and bought an iPad yet?

Are you going to?

Do you think the iPad (or any tablet computer for that matter) is going to be a life raft for book publishing and traditional media like newspapers and magazines?

I’m actually excited to see where traditional media, which is always reportedly on the very edge of issuing its last sad breath, yet still manages to wheeze and somehow find the strength and dollars to carry on, will embrace these new platforms as they grow even more robust.

As the video below shows, magazines like Time, GQ and Popular Science have already put their own unique spins on what magazines can look and feel like on these new devices.

While I’m not rushing out to buy a first generation iPad (because there are always glitches and bugs), I’m looking forward to getting one of these in my hands to check it out eventually. I’m a Mac person and a heavy iPhone user/abuser. I still happily use the first, pre-3G iPhone and the slower Edge network, because it still works great, even after two years, and I’ve never had one problem with mine (this is saying a lot for a piece of technology that gets as much of a working out as my iPhone does).

Hopefully these new iPads will be able to take some punishment, although this video shows that Apple probably needs to rethink the wear and tear aspects for future models as it is an easy target for getting destroyed. Doesn’t seem like it takes to much stress to ruin one.

This isn’t very cool after one has shelled out good money for one, since the whole idea of these devices it that they are light and portable, so shouldn’t toughness and overcoming the “drop factor” be a big part of the design? It’s still early days, so I’m sure Apple will eventually clear these hurdles (or a competitor will).

Writing in the New York Times, computer programmer and author Craig Mod likes what he sees and likes where the technology is taking us (especially for content creators and publishers):

The next few years will be very exciting for content creators and publishers, who will have a first crack at defining user interaction, design and typographic standards that will establish the habits and expectations in readers for decades to come.

We’re already seeing the work of art directors and interaction designers merge by necessity. When content can move and break linearity, classic art direction for static content doesn’t hold up. It’s no longer about where to place an image, it’s about how and with what level of interaction.

iPad Magazine Art Direction from Brad Colbow on Vimeo.

AJ Bombers, a Milwaukee burger joint, recently harnessed the power of Foursquare to assemble a flash mob of 161 hungry patrons, resulting in a 110% increase over the typical Sunday sales. How’s that for social media ROI?

Owner Joe Sorge was asked to help raise money so the Milwaukee Social Media Community could host an event at the popular South By Southwest (SXSW) Interactive Festival in Austin, TX. Joe says the idea came when he realized how many of his restaurant’s patrons were getting into Foursquare, the location-based app/game that allows users to earn points and special badges for “checking in” at various locations.

One of the harder Foursquare badges to obtain is the Swarm Badge, which requires over 50 other users to be checked in at the same location at the same time. So Joe used Twitter and Facebook to encourage people to come out to his restaurant and check-in via Foursquare in order to obtain the Swarm Badge and help raise money for the Milwaukee Social Media Community at the same time. The idea took off and was quickly disseminated through the social media networks of the restaurant’s fans.

Watch the video (below) from the event, or check out Joe’s Flickr photoset.

Want to know more? Check out this Q & A with Joe Sorge where he talks about how he pulled it off.