The only thing more satisfying than having a client telling you that you’re doing a good job is when they're telling the press that you’re doing a good job. For those of you with limited Norwegian here’s a translation of the article:

Meeting young people 'face to face' - Stavanger Aftenblad 16/8/07

The Culture Card is struggling with a bad reputation.
Very few people have got one, even fewer actually use it.
Tove Hervik at KK is determined to change this trend.

We need to engage with young people where they like to spend their time, and that is increasingly online, she says.

She has hired The Originals in London to help develop and implement a new digital strategy. A mobile internet site and a Facebook group have both recently been created for Kulturkortet.

'Smart stuff' confirms young Christina Cheng who advices Hervik.

Post by Matt August 16 Comments (0) TrackBacks (0) Permalink

The Norwegian Ministry of culture, in a drive to get young people more involved in cultural activities have introduced a scheme offering discounted entrance to art galleries, concerts, theatre, cinema and football matches.

At the heart of the service is a localised events calendar - we took this and turned it into a mobile internet site, so now Kulturkortet is not just a great money saving scheme, it’s also a useful resource for everyone.

To make the user experience richer we’ve added streaming audio and video clips, and a range of downloadable items. Later this summer we’ll be integrating the site with Facebook to better connect Kulturkortet with peoples social lives.

The site is currently being promoted by an SMS to 25,000 students.

If you’d like to see the real thing visit kulturkortet.mobi on your mobile.

Post by Matt July 10 Comments (0) Permalink

Once again we had the opportunity to work with our friends at Image Semantics - this time on their new mobile messaging proposition. We were involved in the project from a very early stage developing the brand name, visual identity, and the finished the user interface.

The project was built by Airsource in Brew so there were a lot of ways to add visual feedback into the design. This meant the finished product was a lot more dynamic, responsive and fun for users.

The design challenge was to develop a strong graphical idea that could be applied to each interface elements, so that even when the logo was not displayed on the small screen of a mobile phone it would still be unmistakeably Zippi.

Zippi is currently being rolled out to 70 million US customers – and if you’d like to have a look at the project for yourself click here.

Post by Matt July 9 Comments (1) Permalink

ShortCuts gets you the object you desire with the minimum amount of clicks.

Instead of using a clever algorithm to scan every piece of mobile content, ShortCuts simply delivers a relevant series of jump-off points, in the form of brands we all know and love. The rationale being that the best people to give you a list of books for sale is probably Amazon rather than Google.

We see ShortCuts being managed with a web interface, and as a way of generating revenue brand owners would be charged a cost per click.

Once again any venture capitalists or developers wishing to team up on this project should contact The Originals by clicking here.

Post by Matt February 9 Comments (2) Permalink

After attending a fascinating lecture on the current state of mobile search we took a stab at the problem ourselves.

Ideally your mobile would anticipate and answer your questions automatically. A favourites/query list from Delicious or Google Zeitgeist would go some way towards achieving this but for more in-depth queries some kind of application would be needed.

We decided that as entering text is a pain we would rule out using any search fields – one thing that everybody was in agreement about last night. From art college we also knew that seven is the maximum number of pieces of information that could easily be remembered at a glance.

SELECT 7 was born.

Using a series of menus containing no more than seven items, in just seven clicks you can find 823,543 separate pieces of content. These menus would become smarter using pattern recognition, free tagging, feeds from Google/Delicious or any combination of these.

Any venture capitalists looking to get into mobile search should contact The Originals by clicking here.

Post by Matt February 6 Comments (2) Permalink