Remember the pre-Internet days when you actually had to walk into a brick and mortar store to buy something? Well, you might have a reason to reconnect with the habit. Meet Barcode Hero, a mobile app that makes traditional shopping social and practical.

Using your mobile device, Barcode Hero lets you scan product barcodes and receive detailed information about them. In this case, you’ll see outside price comparisons through a partnership with PriceGrabber.com. But Barcode Hero works for more than just deal hunting.

As you scan, the application records each product in a database, creating a shopper profile that automatically generates recommendations as you shop. If that isn’t enough, Barcode Hero also includes a foursquare-style game element, where users earn points by scanning barcodes. Dedicated scanners can earn achievements, like dukedoms and kingships. And, of course, you can connect with friends to brag about your score.

The Win-Win-Win

Groupon, a group discount shopping website, can rightly be described as a win-win service. Customers receive steep discounts on products and services while businesses receive invaluable amounts of public exposure and goodwill. CEO Craig Barnes of Causeon, a new shopping service built on the Groupon model, describes his service as a “win-win-win.”

Where does the third win come from? 20% of all revenue from Causeon’s business is donated to their charitable partners, including Komen For The Cure and Girls Inc. The model is both admirable and strategic; by putting an emphasis on philanthropy, Causeon attracts new shoppers who like to feel good about their purchases.

Other Initiatives Breaking New Ground

Zagat for iPhone Adds Foursquare Checkins and Foodspotting Photos

Best Buy Rolls Out Shopkick’s Geo-Coupon System To 257 Stores

Cross-Innovation

Now that social and mobile applications have become widely adopted, we’re beginning to see faster and more streamlined development of useful services, both through formal partnerships and competitive imitation. In addition to creating applications that take advantage of new technology, developers are thinking strategically about how existing tools can be applied more effectively to different aspects of our lives.

Digg.com has always been a steadfast niche network. While it was arguably one of the pioneers of social networking, it is largely overshadowed by bigger players like Facebook and Twitter. For those unfamiliar with the site, Digg is a community-focused website where users post links to funny, interesting or socially relevant content from anywhere on the Internet. Members of the community have the ability to either “Digg” or “Bury” each piece of content; posts with more Diggs get featured more prominently on the site, whereas buried stories fall off the radar. You might call it democratic.

There is a lot of mindless entertainment to be found, but Digg users also show an interest in public affairs. Browsing through this year’s most popular stories, you will find screenshots of awkward Facebook moments nestled next to an article about Obama’s healthcare bill passing through Congress. Recently, a so-called conspiracy was uncovered in the Digg community, bringing the website into the spotlight.

Enter the “Digg Patriots,” a small, covert group of Digg members whose objective was to bury left-leaning stories posted on Digg to shield them from view. A group email containing a list of targeted posts was revealed to include a variety of perceivably liberal stories, including an article titled: “How Global Warming and Capitalism are Deeply Intertwined.”

While not widely damaging outside the website, the news has been a cause for concern among Diggers. Digg is in the midst of redesigning its interface (much to my excitement), and members of the community are now pointing to a need for more controls against gaming the system. New features might also help Digg regain some lost ground in the social media sphere. 

Twitter and Torrents

Peer-to-peer (P2P) networking, a term used to describe a method of direct file sharing between individuals, often carries a negative connotation. This is because file sharing clients such as BitTorrent are often used for the illegal sharing of pirated files, such as movies and music. With the quick and simple download of a .torrent file, individuals can connect to peers across the world and be well on their way to hearing the latest Coldplay album.

The widespread adoption of Twitter may exacerbate this problem. Traditionally, if an individual wanted to download a copyrighted piece of content, he had to actively search it out. With Twitter pushing endless amount of information unto users, illegal file sharing becomes more passive.  There are plenty of handles on Twitter that regularly post links to .torrent files (both legal and illegal). Users following these handles will be exposed to files they would not have seen otherwise, and may be tempted to download them, much in the way that many users are compelled to read endless streams of Tweets.  This could potentially fuel the already growing problem of content piracy.

Caution is Key

The brief history of social media so far has shown a tendency toward altruism and collective goodwill. But when social networks become big enough, its users and moderators need to be more wary of potential threats, both internally and externally. Because social media is still a young industry, these threats are likely to be unfamiliar and unforeseeable.

Extra Bits

MTV has officially chosen its first Twitter Jockey. Follow her @MTVTJ

Social news site TBD is rethinking how to do journalism

Google adds to its acquisition spree with the purchase of social application site Slide.

Remember a few weeks ago when Facebook announced 500 million users? Well this week, Twitter is making waves with a milestone of its own – 20 billion tweets. And even in the face of traffic and capacity issues, Twitter still has its foot on the gas. Consider the dedicated data center Twitter is building in Salt Lake City, and wave goodbye to the Fail Whale.

Putting the server farm aside, Twitter has revealed some new ideas to improve the service. Using the basic concept of @earlybird, an admin-managed handle popular among bargain hunters, Twitter wants to tweet deals relevant to real-time conversations. In other words, when users are tweeting about a particular product, Twitter will swoop in (in tandem with its advertising partners) with deals on that product, or the closest match. Maybe a little Orwellian, but who can resist a deal?

Twitter has also designed a personalized “suggestions for you” widget, which uses people you follow and those who follow you as factors for recommendations. This Facebook-like move aims to keep rookie users more engaged.

SCVNGR Hunt

SCVNGR is not yet a household name, but spend enough time poring over social media news (which, of course, I do), and you might catch onto a budding trend. The location-based check-in app is gaining popularity using one of the oldest and simplest game formulae – the scavenger hunt. There is an undeniable appeal to the simplicity of it all: go places, do challenges, earn points.

The game has already been used by the cities of Philadelphia and Boston to add a little excitement to otherwise ordinary bouts of sightseeing. Interestingly enough, NFL teams have also jumped on board, using SCVNGR as a way to keep fans engaged during the offseason. The New England Patriots paved the way with their “Help Vince” campaign, which encouraged fans to perform challenges in as many as 200 New England locales. The Minnesota Vikings recently followed suit with a pre-season expedition through Mankato, home of the Vikings training camp.

Being somewhat of a gamer myself, I’m really excited about the ways new services are fusing gaming elements with social medial, and I’ll be keeping an eye out for new developments.

Extra Bits

• Full-time video blogger Dan Brown is crowdsourcing his life to a quarter million YouTube followers.
• Speaking of crowdsourcing…remember Snuggie? The pseudo-blanket maker wants you to create its next viral commercial.
• Bing Maps has a cool new add-on that calculates cab fares for major metropolitan areas.

“What’s the most resilient parasite? An Idea.” — Cobb, Inception

Whether or not you liked the film quoted above, Leonardo raises an interesting point. In fact, the adoption of an idea is perhaps the goal of every marketing strategy out there. And if you are lucky/smart enough to create a campaign that people somehow connect to so much so that they are willing to spread it to others – virally — well, then that little idea can become pretty potent (and be worth a pretty penny).

Facezon (or Amabook?)

Amazon is one such company that’s trying to up it’s “shareable” aspect. Recently, it announced a new partnership with Facebook aimed at making its online shopping experience more social. Consumers who link the two sites together will be able to see recommendations from their Facebook friends on what to buy, have their Facebook profile picture show up on the Amazon site, and view upcoming birthdays and gift recommendations. Shopping activity on Amazon, however, will not be shared via Facebook.

Mashable has already called it “a perfect storm of recommendations” in its test drive of the new feature, while SocialBeat has noted how this partnership is a bigger deal that you might think.

Facebook Questions

In more Facebook news, the social networking site is gradually rolling out a new feature, called Facebook Questions. Like with Yahoo! Answers, users will be able to pose questions to their online network by hitting the “Ask Question” button on the homepage. Questions will also pop up on friends’ profiles.

Additionally, users will be able to ask photo questions (i.e. “Does anyone know what bar this is?”), take a poll, tag a question, browse questions based on topic, follow questions (in order to receive updates and new answers), and change the Facebook homepage. Yes, you read that last one right. Having Facebook Questions will let users add in a new bar at the top through which they can update their status, ask a question, add photos, or post a link.

LucyPhone

What’s one thing that will always kill a conversation? Being put on hold. And as someone who recently had to voice a complaint to ConEdison, I can definitely attest to the total agony of having the precious minutes of your day (your hard-earned leisure time!) wither away as you sit on the line with a recorded message that replays itself for half an hour.

That’s where the LucyPhone comes in.

Aside from just having an awesome name, the LucyPhone is built to be your savior from dreadful on-hold music. The service is free, web-based, and also available as an iPhone application. Essentially, you enter in the number that you wish to reach, give LucyPhone the number at which you’d like to be reached, and hit “**” when you inevitably get put on hold. The LucyPhone will then take over monitoring the call and call your phone back once an actual human becomes available to talk.

Brilliant. How was this not invented sooner?

Extra Bits

• Russia has blocked access to YouTube due to the site’s hosting of ”Russia for Russians,” a video they have judged to be extremist whose name comes from a racist slogan.
• CardStar has announced a new integration with Foursquare so that when a customer scans their club or loyalty card via CardStar at the checkout they will also be given the option to check in on Foursquare at that location. This integration will coincide with a few other updates CardStar is adding to its iPhone application, including having better card storage and scanning.
• The oldest Twitter user, Ivy Bean, passed away yesterday at 12:08 am in her care home in England. She was 104 years old and started tweeting on @IvyBean104 (…an oddly foretelling Twitter handle) when she was 102 years old.
• In case you didn’t know already, Isaiah Mustafa is marketing gold. Sales of Old Spice Body Wash have reportedly increased 107% in the past month and 55% in the past three months. “Since the ‘Smell Like A Man, Man’ campaign broke in February, Old Spice has month-over-month strengthened its market position,” P&G representative Michael Norton wrote in an e-mail to Brandweek.
• In honor of its fifth anniversary, Mashable did a look back on the last five years in mobile. Hard to believe that five years ago, all I wanted was a shiny, new Razr. Now, a flip phone even feels archaic. I can only imagine what we’ll be using in 2015. The geek in me is hoping it’ll be something kind of like this though:

Ford has made some significant design changes to its signature Explorer, so the brand decided to do something equally fresh to unveil the 2011 model. Ford simulated a daylong auto show experience on the Explorer’s own Facebook page, creating a “Reveal” tab to house a number of videos and chats about the new vehicle.

Make no mistake – this isn’t your ordinary campaign. The unveiling doesn’t have a real-world counterpart, so the entire event is happening digitally and socially. There’s even a sweepstakes component, where one lucky fan of the page will win a 2011 Explorer.

The Explorer won’t hit the road for a few months, so there is some concern the campaign is a little premature. Regardless, Ford deserves credit for taking a big risk and diving head first into the social media game.

Ready, Set, Groupon!

One of the biggest challenges facing independent filmmakers is how to convince theaters to screen their films. Without any guarantee of ticket sales, which few indie films offer, theaters are more inclined to dedicate screens to more popular flicks.

Enter the Groupon strategy. The creators of a new film, Ready, Set, Bag! use Groupon’s group discount model to solve multiple problems at once. By featuring a movie screening as one of Groupon’s daily deals, filmmakers can promote a film while simultaneously guaranteeing a minimum attendance number to theaters.

Ready, Set Bag! is a documentary about a national grocery bagging competition. And yes, it is exactly what you think it is. Instead of explaining, I’ll leave you with the trailer below.

India’s Fabled Tablet

Last week, India’s Human Resource Development Minister Kapil Sibal revealed a prototype for a $35 tablet, now hailed as the world’s cheapest computer. The tablet will run on Linux, and appears to have video and wireless capabilities. Sibal announced the tablet as an “answer to MIT’s $100 computer,” which is in the works in collaboration with the One Laptop per Child Program.

In theory, the computer could be used for educational purposes in countries without access to comparable technology. Although $35 is still too expensive for some institutions, government subsidies could bring the price within an affordable range.

Behind the patina of optimism, India’s announcement has been met with reasonable scrutiny. Wired and Computerworld cite concerns about questionable math, media hype and political opportunism.

Personal Plug

This weekend, I took a trip to the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum to see the Why Design Now? and Doodle for Google exhibits. You can read about them here, so I won’t go into detail, but I’ll give you the key takeaway: the future is now.

My favorite idea? A solar lawn umbrella that provides shade during the day and soft lighting at night. If you have the time, I highly recommend a visit. It also might be your only chance to see Twitter in a museum.

Extra Bits

• Mashable’s Pete Cashmore provides commentary on Facebook’s amusing but unlikely “Dislike” button
• VH1 is jumping on the foursquare bandwagon (get it?), featuring the service in its ads to drive adoption
• Mobile location-based game SCVNGR is being used to promote the upcoming book-inspired film Eat, Pray, Love
• Google Maps on Android phones just got even cooler. Check it out here

“Customer satisfaction is a combination of what you get and what you expect [from a website],” Larry Freed, ForeSee Results’ chief executive, said in an interview by TechCrunch. “The business model of starting out free and ad-free, then turning your site into something else over time works somewhere in tech, but from the average consumer standpoint it doesn’t work.”

So how are we going to get people to keep using these sites as frequently as they did pre-annoyance?

By making it look pretty and giving away free stuff, of course:

Flipboard

Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Foursquare — if you’re into social media (which I hope you are if you’re reading this blog), you more likely than not have more than one social media account. And after so many, it can get complicated keeping up with all those newsfeeds/updates.

That’s where Flipboard comes in.

Flipboard, an iPad application, is “the first social-media magazine.” It aims to put all of your friends’ information into one, easy reading experience by pulling information, links, and multimedia from your friends’ updates and compiling it into, well, a “flippable” magazine.

Pulse of the Nation

 

Researchers at Northeastern and Harvard universities have collaborated to gage the mood of the nation during a typical day, as collected and inferred through tweets. To accomplish this ambitious task, the scholars created a word list to help them analyze over 300 million tweets sent out over three years. The result is an in-depth infographic and a video (above) showing the progression of moods throughout the day.

Along with being visually captivating, an interesting pattern these academics noticed was that that West Coast tweets are generally happier than East Coast tweets, even when accounting for the time difference, and that West Coasters’ moods didn’t drop as low as East Coasters’ by a significant amount.

Having to live amongst crabby people — guess that’s just one more thing to complain about now.

Free Stuff

Allure magazine has announced that for its annual Free Stuff issue this August, it will partner with Microsoft Tag (Microsoft’s version of a QR code) to give away $725,000 worth of beauty products to the first person who enters each contest. Starting on Aug. 2, readers who type in gettag.mobi into their smartphone’s browser will be able to download the Microsoft Tag Reader, scan the Tag on the magazine or on Allure‘s Free Stuff page to register, and scan the Tag to enter. An option to receive text alerts 15 minutes before each event occurs will also be available.

Extra Bits

• Google has updated Google Images to include a dense tiled layout, continuous scrolling between pages, larger thumbnail previews, a hover pane for an even bigger preview, a new landing page, and optimized keyboard navigation.
• The company has also signed a deal to power some of its data centers with wind energy for the next 20 years.
• Foursquare now has over 100 million check-ins and the company has also announced a new partnership with New York Magazine. Those who check into locations listed on the magazine will earn points and gain access to deals and discounts at that local business.
• Android phones now have an Auto-Tune application, MicDroid. Because everything is more entertaining when done like T-Pain.

The Fun in Fundraising

BlueSwarm is a web-based company that has been around for a while, but in light of its growing reputation, the social media fundraiser has started to register on a few more radars. What, you might ask, is a social media fundraiser?

The core idea behind Blue Swarm is easily explained by its Facebook application, which is the root of the company’s success. Using the app, Facebookers can create their own fundraising campaigns and send out donation requests to all of their friends. Those friends, in turn, can forward the campaign to their friends. The progress of the campaign is mapped, so every forwarder can see what happens to her requests, and how much money is donated at each layer. In essence, fundraising becomes more fun.

BlueSwarm is in the process of relocating to Silicon Valley, where it hopes to recruit some of social media’s finest. And small-time fundraisers aren’t the only people getting on board. Just look at Meg Whitman, a California gubernatorial candidate who has collected $20 million for her political campaign through BlueSwarm. Clearly they’re onto something.

A Smarter Twitter

Twitter wants to read your mind. Okay…that may be an exaggeration, but Twitter does want to gage your intent to purchase. Compass Labs, a startup specializing in targeted social network advertising, has cooked up some algorithms to analyze tweets and decide whether or not the author wants to buy something. For example, if I were to tweet “Dog ate my Wii Remote; need a new one,” Twitter might show me an ad from a retailer selling game equipment.

Luckily, these ads don’t show up directly in the Twitter stream, but in the dedicated ad space on the webpage, so I doubt users will have any gripes. There shouldn’t be privacy concerns, either, since anyone who’s tweeting is making the information public anyway. Sounds good to me!

My Two Cents: The Social Network

If you’re reading this blog, chances are good that you’ve heard of the in-production film The Social Network, or, less officially, “That Facebook Movie.” If you haven’t, check out the first live action trailer, which was released last week.

While it might seem ridiculous to turn a website into a two hour drama, Facebook is emblematic of the entire social media phenomenon, which has revolutionized how millions of people communicate with one another across the globe. Successful movies have been made of much leaner stuff. But maybe I’m biased because I happen to think Jesse Eisenberg (as Mark Zuckerberg) is the man. In any case, it’s something to look forward to.

Extra Bits

• Facebook is on course to hit 500 million users this week, marking a huge milestone for the social media giant.
• Zynga’s most recent release in online gaming, Frontierville (cousin of Farmville) hit 20 million monthly users in only five weeks. Ten million users have already clobbered a snake!
• Rumor has it that foursquare has been talking to big Internet players like Google and Yahoo. Information is scarce, but I’d bet there are some cool services coming your way.

You know what else is coming your way? Thursday’s blog post, compliments of Lucie Z.

Here’s a look at what companies, brands, and advertisers have been doing lately to use that organically-created discussion in their favor.

The Old Spice Man

Ladies, he’s done it again. Just when you thought the “Old Spice Man” (real name: Isaiah Mustafa) couldn’t get more irresistible, he’s followed up his “Questions” commercial with answers — personalized videos in response to fan input he’s received via Twitter (example video above). Intelligent, witty, good-looking, and attentive? He really is the perfect man.

Directed at everyone from celebrities to stay-at-home mothers to the Huffington Post, all of his almost-instantaneous replies are available for viewing on his YouTube channel, along with his famously hilarious commercials. My personal favorite? A marriage proposal he did for one fan, Johannes S. Beals (below).

(She said yes!)

And then (yes, there’s more), the Old Spice Man one-upped himself when he made a voicemail message for Pandarr on Reddit. This led to @knitmeapony asking for a voicemail message for ladies (when you give a mouse a cookie…), and within just a few hours an Old Spice voicemail generator popped up from Reddit.

Brilliant.

SocialAds

Twitter will begin hosting its own video advertising network, called SocialAds, on its video hosting site TwitVid. Meant to be an alternative to traditional pre-roll and overlay online video ads, SocialAds aims to help advertisers enter the social media realm and increase a brand or company’s number of Twitter followers and online mentions. Pricing for SocialAds will be based on a price-per-action model, where advertisers only pay once a desired action (such as retweeting an ad displayed in a video on TwitVid) has been taken.

So far, a private alpha test has shown that brands who participated in SocialAds got over 400 new followers in less than an hour. Additionally, SocialAds will have the ability to offer quantifiable data on the number of added Twitter followers and retweets an ad creates, an important advantage in a field where measuring ad effectiveness can get tricky.

Hauls

Hauls (short, look-what-I-got videos made by teens) are the latest trend in YouTube, with over 159,000 posted, and stores are doing their best to leverage their buzz-creating ability. J.C. Penney is the latest to join the likes of American Eagle and Forever 21 in incorporating hauls into their back-to-school marketing campaign. Some retail stores have even offered to cover travel expenses or give free gift cards to haulers to encourage them to feature their goods. Haulers are obligated under Federal Trade Commission guidelines to acknowledge when this happens, but either way, these influential videos have been shown to shape not only teens’ tastes but also the tastes of parents of teenagers.

Uncensored

Innocean Worldwide Americas has launched a new campaign for Hyundai Motor America. Called “Uncensored,” the campaign allows people who saw the cars at mall tours around America to test out Hyundai’s new versions of the Sonata, the Santa Fe, Accent, and Elantra for a month. The commentary will be, as the name implies, uncensored, and it will air on both cable and network television channels, with outtakes available on YouTube. Hyundai will also have 125 people who did not previously own a Hyundai car test-drive a 2011 Sonata for a month and document their experiences on Hyundai’s Facebook page. The campaign will last throughout the entire summer, meaning that Hyundai is putting a lot of faith in user-generated content.

Extra Bits

• Help spread awareness about the dangers of using fossil fuels by creating your own oil spill (virtually, of course). Enter in a URL and watch as that website gradually becomes covered in oil, until the entire screen goes black. Donate, sign a petition, volunteer, or share the site with friends afterwards.
• Walt Disney Studios became the first sponsor to have an exclusive offer at @EarlyBird, Twitter’s new deal-hunting tool. Followers of either @EarlyBird or @DisneyPictures have the chance to receive a special 2-for-1 deal on tickets to The Sorcerer’s Apprentice.
• Starbucks became the first brand to have its Facebook page reach over 10 million fans.
• Calvin Klein Jeans, known for their provocative billboard advertisements, has replaced three of these ads (two in downtown New York City and one in Los Angeles) with a QR code (below). Passer-bys who take a photo of the billboard with their smartphone will pull up a 40-second commercial featuring models Lara Stone, “A.J.,” Sid Ellisdon, Grayson Vaughan and Eric Anderson. Users can then share the code with their friends via Facebook or Twitter.

Love the use of social media to enhance real-life? Think it’s all a big ploy to turn communication tools into floods of advertising and brand talk? I would love to hear your thoughts.

The British government seems fully committed to engaging the public through mobile and social media. “The Spending Challenge” is a social media effort launching from the Democracy UK Facebook page, and encourages the British public to converse about possible ways to eliminate the country’s debt.

The government is hoping that adopting a bottom-up approach will get British citizens more interested and engaged in helping to find a solution to the looming problem. And if you like the idea of Britain joining forces with Facebook, you’ll love the video below of Prime Minister David Cameron on a video call with Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg.

 MTV Networks: Game On

Now more than ever, the line between gaming and socializing is getting blurry. Social Zynga game Farmville has taken the world by storm, and even more traditional platforms like Playstation and Xbox offer sharable content like player achievements that are viewable to online friends.

MTV Networks wants a slice, too. In a recent press release, the company announced that it has acquired Social Express, a social gaming development company. MTV has plans to develop games featuring popular characters from MTV, Nickelodeon and affiliated stations. The branded content will probably pull in a fair number of players, but the success of social content depends on how many users adopt it. MTV already has a good deal of experience in online gaming, so the acquisition may yield some interesting results.

Gowalla and LIVESTRONG

Those in support of the Lance Armstrong Foundation can show their support through a new partnership between Gowalla and LIVESTRONG. Twitter users can direct inspirational tweets to @chalkbot, a roaming robot that rolls around the Tour de France circuit chalking tweets onto the pavement. Chalkbot will be updating users about its location by checking in via Gowalla.

Nike is joining in as well, encouraging Gowalla users to check-in at Nike retail locations. Those who do will receive a custom Gowalla Stamp and a limited edition LIVESTRONG pin.

Extra Bits:

• E-marketing company MailChimp is preparing an application that will allow Facebook’s “Like” button to be embedded directly into email.
• An Internet study from Pew Research has concluded that Generation Y will continue to use social media for the rest of their lives.

My Two Cents: Google Me

If you’ve been keeping an eye on Google, or read my Extra Bits a while back, you’ve probably heard about Google Me, Google’s nearly-confirmed social media platform. It’s expected by some (but certainly not all) to be a serious Facebook competitor.

Consider this slideshow from Google’s Paul Adams. Adams illustrates a common problem that is familiar to many Facebook users: how do you share certain information with small social groups without announcing it to your entire network? Google has some ideas, and I’m really interested to see how Me turns out. I’ll keep you posted as the story unravels!

Life in a Day

YouTube has launched “Life in a Day,” a project that attempts to document one day as seen through the eyes and cameras of people around the world. To be included, individuals must record a video of July 24, 2010 (preferably in HD) and upload their footage onto the official Life in a Day YouTube channel before July 31. There are no limits, no guidelines, and unfortunately no monetary rewards for those selected. However, those included in the final cut of the film will be credited as a co-director and 20 contributors will also be chosen to attend the film’s premiere at the 2011 Sundance Festival. Additionally, Ridley Scott will serve as the executive producer and Kevin Macdonald will edit this ambitious project.

Narcissus

Liubo Borissov, artist and assitant professor at Pratt Institute’s Department of Digital Arts, has created an art exhibit called the Narcissus Series, which captures thousands of human reactions that were seen via Chatroulette. For the project, Borissov used a software that diverted the incoming video feed, reflected it, and fed it back so that the person was confronted with their own, upside-down image (a reference to how the mythical character Narcissus saw his reflection in the water). He then sought to capture these “moments of self-recognition.” The result is a 10-minute video, “Narcissus Lament” (above), and three prints of 576 pictures each that are titled ”Regret,” “Redemption,” and “Remorse.” One can only wonder how many NSFW images Borissov had to witness during this process.

Mad Men Starring You

JibJab has created Mad Men Starring You, which lets users upload or import photos from Facebook, crop out the faces, and stick them onto the bodies of Mad Men characters Don Draper, Betty Draper, Roger Sterling and Joan Holloway (just like with JibJab’s Stars Wars tool). Once finished, the Mad Men video recaps what’s happened thus far on the popular TV show, which will enter its fourth season in 2 weeks and 3 days (if you’re counting).

Extra Bits

• Borders launched its e-bookstore yesterday, along with reading apps for both Blackberry and Android phones. Those who download these apps either tomorrow or Saturday will also receive five recent bestsellers for free.
• Chase Bank has added a new Quick Deposit feature to its iPhone application that lets individuals deposit checks with their iPhone by simply selecting an account, entering in the amount of the check, and taking a photo of the front and back of the check. The app also now allows for Person-to-Person QuickPay. Here’s hoping that a version for Blackberry phones is in the works (or that Chase magically decides to stay open past 6 pm on weekdays).
• Ford Motor Company is updating its SYNC technology to allow for safer cell phone use while driving. 2011 Ford cars with MyFord Touch will support a new protocol (Message Access Profile, or “MAP” for short) that allows for SYNC to read aloud incoming text messages over Bluetooth. Additionally, a “Do Not Disturb” button will let drivers block incoming calls and texts, but still make outgoing calls. I wonder as to how useful this will be considering there’s no guarantee that people won’t text back their responses (and a text message read aloud is pretty much the same as a phone call…), but still I applaud Ford’s efforts at encouraging individuals to stay focused while driving.
• Israeli soldiers dance to Ke$ha’s “Tik Tok” in the streets of Hebron and get over 2.2 million views on YouTube.

Hope these news clips serve as a bit of inspiration. Now go to something interesting this weekend — and who knows, maybe you’ll be the one getting a mention on this blog next week.