Top digital stories this week, incl. Angry Birds, tasty tweets & BBC Sport

* Featured, Brass digital roundup — By Brass Team on February 3, 2012 11:54 am

Round off your week with our pick of this week’s most interesting digital stories, including Angry Birds, BBC Sport site revamp, Nano Quadrators and tasty tweets! We’d love to hear your thoughts too, so get involved with the comments box at the bottom and check back each Friday for more top digital stories.

Mellow birds

George Hurrell, Digital Designer

We’ve seen lots of news stories surrounding piracy and copyright infringement recently, and lots of people getting angry because they didn’t make quite as many millions of pounds as they did last year. Quite the opposite for the CEO of the company behind Angry Birds. I think we all know the Angry Birds so there’s no need to introduce them.

Mikael Hed, the Chief Executive of Rovio said at a conference in Cannes this week “Piracy may not be a bad thing: it can get us more business at the end of the day.” Who’d have thought a games company would be taking this line. He talked about how at least part of Angry Birds’ success has been down to learning from the Music industry’s mistakes when it came to dealing with piracy.

Its quite a refreshing outlook but one that may be easier to take when you have a huge commercial hit on your hands. However I agree with him to some extent. People copy games and many people will then go buy a game off the back of this, the same with music and films. I’m sure we’ve all done it at some point. The only difference I can see with ‘apps’ and games for smartphones is that they only cost 69p so if you do get a dud, you’ve not really missed out on that much.

The ‘creative industries’ are still making lots of money but in some cases and in some years just maybe not quite as much. The film industry should be happy though, and I’m sure we’ve all been waiting for ‘Angry Birds – Pigs of war’ the motion picture to arrive…….no?

#GoodEatsGoodTweets

Jenny Are, Social Media Week Intern

Twitter and pop-up restaurants like #MeatEasy (brilliant burgers and all-American comfort food) are helping London become a hub of food and food chatter. Who hasn’t tweeted about food or shared a picture of their plate via twitpic with the world? I know I have. Twitter is allowing Londoners to engage with the people that make their food, as well as allowing customers to criticise or compliment food and service in an instant, to a potential audience of thousands. And there are plenty of Twitter accounts to get your mouth watering, including @welovefoodtweet and @2girls1cake who focus on food and restaurants.

Brands are taking note; @Boxpark are running a Twitter competition every day this week using the hashtag #freelunch to offer one follower a free lunch (funnily enough!). All followers have to do is retweet a message from Boxpark in order to be in with a chance of winning their free grub. Simple yet so effective.

Benito’s Hat’s social media campaign ran last autumn and saw the Mexican restaurant brand decorate a van with Day of the Dead skulls and flowers and play Mexican music as it drove around central London. The Twitter competition was Central London-based and every hour the two offices that tweeted @Benitoschat and used the hashtag #dayofthedead the most, received a free burrito lunch delivery for their office. Hungry Londoners could also get 50% off their lunches if they arrived at Benito’s Hat in Day of the dead fancy dress and took a picture of themselves and the Day of the Dead van.

Some great examples of how foodie companies can tap into consumers’ appetites for discounts via social media world, and leave us hungry for more!

BBC Sport site revamped

Simon Marshall, Digital Account Director

The BBC released an update to the BBC Sport site this week and very nice it is too. The revamp comes a few months ahead of the Olympics and a post on the editors’ blog indicates that this was a factor in the timing of the update. Of course the internet has come a long way since the last site update in 2003 so it was probably overdue, but a wider screen layout and some neat expandable menus and panels make for a clean user experience.

There are also some neat looking typography tricks with headlines cutting into images to make articles prettier and quote panels sitting nicely next to copy. It wouldn’t surprise me to see a few of these tweaks finding their way into the main news site in the future too.

Google’s Hotel Finder

Jamie McGrath, Senior Search Manager

Google is continuing to make improvements to its experimental tool Hotel Finder, which allows you to enter the location you want to visit and filter results by travel time. Currently the only options for travel time are by public transport or walking, but I would expect an imminent addition of travel time by car.

It will be interesting to see what types of advertising will ultimately become available for this platform. Currently all the data is integrated from Google Places and Google Maps,  both of which are free to use. This is a great example of how Google has collected the two data sources to create a useful platform that will ultimately host ads.

A Swarm of Nano Quadrotors

Andrew Brown, Creative Director

The University of Pennsylvania’s GRASP Lab released a video this week of Nano Quadrators flying in formation.  It’s racked up over a million views in a couple of days on YouTube.  “What’s so special about that?” I hear you cry!  Watch the video: http://youtu.be/YQIMGV5vtd4

Kind of sinister even at this size.  Imagine them equipped with machine gun turrets.  Gulp.