VPD: Virtual Police Department

The Vancouver Police Department is poised to become the first real-life police force living in the virtual world. They plan to hold a Second Life recruiting session as a way to lure more tech-savvy recruits.
The VPD has been prepping to become the first real police force to join the more than 6.7 million inhabitants who live, work, play and learn inside their computers — an initiative aimed at finding real-life people with computer know-how to join the force.
Source: Chantal Eustace, Vancouver Sun, May 29, 2007

Ambulance crews gain crucial new hand held computer link to emergency medical data

Ambulance crews are to gain a crucial new tool to help them get speedy access to information on everything from advice on resuscitation drugs doses, to data on toxic chemicals and poisons thanks to a new Ambulance Crew Electronic Pocket Guide for Personal Digital Assistants, devised by the University of Warwick.
[The University] devised a new Ambulance Crew Pocket Guide for PDAs, in conjunction with colleges from the School of Engineering at Warwick, that not only contains more information than the pocket guide version of the guidelines but also allows much easier search and retrieval of the information using keyword searching, contents buttons, bookmarking favourites etc.
Source: University of Warwick, June 26, 2007

On the Digital Catwalk at H&M

The “fast fashion” retailer is teaming up with Electronic Arts to weave its threads into the latest Sims video game. [...] This coming winter, video game publisher Electronic Arts and clothing retailer H&M plan to transform the bits and bytes of the digital world into a physical product. While they’re going the more traditional route, featuring H&M fashions in recently released Sims software, the companies are also holding an online contest to allow a Sims 2 player to design clothes that might be produced and sold in the real world.
Source: Christopher Megerian, BusinessWeek Online, June 29, 2007

When on YouTube, check out EUTube

The European Commission, the executive body of the European Union, has launched its very own channel on YouTube to make its audiovisual content more widely available to the public. The channel, EUtube, contains video content ranging from documentaries covering the EU’s activities and history to interviews with European commissioners.
Source: Tim Ferguson, Silicon.com, July 2, 2007

Open standards for social networking

Looking over the landscape of recent blog posts on open social networking, it’s clear that folks are interested in connecting together some of their disparate accounts on a wide range of social networks.
The dream is that distributed social networks will mesh with individuals–each who are on multiple social networks — and that the whole thing kind of slides up next to the blogosphere and extends the notion of a free, open, distributed Long Tail environment. Microcontent is part of it–but people are at the center.
Source: Marc Canter, for CNET News.com, July 5, 2007

Viral Marketing Effectiveness - the Digg Case Study

Those who follow regularly this blog know that I have a keen interest in viral marketing and in better understanding how to make it effective. The Information Dynamics Laboratory at HP Labs recently studied the subject of collective attention, central to the effectiveness of WOM at a point of time where people are bombarded with information. They analyzed the behavioral patters of one million Digg users, the digital media democracy, which allow users to submit news stories and “digg” them.
Source: The Marketing Excellence blog by Eric Kintz, HP, July 6, 2007