Here’s a video showing our integration of Facebook Places into the official Eristoff app guide to Volvo Snowbombing. Check out how to check in, so to speak.

Building on Alchemy Content’s content-driven iPhone app from Snowbombing in 2010, this year we’re breaking new ground by being the first festival to unlock the potential of the ‘checkin’ both as a way of locating friends quickly (always one of the most annoying festival problems) and also of entering realtime competitions for prizes and discounts.

Download V2.0 of the Eristoff App (a new update is due this week too).

Volvo Snowbombing takes place April 4-9 in Mayrhofen Austria with an almighty live/DJ line-up. Here’s the deal.

We love the way a 250-year-old institution like The RSA is able to embrace a medium like YouTube so well. The switched on RSA-ers appreciate the cultural benefits of digital media, and have invested in it thoughtfully and originally. This makes a nice change from the more standard institutional practice of rubbishing/fearing/ignoring such platforms, before belatedly jumping on board in a half arsed panic.

The RSA Animate series on YouTube enlists the analogue-meets-digital artwork of Cognitive Media to great effect. Their maker pen scribblings add an engaging visual element to the free on-demand lectures. I’d go as far as to say that the animations focus the mind better on the topic than sitting in the lecture itself. It’s certainly more fun than watching the live stream, welcome as this also is.

Above is their video on the topic of 21st Century Enlightenment, but there are plenty of others to choose from. Not just a great example of innovative use of YouTube but fantastic subject matter too.

If I wasn’t deep in the throes of parenthood I’d regularly go to some of their amazing free lectures. As it is, I just need to find the time to play more of these beautiful videos online.

Proving in a big way that User Generated Content (UGC) videos need not all be tarnished by the ‘sub-You’ve Been Framed clips of funny family cats’ brush, this student-made ‘lipdub’ video to the Black Eye Peas ‘I Gotta Feeling’ is nothing short of fantastic. 172 students from the University of Quebec in Montreal shot it in a single take and it sums up perfectly what can be done now digital technology is so advanced, easy to use and affordable that the focus of film-makers can be on the creative concept rather than how to afford/work the kit.

I actually meant to post this a couple of weeks ago after spotting a tweet from none other than the original track’s producer @DavidGuettaLife and it has since gone seriously viral with over 2m YouTube views.

The track is a great slice of optimistic pop anyway, and combined with the enthusiastic performances from the students (most of whom had only just started college and hardly knew each other) it produces a video that is joyous and life affirming from start to finish. Wrapped up in it all is very positive message about what can be achieved with today’s media and its platforms.

The app is up for ‘Best Handset Application’, facing some healthy competition from the other nominees in the category including the Financial Times, Mobile Money Services, Airborne Mobile Inc and UMU Limited.

Feedback on the app has been overwhelmingly positive and the live feeds of news, special offers and over 50 free guestlist places a week have really captured the users imaginations.
The nomination is a great result for one of our key projects in this, our first year of operation.

Check out the promo video and download the app if you’ve got an iPhone. There’s still plenty of time to fly over for the Closing parties in September!

Pioneer’s excellent video blog DJsounds has been going for a few years now and is a great example of how to use AV content to promote a brand.

It’s obviously particularly apropriate for Pioneer, who are busy bluring the lines between audio and video in the DJ booth, which explains their early adoption and enthusiastic use of video as the prefered method to speak to people online.

The brand maintains a major presence in Ibiza, and were sponsors of last month’s International Music Summit, where they thrust a mic in my face to contribute to this summary of the 3-day event.

Chris is increasingly using this sort of digital content to promote his artists since it’s quick and easy to produce, yet the exclusive access is really interesting to fans and industry heads alike.

The content is being picked up for use by BBC 6 Music themselves, highlighting the value of creating and posting cool little promotional videos regularly and just seeing where they end up.
See the band perform ‘Watchmen’ in Part 1, and the single ‘Lover Gone’ in Part 2.

A birthday bash for a 1-year-old I attended at the weekend revealed a great example of how people are creating their own personalised communications systems using free web tools.

The parents had no fewer than 3 laptops set up, all running Skype video connections so relatives in various parts of the world could join in the singing of ‘happy birthday’ to the little boy.

The grandparents in Malaysia were propped up on the sofa while an uncle and aunt in Manchester were on the windowsill. The connections were clunky and eventually went down, but as an indicator of the changes such devices are already making to our daily lives I thought this was a great effort.

Knowing that the gathered toddlers will be looking back on the photos one day and laughing at the ‘prehistoric’ technology we employed is a reminder of the pace of change that continues to effect us all. My own 1-year-old had already spent the morning making faces at her 92-year-old great grandmother on Skype, who was of course the far more bemused of the two.

It looks like future generation’s ‘can’t work the video recorder’ moment is going to come earlier and earlier.