On April 8, Apple revealed version 4.0 of the iPhone’s operating system, marking their latest major upgrade to the revolutionary device that redefined the smart-phone competitive landscape.

An iPhone app displaying an HTC banner ad using the traditional ad delivery model we see on all current smart phones.

The new upgrade brings a number of features (over 100) that iPhone and iPad users and application developers have been yearning for. New features include multitasking, having a choice between individual email inboxes or a unified inbox, and the ability to organize your home screen apps into folders. OS 4 will be available to users in the summer of 2010.

For users of VoIP apps like Skype, new multitasking will allow VoIP apps to work in the background while you use your iPhone for other things, and even when your phone is off! This means that your VoIP call will ring through like a regular telephone call.

For Skype users who make international calls using free calling over WIFI (like me!), this feature finally provides true phone cloning and removes the issue of not being able to make or receive on-demand calls to/from your Skype contacts because their application is not turned on.

To people in the online/mobile ad business, a more exciting and trend-setting feature is Apple’s new mobile advertising platform: iAd. Below is Apple’s description of the iAd platform:

iAd, Apple’s new mobile advertising platform, combines the emotion of TV ads with the interactivity of web ads. Today, when users click on mobile ads they are almost always taken out of their app to a web browser, which loads the advertiser’s webpage. Users must then navigate back to their app, and it is often difficult or impossible to return to exactly where they left. iAd solves this problem by displaying full-screen video and interactive ad content without ever leaving the app, and letting users return to their app anytime they choose. iPhone OS 4 lets developers easily embed iAd opportunities within their apps, and the ads are dynamically and wirelessly delivered to the device. Apple will sell and serve the ads, and developers will receive an industry-standard 60 percent of iAd revenue.

With iAd, Apple once again proves their dominance in the area of providing game-changing innovations to the market place. This new way of delivering ads within mobile applications is poised to improve click-through rates for advertisers, and will become the new standard that other mobile platforms (Blackberry, Android, Symbian, etc.) have to measure up against when delivering ad content through their applications. No longer will it be acceptable to kick the user out of the app they’re using whenever they click on an ad!

The iAd also provides Apple with a new revenue stream, marking the company’s entry into ad serving. Together with iTunes and the new iBooks store, iAd is yet another bold step in Apple’s strategy of vertical integration.

Additional information on the OS 4 can be found in Apple’s press release. In the video below, Steve Jobs demonstrates some of the features mentioned of the new operating system.

Every day at 3 p.m. there will be a So You Think You Can Dance competition. And at 5 p.m. is a Fastest Feet Competition, to see who can generate the most energy by moving their feet. On Friday and Saturday nights at 8 p.m. local b-girls and b-boys will spark one-on-one break-dance battles on the energy-generating floor. Throughout the Games, Club Energy will be measuring which country is able to generate the most power by dancing in the BC Power Smart Dance Challenge.

The Toyota TVC below features an animated showcase of the technology.

Your World Today reported on SDC’s invention in early 2008. The world’s first sustainable dance floor was installed at Club ‘WATT’ in Rotterdam – Holland. Through successful collaboration with the Technical University of Delft in the Netherlands, WATT sports the world’s first ‘Piezo-electricity’ dance floor. The dance floor harvests energy from the vibrations created by dancing clubbers and uses it to power the club’s own LED lighting.

The dance floor is not the only sustainable aspect of Club WATT. Dutch architect Henk Döll is the visionary behind the club’s design, and has creatively integrated the latest innovations in sustainability to reduce the use of energy and water and decrease waste production. He is a founding partner of project SDC (Sustainable Dance Club) along with ENVIU. The project aims to ‘green dance clubs worldwide’.

Old Spice (Procter & Gamble) is continuing to reposition their brand, aiming straight at the Axe (Unilever) target market. What’s clever is that it uses the ‘Old’ from its previous image to inspire its new image by implying that it is ‘more real’.

Unlike Axe commercials, which target men with fantasies of sexual conquest, this Old Spice commercial targets women… with fantasies of the man they wish they had.

The commercial was created by the Portland Office of Wieden & Kennedy. I say they hit a home run with this one!

[Spotted at ViralBlog.com]

The Toronto branch of Halifax-based Extreme Group and Toronto-based Lollipop have been tirelessly working on this unique branding and interactive campaign for a new Toronto business venture. The edgy campaign received final blessings and was about to launch when nature decided to rear its ugly head in Haiti.

So, instead of the massive launch this campaign was about to receive, a highly subdued roll-out took place. I’m being deliberately vague here because I don’t want to spoil your first interaction with this campaign. Go ahead and click on the image below to visit HaitianPure.com (Edit – March 1 2010: website has changed to PureBlackSunshine.com). Turn your volume up, set your browser to ‘Full Screen’, then follow the website prompts and you’ll know what I’m talking about.

While I can understand the potential risk of backlash, I can’t help but wonder if the campaign (and the client) would have benefited from the publicity that would have resulted from any potential controversy. In the end, I think the client and the agency correctly decided to err on the side of safety.

Despite the quiet launch, the campaign’s viral potential will make up for the lost attention. Extreme made sure to furnish the interactive with the necessary tools to squeeze as much social juice out of the site as possible. You can add it to your Facebook or MySpace profile. You can also Digg it and Tweet it (but for some reason, you can’t Stumble it).

Regardless of the outcome, this campaign is surely heading for some award nominations (at least a Davey Award!).

Utilizing YouTube tags and annotations, the company did not only succeed in engaging its website visitors in a very unique way, but it was also able to gain tremendous viral reach as the new site/video propelled it to being one of the top five viral videos on the internet for the week of June 12-19 (Viral Blog rankings).

Check out the video below, or go to BooneOakley.com to see it.

[via AdblogArbia]

The two main parties are:

1. Indian National Congress (INC, a.ka. ‘The Congress’) – Current ruling party.
2. Bharatiya Janata Party (“Indian People’s Party”, BJP)

Indian elections are monumental by nature. As one of the largest and most populated countries in the world, the numbers involved are staggering:

• Eligible Voters: 714 Million, a ‘slight’ increase of about 40 million voters since the previous elections in 2004
• Elections Budget: 176 Million Euros (approx. $280 Million CAD).
• Number of Seats: 552
• Number of competing candidates in 1st Phase: 1715 candidates (122 women).
• Voting Style: Electronic
• Number of voting machines: 1,368,430 voting machines in 828,804 polling stations across the country

With such a vast election covering vast territories, political ads in India have their own special flavour. How else would you convince the majority of 714 million voters to elect your party? The term ‘Political Song and Dance’ is taken literally here, with parties vying to capture the hearts and minds of India’s diverse population.

INC “Hand Of Congress”

In the ad above, the girl says to her uncle: “Look what I’ve done with my hands”, and afterwards he shows her what the hand of the Congress has achieved.  (Translation found on France 24 Observers web page).

In fact, the Congress party was successful in buying the exclusive rights to the “Jai Ho” song featured at the end credits of internationally acclaimed movie ‘Slumdog Millionaire’. The song, which translates into ‘Be Victorious’, won the Oscar for Best Song in the 2009 Academy Awards.The party has been using it in elections rallies across the country, along with various other Bollywood-inspired campaigns.

This did not go well with the BJP party, so they created their own anthem to remind people of the grateness of the BJP era, which ruled india from 1999 to 2004 .

BJP “Anthem For Change”

I expect nothing less from such a colourful and diverse country!

[More Indian Election ad videos available here from France 24]

Similar to the Atlantic ICE awards, the Dubai Lynx awards ceremony features a competition among the best ads and campaigns created by agencies in the MENA region. FP7-Doha is based in Qatar, a small GCC country where Newfoundland’s College of The North Atlantic has an operating campus.

You may remember FP7 Doha by their famed Medal of Honour ads that earned them 2 golden awards at the 2008 Cannes Lions International Advertising Festival.

With offices spanning the Middle East and North Africa, FP7 Doha committed the advertising industry’s 3 cardinal sins of…

1. Submitting fake ads to an awards show for products that don’t exist or for clients who didn’t hire them!
2. Submitting ads with plagiarized creative
3. Submitting ads that were not approved by clients and not used in client campaigns

Arabian Business magazine reported a statement yesterday from Fortune Promoseven announcing that the company is conducting an internal investigation:

“We are continuing our internal investigations and we are taking strong punitive action against anyone who was in contempt of our reputation and our standards,”

Below is one example of the withdrawn winners. This ad won a Golden Lynx in the Print category. The problem is that this model of washing machine isn’t even sold in the Middle East.

Samsung Washing Machine Ad