I have recently discovered a website called The Bold Italic, a great hyperlocal project for San Franciscans.  The website is developed by IDEO for Gannett, one of the largest media company in the United States.

As they describe it, their mission is  to help people become better locals, equipping their members with rare local intel, backstory and potential adventures. Their writers are the Bold Locals, who are San Franciscans selected  for their authenticity and their unique take on the city.

As a growing trend in cities, people are much more interested in discovering  unknown destinations, activities, stores, restaurants as  a result of being fed up with mass consumption. Like in old days, this is turning into supporting local merchants at the end.

The best thing I like about The Bold Italic is the way of telling  story about local experiences; the real reason about why to go there from Bold Locals and the user friendly design for people to keep pieces of these backstories — a particular merchant, landmark, or product — in a personalized tab.

One of the best campaigns I have seen lately belongs to Eastpak. Referring to their “Built to Resist” motto, various characters are seen mentioning the product’s strong, tough and contrary standing on their campaign videos. All the videos reminded me Fantastic Film Festival at Austin. During the fest we were seeing the most absurd films from all around the world. As usual, one more time I ended up my entry with a referral to Austin.

At the SXSW 2010 Awards, Gowalla beat Foursquare in the mobile category. The reason might be Gowalla is using GPS data to confirm a person is actually at the stated place, whereas Foursquare does not.

Another most talked website is  Cornify which had the People’s Choice Award. It generates a button you put on your blog and when the visitors click on it, it overlays pictures of unicorns over  the website.

My favourite nominee was vark.com. This is a social networking website, where you can ask questions and get your answers immediately. I tried and got my answer in just two minutes. It may sound like ask.com but this website is definitely more user friendly, well designed and fast. As usual, Google saw the spark and acquired this website, which is not surprising.

Read More http://www.wired.com/underwire/2010/03/sxsw-web-awards/#ixzz0lB8h1Oii

Youtube launched a partner program at SXSW 2010 called Musicians Wanted. Musicians who are accepted by Youtube will be able to make money when their Youtube videos are embedded on external websites, including music blogs. They’ll also get to add tour dates and “buy” links for music, merchandise and receive advertising generated from pre-roll, text and overlay advertising.

Musicians will have to upload real videos, static images will not be accepted. The reason behind this to maximize  attention to the videos, prevent people’s eyes wander and keep Youtube’s advertising rates up.

It seems Myspace will be affected by this cool win-win program in the near future.

Only two days left to the end of this year’s SXSW Festival. One more time, I’m so jealous of people who attending to the festival. SXSW Interactive is getting more and more popular over the years, even can be named as new Cannes for the digital advertising geeks. Some of the top speakers; Danah Boyd, Microsoft Research Social Media Researcher, Twitter CEO Evan Williams (By the way the tipping point for Twitter’s popularity was the 2007 SXSW festival. During the fest usage went from 20,000 tweets per day to 60,000), Spotify’s Daniel Ek, Erik Bethke from Zynga (Famously known with its Facebook game, Farmville), Lucy Bradshaw from Electronic Arts and the list goes on with other famous key speakers.

Efe Cakarel from The Auteurs ( fabulous online film website) is also a panelist at SXSW and will be talking about online film distribution. Last month with the support of the Auteurs, the first of its kind in the world, 5 selected movies were screened to the audiences in Istanbul and at the same time screened online to reach wider audiences across different geographies including some regions of Turkey, Yerevan (Armenia), Tblisi (Georgia), Ramallah (Palestine) and Tangiers (Morocco) during the If Istanbul Film Festival.

I want to end this post with a photo from Austin’s famous 6th Street, where is impossible to walk during the festival times.

The Hero is real viral campaign with its 26.1 million visits in 12 weeks. The campaign has launched by Draftfcb Sweden for their client Radiotjänst, Sweden’s public TV and Radio license fee collector.

The film totally fits to the aim of the campaign. Draftfcb says that, Radiotjänst wanted to show the young metropolitan target audience in Sweden that they are an important part of the Swedish public service system and get them to start paying the broadcast fee.   Knowing that this audience frequently uses the Internet and takes many things for granted in their “it’s all about me” world, the idea was to appeal to them by giving them an opportunity to star in their own film — as the hero of the world. At the end, the site had 66 million page view in 230 countries.

Here is my The Hero film.

It is a late news but the Fifth Annual Global Mobile Marketing Award winners were announced for 2009. Two Turkish campaign were also awarded. The list below includes some of the winners that I was able to find detailed info.

Mobile Innovation: Creativity

Pepsi Makes Your Day, Rabarba Ietisim Hizmetleri

Mobile Messaging Campaign

Kraft Foods Turkey / Patos, Mobilera

Obama SMS Speech Excerpts Sent to Cairo and Ghana Regions, Clickatell

Mobile Display Campaign

Pizza Hut iPhone App; Pizza Hut; Inc.

Puma F Wan, Phonevalley

Virtual Zippo Lighter App, Moderati, Inc.

Emerging Technology Campaign

Fanta More Play, The Hyperfactory

Cadbury Be The Gorilla, The Hyperfactory

Multi -Mobile Channel Campaign

Sony Quantum Code, AURA Interactive

Pepsi Makes Your Day, RABARBA ILETISIM HIZMETLERI A. S.

Mobile Social Media Campaign

The Fastest on Facebook, Mobile Dreams Factory

Sony Quantum Code, AURA Interactive

Cross-Media Integration Campaign

Who Killed Summer 09 (Vodafone Group), OMD Mobile

Best Mobile Campaign Overall: (three-way tie)

Who Killed Summer 09 (Vodafone Group), OMD Mobile

MMA Industry Awards for Innovation: Social Impact

Text ALIVE Mobile Donations, Mobile Accord Inc.

Ad Age recently announced their annual Agency A List and Latinworks was selected Multicultural Agency of the Year for 2009. One more time, I noticed how lucky I was with working at Latinworks at some part of my life ( a five month long internship).

Last year, Latinworks’ Starburst commercial won Silver Lion at Cannes Advertising Festival and for the first time a U.S Hispanic agency won a silver award.

Bud Light Classroom commercial is one of the other famous work of Latinworks, which was also awarded with Bronze Lion at Cannes. This funny spot for Anheuser-Busch features comedian Carlos Mencia teaching a group of immigrants how to order a Bud Light in English slang. The commercial was named as the most watched spot among all commercials that aired during the Super Bowl by TiVo in 2008. And, the follow up commercial came for the next Super Bowl with “Language of Love”. This time  Mencia tries to coach of his students in the art of picking up women, by convincing the guys that American women love foreign accents. I hope to hear Latinworks’ name more..