A creative agency in Singapore has scooped awards and fame with their innovative combination of music, fashion and RFID technology.

Created by DDB Singapore, the campaign set out to engage the young people as well as to increase web traffic and downloads at StarHub Online Music Store.

Partnering with local retailers, the campaign created state-of-the-art fitting rooms that play music matching the style of each person trying clothes on.

Using Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) technology, the team attached contact-less bar code tags containing data about the style to items of clothing.

RFID readers were then installed in the fitting rooms and voila – a track matching the style is played when trying clothes on.

The youngsters then received a close proximity text message on their mobile with information about the song and the music store.

According to Will Sansom, from Contagious Communications (UK), a quarterly intelligence magazine and consultancy, the campaign’s success is down to the concept of ‘experience over innovation’.

“It’s about human experience first, then technology to amplify that – the technology is invisible, it’s seamless”, Will said talking at the Midem Music Conference

“The reason I like this is that the consumer isn’t asked to do anything but they get an interactive, relevant and personal sensory experience.”

Check out the campaign video:

The world’s largest music industry trade fair once again boasted a range of experts sharing their insights and discoveries on new innovative ways to reach, engage and monetise audiences.

The events culminated in ‘Visionary Monday’, a day of talks and debates around ideas such as ‘has sharing become the new advertising’.

You can still listen to all the talks on the Midem website. Be sure to also check out The Next Web’s Martin Bryant’s article about the 11 innovative music apps and services from Midem Hack Day.

“Piracy almost our fault”

The audience also heard from Rovio’s Mikael Hed, who revealed that the Angry Birds company is currently working on a music game.

Hed also shared with the audience Rovio’s unusual attitude to piracy – the company is only chasing up producers of unsafe products or ones that damage brand perception.

“We can learn a lot from the terrible way the music industry dealt with piracy. It would be futile to tackle it all”, Hed said.

“We embrace the pirates – as long as the product is well made, even if it’s not officially licensed it helps improve the brand.”

“If we have failed to make our legitimate products the easiest thing to buy, it’s almost our fault that we get pirated.”

At noon, the organisers will release 50 tickets at a discounted rate of £290 + VAT.

One of the top digital events in the country, Thinking Digital, welcomes leading minds from the sector to The Sage, Gateshead, at the end of May.

Just last week, 20 new speakers were announced including Richard Banks, Interaction Designer at Microsoft Research and author of The Future of Looking Back; Jennifer Gardy, Canada’s answer to Brian Cox and Jonathan Forster, a Geordie abroad in Stockholm amd also European GM of Spotify.

A new website dedicated to the event went live last week, providing a range of details on the event, tickets and speakers.

The site itself celebrates local talent as it was created by developers from Newcastle-based digital specialists AYO Media.

According to the organisers,  201 places have already been booked for the popular conference four months ahead of the kick-off.

“This year’s Thinking Digital Conference is our 5th Anniversary so we’re trying to make it extra special”, Laura Harrison, Project Manager at Thinking Digital said.

Thinking Digital will take place on 29-31 May with the Thinking Digital University workshop sessions on the first day, followed by the main conference on 30-31 May. For more information on the event and how to get tickets visit www.thinkingdigital.co.uk

A chance for ambitious local business leaders to meet with brand experts face-to-face.

Hear how some of the world’s best Brand Builders have supported profitable growth for ‘local heroes’ such as BALTIC, The Sage, onyx and Activities Abroad based upon identical approaches that they personally have employed at Coca Cola, Virgin, Nike, Intel, Sony, Starbucks, Porsche, Nokia, Metrocentre and more.

It worked for them – and it can work for you.

Speakers:

Les Stern – Ex-Saatchi & Saatchi Head of Planning and Strategy and now Violet Bick Brand Consultant. Advised for over 15 years on brand construction to the board of Virgin, Porsche, Coca Cola Corporation, Starbucks, Nokia and Metrocentre.

Roger Blight – Violet Bick Brand Consultant and the man that helped move the Nike brand from World number 3 to World number 1 during the recession of the 1990’s.

Mark Tinnion – Violet Bick’s Brand Director and the man that helped launch and build the Sony VAIO brand and Intel Pentium 4 brand in the UK. Mark now helps run four multi-award winning businesses here in the North East.

Parking: Lots. And it’s free

Eating and Drinking: Lots. Including warm Cinnamon cider, cloutie dumplings, double choc brownies and locally produced pork scratchings.

The venue is space limited so book early to avoid disappointment.

A small friendly web agency in the centre of Newcastle is looking to recruit a junior PHP / ecommerce developer

You will be responsible for developing CMS driven web sites and ecommerce sites along with integration of those sites to back office accounting and CRM systems.

Your skill set should include:

• Strong PHP5 & MySQL
• Strong HTML and CSS
• Javascript Frameworks such as JQuery, MooTools
• Experience with Ecommerce platforms such as Magento
• Experience and knowledge of CMS systems
• Experience of MVC Frameworks such as Kohana, Cake, CodeIgniter
• Ability to configure and setup Linux web servers
• Use of Code repositories such as GIT or SVN

You need to be a self starter, team player with a positive can-do attitude, you also need to be able to speak to customers in a non-technical way.

• Working hours are Mon-Fri 9:00 – 17:30
• 25 Days paid holiday + Bank Holidays
• Based in Newcastle NE1
• Salary dependant on skills and experience but paying around the £18k-£22k mark

If you are interested in the advertised position please apply by contacting Sharpe Recruitment.

Sharpe Recruitment is a North East based consultancy, dedicated to placing professionals in rewarding jobs throughout the North of England across a variety of disciplines including Digital Media, Creative Advertising, Sales & Marketing, PR, IT and Business Operations.

A small friendly digital creative agency based in North Yorkshire is looking to recruit a PHP / ecommerce developer.

You will be responsible for developing web sites and potentially ecommerce sites along with front end HTML/CSS and development stages of projects.

Your skill set should include:

• Strong PHP & MySQL
• Strong HTML and CSS
• Javascript Frameworks such as JQuery, Ajax
• Experience of WordPress CMS Platform
• Knowledge of Object Oriented PHP frameworks
• A solid understanding of usability, accessibility and web security
• Essentially a minimum of 2 years commercial experience

You need to be a self starter, team player with a positive can-do attitude and you also need to be genuinely passionate about the digital industry.

If you are interested in the advertised position please apply by contacting Sharpe Recruitment.

Please be advised that your details WILL NOT be automatically sent through to the company looking to recruit, applying for the role is purely registering your interest, if suitable we will contact you to provide more information on the role and company and only then will we pass your details on to our client should you wish us to do so.

Sharpe Recruitment is a North East based consultancy, dedicated to placing professionals in rewarding jobs throughout the North of England across a variety of disciplines including Digital Media, Creative Advertising, Sales & Marketing, PR, IT and Business Operations.

Paul Dayan with Sunderland Software City's Bernie Callaghan

South Shields based online nutrition planner, planmyfood, is offering a free trial for anyone looking for a healthier start to the new year.

The diet-planning software analyses the nutritional content of meals to create user-friendly, daily nutrition guidance.

The software tells people if their meals are within guidelines for their medical condition or diet.

It was created by founder Paul Dayan to help a family-member battling an eating disorder.

Paul also uses the product himself after being diagnosed with raised cholesterol.

“Unlike traditional diet planners, planmyfood doesn’t just focus on slimming and weight loss”, he said.

“It’s about good nutrition leading to good health. It puts people in control of their diet and promotes real and sustainable behavioural changes that lead to long-term health improvements.”

planmyfood subscribers can keep their diet and nutrition on-track wherever they are during the day; at home, in the office or out and about.

Subscribers also get advice, support and recipes from an online community of other users.

planmyfood is currently offering a free 5-day trial to new users. Existing subscribers can also add up to 5 family members to their account for as little as 56 pence per week. For more information, visit: planmyfood.co.uk

“There is a digital revolution brewing in the world of the arts and cultural organisations”, she said.

“We have known for years that there was tremendous potential if we could find ways to help artists and arts organisations work more closely with people in the digital world – from creating new forms of art to helping arts organisations better use digital tools in everything they do.”

The CultureCode initiative is a set of four events, all looking to spark and facilitate innovative collaboration between the culture sector and the digital professionals.

“CultureCode aims to take the artist or cultural professional on a journey of learning, collaborating and participating”, Joeli said.

“We want Cultural organisations to have a better understanding of what a developer/designer or creative technologist does, how they realise a project, and how collaborating with them could be key to their own innovation.”

Journey to innovation

The cultural-digital bonanza kicks off on 21 February with the CultureCode Encounter - an event looking to encourage more open data in arts projects through examples and discussing some of the challenges involved.

The day after the Encounter, the CultureCode Boutique will give artists and cultural professionals the chance to hear from specialists who have embraced the arts and digital to create daring, inspirational projects.

The next event, the CultureCode Salon, will take things to the next level. The networking event will enable the two communities to meet and discuss ideas, challenges and potential future collaboration.

The whole thing is then brought together in the climax of the journey – the CultureCode Hack – 24h of rapid prototyping culminating in an award ceremony.

“There will also be maker activity, coding for beginners, various films will be shown and food and drink will be available throughout the 24 hour period”, Joeli said.

World class speaker

To spark true inspiration, both The CultureCode Encounter and The CultureCode Boutique will host data artist Jer Thorp as the main speaker.

“Jer is the data artist in residence at the New York Times, a contributing editor of Wired magazine, an educator, scientist, artist and all round truly awesome speaker who will adapt his presentation to inspire and educate the different audiences”, Joeli said.

“Jer will focus on his exceptional data visualisation work and will also talk through examples of other developers and designers who are already doing innovative work within the cultural and arts sector.”

Starting point for conversations

The CultureCode initiative was set in motion by the Arts Council.

The aim was to encourage artists and cultural organisations to utilise digital technologies to make great art and to engage as many people as possible with their work.

“The reality is that very few cultural organisations and artists have an opportunity to mix with creative technologists to start the conversations that might lead to more innovative work”, Joeli said.

“We would love to see CultureCode act as a key catalyst alongside other forward-thinking organisations around the UK in getting this revolution over the tipping point.”

To find out more and to register, visit the CultureCode website.

A new start-up competition is launching to find the brightest stars of the tech scenes around the world.

Organised by the technology news website The Next Web, Startup World is holding pitching competitions in 36 cities world wide.

The regional winners will be flown to Silicon Valley to pitch to a panel of expert judges with one of them crowned as the the world’s best start-up in the end.

The winner will get a three-month incubation period at i/o Ventures – an early mentorship stage start-up programme in Silicon Valley – worth $30,000.

The idea behind Startup World is to shine a light on technology that’s being built all over the world, tech journalist Hermoine Way explained on the launch video.

“Whilst Silicon Valley is undoubtedly the highest producer of technology companies in the world, there’s actually a global entrepreneurial revolution happening”, she said.

“As the cost of innovation is coming down, people all over the world are building start-ups with a laptop and a wifi connection.”

For more information and to find out how to apply, visit the Startup World website.

Apple’s staggering sales figures mean there’s now more iPhones sold than babies born in the world every day.

According to the tech giant, 37.04m iPhones were sold between October and December.

The Next Web’s Apple editor did the maths and with 377,000 iPhones sold each day, Apple tops the average birth rate in the world, currently at 371,000 per day.

“We thought we were setting bold bets, but it turns out we didn’t bet high enough”, Apple CEO Tim Cook commented on the huge demand.

TNW’s mobile editor Matt Brian, suggests that the huge figures are helped by the ‘impressive’ launch of the iPhone 4S, the reduction in price of the iPhone 4 and the iPhone 3GS going completely free on contract in several countries.