Q-news

I was interested to see how they were working the contest, as I’ve help a few clients out with this type of promotion before. It’s a great idea, but something about the set up made me think they missed the boat. The contest was tweeted out by its partners, the tweet contained a link to its Facebook page.

Here’s where they went wrong.

When you click the button “Enter Sweepstakes”, you’re pushed to the Facebook login page. I know Facebook has many members, but if you’re not, you can’t enter. This eliminates possible entries and database building for G.M.

Maybe a better solution would have been to have the “Enter Sweepstakes” button redirect you to their website or micro-site for this contest. That way, everyone that clicked the link from the tweet, who are obviously interested, would be able too. Allowing G.M. to build a bigger database.

Maybe next time.

My phone is always on me, so it’s easy to capture moments or inspiration. There is no longer a need for me to carry around my gigantic point-and-shoot camera (ok, so it was only 1 inch thick, but in this day and age, that’s archaic.)

In an effort to learn more about what can be done with my iphone camera, I attended a NMM iphonography workshop recently. Two local pro photographers shared their secrets, tips and tricks, on how they use their iphone camera. I want to pass on three of my favorite apps that they covered.

The app that I am most loyal to is Instagram. Instagram allows you to take a photo, apply a filter, and upload it to the Instagram photo feed. From there, you can share the image to Facebook, Twitter or Flickr. This app appeals to me for two reasons. I enjoy the social sharing aspect. But mainly, I identify with the power of photos and the visual language that can be communicated. A picture is worth a thousand words, and you can’t fit a thousand words into a tweet.

The other two apps that I want to share are very similar to each other. Snapseed and Camera+ are both photo editing apps, which allow you to take photos and edit them on your phone.

Camera+ has a nice stabilization feature. Once activated, it won’t let you take the photo until the camera is still enough. Once the photo has been taken, or uploaded from your camera library, you can make basic adjustments, including rotation, cropping, borders, and some colourization effects.

Snapseed does similar things to Camera Plus, but it has a few more specific functions. There is selective adjustment, which allows you to select a portion of the image and brighten or darken that area. You can also adjust things like brightness, saturation, contrast, ambience and white balance. If you want the depth or field effect (when an object is in focus and the background blurs out), you can use the centre focus function. Both Snapseed and Camera+ allow you to apply retro effects and textures to the image. They also give you the capability to adjust the strength of the effect.

Snapseed has been voted “iPad App of the Year 2011”. It can be downloaded for 4.99. Camera+ will only cost you a mere .99 cents.

You can use these apps to simply rotate a photo that is slightly crooked, or crop out an unsightly background element. Plus, you can use them to add emotion, character and artistic flair. When I am playing around with a photo, it’s a simple exercise of my creative muscle and it keeps me inspired.

I took a few photos of the holiday flair around the office, and I used Snapseed to show some of the fun that can be had with these apps.

Greg Fritz, project coordinator at the FaQtory, created today’s recess. The game was simple enough, take a plastic drinking cup placed on the edge of a table, and flip it onto a beer bottle in under a minute. If you got a cup onto the bottle you moved onto the next round.

After the first round, Pierre, Stephanie, Cory and Rick all moved on. Pierre defeated Rick in the semi-finals, and Cory took down Stephanie. In a final that had to be seen to be believed, Pierre landed his cup on the bottle in the first shot… only to have it wobble off and land back on the table. The next shot saw BOTH Pierre and Cory land their cups, with Cory’s now rounding the cup and wobbling off, to the screams and gasps of the crowd!

So week two goes to Pierre “Cups” Lemoine, making the interactive team the guys to beat come next weeks recess!

Check back next week for our next recess post. We are working on something really special for Christmas, and considering it’ll be on our last day of the year we will try REALLY hard to only limit it to fifteen minutes!