In a time where there’s a fast food ‘church’ opening on every street corner [yes, news this morning is that Pizza Hut will be returning to South Africa soon] – the allure of the old seems to becoming ever more powerful.

Prime Burger Restaurant, in Midtown Manhattan: For many of the guys that work here, the restaurant is like a second home – some of them have been slinging burgers, making shakes, and waiting on customers at this location for decades. Opened in 1938, the place hasn’t been altered since the early ’60s, and it looks all the better for it.

Here the waiters and workers of Prime Burger discuss their views on their chosen profession, and the unique nature of the place itself.

via

This mapping idea doesn’t have to just be done on a huge scale outside on the side of buildings. It can also be used inside shopping malls, which have become our modern-day forests (where people roam and forage and spend family leisure time instead of outside where you may get skin cancer or stung by a wasp).

This one was created for such a modern-day forest mall in San Fransisco over Christmas time.

Richard Branson has relaunched Virgin Money as a bank – vowing to shake up the UK banking scene.  To do this, Virgin Money created a 270 degree fully immersive architectural projection on the University of London’s Senate House Library. Lovely to watch.

Cape Town is full of struggling entrepreneurs and loads of empty retail space. We’re not sure whether or not an empty, derelict shop is beneficial to a landlord, but most of them seem to be in no hurry to fix the situation any time soon.

 popuphood in Oakland, San Francisco is an urban initiative offering free retail space in unused buildings to local entrepreneurs, in yet another variation of the pop-up concept.

Popuphood was launched in December 2011 by Alfonso Dominquez and Sarah Filley to encourage urban renewal in Oakland where — despite a thriving bar and restaurant scene — retail is struggling. The project started in the historic neighborhood of Old Oakland, filling five previously vacant store fronts with five new retail shops, including a jewellers and art gallery. The project’s main focus is to support the local community, providing them with a vibrant shopping area and giving local artists, designers and retailers the opportunity to open their own store for six months, rent free. By building cross-sector partnerships with state and federal governments and economic development professionals, popuphood hope to incubate small businesses and create a dynamic community-centric neighborhood, optimizing empty retail space block by block.  via

Just looking at the growing number or To Let signs in our own building – it seems that a solution like this couldn’t get to Cape Town soon enough.

Jeez – the year has just started and already people are riding subways in NYC with no pants on. This thing is just getting bigger and bigger every year. This is what every ‘flashmob’ attempt needs – some sign of commitment to the cause. Dancing in time is lame.

Alternate reality conferencing

As well as being the year of The Protester [Time magazine's person of the year] , for us 2011 has been the year of pushing ourselves into uncomfortable new spaces.  We started this year with a mission – to take everything that we’d learnt from producing alternate reality games for our clients over the years, and packaging the unseen, fantasy mechanic for retail and event applications. In essence we’ve transformed ourselves from a marketing company, into a technology company.

This year we’ve focused on just a few key areas of specialisation. We’ve done a significant amount of work in the realm of 3D projection mapping, which on a global scale has seen a significant amount of growth as a brand presentation mechanism. We’ve concentrated our efforts on the production of 3D mapping, which culminated in the production of the Dimension Data’s Annual Sales Conference mapping on a custom built 14 x 5 meter set. We worked with the world-class team from Motif Studios to create a mixture of visual and audio delight that really blew the audience [and client] away. Having seen many of the mapping examples from around the world – we’re pretty confident that ours was right up there with the best of them, which is where we feel the most comfortable.

See our post on The re-engineering of a conference for more on what we created for Dimension Data.

The other area of specialisation that we really got some good traction with this year is RFID. It stands for Radio Frequency Identification and as a technology we’ve been exploring its uses as a means to trigger our branded experiences and integrate those real-world experiences with social media platforms like Facebook. In a very short space of time we’ve developed, prototyped and built some pretty powerful machines that talk directly to actionable applications like Facebook. The result was that we turned the recent Axe Cloud 9 Party into an interactive media space that added to the experience of being at the event and gave the Axe brand some very cool brand exposure on Facebook.

So this year has been a great one in the sense that, once again – we’ve prepared ourselves well for 2012 and our mission to help brands create fantasy experiences for their clients and stakeholders.

A huge thanks has to go to all of our business partners and clients for making 2011 the success that it was. The team from Dimension Data / Internet Solutions, Habari Media, BAT, G2, Steenberg Vineyards, You Know Who, BConfident, Go4Word, CCPP and Motif Studios – thanks for sharing the vision and pushing the boundaries with us.

The Cherryflava Team - Stefan, Heinrich, Jon and Dylan

As is tradition here at Cherryflava – at the end of every year we give ourselves a public grading for how we feel we have performed throughout the year and this time around we will give ourselves a B+ for 2011. We are exploring in a unique, niched arena not only in South Africa but globally, but with our unique background and mixture of talents we’re well set up now to deliver even more in 2012.

Thanks do much for reading and joining in with us this year – have a great holiday.

The blog will be taking a break over the festive season until posting resumes on the 9th of January 2012.

This application may appear a bit of an overkill for this demonstration, but the potential for using this kind of technology for other displays that could do with some touchy-feely is astounding.

It’s very acceptable indeed.

Conferences should be fun

On of our best clients is Dimension Data. They really get it – and are dedicated to pushing the innovation envelope when it comes to their conferences. They understand that hosting a conference is a huge opportunity to demonstrate forward thinking to the people that matter – the people attending the event.

Most brands [even the seemingly progressive ones] when hosting events, surprisingly just can’t tear themselves away from the standard conference format. It’s the same ol’ format with the same ol’ tired outcome at the end. It feels like event organisers are too scared to do something different for a change.

Last year, we produced a conference quite out of the ordinary with a 2-week long game called State of Grace. This year we stayed physically in Sandton, but instead produced interactive and immersive elements for the event that enhanced the overall message and experience of innovation.

Finishing touches to the RFID stations

RFID tag technology has remarkable applications for events, allowing you to blur the barrier between physical interactions, digital tracking and social media integration. We designed, prototyped and build a series of RFID stations, which we placed throughout the conference venue -  tracking each participant’s progress between sub-venues through the day. All were build from scratch in our lab using Netbooks and Arduino circuit boards and software applications that we wrote. Tags were personalised and loaded with individual information that even indicated the preferred beverage of the conference goers to the barman at the end of it all. Unexpected touches that make a huge difference and all possible with the technology.

Our RFID-trigger photo booth

Part of the series of stations was an over-sized RFID triggered photo booth [that we also designed and built from scratch] that tagged photos with the names of the people triggering the shot based on the RFID cards swipped. These images were then displayed in real time via large projections to the dance venue at the end of the event. At one stage we had eight people crammed into the booth firing multiple images of themselves and then running through to the dance floor to revue they efforts.

RFID picture taking and tagging

Some couldn't stay away

In the repackaging of the conference content we also created a 2m high hologram [for real] and a 5-minute long 3D-projection mapping that was displayed on a partially wrapped 14m x 5m specially design stage. We used the backdrop of the mapping throughout the conference as a dynamic theme to pull all of the content together.

[Once the video of that mapping is complete we'll share more about that then.]

Projection mapping set up

Space ship masking

Mapped conference backdrop

In conclusion: Our philosophy is that an event or a conference that people have elected to attend is an unbelievable opportunity to WOW! people with your brand. We hear a lot about ‘death by PowerPoint’ these days, but in truth it’s not PowerPoint that’s putting people to sleep, it’s the company’s unimaginative intention behind that presentation that’s the crying shame. If you’ve managed to attract an audience to your gig – do them, and your brand a favour and make sure the overall experience is remarkable and unforgettable.

To infinity and beyond...

Invest the budget and leverage off the massive amount of word-of-mouth you could potentially generate. In an overcrowded global media environment it’s the hardest working investment you can make. If you’re not sure how – call us.

What’s with this guy? Did nobody tell him that at 39 he should be playing golf and relaxing instead of racking up yet another World Surfing Championship?

Amazing – Tim Noakes will tell you that all remarkable achievement starts and ends in the mind.

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Although this augmented reality stunt in a mall for National Geographic is very cool – it’s also, in another way, incredibly sad.

The sadness that we feel is admittedly as a result of some deepset philosophical trigger spawned by the realisation that human beings are so out of touch from our surroundings that this thing is then seen in some kind of positive light, but that’s a topic for another day.