The world of OLED is looking pretty groovy. OLEDs are organic light emitting diodes. To you and me that means really thin, easy to use, low energy, cheap, light sources. And now they can be printed out on a roll, like a newspaper. The possibilities for this stuff are fabulous. Imagine a wallpaper that glows. With ads that can change. Where would you put that? Yes, pretty much anywhere.

Researchers at GE have come up with the latest production developments.

Here’s a concept a little removed from the advertising arena until someone sees a route to deliver a media application. Sometimes the very best advertising media ideas come from thinking a little out of the box around quirky ideas like this.

New Scientist reports a paper presented at the 2008 Consumer Communications and Networking Conference (CCNC). Scientists at the University of California have developed an application that gathers people’s music tastes in a room and creates a dynamic playlist that delivers the most popular music for those in the room. Each user’s mp3 player sends out its playlist via wi-fi to a central dj box. This computes the location of users by triangulating the strength of their signals. The Smart Party was developed by Kevin Eustice and Peter Reiher.

So you might be thinking how the hell am I going to make this a media buy? Strip it to the core elements and you have the essence of some great interactive possibilities for an ad campaign. The elements are:

• location detection by triangulating a device’s wi-fi (or bluetooth) signals
• Identifying preferences from those devices
• calculate a dynamic list of most popular, fastest rising, all time favourite, best in the past hour etc.

You could apply this principle to many, many things beyond music and have great fun at your next big event.

Over at the University of the Arts Berlin, Markus Kison has come up with a Google vanity ring. Set it up with your name and it will track your Google popularity. The prototype is very bling, if only because of its bulk. The device has a docking station which allows a recharge of the batteries and that all important “how important am I today?” update from the Google databases. Check out the home video below. (more…)