George Walkley's posterous

80s choose your own adventure meets 10s music marketing

Via @stml:

"Hurts and Manchester novelist Joe Stretch have created a wonderfully unique experience . . . an interactive audio novel which utilises Spotify in a completely new and unexpected way. Each chapter of the novel has been published as a track on Spotify, and can be located by typing a unique code into the search field. After listening to each chapter of the story you’ll be offered a choice of what to do next . . . If you manage to get to one of the story’s eleven possible endings without dying, you’ll be rewarded with an exclusive preview of an album track."

@financialtimes on physical retail and smartphone promotion

Interesting piece in the FT on using location-based smartphone promotions in physical retail. I haven't heard of any bookshops using location-based services as part of their marketing strategy, but it seems like a natural step.

"In a sign of how the new generation of internet-connected phones is set to transform traditional retailing, [Best Buy] has deployed a location-based marketing tool developed by Shopkick, a California-based start-up . . . Customers who activate the Shopkick application on their phones will automatically receive 'kickbucks' credits just for entering the store that can be traded for benefits."

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/e986b328-a320-11df-8cf4-00144feabdc0.html

How many books are there?

Google puts a figure on it:

"Ever wonder just how many different books there are in the world? After some intensive analysis, we've come up with a number. Standing on the shoulders of giants—libraries and cataloging organizations—and based on our computational resources and experience of organizing millions of books through our Books Library Project and Books Partner Program since 2004, we’ve determined that number. As of today, we estimate that there are 129,864,880 different books in the world."

@flipboard transforms Twitter

I downloaded Flipboard to my iPad this morning. It's transformed my use of social media in less than a day, and it's one of the first genuine must-have iPad apps that I've seen. My fairly tightly curated Twitter network generates dozens of links a day: the 140-character limit means that the context provided for many of these links is limited, and URL shortening services don't give any clue as to the destination page. The consequence is that it's pretty easy to miss things, unless the context is arresting, or the link is posted by a friend one follows particularly closely. Flipboard is game changing: it renders text and photographs from the pages linked to, in a very cool magazine-style format which really makes the most of the iPad's screen size. It enables serendipitous discovery of interesting web pages in a way that no other Twitter client I've seen can do.