Want to catch up with what happened in the digital world this week? Our weekly Cheat Sheet fills you in on everything you missed while you scrambled to meet deadlines and put out fires.
Read about Audi’s augmented reality app, users making dinner reservations through Facebook, donating to nonprofits via social sites, CrowdFlik’s app for creating crowd sourced videos and how Porsche turns to its fans to help design a car.
1. Audi’s new augmented reality app replaces instruction manuals
It can be quite painstaking at times to have to flip through an owner’s manual just to find information on a specific feature of a car. Apparently, Audi has made it so that A3 owners can now use their smartphones to assist them in understanding the different functionalities of the car. Using an augmented reality app known as eKurzinfo, owners can get instant information about almost anything just by pointing their phones cameras at things like a mysterious button or even a part of the engine. The Audi eKurzinfo augmented reality app can be downloaded from the iTunes store for free and is currently available in English, Japanese and German.
2. Users can now book a reservation through Facebook
This week, Facebook announced its integration with OpenTable, which will allow users to make online reservations without having to leave a restaurant’s Facebook page. To book a table, simply open the application, decide on a date and time and specify how many people are in your party. Currently, the booking service is only available on Facebook’s mobile site for both iOS and Android devices, but it is expected to roll out to desktop soon. With more than 20,000 U.S. restaurants to choose from, consumers shouldn’t have too much trouble deciding on where to eat for their next dining experiences.
3. Making donations through social media channels
It would be ideal for companies to affiliate themselves with Cause marketing programs given the fact that the programs provide opportunities to not only better the brand but society as well. GreaterGiving has announced its partnership with Chirpify to launch a platform that will enable nonprofits to fundraise, buy, sell and pay through social channels like Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. This platform will allow users to make contributions by simply replying to a post with “gimme” for giveaways and “donate” for donations. This joint venture will prove to be successful for brands as they leverage this platform to promote their businesses, while helping nonprofit organizations in the process.
4. CrowdFlik launches an app to create crowd sourced videos
Wouldn’t life be easier if we could capture moments from different angles by picking and choosing clips from other people’s cameras when making a video? Similar to Vyclone,CrowdFlik has launched an application that allows users to crowd source video content from the same event, enabling them to share their different viewpoints. This free iOS app lets users create custom videos through collaboration with other people, giving access to recordings that will help with video creation by filling in the missing pieces. CrowdFlik is currently available for iOS only and is available now for free in the iTunes store.
5. Porsche unveils crowd sourced car
Porsche finally hit the 5 million fan mark on Facebook and decided to celebrate the occasion by launching a campaign that gave users the opportunity to vote on unique design options for a car — the Porsche 911. This platform encouraged more than 54,00o people to vote on the different features of the car, creating Porsche’s first social crowd sourced vehicle. The company is now running another campaign on Facebook, offering its fans a chance to drive the car during the UK race circuit later this year. This platform showed an excellent form of interaction between a brand and its consumers by allowing the fans to engage and contribute in the creation of a product.
