Mobile Behavior: an Omnicom Group Company

1. Too Lazy To Count Calories? Now You Can Just Take A Picture Of Your Meal

"While the company chalks it up to 'magic', we’re assuming they’ve got a handful of people (be it through Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, or a room full of dudes promised free Internet in exchange for calorie counting) breaking down the meal in your picture item by item. Snap a shot of a chicken salad? They punch in some chicken, some lettuce, maybe some dressing — and bam, they’ve got a rough estimate."

2. Designing for second screens: The Autumnwatch Companion

"We were interested to see how much of the existing online content could be reused, which was easy for the species and habitat information drawn from the BBC Wildlife Finder, but articles and blog posts had to be simplified. This gave us the opportunity to experiment with presentation formats and interactions, including diagrams, image galleries and animations."

3. Unofficial app store Cydia lands advertising from Toyota

"This is the first major corporation we have seen put direct positive attention into the jailbreak scene, developing specifically for it and addressing this large userbase. Could this be a turning of the tide for the previously 'outlaw' jailbreak community?"

4. Did I mention how much I love Instagram?

"You see something, you whip out your iPhone. You take a shot and then you send it directly to someone else's brain. It's over in seconds (most of the time). It's sharing at the speed of thought, almost. Flickr isn't like that. In fact, I think Instagram makes it easier and quicker than it's ever been to think of an image and send it into someone else's brain. This is a huge deal, since we are primarily visual creatures."

5. What a Provider's Mobile Phone Logs Reveal about You

"German politician Malte Spitz sued his mobile provider to receive his personal phone data of over 6 months, to prove how this information, combined with other publicly available facts, such as from Twitter feeds, blog entries and website stories, can reveal much more than one wishes for. German newspaper 'Die Zeit' and computational journalism company OpenDataCity then rendered this data on an animated map with interactive timeline."

6. iAd Gallery by Apple

"The iAd Gallery is a celebration of advertising, featuring iAd campaigns from some of the world's best brands and their advertising agencies. The iAd Gallery gives you easy access to a selection of the fun and informative ads that have run in some of your favorite apps."

7. Facebook For iPhone Gets Event Check-Ins

"To be able to check-in to an event you have to (obviously) be invited and RSVP’d 'yes' to attending. Your location also has to match the location of the listed event venue, and it has to be the correct time of the event. All of this will presumably help dissuade gaming."

8. In a New Web World, No Application Is an Island

"'Right now, we’re in a native apps world,' says John Lilly, a venture partner at Greylock Partners, a venture capital firm in Silicon Valley. 'But people are underestimating the power of the Web. I think we’re going to see an explosion of Web-based apps over the next couple of years.'"

9. TV-Tagging App IntoNow Tries to Kickstart Discussions With New Release

"The startup is accommodating users with a discuss button they can hit to start public discussions with everyone; they can also use the button to initiate more private chats with just friends. Users can strike up conversations around series, movies and single episodes. While not as fluid as instant messaging, the discussions feature is real-time; and users are notified as new comments pour in."

10. Shall I Buy

"Shall I Buy is a mobile application that allows users to log and share their purchase intentions and get instant feedback from friends."

Tweetworthy is a weekly roundup of the most shared tweets from @MobileBehavior. You can follow us on Twitter here.

1. Old Navy Replaces Mannequins With Music

"The tie-in with Shazam will work this way: Consumers who hear a song in an Old Navy commercial will be able to identify it by visiting oldnavy.com/shazam. The app is supposed to work whether the spot is being watched on TV, Facebook or YouTube or in an Old Navy store.

The consumers will then be able to gain access to the fashions featured in the commercials as well as special deals and styling tips. They will also be able to download the song, watch the spot again or learn more about the musicians."

2. Shot Note App

"Shot Note from Japanese stationary company King Jim is a notepad for storing hand written notes in a digital format. The iPhone app recognizes the fiduciary markers on the corner of the pad and corrects the perspective, color, and scale to fit the iPhone screen perfectly."

3. Fisher Price Introduces Toddler Ready iPhone Case

"Fisher Price will showcase a new product at this year’s New York International Toy Fair that should help many parents with this very need.  The Laugh & Learn Baby iCan Play Case is a fun and colorful way to let toddlers enjoy their apps while also protecting the iPhone or iPod Touch from 'dribbles and drool.'"

4. World's First Heads-Up Display eBook Reader

"Megareader, an eBook reader, has released in its latest software update, a heads-up display for reading on any Apple device. The application — which requires your device have a camera and iOS4 — overlays the text of whatever you are reading on a live feed of the view in front of you, allowing you to safely walk and read at the same time."

5. The Wristwatch Looks For a New Use

"These newly commissioned freshmen don’t use wristwatches. In fact, the wristwatch is so alien to this group of late teens, that even the mere action of pointing to a wrist to ask someone the time is akin to speaking an unfamiliar foreign language."

6. Homeless People Start Tweeting in New Awareness Initiative

"Underheard in New York is an initiative to help homeless New Yorkers speak for themselves through Twitter. Four homeless people — Danny (@putodanny), Derrick (@awitness2011), Albert (@albert814) and Carlos (@jessie550) — were given their own prepaid cell phone, a month of unlimited text messaging and a Twitter account."

7. Social Aggregation via Images

"Last night Instagram did something really fascinating—it streamed and aggregated photos from the Grammy’s. There’s something about an event where people can shoot images at the same time from slightly different angeles and locations to give a much fuller 360 perspective. It’s only a matter of time before this type of social aggregation becomes common."

8. Social-media sites give travelers local insights

"Can the wisdom of crowds improve your travel experience? That is the premise and promise of several new travel websites that are harnessing social-media energy for answers that otherwise require asking your family and friends or serendipitous encounters with other travelers."

9. Fashism Goes to Fashion Week

"Attendees were able to try on and photograph themselves wearing pieces from both the Spring and Fall 2011 collections, the latter of which had been presented on stage at Lincoln Center just hours earlier. Photos were posted directly to Fashism, and Fashism users were able to view and share their opinions about the looks on fashism.com and through the Fashism iPhone application."

10. Experimenting with a second screen

"When watching North Sea Hijack, it also occured to me that having the twitter feed up there next to the telly also makes everything more social; the twitter stuff becomes another component for the banter in the room. I bet there's a load more you can do with it though, to surround the telly with other stuff; complementary, distracting, whatever. That'd be worth playing with."

Tweetworthy is a weekly roundup of the most shared tweets from @MobileBehavior. You can follow us on Twitter here.

1. Instagram coming to soda cans at SXSWi

"The promotion, called 'Briskpic,' encourages Instagram users to caption their photo with the hashtag #briskpic and share it on Twitter. A total of 4,000 cans of Brisk emblazoned with Instagram photos will be distributed at SXSWi."

2. Amnesia Connect fuses Microsoft Surface with your iPhone and iPad

"Utilising a range of technologies including Wi-Fi, proximity detection, unique ID and the phone’s accelerometer, Amnesia Connect allows users to transfer content from a Surface table to their smartphone by dragging it directly to the device with a single swipe, previewing the content with an X-ray style visuals."

3. Foursquare: Our Year of 3400% Growth

"Wendys who checked in at Wendy's: 224. Wendys who are mayor of Wendy's: 1."

4. Social networking under fresh attack as tide of cyber-skepticism sweeps US

"Turkle's thesis is simple: technology is threatening to dominate our lives and make us less human. Under the illusion of allowing us to communicate better, it is actually isolating us from real human interactions in a cyber-reality that is a poor imitation of the real world."

5. WeSC KarmaTech: social media via your shoe

"Students at Swedish agency Hyper Island developed this concept for shoe brand WeSC, describing it as 'a social take on Nike+'. The idea is to place an RFID (radio frequency identification) tag in a shoe . The KarmaTech shoe can be placed on a reader (for example, on a mat) to update the wearer's Facebook or Twitter status. It could also get them special entry to an event or free products."

6. Smartphones to help keep heart attack victims alive

"Here’s the gist of the app: you launch it, and it prompts you to ask if you’ve been trained in CPR and would be willing to help a stranger in the event of an emergency. If you accept this, then the application will take advantage of the iPhone’s location monitoring to get a general sense of where you are. Then, the next time a 911 dispatch center receives a call for an emergency that’s occurring near you, you’ll receive a push notification telling you that help is needed."

7. What users are doing on mobile devices while watching TV

"Yahoo!’s recent Mobile Shopping Framework Study revealed that 86% of mobile Internet users are using their mobile devices simultaneously with TV viewing. A quarter of them say that they browse content related to what they are watching, which presents a compelling opportunity for content providers and advertisers alike to complement the viewing experience on the mobile platform."

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8. The Black Eyed Peas unveil 360-degree video app

"Users can point and rotate an iPhone, iPod Touch, or iPad to change the user's point of view, similar to Google Street View. Users can also point their device to look at album cover artwork, watch avatars dancing, read Tweets from the band, or post their own photos on BEP Earth, a tool that the company describes as 'sharing and celebrating their love for the BEP and their music.'"

9. Tracking the Taliban? Soldier develops app to do just that

"U.S. soldier, Captain Jonathan Springer, has contributed 26,000 dollars of his own money to launch an iPhone app for use in combat. Conceived by Springer, an artillery specialist stationed in eastern Afghanistan, Tactical Nav will help soldiers map, plot and photograph waypoints on a battleground as well as transmit coordinates to supporting units."

10. JetBlue offers rewards for checking in on Facebook Places

"Members of JetBlue’s TrueBlue rewards platform can register on the company’s Facebook Page. Registered users will then receive 25 TrueBlue points every time they check in to an official JetBlue airport location on Facebook Places. The first 100 customers to check in at Boston’s Logan International, Ft. Lauderdale-Hollywood International, Long Beach, New York’s John F. Kennedy International or Orlando International airports will receive 100 points. Those who accumulate 5,000 or more points can trade them in for free flights."

Tweetworthy is a weekly roundup of the most shared tweets from @MobileBehavior. You can follow us on Twitter here.

Pictures sell louder than words. At least that’s what a new app called Pose is banking on. Recently launched in beta, Pose enables photo-sharing geared around the brick-and-mortar shopping experience. It’s a lot like Instagram, picplz, or Path, in that it lets users quickly take pictures, tag, and distribute them via various social networks.

Pose enters the space alongside similar services Fashism and Go Try It On. Both of these services also let shoppers bring their friends along to help them make purchase decisions. Pose takes this step further by making it easy to find a tagged item by directing users to the nearest physical location or online storefront that carries that item. It even provides the specific retailer’s return policy. All of this points to the emerging potential of mobile social shopping. Our social network already has a huge influence on our fashion sense; these apps can only amplify it. Were Pose to implement in-app payments, it could become an extremely potent path-to-purchase.

Temptd is an iPhone app that harnesses the power of social networks to strengthen personal willpower. Created by Frog Design, it is offered as a tool for followers of MTV's new docu-series 'I Used To Be Fat'.

According to the teaser site:

Whether you're struggling with weight loss or smoking, Temptd connects you with a community of people who are facing similar challenges. This free app uses game play to make it easy and fun to make smart choices, track your progress, and compete with others for willpower and karma points.

Temptd is a unique platform that combines Facebook with mobile technology to improve your long-term health and wellbeing through active social engagement.

Apps like Temptd bring the support of our social networks to us when they are most needed. We reach for our mobile device to feel connected just as much as to accomplish a task. The phone call is giving way to increasingly micro interactions such as hearting photos on Instagram or cheering Facebook friends on via Nike+. According to Paul Saffo, the smaller the quantum of creative act you ask of participants, the more they will participate. That split second it takes to "like" a friend's status update has the power to positively change behavior over time.

This article was originally published at AdAge.com, where we contribute content for the Digital Next blog.

In the 1995 film Johnny Mnemonic, the title character, played by Keanu Reeves, has a cybernetic brain implant that stores vast amounts of data. Today, we all have this capacity, but the mechanism is in our hands, not our heads. Smartphones are helping us become, well, smarter – both expanding our memories and giving us access to the web's collective knowledge.

In many ways, the mobile device has become a mnemonic device - literally a tool to help us remember things. We might email information to ourselves, keep grocery lists on our mobiles, or performs a search to recall a fact. Increasingly, though, we simply take photos. We snap pictures of things we want to remember later or share with others. What was that book I wanted to get? What's the name of that restaurant? What do you think of this shirt? We are all developing photographic memories.

This behavior is increasingly common across age groups and income brackets. Cameras are now standard on mobile phones and as a result, they are now one of the most often used features. 85% of all mobile users worldwide have taken a photo with their phones, making it the second most popular mobile content activity after texting (88%), according to eMarketer. iPhones are the most popular camera used to take photos posted to Flickr.

This reasoning behind this is simple: When you're on the go—in a "mobile environment"—it's much quicker to snap a photo than to type in text, and the phone is a camera that's always on us. I'd even argue that's why photo-sharing apps like Instagram and Path are becoming so popular –we're creating quick, expressive status updates through pictures. Forget 140 characters, a picture is worth a thousand (at least). Rising generations will rely more heavily on graphics and imagery, and it will affect the way they perceive the world.

Several companies have taken notice of this behavior and developed innovative tools around it. Evernote's service lets you store photos with tags and also makes printed and handwritten text inside your images searchable, so you can find them quickly. Amazon Remembers, part of Amazon's mobile application, lets you create visual lists of things you want to remember while out and about. If it's a product, Amazon will even try to look up what it is. Interestingly, there's no artificial intelligence at work here; it's all done by humans through Mechanical Turk.

Google, on the other hand, is pioneering technology that conducts visual searches. Through a recognition algorithm, the Google Goggles application can identify different kinds of objects and places, such as landmarks, logos and books. The company recently announced some experiments they are doing with brands—Disney, Diageo, T-Mobile, Delta and Buick—that link product recognition to advertising. Snap a photo of the ad and unlock content such as recipes, movie trailers, or nearby locations. Right now, there needs to be a call to action on the creative, but in the future, every ad could be recognizable and the behavior becomes automatic.

I'd place my bets along with these companies – that visual memory and search is the future, and that images will rival text as the preferred input mechanism on mobile. So, in order to stick in consumers' heads, brands will need to get in their phones.

Emerging applications and services will certainly help marketers do this. Looking forward, I imagine Google could tie the visual product search technology they acquired with Like.com to Google Goggles. Snap a photo of a pair of shoes or a jacket you liked, and the service recommends a similar one you can buy. Social shopping could extend into brick and mortar stores; take a photo of a jacket and your friends will know exactly what it is and where they can find it. Visual search will also become key to social media monitoring. Brands can see when people are posting and sharing photos of their products online.

Today, there are some low-tech ways brands can "optimize" their products and ads for cameraphones. One is to simply produce creative that invites picture taking and sharing. I recently passed a couple ads on bus shelters that beckoned passersby to take a photo. One was a boxing gym in Brooklyn that offered a discount if you brought in a picture of the ad. The other, for a vacation destination, had a blank space for you to get in the photo to put yourself in the scene.

In stores, I've actually seen employees tell people poised to take a picture that photography and video was not allowed. This was not in storage rooms or behind counters either, this was someone snapping a photo of a menu board. Retailers should not only refrain from discouraging this behavior, they should make it easier for people to do it. Simply positioning products and signage in a way that invites a good shot could make a difference.

Since people often share the photos they take, why not encourage it? In dressing rooms, there could be signs suggesting people take photos of their outfits to get friend's opinions, or upload them to a service like Fashism. Customer service departments could even suggest people send in photos, rather than ask them to describe their problem.

Our mobile devices will continue to become our second brains, and they will never forget. Better make sure your brand is ready for its close-up.

1. Go Time For Gowalla 3!

"Gowalla is now the easiest and best way to keep up with your friends across services with a combined activity tab that merges the whereabouts of your Gowalla, Facebook and Foursquare friends. Additionally, Gowalla now supports checking in on both Facebook Places and Foursquare in addition to sharing with both Twitter and Tumblr."

2. Information overload, the early years

"If we look closely, we can find a striking parallel to our own time: what Western Europe experienced in the wake of Gutenberg’s invention of printing in the 15th century, when thousands upon thousands of books began flooding the market, generating millions of copies for sale. The literate classes experienced exactly the kind of overload we feel today — suddenly, there were far more books than any single person could master, and no end in sight."

3. Shedding some light on phone design

“'What’s in a handset?' - was the question this reporter threw at Hwang Sung-gul, the creative designer of mobile devices at Motorola Korea. Hwang has been designing mobile phones - something that more than 98 percent of Koreans have - for more than a decade."

4. How Video Games Are Infiltrating—and Improving—Every Part of Our Lives

"Before turning 21, the average American has spent 2,000 to 3,000 hours reading books -- and more than three times as much playing computer and video games. Ten thousand hours of practice, according to Outliers author Malcolm Gladwell, is a defining trait of virtuosos."

5. Shout #turnRED to help create an AIDS Free Generation

"By any measure, AIDS is one of the most dramatic and pressing health issues facing the world today. At foursquare, we like to think that people’s actions can help raise awareness and change behavior, so we teamed up with (RED) to help turn the world red with awareness."

6. Bargain Junkies Are Beating Retailers at Their Own Game

"One might call it retail hacking: the reconception of shopping as not just a full-time job but a contact sport, a scrum in which consumers increasingly refuse to buy on the terms dictated to them. A whole network of so-called deal-hunting sites has sprung up for users to trade inside tips about little-known bargains..."

7. The Mobile Device is Becoming Humankind's Primary Tool

"People everywhere are consuming more and more wireless bandwidth to manage a wider variety of tasks. Evidence shows that the mobile phone is becoming indispensable to us: more people are paying for apps, and they're more willing to trade privacy for benefits."

8. Instagram Captures Their First Big Brand Partner: National Geographic

"The partnership seems like an obvious one since Instagram is all about great-looking pictures, and National Geographic is known for great-looking pictures.'Given that they’re so visually oriented, it’s a no-brainer that we’re going to be trying some interesting stuff out with them over the next few months,' Instagram co-founder Kevin Systrom tells us."

9. In-ground sensors alert drivers to open parking spots

"The presence of a vehicle changes the sensor's ambient magnetic field, allowing it to infer whether or not there is a vehicle in a particular spot... Drivers, meanwhile, can use the free ParkSense iPhone app to see the resulting information as to what parking spots are available nearby."

10. Can Mobile Phones Think?

"Nokia has introduced a little app called Nokia Situations, which essentially transforms the phone based on the situation you are in. As the company described it on the Nokia Beta Apps blog, it is an experimental application which users can “use to define how you want your phone to behave in different situations, like ‘In a meeting,’ ‘Sleeping,’ or ‘Playing with the kids.’”

Tweetworthy is a weekly roundup of the most shared tweets from @MobileBehavior. You can follow us on Twitter here.