Afternoon all,

Hooray, it’s Friday. Holidays are over and we return to the regular cycle of updates. Lots has been happening and some great news about some mega client campaigns being recognised as we enter in to award season (EMI and Professor Green / EMI POEM for MediaWeek and Samsung Zeebox and the Harveys app for Campaign amongst others). And a big huzzah to Mike Hartley and Heineken team for their bronze award at the Ocean Outdoor Art of innovation

But before we get the champagne out here is this weeks round up of what happening around the web.

Spotify tv: If you have a swanky new Samsung SMART TV set then rejoice, they have just inked a deal with Spotify to bring its music service to the device. If you don’t have the TV then upcoming Blu-ray players will enable you to access it and the rest of the SMART functionality.

Here is nice little thought from Steve Smith on it

As we move into the 2013 expect to see a lot more opportunities around connected tv advertising and ways of engaging with viewers beyond just pre-rolls.

YT channels: YouTube have been in the news this week with a further push to their branded channels. A whole host have been announced, for the full list They range from repackaged BBC offerings such as Natural World to new online only content by the new stars of online. It is worth checking out as from the original 100 channels they launched last year over 25 of them are already garnering 1m+ views a week and racking up the subscriber numbers.

For YouTube we need to start thinking of Subscribers as the core metric, not just views. Much like Facebook has seen the shift from the all encompassing ‘Like’ as will YouTube. Get ahead of it and think bigger than just a pre-roll.

Bird on a Vine: Keeping with the video vibe, Twitter bought an interesting company this week called Vine. Interesting for a number of reasons, such as Vine being a mobile video service that hadn’t even officially launched and only set-up in June, but most of all for it being a short form video offering much like the video equivalent of a tweet. Users record snippets of content and then the clever Vine system puts them together into a single longer shot. From the snippets of video I have seen it is a lot like the quick change type of camera angles that programs like 24 used or the real originator for the old school tv aficionados This life. Here is a video from one of its beta users.

My reason for mentioning it though is that as Twitter becomes more of a self contained platform driving users through the official offering it makes sense to bring in a video product that it controls.

Looper in your ear: Heading the box offices before Bond’s Skyfall is released is the new film Looper (93% on RottenTomatoes) about a time travelling mob hit target. What struck me about it is two things, one it is potentially the start of a new trend of Chinese funded films and is the first Western film to open bigger in China than the US but also because its director has come up with a novel way to get viewers to watch it again. He has released an accompanying director’s commentary to be listened to in the cinema. Also worth noting the services he is using to promote and create – Tumblr and Soundcloud. Neither of which are traditional media sites. A new dawn indeed.

Everyone loves cool things? Of course you do, who doesn’t want to read about Dark Energy cameras or Strongbow’s RFID bottle cap? Well now you can. Priya puts together a weekly piece of cool things and you can find it on her Yammer page here

UK Kickstarter: Regular readers of this email, or anyone who sits near me, will be well aware of my love of Kickstarter.com and see the little things I have bought and championed. I’ve written many times about how it is one of the driving forces behind the change of funding we are seeing. Well, brace yourselves, it is now launching in the UK and from next month you will be able to seek funding for your projects. Hooray. Why not for a future campaign flip your thinking round a bit and ponder the challenge of how you make it in to a Kickstarter project and get your audience to co-fund it with you, maybe a piece of NPD.

And finally... Everyone loves a good robot video and the flying quadrocopters playing the Bond theme a while back were popular, so here they are back learning how to throw and catch a ball.

This isn’t pre-programmed this is robot learning based on super clever algorithms. Skynet is one step closer.

Have a great w/e.

Oli.