The creators of the infamous “Shift Happens” presentation have just released their latest updated version. The people behind it are Jeff Brenman, karl Finch and Scott McLeod.
****UPDATE 2009 FALL V4.0 NOW AVAILABLE: CLICK HERE****
Never ceases to amaze me.

On Wednesday I was lucky enough to be invited to a great night out for the Launch of Glacéau VitaminWater in Cape Town. The brand has been one of the most successful new drink brands to be launched in the last 7 years (Its the top enhanced water brand in the USA) and its great to finally have it in South Africa. The range comes in 6 guises namely Power-C, Essential, Energy, Super-V, Revive and xxx. The drinks are made from reversed osmosis water and have been infused with vitamin goodness, with each one possessing different key vitamins and fruit flavours (Also no artificial flavours and low cal) I have tried the brand before many times and what I most like about them is that to me they all taste good and fresh with a pleasant aftertaste unlike a lot of flavoured water, and I must admit I do feel a bit of a good natural energy boost after drinking them. The brand is also pretty famous for having US Rapper 50 cent as a shareholder in the brand, who initially helped to endorse the product (in return for Shares) by several ways including the great short ad shown below. VitaminWater should be in stores nationwide in the coming weeks so keep a look out and give it a go.  

Great new ad for Microsoft windows phones from Andy Lees team. Nice to see the guys making their ads a bit fun and great soundtrack from The Fratellis (Chelsea Daggers) Cant wait to see more of their upcoming Windows mobile 7 as currently I still find 6.5 a bit slow and fiddly to take full advantage of, here’s hoping that they can release it before the year end ! (Hat Tip to Microsoft’s Steve Clayton for the above find)

The 2009 SA Blog Awards is well underway and everyone will be in for a treat this year (because its being pimped by Huddlemind).

The finalists will be decided on the 18th of march and then its only 1 1/2 weeks of final voting with the spectacular awards ceremony being held at the new and hot Chevelle Night Club in Cape Town on the 3rd April.

This year so far we have had a record number of blogs sign up and have attracted some great sponsors including getting 24.com to support the community by putting up some hard cash to become the title sponsor of the event.

We have a great line up of prizes this year too so be sure to get in some last minute votes if you haven’t already.

Below are just some of the prizes lined up this year:

• All winners receive personalised engraved gold plated Dog Tags (judges get silver ones)
• Audi R8 Test drive around the cape
• Stuff Magazine subscriptions
• Springleap T-Shirts
• Vida e caffe vouchers and loyalty cards
• Glaceau Vitamin water (pre-release)
• KIKA-SACK balls (perfect for a bit of pre world cup fun)
• Quirk e-marketing text books
• Stormhoek wine

(for new prizes and news follow us at twitter @sablogawards)

Power judges this year include some of the brightest and sexiest people in the SA media space including people like Vinny Lingham, Allan Kent, Fred Roed, Rob Stokes, Heather Ford, Eric Hersman and Tyler Reed.

For full details and to sign up to what will be one of the best parties of the year go to www.sablogawards.com there are only 150 spaces available so sign up quick to avoid been teased forever.

P.S. Please help us pimp all our sponsors as much as they make these awards possible and fun.

I was born in the 80’s and I think one thing that has remained a constant in my life is the huge leaps in tech innovation that seem to happen every month.

I can remember clearly been taught when I was 7 about basic programming on BBC computers (I recall we made a game so probably not surprising I remember it), I then remember learning how to boot up programmes with DOS, then windows, and now my mobile phone can do it all and more!.

Its the same story you hear every day from friends: “But how can my new laptop be out of date? I only bought it 6 months ago!”. Well now Microsoft have shown us the above video on what they are working on for circa 2019 just to show us how out of date we will be soon. I must say my initial thought was “Holly ***t !”.

Everything shown is Microsoft’s inspirational view of what they are working towards, based on research and tech exploration from within Microsoft and their partners. Basically this is stuff we will see in some guise or another in the near future.

All the products shown are designed to improve productivity for businesses and individuals.

I personally cant wait to be able to carry around just one card that can be my everything from a wallet to a phone and in between. I also would love the huge touch video wall in my sitting room for work, video and catching up with friends (imagine the innovative parties you could have!).

The Video was first shown at the Wharton Business Technology Conference by Microsoft’s Stephen Elop a few days ago.

For more info go to Steve Clayton’s Blog from Microsoft. He’s a great chap to follow and has all the links to the full video and presentation as well as all the latest updates from Microsoft in plain English.

As I know a lot of my readers are Mac lovers (not the McDonalds type but the Apple type) so I though I would post the main basic specs of the new Apple line up for March 2009.

Mac Mini

The new Mac Mini see’s Mini DisplayPort and DVI plugs added, 5 USB ports and an upgraded Graphics card to the NVIDIA GeForce 9400M card and its more energy efficient.

Mac Mini $599
Mac Mini $799

• 2.0GHz Intel Core 2 Duo

• 2.0GHz Intel Core 2 Duo

• 1GB memory

• 2GB memory

• 120GB hard drive

• 320GB hard drive

• 8x double-layer SuperDrive

• 8x double-layer SuperDrive

• NVIDIA GeForce 9400M graphics

• NVIDIA GeForce 9400M graphics

Apple MacBook Pro

The new MacBook Pro see the 15” down in price (in the USA) and a slight CPU upgrade.

15” MacBook Pro $1,999.00
15” MacBook Pro $2,499.00

• 2.4GHz Intel Core 2 Duo

• 2.66GHz Intel Core 2 Duo

• 2GB Memory

• 4GB Memory

• 250GB hard drive

• 320GB hard drive

• NVIDIA GeForce 9400M + 9600M GT with 256MB

• NVIDIA GeForce 9400M + 9600M GT with 512MB

Apple iMacs

New iMacs see prices drop and the addition of a Mini DisplayPort video out, however the numeric part of the keyboard is now an optional extra!

iMac 20-inch, $1,199
iMac 24-inch, $1,499

• 2.66GHz Intel Core 2 Duo

• 2.66GHz Intel Core 2 Duo

• 2GB memory

• 4GB memory

• 320GB hard drive

• 640GB hard drive

• 8x double-layer SuperDrive

• 8x double-layer SuperDrive

• NVIDIA GeForce 9400M graphics

• NVIDIA GeForce 9400M graphics

iMac 24-inch, $1,799
iMac 24-inch, $2,199

• 2.93GHz Intel Core 2 Duo

• 3.06GHz Intel Core 2 Duo

• 4GB memory

• 4GB memory

• 640GB hard drive

• 1TB hard drive

• 8x double-layer SuperDrive

• 8x double-layer SuperDrive

• NVIDIA GT 120 with 256 MB memory

• NVIDIA GT 130 with 512MB memory

Mac Pro

The new Nehalem based Mac Pro is up to twice as fast as the original. Nehalem is basically a really cool bit of tech from Intel for their processors that allows the processor to deal with cache data and greater application performance.

Mac Pro, $2,499
Mac Pro, $3,299

• One 2.66 GHz Quad-Core Intel Xeon 3500 series processor with 8MB of L3 cache

• two 2.26 GHz Quad-Core Intel Xeon 5500 series processors with 8MB of shared L3 cache

• 3GB of 1066 MHz DDR3 ECC SDRAM memory, expandable up to 8GB

• 6GB of 1066 MHz DDR3 ECC SDRAM memory, expandable up to 32GB

• NVIDIA GeForce GT 120 graphics with 512MB of GDDR3 memory

• NVIDIA GeForce GT 120 graphics with 512MB of GDDR3 memory

• 640GB Serial ATA 3Gb/s hard drive running at 7200 rpm

• 640GB Serial ATA 3Gb/s hard drive running at 7200 rpm

• 18x SuperDrive with double-layer support (DVD±R DL/DVD±RW/CD-RW)

• 18x SuperDrive with double-layer support (DVD±R DL/DVD±RW/CD-RW)

• Mini DisplayPort and DVI (dual-link) for video output (adapters sold separately)

• Mini DisplayPort and DVI (dual-link) for video output (adapters sold separately)

• Four PCI Express 2.0 slots

• Four PCI Express 2.0 slots

• Five USB 2.0 ports and four FireWire 800 ports

• Five USB 2.0 ports and four FireWire 800 ports

• Bluetooth 2.1+EDR

• Bluetooth 2.1+EDR

• Ships with Apple Keyboard with numerical keypad and Mighty Mouse

• Ships with Apple Keyboard with numerical keypad and Mighty Mouse

(Based on info from Apple and Engadget, Check them out for more detailed reading)

   For the second time this week I have found a great campaign from down under. The Outdoor Media Association of Australia has created a new award called “The Outdoor Awards”. The prize for the award is pretty novel as the organisers have arranged for the winning agency to walk away with $10,000 of scratch cards that have been put up on a billboard by one of Sydney’s main highways (Parramatta Road if your in Sydney). Needless to say the billboard is being guarded 24/7 and hopefully the winning agency will walk away with a lot more than $10,000 when they scratch all the cards, which by the way they estimate will take up to 20 days to do. To promote the awards they drove an outdoor billboard truck over 10,000 km around Australia with the message "THE OUTDOOR AWARDS ARE COMING". The truck was on the road for 40 days and took in Alice Springs, The Red Centre, Broome, Perth, Adelaide and Melbourne before its return to Sydney at the end of November. To enter the awards you need to head over to www.outdoorawards.com.au and register your work before the 30th April 2009.

This new ad for Norwich Union changing their name to Aviva is a little controversial given the current economic climate but is a pretty good name change ad none the less. The ad is made by AMV BBDO and features some classic celebs that all have different real names such as, Bruce Willis (aka Walter Willis) Ringo Starr (aka Richard Starkey), and Alice Cooper (aka Vincent Furnier). Considering Aviva (Norwich Union) has just laid off 1800 staff last year alone I’m not sure personally I would have spent about £10 mill on an ad like this. I think it would have done much better to give something publicly directly to their consumers and investors.

If there is one thing Australians are consistently great at, its making beer commercials. The above is the latest in a line of gems to come from down under. The ad is for Boag’s Draught Beers and is made by Mojo Sydney (cant find their web site, ideas welcome) who did the infamous legendary ads for Australia Tourism in 1984 with Paul Hogan (one shown below) Considering the tourism ads were pre Crocodile Dundee its incredible the effect they had. Australia went from being the 74th most desirable holiday vacation country for Americans to the 1st or 2nd and stayed like that for the next two decades !. Back on to beer ads click here for some top ten greats from Australia