Welcome to this week’s installment of #ManyCoolThings, a Social Media Group culture jam. These are the many cool things that recently caught our attention or inspired us:
Empathy, cooperation, fairness and reciprocity — caring about the well-being of others seems like a very human trait. But Frans de Waal shares some surprising videos of behavioral tests, on primates and other mammals, that show how many of these moral traits all of us share.
Discover more on this topic in Nova Science Now’s “What Are Animals Thinking?”.
Digital Out of Home Experience
OMD created a storefront campaign at the MLB Fan Cave that would engage consumers through FourSquare. To activate, consumers used their phones to check-in to the location on FourSquare. The vending machine then dispensed a MLB official baseball for them and a few lucky participants received an autographed balled signed by Giants center fielder Willie Mays.
RecoverFeed – Take action on behalf of those affected by Hurricane Sandy. Aim for visible progress.
Big Spaceship (Digital agency in Brooklyn NY) created a page to help the recovery of Hurricane Sandy. The tag like is to ‘Aim for visual progress” and have included photos (looks like most of the photos are coming in from Instagram) to display this. There are options to donate and volunteer with multiple charitable options to choose from.
Wanelo
This start-up was founded in Oct 2010 in San Francisco. The name Wanelo combines a blend of the words “Want, Need, Love”. The platform positions itself a content curation tool, comparable to Pinterest, Fancy and Polyvore. In June 2012 they received $2M in investment. You can follow users and brands. Because it is integrated with Facebook, users can stay within Facebook chatting with their friends while they shop. This has also allowed the site to grow to about 30 million users.
Donation Box: The best idea Apple never had
How’s this for an innovative way to raise money for charity? In this promo video, Apple users are encourage to help fund the Salvation Army this Christmas using “Donation Box”. Simply drag and drop your unwanted apps into the Box and Apple will donate cash to the charity. Amazing… except unfortunately it’s not real.
The promo is so slick and professional, there’s no way you’d know this wasn’t an official Apple commercial – but it’s not. It’s actually a project made by a group of advertising students affected by Hurricane Sandy.
Net-A-Porter
The Net-A-Porter Group Limited is the world’s premier online luxury fashion retailer.
Kallxo
This is a project that encourages citizens to report cases of corruption in Kosovo via a Ushahidi-based platform. (If you’re not familiar with Ushahidi, it’s a non-profit tech company that specializes in developing free and open source software for information collection, visualization and interactive mapping.)
Virtual store for Toronto holiday shoppers
Holiday shoppers walking through Toronto’s business district now have the option of making purchases with their cell phones from a new virtual store. Walmart Canada and Mattel Canada have set up a digital pop-up store at Brookfield Place in the PATH — Toronto’s underground tunnel network — right next to an entrance to Union Station, the city’s commuter hub. The store features two walls with images of products like doll houses, toy trucks, and race car tracks, and will be open for the next four weeks. To purchase the products shoppers use a smartphone app to scan a code, or access the store’s website and find the product code manually.