This past week has been a busy one at USN as we have launched all the activities around the Red Bull BCOne (breakdancing championship) set for Tokyo in November this year.

This is probably the biggest cross media campaign I have creative directed to date, and we are all super happy with the results, so let me list all the things out there for you.

The TVCM

We started work on this back at the end of last year and in the last week it has been on TV, in Cinema and at Shibuya’s super packed Scramble Crossing. It is even doing the rounds on 10,000 screens in Karaoke rooms across Japan.

Here is the 30 second version…

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JDfMuU4kZj8

And the English long play 2 minute version…

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=enjxgR3zcsI

The Japanese 2 minute version is here.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NmhKOQ76v5M

Red Bull BCOne website

http://redbullbcone.jp

This is one of several websites we launched today (7th Sept). Big ups to our designers and web team here who did a great job putting this together.

Red Bull Check One

This one was put together quite quickly but we are really proud of it. It came out of a simple idea to utilize location based mechanics for a small focussed area campaign around the Red Bull BC One event. Players can use their mobile phones and the GPS function to perform break moves around key locations in the Shibuya / Harajuku area of Tokyo. You can unlock different moves and the move unique moves performed in any area will give more points.

Winners of this game will get a bunch of prizes, including the hard to come by tickets for the event itself.

Convenience Store Campaign

And the last way you can get tickets for the event is in the nationwide campaign that is currently running in convenience stores around Japan. Enter the code from any one of 3,500,000 cans and you can win tickets and other prizes.

… and thats just the start.

More coming in the leadup and a lot more planned for the event itself. Our extended family team who has been working on Red Bull related activities is approaching 40 people!

Can’t wait for the event.

Red Bull BCOne Tokyo Website (Japanese)

Back in January 16, 2007, me and Marc started up USN in some shared office space in Shibuya. 3 years later we have grown to a good sized team working with some great clients and getting more and more opportunities to “do our thing” from our office in Harajuku.

So, as we get kicked off into 2010 and start on a fresh year with many new opportunities and expectations, we have taken a moment to reflect on all that was achieved in 2009 (ie. Year 3) at UltraSuperNew Inc.

On our final day in the office for 2009, we spent a little time discussing our favorite projects for the year and for me, this past year was really something to be proud of. We managed to step it up to the next level this year, and even though some days it seemed like a tornado of different things all demanding attention, we managed to achieve a lot. In the end, keeping the list down to 10 projects was actually very hard, this could have been a much longer list.

So, without further ado, lets get the list going.

1. Missing Wheels (client : Red Bull)

In order to promote the call for entry for the Red Bull Box Cart Race, we bought 70 second hand bicycles, took off parts and placed them around the city with obvious signs that read “We have borrowed your wheel. We needed it to build our box cart for the Red Bull Box Cart Race and will return it to you after the race.”

We managed to create a new type of media with the bicycles, utilizing something that is in plain sight all over the place in busy shopping areas of Tokyo. Even though we had to answer some questions from the police since they were wondering why all these bicycles had no wheels, they found we were behaving completely legally and even complimented us on the idea.

The result was a lot of attention for the race, discussion online and off and in the end we managed to get about three times our goal for the number of entries for the race.

2. Crowdcast (client : Red Bull)

Red Bull Crowdcast is a new platform we developed for Red Bull to get people attending their events more involved with the brand and create a new source of media surrounding events.

Attendees at events can use a simple mobile application to upload photos of the event to a central server. The Red Bull Crowdcast website then publishes the content and provides a combined stream of images in real time back to mobile and PC users at the event or at home, as well as digital screens at the event. When watching in slideshow mode, images can take just a few seconds from submitting to appearing in the slideshow.

The images submitted are more spontaneous than the general material that is collected around events and are published much faster.

We did everything on this project from the concept to the programming to the running of the system, and have many more plans for the next year to take this to the next level in 2010.

3. Pump 20th Anniversary Party (client : Reebok)

We created a 20th anniversary party with a difference for the Reebok Pump at Mado Lounge on the 52nd floor of Roppongi Hills building in central Tokyo.

Apart from the general logistics, branding and planning, we had three key special features for the event that made this one a special one for me. The shoe display, projection screen and dance performance.

Reebok made 20 collaboration models with select specialty sneaker stores around the world, and we needed to display them in an interesting way at the event. The solution in the end was a special vacuum pack that we ended up doing by hand at the office because nobody had machinery the right size to do the sealing of the vacuum. The vacuum packed shoes were then hung on a custom built display. This one took a lot of hard work to execute, but ultimately an incredibly satisfying result that people really took notice of.

For the main space I wanted to make sure we had an interesting way to show the shoes as well, so we designed a special screen in the shape of a shoe silhouette that we then projected images of the 20 collaboration shoes on to. The footage was also programmed on a cycle with sound reactivity and some special tweak controls. The end effect was a floating shoe that pulsed to the beat sitting over the room with a backdrop of Tokyo city lights stretching out below.

Finally for entertainment, in addition to headliner Captain Funk, we had a dance performance by what I term “The ghosts of 1989″. Three guys in neon costume pulling off crazy b-boy dance moves.

We had a packed event and generated a lot of press and buzz around the 20th anniversary. By the end I was so tired from putting everything together I couldn’t even make it to the after party, but slept one of the most satisfied heavy sleeps I ever had.

4. pecha-kucha.org Renewal (client : Pecha Kucha)

This year marked the second major iteration of the Pecha Kucha online platform that we have put together in as many years, and this years version is really pushing towards the big vision. Pecha Kucha is a presentation style and an event format, Pecha Kucha Night, that is now held in over 260 cities globally, and still growing.

We have been involved with Pecha Kucha Night for a few years and have known the founders, Mark Dytham and Astrid Klein, since the beginning back in 2002. In 2009 our goal was to set Pecha Kucha for the expansion that it has already experienced and also what is still to come. The complete overhaul included an extensive redesign and an expansion to allow presentations to be viewed online with its own custom player via the presentations portal. It also saw a formalizing of the special event platform where one off Pecha Kucha events can be tied up with larger conferences or events and the integration of Creative Commons licensing on presentation content.

The new platform was soft-launched in late October, in time for Tokyo Design Week.

5. 100 Years of Life (client : Audi)

For Audi’s 100 year anniversary we put together two short documentaries and an exhibition at the Audi Forum Tokyo.

The documentaries featured two Japanese centenarians. Tateoka-san still plays the koto and we were able to arrange a special reunion for her family where she was able to meet her great grand-daughter (just a few months old) for the first time. 103 year old Shouchi-san still travels Japan and the world lecturing and holding workshops for both adults and children about how to live life well and stimulate your mind at both a young age and when you are in your later years.

For the exhibition we collaborated with photographer, Shouichi Ono, who specializes in photographing 100 year olds, to show the life and strength post 100years.

6. Easytone Pink Bomb (client : Reebok)

In one of our last projects of the year we put together a guerrilla campaign in bustling Ginza with the special pink Christmas edition of Reebok’s toning shoe, Easytone.

We assembled 100 women wearing the bright pink Reebok Easytone and coupled that with some promotional trucks and sample girls giving out present gift cards, all driving people to one of four stores in the area that stocked the shoes.

Even on a cold winter day, we made a lot of people take notice and managed to dominate the area with pink.

7. Pump Atmos Billboard (client : Reebok)

This is a fun, impactful billboard that we put together for the Atmos store in Harajuku for their special 20th Anniversary Reebok Pump collaboration shoe and the anniversary in general.

We wanted to make something a little tactile, so placed a great big three dimensional pump in the middle of the board and added shading on the billboard surface to make it look three dimensional.

8. Audi Live (client : Audi)

We created a live blogging platform for Audi press conferences so that a larger audience of press members could be reached.

The platform consists of a live updating page that is updated by someone at the event and a live video stream. The text portion is also directly updated to the Audi Japan Twitter account. Also on the page is a question form so reporters online can ask questions and receive a real time response, extending the press conference past the duration of the press event.

The innovative use of Twitter made news on TV Tokyo’s Morning Satelite, and featured our own Toyo Yokota.

9. Jetset UK, Claska (client : MINI)

To provide an impactful space for MINI at the Jetset UK event at Claska in Meguro, we created a massive 8m x 3.5m window sticker to make sure MINI put their stamp on this UK themed event.

To execute, we worked with a UK based photographer to get some original scenes from Mayfair (the namesake of one of the new release MINI models) in London, then put together a design utilizing the Union Jack flag and some Minis.

The design managed to dominate the main space of the event, providing a strong thematic element for the event and also present MINI well for attendees.

10. E-City (client : Expedia)

E-Cities was what we term a “passive game” that we launched all the way back in January 2009. The concept of a passive game is that the user just needs to sign up to get their page (their city in this case) and then doesn’t need to do anything other than get people to visit their page in order to play the game.

The more people that visit, the higher the population of your city and the more your city evolves and adds features and buildings. We featured Paris, New York and Honolulu as the key cities that you could grow.

We added some special giveaways as incentives to play the game. Visitors to the cities were rewarded with coupons for discounts on Expedia travel and hotels, while city owners had the chance to win the trip to their favorite city.

BONUS. New Office

Not really counting as a project, but quite significant to us for 2009 was the move to our new office in Harajuku. In our Shibuya office we were bursting at the seams, all in one room, some people even working off the meeting table. We spent more than 6 months on the lookout for new space before finally lucking out and discovering the gem of an office we have now in Harajuku.

Other than space and a great environment to work in, we are treated by working each day surrounded by the key people (young and fashionable) that we spend most of our time creating for. The only thing we have to worry about now is that we don’t fill up this office too

Other things

As I mentioned earlier, we had a lot more projects to be proud of in 2009 that couldn’t fit on the list, and for me personally, this past year of work speaks for the hard work that the whole team at USN has been putting in. As we are approaching our 3rd anniversary of the company, its incredibly satisfying to look back at the progress we have made. Especially in the face of trying times financially for the industry in general, we are very happy to have had our most successful year and have finished on an upswing.

2010 has a lot more in store and we are looking forward to an exciting year ahead.

If you want to follow updates about UltraSuperNew, you can follow us on Twitter at @ultrasupernew or just check out our website from time to time at http://ultrasupernew.com.

At USN we seem to be doing more and more event work. Last Friday we did the Reebok Pump 20th Anniversary party in Tokyo. The location for this one was Mado Lounge, on the 52nd floor of the Roppongi Hills Mori Tower with a stunning backdrop view over the city.

We managed to create a few special treats for the event that I was pretty happy with.

First we had to show off the special 20th anniversary collaboration shoes (20 of them of course) … now these are the only ones in Japan right now, so I approached it from a collector angle. Vacuum packs!

The vacuum packs actually needed to be hand constructed and took a long night of assembly and several broken vacuum packs to get them ready for the event.

Second, we needed some decoration. For that I brought in an artist friend of mine, Richard Byers (aka VJ Superlight) to help develop software for a silhouette screen for a shoe projection. We created a screen in the exact shape of the projected image (the shoe) and projected each of the collaboration shoes on the the screen. The software was all developed directly in Quartz, the native rendering engine of Mac OSX. To give a little more impact we included controls via MIDI and made it sound reactive, so the image shifted and pulsed to the beat.

The end result was a constantly morphing shoe image rotating through the 20 collaboration models, sitting in space with a backdrop of Tokyo skyline.

And, of course we needed some entertainment. Apart from our DJs … headlined by Captain Funk (great set Tatsuya!) we managed a live dance performance. This was another one of these strange ideas I come up with and was lucky enough that a client let me realise it. We got a group of BBoys, dressed them in neon head to toe and gave them special hoods covering their faces. These were my “ghosts of 1989″. You can see the result below. Very retro, lots of fun.

So finally, the others involved from my team – Tomo, Julien, Bjoern, Rico, Toyo, Alban, Ayako, and Marc. They are all rockstars.

1) Twitter

Yes, I have been on Twitter for more than the hiatus. But I want to be honest here, at some point around the end of last year as the world started to discover Twitter en-masse, as for many people, Twitter became such an easy method to update and communicate about news that I got a little lazy about going to the effort of writing full sentences and paragraphs and became sucked in by the immediacy of the Tweet.

2) Other projects

Lets call a spade a spade, I got busy.

In January I launched Retweetist, a Twitter Website that searched for all the retweets to determine trending topics, popular users and generally what people felt was worth repeating. This could probably have done with a post or two of my own, but being a Twitter project, I was blinded by the Twitter magic for getting the word out here.

My agency, UltraSuperNew Inc, has had an intense year. After picking up the Red Bull Japan account in October last year we have been busy and getting more and more involved, guzzling lots of Red Bull energy on the way. One of the highlights was the bicycle installation we made through the streets of Harajuku claiming to have borrowed parts of people’s bicycles. We got into a little trouble for that one, but the result made it worth while. We have picked up a number of interesting projects with Audi, including running live streaming of their press events and the new mobile website. And that’s just the start.

Press Army, a company that was birthed from a key need of UltraSuperNew to report on the success of social media activities, has now got legs. We launched it as an independent company just recently and have been growing that business very fast with some great new people on board, joining the talented team who has been behind it from the start.

3) A real world social life

Photo by susiviews

Looking past the tweets, status updates and general sharing of digital bits and pieces, I have managed a little more attention this year on exploring the world first hand. I have managed to visit about 8-10 new cities this year that I had never visited before, primarily across India and China — and most of those were not related to work!

I have also been cultivating a non-public life which I enjoy in that it is shared just with close friends and family. This is something I recommend everyone try to do. When we share things online, even on a closed connection with so-called “friend relationships”, I really consider this as a public forum. At some point a work colleague, a client or someone otherwise outside your central circle is going to be included into this platform (be it Twitter, Facebook, Mixi or whichever other service you might consider), so you may as well consider it public from the start… then at least there is a chance you keep the public embarrassments to a minimum. [note: I still have plenty of embarrassing moments captured online, so my method hasn't exactly been foolproof]

So, what does this return to the blogosphere mean?

As I have been distracted by the tweeting, the busyness and a private life, I have been slowly building up the urge to once again express myself in an expanded form online. The blog is the best way to achieve that result, and these days everything connects enough that I can push and pull content to and from other places that my presence can be maintained across the multiple networks without too much management time spent.

In my hiatus I experimented with Yongfook’s Sweetcron to try to merge all my streams of data. The software was a great idea and very neatly executed, but ultimately I found that I ended up with an unbalanced public page. When I mashed together Twitter, Blog posts, Flickr, Youtube etc, I ultimately ended up with a custom Twitter feed where if you were quick you might catch a glimpse of something else. Didn’t work for me.

On the other hand the progress that WordPress has made recently (especially since version 2.8) has been very impressive. It has brought me back to the fold with auto-updates, auto-installs, widgets, more evolved CMS structure and lots of bug fixes that enable me to swiftly make updates and system changes.

So, I am back.

Taito asked us to take a mobile phone with “Chokkan Band”, a game that lets you play guitar and other instruments and have some fun. We decided the best way to do that was to get friend of USN, Shiri, some bright pink makeup, bad fitting clothes, and see where we could get away with playing Chokkan Band around Tokyo.

Here is a summary of what we got up to…

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PQbuE4EUxPQ

The highlight was making an invasion of the local bath house…

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sFr6-2HQFRg

But we also made it to a bunch of other locations…

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8oNHawBYlzE

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SDqadkP8oIw

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ICha-BJ0xQk

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6mEpC0yAN2w

Our two days running about town were a ton of fun. I hope you enjoy the videos.

Freshly added to our website is the new Bookmarks page.

The page shows our latest links, images and videos pulled off the web. This is kind of a media stream of the things we are looking at in the office. We use Tumblr for the feed management, so if you are a Tumblr user already, you can “follow” us or “reblog” from our entries if you are logged in to Tumblr first. Go to the Bookmarks page on our website to check it out.

In the interview I talk a little about UltraSuperNew Inc., what makes Tokyo such an amazing place to work and some of the differences between the market in Japan and in the west.

Some important new features of the new site are the project listing and schedule pages … now you can actually see what why we are always saying we are so busy. The lists will be filled out a little more over time so we also provided RSS feeds on just about everything so you can keep up.

Another change from the old site is that we are breaking off the UltraSuperTube party page to a site of its own. We are still in the process of finalizing that, but I will post again when it is done.

In the mean time, please check out the new site at : http://ultrasupernew.com

We were very proud of the site we released last year, but we kept wanting to get in there and make it even better. Eventually KLM gave us a little budget to go back and develop what is actually quite a substantial upgrade. It ended up taking a lot more hours than originally planned due to us getting the taste for improvements.

First thing you will notice is that the look is completely new. The great new design by Jerome, who joined the team recently. He refined the look and made the site a lot cleaner and easy to navigate as well as just getting it looking damn fine.

We have also made some serious updates to the backend underlying the site, and lead programmer, Alban, has been working tirelessly to set up a great structure and refine many of the things learned in the first build.

Other key updates

• Country level navigation
• Complete restructure of all the forms
• Extra fields in the writing pages for location name, address/info, URL
• Expansion of social features, such as friend feeds and comment feeds
• RSS feeds available on just about any content search

The site is currently only in Japanese, but if you tell KLM you really want it in other languages they might give us a budget to fast-track the multilingual roll-out.

Check out Flightclub V2 and enjoy!

First it was integrated in an invitation to an event I went along to recently. After arriving at the event and you were able to use the invitation card (about the size and thickness of a credit card with an ReacTable style amoeba shape on it) to see your fortune for the year up on a screen while moving the card about on the sensor table.

Then Ernst-Jan Pfauth from The Next Web (which I am also occasionally writing for) included a small note on it in his report on the European Music Revolution.

Basically it is based on a piece of software called ReacTIVision which is “…an open source, cross-platform computer vision framework for the fast and robust tracking of fiducial markers attached onto physical objects, as well as for multi-touch finger tracking.” It can track unique amoeba shaped images on objects via a camera and then pass on information about position, rotation and which object is being recorded on to another application.

After seeing the invitation system and then being wowed by the very cool music application linked to by Earnst-Jan …

[mikesheetal_1]WEDia3CFdfg[/mikesheetal_1]

… I had to learn some more.

After a bit of experimentation and playing about I got the system working sending data to a Flash application and manipulating that display with a visual interface. The data itself is very interesting and I am already looking at plenty of fun and interesting applications to use it for.

If anyone wants to add something extra to an event or interactive space, let me know. This is fun, exciting and impressive technology.