Andrew Shorten

Following my post about UK speakers at MAX Europe, one additional session has now been confirmed - Dom O’Brien from Glue London will be speaking about Interactive Video Campaigns; one of the campaigns that Dom and the team worked on was Desktop Keeley for The Sun newspaper. So, if you want to know how they made Keeley come to life in an AIR application this session is for you. The full session description is below:

“We’ll take you through the whole process showcasing our latest work for brands such as Bacardi, The Sun newspaper, The Royal Navy and Royal Marines, Philips and Virgin Money. From idea creation; to channel planning; to doing the shoot; to post production; to building the application. We’ll aim for you to leave with a better understanding of what’s involved and what to think about when approaching campaign work.”

You can register for MAX Europe in Milan here.

Car manufacturer Fiat launched an AIR application this week that can help drivers adjust their driving style so as to improve fuel efficiency, reduce Carbon Dioxide emissions and save money on fuel.

Owners of Fiat Puntos, 500s and Bravos equipped with ‘Blue&Me‘ technology can plug a USB drive into their car, onto which data about every journey made is then stored. This data is then loaded into the eco:Drive desktop application (created using Flex and deployed using Adobe AIR) to provide the driver with an eco:Index - a measure of their driving efficiency, which considers acceleration, deceleration, gear changes and speed throughout journeys made.

Upon calculating an eco:Index, the application compares your driving style to others, provides hints and tips on how to improve your driving efficiency and advises how much money you could save by driving more efficiently.

Whilst the the ‘Blue&Me’ in-car technology was developed in conjunction with Microsoft, Fiat wanted to ensure that all their customers could make use of the eco:Drive desktop application, hence they turned to Adobe AIR to build an application that could be accessed from both Windows and Mac operating systems (and likely Linux too when we release AIR for Linux).

The application was built by digital agency AKQA in London, and as you’d expect is very nicely designed and is slick in operation.

You can get more information on eco:Drive and download the AIR application from http://www.fiat.com/ecodrive/.