Yahoo unveiled some  big changes to Flickr on Monday, both in terms of features and overall design. One of those changes is that free users are no longer limited to a certain number of photos; instead, everyone gets 1TB of space for their full-resolution photos.

With that change comes an end to what used to be the biggest difference between free Flickr accounts and Flickr Pro. As it turns out, that’s by design. In addition to lifting the previous upload and storage limits, Flickr is quietly discontinuing its Flickr Pro accounts (existing Pro users can continue to use Flickr Pro) and shifting to a different type of upgrade model.

If you’re an existing Flickr Pro user, the new changes might be confusing.

• Which Flickr Pro features are now available for free?

The biggest advantage of Flickr Pro was that more than 200 photos were viewable in a photostream, users could only upload 100MB of photos a week and photos were not displayed in full resolution.

With the new Flickr, free users now get 1TB of photo uploads, and the maximum photo size is now 200MB (it was 10MB for free users before). What’s more, all users can create collections, post to up to 60 group pools and limit the maximum image size available to others.

Free users can also upload full HD videos up to 1GB each, with playback of three minutes.

• Which features are still limited to Flickr Pro?

The old Flickr Pro accounts included unlimited storage space, and that means it can exceed 1TB.

Flickr Pro users also get to view view counts and referrer statistics for their images. Lots of professionals often like this feature because it shows where a photo has been used or linked across the web.

Flickr Pro users can replace photos (without having to reupload), archive high-resolution original images and enjoy an ad-free experience.

In addition to unlimited storage and bandwidth, Flickr Pro members will be able to take advantage of the new upload limits. That means that photos can now be up to 200MB in size and 1GB per video.

• Can I buy a new Flickr Pro account now?

No. Flickr Pro accounts stopped being sold as of May 20, 2013. Existing Flickr Pro users can continue to use the service or migrate to a free account.

• Can I still keep my Flickr Pro Account?

Yes. Last year, Flickr migrated all Flickr Pro accounts into recurring accounts. As long as your account is by way of a recurring subscription (currently quarterly, yearly or for two years), you can continue to renew your account once it expires.

If your Flickr Pro account was the result of a gift certificate, it’s possible that because it is not recurring, it and its benefits will end once it expires.

• How long can I Keep my Pro account active?

We asked Flickr how long Flickr Pro users would be able to continue to renew their accounts and were told, “There are no plans for Pro renewals to go away.”

Renewal rates will also remain the same as they are now.

• What happens if I convert to a Free Account?

Certain Flickr Pro members have the option to switch to a free account by Aug. 20, 2013.

Switching to a free account will give users a pro-rated refund for their current Flickr Pro membership. While users will continue to have the ability to upload photos up to 200MB in size and videos up to 1GB in size, other features such as replacing photos and the ability to look up referrals and statistics will also disappear.

Users will also get ads in their experience.

For users that want to migrate to a free account, you can do so by visiting Flickr.com/Pro, clicking “learn more” and then making your choice.

• What are the new upgrade options?

Flickr Pro is going away, but Flickr will still offer upgrades for users.

For $49.99 a year, users can remove ads from the Flickr experience. This doesn’t add any other features; it just removes ads.

It’s worth noting that $49.99 a year is twice what a Flickr Pro membership used to cost.

For $499.99 a year, users can double their Flickr capacity and bring it all the way up to 2TB. Yeah — $500 for another terabyte of storage.

Frankly, if you need more than 1TB of photo storage, we think you’re better off either looking at a customized Amazon S3-based solution or at other photo hosts such as SmugMug or 500px

• Flickr Pro Users, Will You Stay?

Flickr Pro users, let us know what you think of the new changes to Flickr plans. Will you stay a Pro user, migrate to a free account or are you looking at Flickr alternatives? Tell us in the comments.

Data sourced from www.mashable.com

The UEFA Champions League has long proved to be an effective platform for marketing to the masses through TV. For this year’s final between German rivals Bayern Munich and Borussia Dortmund, the likes of Adidas, Heineken and Jaguar are looking beyond traditional media to real-time marketing and co-creation to maximise the competition’s growing global reach.

Champions League brands are looking to co-create experiences with fans around the all-German final.

The global audience for Saturday’s final (25 May) is expected to top 300 million, outstripping the Super Bowl, making it a huge draw for brands. Governing body UEFA expects to generate €1.3bn (£1.1bn) in commercial revenues from this season’s tournament and the Super Cup, a 42 per cent increase on last year’s €754.1m (£638m).

It is understood several brands will pay ITV up to £250,000 for a Champions League final ad slot, a 65 per cent increase on the average price, with the broadcaster expecting to gain around £8m in revenues from its coverage.

Away from TV, media and sponsorship experts predict social media will play a major component in non-sponsors marketing activity around the match as they look to replicate the impact of Oreo’s reaction to the Super Bowl blackout.

Adidas will assemble a team of marketers, artists and agency members to create campaigns in response to events during Saturday’s match at Wembley. The sportswear maker is hoping the move will elevate its promotions above those non-sponsors looking to hijack the event.

Long-time sponsor Heineken has changed activation activity to reflect an age where sharing has become a core part of the event experience. This season, the beer brand is taking the Champions League Trophy on a global tour with fans able to share picture and videos of themselves around each location. The brewer is using the content in its ‘Road to the Final’ online campaign.

It also used Dutch legend Clarence Seedorf to tweet from its account during last month’s semi-final matches.

Jaguar is attempting to increase its chances of success by also tapping dual-screening technology activity to build buzz around its TV spots during the game. The car marque is partnering with mobile app Shazam to allow customers to explore its latest F-Type sports car and win the chance to test drive it.

Gordon Lott, former London 2012 Olympic marketer and managing director of Havas Sport & Entertainment, says: “With the media space becoming more fragmented and fans sharing branded content far more readily, Champions League sponsors are learning to be less restrictive on how its used. It’s not a question of ad spend increasing to drive reach but how innovative you can be with technology to drive social activity around the game.”

Data sourced from www.marketingweek.co.uk

Facebook has started rolling out it’s new emoticon and ‘what are you doing’ status update feature in the UK.

Next time you go to post an update you’ll see a smiley-face icon pop up. From here, you can tell Facebook how you’re feeling, or choose from a handful of options such as, watching, reading, or eating. You can then tag on a myriad of products and most importantly brands. Sharing a beer with your friends at a festival? You can now accurately tag your entire moment in a status update.

This new feature may seem a tad juvenile, however behind the scenes Facebook has made a mature compromise about the direction of their business. They are risking annoying a few users with this new feature all to increase revenue from marketers. What Facebook really cares about is what you are doing, what’s trending and importantly what your interests are. Facebook and advertisers will now be able to get a much more concrete idea of what users are doing and interested in, beyond the “Like.” All to serve you highly-targeted adverts.

One of Twitter’s most profitable features has been through #hashtags, which have given advertisers a window into what each of us likes, hates and buys. Facebook’s new feature aims to mimic this but whilst hashtags have been a core-component of the micro-blogging platform, these new updates could start to clog up for your newsfeed very quickly. Tagging a brand into an update also adds their logo and a link to their brand page directly into your status. Imagine logging into your newsfeed on a Saturday afternoon and seeing a flurry of noisy, intrusive updates.

The upshot for brands is that they’ll soon have a wealth of analytical data that they can drill into, which will hopefully lead to end-users being served highly tailored adverts. We expect to see a new set of advertising options in the next few months, once Facebook can package up all the data they are sitting on. These new updates may also help smaller brands and community pages to get noticed and more advertising options should make adverts cheaper to buy.

But in the meantime, definitely prepare yourself to see a slew of sarcastic and funny status updates hitting your newsfeed :

Written by Karel + Emilie.

Life is short and full of pain. And there’s nothing worse than being stuck in a lifeless hotel room on the most stressful business trip of your life—reports sprawled about, a calendar you can’t make sense of, an Excel chart that seems as if it’s in Chinese.

To make matters worse, your boss calls … but all you really want to do is find George Clooney’s character from Up in the Air. You probably won’t find him, but it’s OK to dream.
Thank goodness, however, that you’re staying at a Kimpton Hotel, the boutique hotel chain whose every room comes with a yoga mat. And according to this amusing spot from Portal A, it’s not just any yoga mat. It’s an unbelievably persuasive, Fabio-like yoga mat whose mission is to “make all that stress melt away.”

With “Mat,” you’ll enjoy a romantic ’70s-style montage with slow-motion sprints down the hall, shiatsu, bike rides and massages by the pool. Be careful by the pool, though—Mat isn’t exactly a strong swimmer.

After your 24-hour romance with Mat is through, he’ll even shock one of your chakras with a good laugh before bed. Let’s hope you’ve enjoyed the last 24 hours, too, because you’ll wake up and realize you got nothing done and will be back in the same situation as you were the day before.

But hey, at least you had fun, right?

Namaste.

Data sourced from www.adweek.com

Rumor has it Google will debut a subscription music service this week at its annual developer conference, Google I/O. The rumor mill intensified Tuesday after The Verge reported  that its music industry sources said Google secured licensing deals with Sony Music Entertainment and Universal Music Group for YouTube and Google Play.

Google already has Google Music, a cloud music service, that lets users upload as much as 20,000 purchased songs (for example, their iTunes purchases) in the cloud and listen to them across their Android devices or on the web.

However, a Google subscription service with major record labels on board would put it in direct competition with existing music services, particularly streaming hotshot Spotify, which boasts 24 million monthly active users, 6 million paying subscribers and more than 20 million licensed songs in 28 countries.

Jim Cady, CEO of competing music service Slacker — which has 13 million songs and a newly redesigned look — told Mashable on Tuesday night what he anticipates Google will launch, hinting it could have limitations.

“We expect that it’s going to be platform-specific and focused on the Google ecosystem,” Cady said. “We’re huge supporters of Netflix’s belief in the power of ubiquity and we think it’s incredibly important for consumers to have access to their music across a variety of platforms and devices — whether it’s in the car, on their Sonos, Roku or iPhone.”

“We’ve seen several new players enter the space recently and we believe the growth and competition only validates the industry that we’re in,” Cady of Slacker added. “While there’s a lot of attention on on-demand listening, we’re seeing our users spending the majority of their listening time with our curated radio experience, which is a major differentiating factor for Slacker.”

Mashable has reached out to half a dozen contacts at Google, Universal Music Group and Sony Music Entertainment for any details about Google’s rumored music developments and will update this post accordingly once they respond.

One Sony Music Entertainment employee was instructed to reply, “No comment.”

Data sourced from www.mashable.com

Sending messages in bottles has been around since at least the Ancient Greeks, but it’s doubtful that anyone back then sent out a bottle quite like this. As part of a promotional campaign, Solo, a soft drink company based in Norway, recently built an 8-meter (26-foot) tall replica soda bottle outfitted with solar panels, a camera, and tracking technology and set it adrift in the ocean.

When Solo wanted to run a contest involving a sea-worthy bottle, it enlisted Bård Eker, co-owner of several vehicle design companies, to handle the construction. The finished product, which was completed after several months of work, measures 2.5 meters (8 feet) in diameter, weighs 2,500 kilograms (2.7 tons), and is even registered and insured as a boat.

Solo towed the bottle off the coast of Tenerife in the Canary Islands and left it at the mercy of the currents. Inside the bottle is a case of Solo and a 12 square meter (129 square foot) letter in various languages explaining that whoever finds the giant bottle wins a finders party in the nearest town and lists a phone number to call. The company also set up a website where users can post their guess as to where they think the bottle will eventually land, with a correct guess winning one real bottle of Solo for each nautical mile the oversized one travels.

As you might imagine, you can’t just dump a giant bottle into the ocean – at least not publicly – without taking a few legal precautions first. Solo consulted shipping insurance companies, ocean researchers, and marine biologists to ensure that the vessel fit the proper requirements for a drifting object in international waters.

As such, the enormous bottle is equipped with navigation lights, an Automatic Identification System, a radar reflector, and GPS tracking technology, all powered through solar panels on the top. It also has a customized camera that is programmed to tweet a 360-degree panorama every eight hours and is outfitted with nozzles that clear the lenses with fresh water from an onboard tank.

In a released statement, Solo CEO, Joakim Sande joked, “Hopefully we will not end up breaking Captain Brown’s record for the oldest message in a bottle – it roamed the sea for 97 years and 309 days.”

Data sourced from www.gizmag.com

To promote the launch of the new Puma Sync Fragrances, the company has created the Puma ‘Dance Dictionary’, which encrypts words into dance moves.

Users are invited to create a message, with every word then converted into a unique dance move and edited together to form a whole sentence.

This video can then be shared on social networks or e-mailed directly.

The project featured freestyle dancers including Storyboard P, King Charles, PacMan, Ron Myles AKA Prime Tyme and Krumpers Big Mijo, Outrage and Worm and A-List Choreographer, Super Dave; with a music video for the track directed by Daniel Wolf.

The Dance Dictionary is also set to feature in a TV commercial across Europe.

Data sourced from www.thedrum.com

Johnson & Johnson in the USA created a photo-sharing app that donated $1 to a cause each time a photo was shared.

The Donate a Photo app lets users attach a cause from a curated list to a photo in their phones. After selecting a photo and a cause, the app attaches an overlay highlighting the chosen cause, one reads ‘This photo helped a new-born to breathe’.

Integrated with Twitter and Facebook, each photo shared triggers Johnson & Johnson to donate $1 to the chosen cause. Each person can send one photo per day and all the photos shared are entered into an online Donate a Photo gallery, allowing them to be used throughout the campaign.

So far 4,933 photos have been shared, raising $4,933.

Contagious Insight

This campaign taps directly into something many of us do every day – share photos online. According to recent stats, 300 million photos are uploaded to Facebook each day, a clear indication as to the scale of our obsession with photography. If the brand can harness even a tiny percentage of this audience, then the campaign stands to raise a significant chunk of cash for charities across the world.

There are a couple of shortfalls, though. Firstly, why aren’t people given the opportunity to upload to Instagram? The photo-sharing network has over 100 million users and receives around 40 million uploads per day, so would it not make sense to incorporate this audience? Additionally, it’s a shame that the names of the charities haven’t been embedded in the photos – this could have been a useful way to raise further awareness of the causes, and the companies behind them.

www.donateaphoto.com

This story originally appeared on Contagious Feed.

Created via agency Deutsch, Los Angeles, the 1,600-square-foot installation is made up of interlocking 4-by-8 panels that were fitted together in just 54 hours to create an open-plan house, as well as a patio and lawn area that will show off the line. There are somewhere between 3,500 and 4,000 products on display in the house, everything from towels to lamps to throw pillows, and each one, other than a couch, a dining room table and a headboard, are for sale by Target.

Kelli Frazer, senior VP-executive producer for the experiential group at Deutsch, said the house is “designed for exploration” for the more than 500,000 people who visit the Terminal daily for commuting, shopping and dining. There are “guest interactions” scattered throughout the house — for example, in the bathrooms, there are makeovers being offered — and staff members inside the house are on hand to show off products and encourage people to touch them and use them. The project coincides with the Terminal’s centennial celebration, which is sponsored by Target.

Daniel Chu, executive VP-experiential creative director at Deutsch, said the brief was to create a pop-up that would meld fantasy and reality together. “Target is about the balance of the thrill of expecting more, and the reality of paying less,” he said. “We wanted to take these two brands, Grand Central and Target, and look at them as connectors of fantasy and reality.”

Ms. Frazer said that while for other campaigns, the team often goes through multiple rounds of ideas, this was a “butterfly moment” when they landed on the concept of a dollhouse. To tease the dollhouse, the agency placed moving boxes on the ramp at Vanderbilt Hall, as well as signage that will indicate what people can look forward to.

There will, be a photo station for guests to take a picture to capture the dollhouse and share it on social media. iPad photo frames in the house’s living room and bedroom will feature photos taken throughout the day, while a “design inspired scavenger hunt” with select bloggers will be hosted inside the house as well.

Data sourced from www.adage.com

We attended Saleforce.com’s latest marketing expo at Excel in London last week. They brought together a number of their partners and solutions but what really was of interest to us were the afternoon social media break-out sessions. We were expecting to see big things from the lead-generation/management website, especially considering that Salesforce.com bought social media listening tool Radian6 last year (TechCrunch).

One of the best pieces of activity that we heard more about was ASOS’s Christmas campaign #BestNightEver. The online fashion retailer used Radian6 to run a search across the web to see which celebrities were style icons amongst twenty-somethings. Based on this research they then drew up a shortlist of artists to approach.

Whilst using social to determine what talent you choose for your campaigns isn’t particularly groundbreaking, we liked how ASOS maximised their assets to drive sales. Slick YouTube promos were shot with their chosen artists and a set of these included shoppable videos. Hovering over a video allowed you to see what outfits a celebrity was wearing and with one-click you would be taken to ASOS buy-page for that product. A nifty mechanic which made it easy for fans to be come shoppers.

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