Friday: Toshiba celebrates 25 years of laptop development with two great new products. The Portégé R700 and the Libretto W100. Both outstanding products, the R700 features new Intel cooling technology allowing a fully featured Core family processor to be placed in a very light, very thin, laptop. And the W100 certainly has everyone talking with it’s dual screen.

The Upper Storey developed the pan-SEA campaign mainly executed through Print. However a key component was digital activation online and through a new innovative POS initiative. I will post the material as it goes live around Asia, and we’ll post a special edition about this retail idea.

Even before we get the time to send out a post on Tech Therapy, POPSOP has already done a pretty good review. This campaign is still in soft launch as we have only shared to a small group. Videos are starting to pop up everywhere (Vidz, Scary Ideas, Daily Motion, Kewego, Viddler, Guba, …. ), mostly uploaded to their own server, some re-branded and some crediting the wrong agency (again), but as we know we cant control these things.

We will post a more complete background for this campaign soon.

This year I have been asked to help judge the DMA awards for 2010. This is a great opportunity to see some of the best work in Asia, and get some insight from fellow judges on how they perceive the work. So I am very happy to do it, although it is not something I have done since my days back in London when I was part of BIMA. Of course we hope to enter a few things too. At the DMA’s last year we won Gold and Silver (Dell and Intel) and helped Intel & Dell win joint Digital Brands of the year.

Microsoft announced the general availability of Office 2010 in Singapore with the 2010 IDEA JAM launch party, at *Scape Youth Park.

The 2010 IDEA JAM, an launch idea that was developed from the best launch idea crowd-sourced from more than 5,000 fans on the Facebook page “Office 2010 SG Insiders”. It was a celebration of local alternative art and music, creative ideas that were made better with Office 2010. Rock acts Jack & Rai, 53A, and DJ Perk (Pietrek) used Excel 2010 to visualize their music.

The winners of the evening’s Demo Challenge also won themselves the first retail copies of Office 2010, autographed by Steve Ballmer.

The event was executed by a local Singaporean event company.

The Upper Storey has launched a new campaign for Microsoft Singapore to help promote the key features of Internet Explorer 8. The campaign called ‘MysterIE8 Ball’ allows users to receive fun messages to foretell their future, and to potentially win cash and partner prizes.

Utilising a new, specially designed Web Slice, a user can shake the MysterIE8 Ball daily to win cash and prizes. In addition, the campaign will help showcase content Web Slices from Zuji and Golden Village, and Zuji travel vouchers and Golden Village tickets will be available for winners daily.

For details on how this program uses a partnership strategy to help business KPI’s, give me a call and I will run through the approach.

Intel was announced a winner for ‘corporate reputation & professional services’ at the recent worldwide Effie awards. The award was given for the ‘Sponsors of Tomorrow’ campaign.

And graciously they acknowledged all their global agency partners help in bringing the campaign to life.

• Venables Bell & Partners
• Tag Worldwide
• OMD
• The Upper Storey Pte Ltd
• Bates 141 HK

For us it was great fun to put together the ‘rockstar viral’ work for India.

I have just finished moderating the talk “Digital Hybrid- The Future of Agency Evolvement” at ad:tech Singapore. Attendance at the event overall was good. With probably 600 to 700 people at the keynote speeches. However all panel discussions were not so well attended. It seems people are keen to hear more about indepth case studies and/or different topics.

Maybe ad:tech should crowdsource the topics for next years conference, and maybe even nominate who they want to see speaking.

Overall however the audience seemed quite interested in hearing about ‘the agency of the future’. So a big thanks to Haresh, Sally, Calvin & Anand for their insights.

At The Upper Storey we like to strive for new thinking and new ways of doing things. This is not confined to ‘digital’ or to ‘creative’ – but across everything we do. We hope (we strive) to make sure our strategy is fresh, that our technology pushes boundaries and, of course, make our ideas very new.

So it is natural that we might be considered a Non-Traditional agency, and it’s a tag we are very happy keep.

For those of you who have come via a new print ad in the Marketing Agency of the Year 2010 annual edition, please look around and get to know us better.

And to see our latest work contact me (euan.wilcox@upperstorey.com) so I can show it to you in it’s full glory.

Thank you.

Intel’s Jeffrey the Robot, recently featured in a 2010 Superbowl commercial, was scripted in as one of the (minor) characters in an upcoming site we are developing. As the original Jeffrey is an actual puppet, which was unfeasible for our purposes, a three-dimensional digital version had to be created by The Upper Storey’s animation arm, Mofuro.

With the aid of reference images of Jeffrey, taken in various angles, we were able to create a faithful reproduction of the puppet. Modelling was done in Autodesk Maya, textures and mental ray shaders were developed for ‘coloring’ Jeffrey.

For the putting Jeffrey through his motions, we setup an animation rig that allows him to have a range of expressions in facial and body language.

If you own a pair of red/blue 3D/stereoscopic glasses, you can see these anaglyph images of Jeffrey in stereo format. So go on, have a look.

Jeffrey Test Animation Click to see Jeffery in action.