Zaadz – another new community in pre-beta mode

There is a new myspace-linkedin-like site up called zaadz They are still in pre-Beta mode. Honestly: pre-Beta? What exactly does that mean for me?

And this what that site is all about:

Our Mission. That’s easy. We’re gonna change the world. […] The quick version of what we’re gonna do: build THE most inspired community of people in the world… Imagine social networking with a purpose, a community of seekers and conscious entrepreneurs circulating wisdom and inspiration and wealth and all that good stuff. Fun fun fun.

Somehow all of this sounds very ambitious. Almost too big. And like they’re playing in a competition where many other communities already gained ground.

Google Maps and Heineken hooked up in a new advergame

Another campaign utilizing Google Maps: Heineken hooks up with Google Maps for Tapvat World Tour 2006.

In this microsite visitors are supposed to search the world for gigs from Dutch live band Voicst using Google’s satellite images. All within a certain timeframe while a radio signal leads you to the right spot.

The game is intuitive enough, which is good as I don’t speak any dutch. At the end I found the spot (why would the want to have a gig there?), but I didn’t understand what they wanted my address details for – surely it was for some kind of sweepstake, but who knows what else I might have signed up for?

Try it out, it’s interesting and kept me busy for quite a few minutes (I had to try twice to find the spot – and it’s of course in a different place every time).

New iPod Ad visible from outerspace? Or just a normal thing first seen on Google?

boakes.org apparently broke the news: Steve Jobs, the incredible Steve, won an abandoned mineral mine in remote western Australia during a poker game – and has nothing better to do than to build a giant iPod ad on it.
An ad that can be seen from outer space, as even adrants reports (err, quotes). If you look on technorati, you can find lots of posts on this matter – it’s the new Apple story, apparently. OK, it’s for the 30th birthday of Apple, fair enough. They might as well go big.

Yet, according to all the blogs I read sofar, I was probably the only one not zooming in on to the iPod, but zooming out to check out the area around it.

And while I like this story a lot, I couldn’t help myself noticing, that Steve Jobs is indeed building two iPod ads rather close to each other!! I suppose one is for the iPod video while the other one is for, well, any of the other iPods. It’s not finished yet, so it’s difficult to tell.

See for yourself:

You can find it here on Google Local.

(On second throught – what if these square areas are just something unusual that australian miners … no, let the story continue.)