Fight llc, a digital strategy firm based in Portland Oregon, is proud to announce that Operation Switch, an energy efficiency project developed in collaboration with our client Portland General Electric, has been awarded the Public Affairs Council’s annual Grassroots Corporate Innovation Award.

Fight partnered with PGE in creating “Operation Switch” to achieve the company’s goal of moving customers beyond awareness of energy saving issues and into making real change. Key to this program was showing that even little changes, when done by a lot of people, can make a big difference in Oregon’s energy future.

The Award
First presented by The Public Affairs Council in 2000, the Grassroots Innovation Awards recognize the nation’s best grassroots programs and campaigns. Award categories include:

1. Corporate Innovation
2. Association Innovation
3. Social Media Innovation

The Operation Switch program won in the Corporate Innovation category. Last year’s winner in the Corporate category was split between Target and Walmart.

Operation Switch
Operation Switch is an online experiment from Portland General Electric that asked participants to make one simple change in their energy use every couple of weeks, and provided tips and support in making that change. Using a foundation of social media and basic game mechanics, Operation Switch helped PGE customers save an estimated 487,000 kWh of energy in 2010 – enough to power 41 homes for a year.

Fight llc
Fight is a digital strategy firm built from the ground up to respond to the unique challenges and opportunities the digital space provides to brands of all kinds. Unbound by the need to fit ideas into specific executional capabilities, our core focus is on developing strategic plans designed to meet our clients’ business goals; plans that are forward thinking, measurable, adaptable, and designed to articulate a client’s unique value clearly to their customers.

Portland General Electric
Portland General Electric, headquartered in Portland, Ore., is a fully integrated electric utility that serves approximately 822,000 residential, commercial and industrial customers in Oregon. Visit our website at PortlandGeneral.com.

Prototyping is a way of testing that allows you to see how people respond to something so that you can make it even better. Google’s AdWords  is normally used just as a pure advertising channel but Timothy Ferriss, a writer and entrepreneur,  decided that for his new book he was going to use AdWords as a way to test new titles for a book he was working on.

He took 6 prospective titles that everyone could live with:  including ‘Broadband and White Sand’, ‘Millionaire Chameleon’ and ‘The 4-Hour Workweek’ and developed an Google Adwords campaign for each.  He bid on keywords related to the book’s content including ‘401k’ and ‘language learning’: when those keywords formed part of someone’s search on Google the prospective title popped up as a headline and the advertisement text would be the subtitle.  Ferriss was interested to see which of the sponsored links would be clicked on most, knowing that he needed his title to compete with over 200,000 books published in the US each year.  At the end of the week, for less than $200 he knew that “The 4-Hour Workweek” had the best click-through rate by far and he went with that title.

A fantastic way of using the tools that are out there in creative ways, read the full story here.

The trend in bike helmet design has been pretty straight forward, make it lighter, make it stronger. Which ment add more vents and improve the impact absorption. This kind of thinking yields incremental improvements, so how do you make a leap forward?

Rethink what a helmets purpose is, and work from there.

The Hövding is an airbag for your head. Mounted in a bulky collar, which can be disguised as a stylish scarf, the bag explodes on when you crash and surrounds your delicate melon with an inflated hood.

The collar contains the bag itself, helium to inflate the airbag and sensors which tell the Hövding when to fire. The sensor unit consists of gyroscopes and accelerometers which constantly monitor movement and deploy to bag when you’re in danger. The Chieftain is charged by USB (firmware can also be updated via the same port) and you switch it on by zipping the collar shut around your neck.

This is good and all, but before there is any value behind Apps on the AppleTV people are going to have to start creating Apps that are not driven by touch.. or someone needs to figure out how to turn my tv into a touch tv.

IOS hacker p0sixninja, aka Joshua Hill, has jailbroken the new AppleTV. To do it, he used an unreleased version of the tool greenpois0n, an exploit designed to crack iOS version 4.1.

The v2 AppleTV runs on the same iOS that Apple uses for all its mobile devices, and shares the custom A4 chip used in the iPhone 4, the iPad and the latest iPod Touch. Greenpois0n, like other jailbreak exploits, hacks the operating system to give the user access to the file system, and from there the ability to install third-party applications.

Read More [ On Wired ]

Each morning I like to take a peek and see what is trending on Twitter, today all the talk is about the PSAT’s. Which is interesting because often when talking about the Twitter demographic we find that it skews older, or at least older then the people who are typically taking the PSAT.

So either the youth are using Twitter more and represent a rapidly growing demographic or those that do use Twitter partake in the trending topics games more then others.

Check it out for yourself.

Want a fun free app that is focused on blending photo-sharing and social networks on your iPhone? Enter Instagram

Snap a photo with your iPhone, choose a filter to transform the look and feel, send to Facebook, Twitter or Flickr – it’s all as easy as pie. It’s photo sharing, reinvented.

The big question for me, ‘Why didn’t a company like Nikon or Canon make this app?’
Oh and yes it has a ton of great filters and options.

If you do download it, be sure to friend me.

Your business might not have figured out how to make money using mobile devices as a way to drive sales, but Amazon has. In fact they reported that they saw more then one billion ( one plus nine zeros ) dollars in sales from it.

Amazon has seen more than $1 billion in sales from mobile devices over the last year, the company said during its second-quarter earnings announcement.

So what about all of you? Are you making Amazon purchases from your smartphone?

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