Rent-a-Country

Retraction: Upon request of the Rent A Village events company, Ideasspotter would like to advise that they no longer offer Liechtenstein on their books. However they continue to host their ‘Rent A Village’ event marketing format for corporate clients. Please continue to read the article below and imagine how great a service it would have been should it have come to fruition. Or get out there and do it, we’ll spot it right here if you can.

Who would have thought. Rent A Village, a company offering well, the rental of villages. Available for your conference or holiday needs. Rent A Village offers a village wide stay for your trip. You get the key to the village upon arrival, the opportunity to rename street names (branding galore), hold a gala in a cowshed, house your guests individually at the village’s country homes, or take a torchlight country romp. All with a nice little DVD souvenir of the experience upon departure.

And Rent A Village has recently acquired Liechtenstein, yes, you can now rent Liechtenstein and do your bidding with it as above, for USD70,000 per night.

For that price, you can house and cater the country for 150 guests. The current 35,000 inhabitants though, would remain.

Options on the Liechtenstein rental include, your logo created out of candle wax, a customised medieval procession, a wine tasting at Prince Hans-Adam II’s estate, tobogganing, fireworks, horse-drawn carriage rides, cross-country skiing and more.

That’s certainly a few up from that luxury yacht you’ve been dreaming about.

Run by Xnet, Rent A Village and it’s managing company are lauded over by Airbnb. And with an additional 10 locations (villages, not countries…yet) on their book they seem to be providing a very intriguing source of income for the less urbane areas that seem to be going out of fashion in an urban-focused world.

Not to mention the thrill they’re giving large expense accounts at the prospect of owning a country if only for a weekend romp. Hyundai and Siemens are fans.

Crowdsourcing a Concert

Ever been to a concert and they didn’t play any of your favourites?

Ok, so if you bothered to buy a ticket, you’re probably a fan, and they probably played the songs the fans like best.

But what if you could control the songlist order? Or which band member who got the spotlight most? Or what flashes of videos were projected across the stage?

For UMBowl II, Umphrey McGee‘s concert, you could. A text-based voting system enabled the audience to choose exactly these variables.

Founded in 1997, Umphrey McGee has been looking towards a more innovative way of fan involvement for a whilst since. For their record ‘Mantis’ they requested pre-orders, the premise being that the more orders they got, the more content they would produce. More songs, more bonus content, live tracks, alternate takes, fly-on-the-wall studio visits.

UMBowl II ended up being a sold out show. The ‘Choose Your Own Adventure’ experience, tallied real-time on the night itself packed out Park West, Chicago, Illinois on April 2nd. And those who couldn’t score a ticket were able to purchase live streaming of the concert on iClips for $9.99.

More on this and upcoming UMBowl experiences here.

Crowdsourcing Wireless Coverage

One wonders on the extensive market research that goes into those largess carrier claims, “Best Coverage Worldwide” being a biggie. But here’s a company looking to take that wonder away and put some real-time data into our hands and pockets. RootMetrics. RootMetrics downloads as an app onto your iPhone or Android and runs in the background of your calls and data signals to crowdsource the performance data of wireless networks. Data that culminates in what RootMetrics call a ‘RootScore’, enabling users and mobile carrier customers to gauge which carrier suits them best. The RootScore gives consumers insight into many aspects of mobile coverage not usually available upon mobile carrier signup. Consumers can see what kind of coverage they’ll get at specific street intersections, how much time it takes to download a 2MB file or even how much time it takes to upload a snapped photo. The data is also mapped in a RootMetrics heat map, showing network performance in bright green (strong signals), red (poor), and black (little to none). At the moment the app is available for US users, and you can view and participate in RootScores across 22 cities. All available online or on the nifty little app that works with and for you.

E-cigarettes go Social

Blu Cigs in particular. Lighting up these ‘electronic’ cigarettes now not only results in zero second-hand fumes but alerts your fellow E-cig smokers to your presence. And checks you into Facebook and Foursquare to boot. Currently under testing, these ‘Smart Packs’ glow blue when a Blu Cig peer is within 50 foot or your own ‘vaping’ (not smoking) self. You’ll be able to set parameters, ranging from “leave me alone to I’m single to I want a drinking buddy all the way to please date me”, founder Jason Healy tells Fast Company. And once you get home, you can link your Blu Cig Smart Pack up to your computer to keep track of all those other Smart Packs you’ve been hanging out with. Spot those individuals on all the social networks, and clean up your own profile that’s synced to your very social Smart Pack. That’s a way to battle the biggies RJ Reynolds and Philip Morris in the digital social age. Set to release in June the Smart Pack is a step in innovation for the e-cigarette company. However crass the sentiment may initially have been. Healy has also been quoted as saying “it’s almost like a little wing man…doing all the talking for you because you’re too chicken-shit to do it yourself.”  

Photosynth

A free app from Microsoft, meet Photosynth. With a sweep of your smartphone you can now record your entire surroundings, which then gets uploaded to the Bing servers and gives the world access to an instant 3D environment of the given location. It also gets sent out to your community via that Facebook integration we’ve all come to know so well. Google Maps has been the map of choice for an online world. So one can assume that ways of innovation around this are the direction Microsoft are coming from in this initiative. An initiative that could lift Bing into a map space we could reference for a more detailed version of the world around us aside from directions and a street view. The use of the people as a resource also poses an interesting thought. Get the masses to stitch the world around them together for you through the guise of ‘sharing’ with one’s networks. Using this mashup of Micrsoft’s Virtual Earth maps system and it’s PhotoSynth technology we could be seeing substantial 360 degree views inside and outside the world around us.