Devised by London-based agency Dare Digital, the Vodafone Live Guy campaign has been designed to promote Vodafone’s rather nifty new Dell Inspiron Mini netbook.  This absolutely tiny laptop features a built-in 3G SIM, meaning as long as you can get a Vodafone signal you’re online.

The campaign sees Live Guy traveling to a different UK city every day.  He tweets hints at his current location and a time-delayed GPS signal shows his rough location.  The first person to find him at each of three locations in each city wins a netbook.

During his visit to Manchester today I caught up with Live Guy and interviewed him twice; once for the video below and then again for the next edition of the 14sandwiches podcast, out soon.  The podcast interview goes into some of the background to the campaign and why Dare Digital decided to go down the Social Media route.  For now though, enjoy an introduction to Live Guy and his epic journey around the UK.

14sandwiches.com meets… Vodafone Live Guy from Martin Bryant on Vimeo.

More fascinating than the speed at which we’ve adopted USB flash drives, though, is the vast range of names people give them.  While ‘USB flash drive’ is probably the most accurate, here are some of the other names I’ve heard people give theirs…

Memory Stick: This is the name I hear most frequently and one that causes quite a bit of confusion.  Sony’s propritary Memory Stick format seems to have developed ‘Hoover’ levels of generic use.  If someone says to me” can you take some photos off my memory stick” I shake my head thinking they must be rampant Sony fanboys.

Pen Drive: This was the first name I ever heard referring to our friendly USB companions and the name I find myself using most frequently.  I suppose they are roughly pen-shaped and they are drives, so at least it’s accurate, if a little odd.  I’d like to see one that actually did have a pen on the end -

Thumb Drive: Similar to ‘Pen Drive’, this name bears some relation to the object’s shape.  Like Memory Stick, it’s actually a brand name too.  It’d be better if you could keep data in your actual thumb though.  In a time when you can put a chip in your arm to unlock doors it’s got to be in the realms of possibility to store data in your body.  The ultimate in data security – if they want it they’ll have to kill you first!

Key: Now this is just silly.  Unlike the aforementioned chip-in-the-arm, a USB Flash Drive doesn’t open doors.  I’m sure the Chinese are working on it though.

Dongle: Just as a flash drive is not a key, it’s not a dongle either.  Still, ‘dongle’ is a nice word.  Maybe we could call it a ‘dingle’ instead.  “Stick your dingle in my slot” people would say and oh how we’d laugh!

Stub: Stub? Stub?!  That makes no sense at all!  Still, similar to a ‘thumb drive’ maybe you could stick some data storage in your toe?  It’d bring a whole new meaning to ’stubbing your toe’.

I’m sure I’ve heard more names over the years – if you can think of any more leave them in the comments!

[Image credit: Scott Beale / Laughing Squid]

If the scientists are wrong and the girls are right and the world does end tomorrow it might not be a bad thing anyway.  Here are some of the things to be cheerful about in the fraction of a second it takes for the that black hole to suck you into oblivion:

1. We might be sucked into an alternative dimension

No-one knows exactly what happens when you go through a black hole.  Maybe we’ll end up in an alternative dimension; one where there’s no poverty, one where we all live in peace and one where Apple actually released some decent new products at their ‘Let’s Rock’ event today (iTunes Genius? Just a glorified recommendations engine geared up for selling more music through the Music Store).

2. We’ll be spared Google’s Orwellian future

Now they’ve got their own browser they can find out everything about what we do online, they can take photos of us in our houses (’unintentionally’, so they say) with Streetview and they want all the world’s information.  It can only be a matter of time before they get it and the US government nationalises Google to bring all that information into their own hands.  Then we’re all doomed.

3. MTV won’t make any more programmes. Ever.

Flavor of Love, A Shot At Love with Tila Tequila, My Super Sweet 16…  All braindead ‘youth entertainment’ formats will cease to exist – come friendly black hole and destroy us all now!

4. The end of Lost won’t be disappointing.

With two seasons left, Lost has fans on the edge of their seats.  How will they explain the polar bears, teleportation and time travel?  If it all ends tomorrow we’ll never have to put up with the inevitably disappointing, contrived conclusion.

I’m sure there are many more reasons to be cheerful.  Feel free to add yours in the comments…

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The main complaints about this advert have been that it says nothing about Microsoft’s products and that the only thing it can possibly say about their brand is that Microsoft seem to be associating themselves with cheap shoes.  So, is that all there is to it, or could they actually be onto a winner here?

Let’s face it, the ad is only the first in what’s sure to be a long series.  As the first episode, all it needs to do is set the tone for what’s to follow (a kind of Seinfeld / Curb Your Enthusiasm-type thing, unsurprisingly) and introduce the relationship between Seinfeld and Gates.  It does that with wit and humour and that’s all that’s needed.

Only one person seems to agree with me that this might be worth giving a chance, and that’s Chris Baskind.  The ad might not scream “Vista is better than OSX! Buy a Zune!” but it does make you want to see the next ad in the series.  In fact, thay’ve even stated that the first ad is simply there to “engage consumers spark conversation”.  That’s all it set out to do and it’s certainly succeeded.  The rest of the series might turn out to be absolute rubbish, but let’s give them a chance.  At least they’re trying to stop looking like the most boring company on the block.

Recently though I’ve found myself feeling like Apple’s holding me back.  They’re letting me crawl along in dumb luxury when I should be able to run with their products.  They have indeed cut my legs off.  Of course, Steve Jobs hasn’t been round to see me with a sword and mutilated the bottom half of my body, but sometimes it feels like he has.  I feel like this in two distinct ways that actually contradict each other.

1. There are things I can’t do with Apple products that I really should be able to.

- Why can’t I send an MMS from my iPhone?  Why can’t I even receive an MMS?  Come on Apple, the public has been crying out for this basic feature since the first iPhone over a year ago.  It’s not even like it’s a difficult thing to implement!  They’re cutting my legs off.

- Why can’t I capture video with my iPhone when the camera and operating system can easily handle it?  Qik and Flixwagon for jailbroken iPhones show its easy if you just allow developers access to the right bits of the phone.  They’re crippling their own product and cutting my legs off!

- If I buy an album on iTunes I can burn it to CD without a problem.  How come I can’t burn a film bought on iTunes onto DVD?  The only way of watching a film bought on iTunes on your TV is by spending £200 on an AppleTV box.  That’ll only work with an HD-ready TV so that’s another £400-ish in order to watch a film on TV.  Apple have therefore cut my legs off.  It is of course the MPAA and other stuck-in-that-past rights-holding organisations that stop Apple offer DVD burning (even though DRM could easily limit the number of DVD burns and even stop the DVD itself being copied afterwards).  Still, by making the only solution a £200 set-top box (that doesn’t even work with all TVs) they’re cutting my legs off, spitting on me and laughing in my face.

2. Once you’re with Apple it’s hard to leave.

In the examples above, Apple have made it difficult to truly ‘run’ with a device’s true capabilities.  On the other side of the coin, Apple are also cutting off their users’ legs by making the Apple ecosystem so good (problems I’ve mentioned aside).  Very few people who try OSX ever want to go back to Windows.  That’s simply because it makes many tasks a lot easier and more fun.  Try an everyday task like burning a data DVD natively in Windows and you’ll tear your hair out until you buy a 3rd party product.  Compare that to how simple it is in OSX.  Then there’s the iPhone 3G, the best web browsing and email-handling device I’ve ever used despite its drawbacks.  In this case Apple have cut my legs off and I’ve willingly laid back and thought of England until the hacking was complete.

So, if you’re an Apple user you have no legs – whether you’re happy about it or not depends on your point of view.

[Image credit: Atomicshark on Flickr]