Toyota is trying hard to establish a remarkable green market position with its range of  hybrid models and we may say that the brand is highly successful in in its quest so far. The latest marketing effort in that respect is the launch campaign for its newest addition to the series – the Auris Hybrid, to be seen on the roads of Europe since Q1 2011. As ever, Toyota relies on the latest digital marketing tools to enhance the message and this time the cutting edge of projection mapping comes to aid its efforts. This is just the closed audience presentation in London’s Shoreditch district, but the company promises to enhance the experience and present new surprises at the next car-show somewhere in the world. Check the official Get Your Energy Back campaign website.

The Adobe Museum of Digital Media is now live and showing digital art and innovation to the world. It’s obviously the first of its kind and the idea came from Goodby, Silverstein & Partners with the help of many known and unknown digital architects. Make sure you watch the “Making of…” video below first, as you will be mesmerized by the depth of the project right after its webpage is completely downloaded. Hey, and it’s in 3D…

Take the wheel, a.k.a. a sheet of paper, and drive the new Skoda Fabia RS straight from your chair. It’s an excellent example of augmented reality test-drive campaign that lets you immerse yourself into otherwise very simple online game. The catch is, that the developers had everything in mind, including putting your face into a branded helmet and sharing your game results, stats and photo with your Facebook friends. Afterwards you can also challenge anyone of them or just get back to the pretty old Need for Speed Check out the campaign website.

So who’s crazy enough to start shopping straight from a videoclip? It seems as there’s definitely a market niche for that as French Connection UK is demonstrating with its /most probably/ world’s first YouTube boutique called, not surprisingly, a YouTique. It was created by Poke ad agency in London and is exploiting the trend in video fashion collection presentations by taking it to a new level of functionality. FCUK has created a whole brand channel where famous /in the UK obviously/ designers and stylists are giving away precious fashion advice combined with on-model tryouts of the clothing items you’re about to buy. The trick is, you cannot obviously make the transaction straight from the video stream on YouTube, but instead you can click on an item within the video and it takes you to the respective product page at the FCUK online store, asking just for confirmation of your transaction after the shopping spree is complete. In general it’s not a big deal, apart from being the first to venture into the unknown territory of women visual shopping engines What do you think ladies?

Long time no writing and it’s time to restart /as MS does a million times a day /. Have you ever noticed any trends in the way people visualize themselves on their profile photos? Allegedly there are many, but FastCoDesign have done a great effort into turning those trends into a comprehensive an though provoking infographic. Turns out, that over 2/3 of all portraits on Facebook have been photoshopped and most of them have either a whitewall or blue sky backgrounds. The two major groups in general are divided between Self portraits and Group portraits, where users have cropped their beautiful self. Many shots are purposefully deceptive and it turns out that you can judge a lot about a certain person’s character by only the angle and tilt of its head on a profile photo. Check out the full infographic and be amazed… (via FastCoDesign)

So you enjoy tweeting from the office, but you can get fired for that. Or you’re trying to use Skype to share information with your project team or engage in a virtual conference, while the sysadmins are not really happy with that? Many large companies have found their solutions for that by developing expensive internal communication platforms or paying a lot in licenses to Microsoft or other giants. Now it can all be decided by your willingness to improve the inbound conversation and engage more and more of you workforce into one shared dimension. And the biggest surprise is that it’s coming in the form of Open Source platform from a defence giant – Lockheed Martin. Eureka Streams lets employees to engage into relevant conversations related to work issues or project while allowing them to share data, media and thoughts in real time. Almost like the ill-fated Google Wave, this tool lets multiple users to share real-time information. Unlike the Wave though, it has been tested in the last year and half by those more than 40 000 employees at Lockheed Martin and proved to be highly effective. Visit their website to learn more and make sure your developers download the SDK and play with it.

Microsoft Research are not wasting their time trying to develop something that’s already taking the online community by storm. Instead, they are making it better – much better. From what you can see in the short presentation, the Street Slide project definitely looks as a much more improved and intuitive Street View, which fascinated us when first launched by Google. Now, by combining two essentialy overlapping perspectives, it provides a whole new dimension to visual navigation and orientation, as well as a huge new marketing opportunity to countless street-based businesses and digital agencies. Street Slide basically allows you to escape the 360 degree bubble of Street View and get a multi-perspective strip view that gives you an instant snapshot of an entire street – including street numbers, local businesses labels etc. And with the ingenious “multi-slide” system by which the strip is divided you can get back into the 360-bubble view at any specific point on the strip lenght. I hope to see it implemented comercially soon enough.

Just 2 days remain for you to prepare a short clip of your daily life on camera, no matter where you live on the globe. It would then become a part of the world’s largest user-generated feature film – a documentary that would be shot in a single day by you, me and all the other crazy users of the largest video web around. “Life in a Day” project is a historic experiment, produced by YouTube and the acclaimed hollywood director Ridley Scott. Anyone can contribute to the feature with whatever content they like, as long as it’s passable by the special commission which will be screening the uploaded material. YouTube encourages everyone to be as creative as possible and imposes no limits, as long as the footage is shot in HD, so that it can be watchable on the big screen at the end. For more info check out the Life in a Day Project official channel where the uploads should go and make sure you don’t miss the deadline, which is July 24 all day long.

Is this the best social media campaign ever? Perhaps it is… No matter how you’ll percieve it, Wieden+Kennedy have done an envious job in creating the most talked-about viral campaign of the past years. It’s based on the ever so popular ads of the past few months that won them the Cannes Grand Prix in advertising. Now Old Spice is giving you personalized video replies to your messages either on Twitter or Facebook. Yes. It is personalized and the handsome half-naked guy is talking directly and solely to you. Now they’ve even added replies to comments on Facebook and YouTube. In the begining of the campaign just a couple of days ago they delivered almost 120 personal replies in 24 hours! Why is this probably the best social-to-viral strategy ever… simple – so far they have replied personally to the accounts of well known bloggers as GuyKawasaki, Gizmodo and even Ashton Kutcher. So when these guys see their personalized messages they will surely comment and retweet and blog about them and that will send the campaign sky-high. Check more of the Old Spice videos on their YouTube account…