Girl interrupted

Did anyone see ‘DropIn’ – the Tetris-style game – on the LinkedIn blog recently? It lets you rotate and stack your LinkedIn connections’ faces, while discovering the new content they’re sharing online. Pretty neat really.

DropIn demonstrates how gamification can be relevant in B2B (look out for our Sept ’11 issue for more on this). Benthebodyguard.com – another nifty example I recently stumbled across – is a cool ad for an iPhone data security app. The developers behind the ad have used HTML5 to create a parallax scrolling website – a technique that’s been used in gaming for years but that is slowly making a name for itself in the world of online marketing. For any non-tech bods (which includes me), a parallax scrolling website is where the background remains static and the foreground scrolls vertically or horizontally, or vice versa.

You’ve heard of distruptive technology. I like to call ‘Ben the Bodyguard’ an example of ‘interuptive technology’. It interrupts a work task for a couple of minutes. And for what – learning about data security? Yawn… Or at least it would’ve been without a Marvel comic-style bodyguard to navigate through a gritty-looking data-strewn cityscape.
 Infographics do a reasonable job of catching the eye – but this parallax scrolling thingy is something else.

I wonder what other tricks online marketers will nick from the gaming industry?

There’s never a working week when my time is not crammed full of ‘to do’ lists – so any brief interruption – as far as I’m concerned – is always welcome.