Day 2 is over at Cannes Lions 2008 and now we know the entries which have been shortlisted in the Radio, Promo, Press, Direct, Media and Outdoor.

I have arranged the number of shortlisted entries corresponding to their country here:

RADIO LIONS:

USA = 30
Germany = 24
South Africa = 16
Australia = 11
South Africa = 10
Brazil = 10
Belgium = 8
New Zealand = 7
Canada = 7
England = 7
Chile = 6
India = 5
Philippines = 4
Singapore = 4
Denmark = 3
Ireland = 3
The Netherlands = 3
Japan = 2
Colombia = 2
Malaysia = 2
Argentina = 2
Italy = 2
Sri Lanka = 2
Indonesia = 1
Guatemala = 1
Spain = 1
Switzerland = 1
United Arab Emirates =1
Mexico = 1
Romania = 1
Finland = 1
Peru = 1
Poland = 1
Costa Rica = 1
Austria = 1
Sweden = 1
Uruguay = 1
Puerto Rico = 1

PROMO LIONS:

Germany = 28
New Zealand = 14
USA = 12
Spain = 10
The Netherlands = 7
England = 6
Brazil = 4
Australia = 4
Belgium = 4
Sweden = 4
Switzerland = 4
Japan = 4
Argentina = 3
India = 3
Dominican Republic = 3
France = 2
Malaysia = 2
China = 2
Portugal = 2
Singapore = 2
South Africa = 2
Thailand = 2
Israel = 2
Hungary = 1
Hong Kong = 1
Poland = 1
Peru = 1
Mexico = 1
Korea = 1
Austria = 1

PRESS LIONS:

France = 73
Brazil = 71
Germany = 65
USA = 47
Thailand = 46
India = 29
Singapore = 29
South Africa = 28
Spain = 27
Argentina = 27
Australia = 24
Switzerland = 18
Belgium = 16
Canada = 16
England = 16
United Arab Emirates = 13
Portugal = 12
China = 11
New Zealand = 10
Italy = 9
Chile = 6
Romania = 6
Venezuela = 4
Colombia = 3
Poland = 3
Indonesia = 1
Finland = 1
Israel = 1
Puerto Rico = 1
Korea = 1

MEDIA LIONS:

USA = 35
Germany = 27
Japan = 17
England = 14
Switzerland = 11
Spain = 10
China = 10
India = 9
Australia = 9
Canada = 9
France = 7
Brazil = 7
Israel = 7
New Zealand = 6
South Africa = 5
Sweden = 5
Belgium = 4
Colombia = 4
Austria = 3
Argentina = 3
Dominican Republic = 3
Romania = 3
Singapore = 3
United Arab Emirates = 3
Indonesia = 2
Hong Kong = 2
Turkey = 2
The Netherlands = 2
Portugal = 2
Denmark = 2
Czech Republic = 1
Malaysia = 1
Poland = 1
Russia = 1
Thailand = 1
Philippines = 1
Puerto Rico = 1

DIRECT LIONS:

Germany = 26
Australia = 20
Spain = 17
England = 15
New Zealand = 13
Sweden = 12
Brazil = 9
India = 9
Belgium = 6
Singapore = 5
USA = 4
Canada = 4
Costa Rica = 3
Argentina = 3
Austria = 3
Portugal = 2
Denmark = 2
Switzerland = 2
Colombia = 2
Japan = 2
Israel = 2
Czech Republic = 1
Dominican Republic = 1
Indonesia = 1
Latvia = 1
Norway = 1
Puerto Rico = 1
Peru = 1

I will post the number tally about the remaining categories in my next post which will be few minutes (or hours) from now. Do inform me if you find any discrepancy in list.

Philanthropy is no more a prerogative of rich people in the times of Adsense and Pay Per Play. The internet has given every single netizen tremendous opportunities to do his karma. Advertising is often criticized for its inability to do any solid service to mankind but we do have examples where advertising is turning out to be life savior now. I have found some links for you to do your share of good.

1) FreeRice: This site was created in October 2007 and it is a vocabulary game where you try to guess the correct synonym out of four options. 20 grains of rice are donated for every single answer.

2)  Ripple: It is a charitable site which earns money through clicking and searching and the guys behind this site are also associates of Boston Consulting Group. The users have the freedom to choose their preferred form of  charity out of the option of four.

3) FreePoverty: This site is pretty similar to Free Rice in a way that you do play some game on this one too. You locate places which are asked on a world map and you receive points on the basis of accuracy of your answers. The points then convert into cups of water which are donated by the site.

4) Carbon Grove: It is a Carbon Reduction Reminder Service where it will remind you about small things that can make a big impact in saving environment. You also get to plant a virtual tree and the site promises to plant up to 250,000 real trees in deforested regions across the globe. The only problem with this is that you have to use Internet Explorer to do this.

I would like to mention another site called Charity USA which has many daughter sites like The RainForest site, The Hunger site, The Breast Cancer site, The Child Health site but it’s a for profit organization which means it donates only a share of its revenues.

There are quite a few more sites but I didn’t had many reasons to believe in their claims.

The Apple iPhone 3G will be launched on June 11 in U.S. and quite obviously Apple has started to air its latest commercial to create further hype. The new TV commercial has only one hero and that’s the iPhone. The focus of the ad is throughout on the stuff the company wants to sell (or people want to buy). The visualization of the ad also suits the iPhone. Watch the advert here

Product: Apple iPhone
Agency: TBWA\Media Arts Lab, Los Angeles
Chief Creative Officer: Lee Clow
Executive Creative Director: Duncan Milner, Eric Grunbaum
Associate CD / Art Director: Alan Briere
Senior Copywriter: Krista Wicklund
Copywriter: Alicia Dotter
Art Director: Drew Stalker
Agency Producer: Anne Oburgh, Perrin Rausch
Director: David Fincher
Production Company: Anonymous Content
Country: United States of America
Other Credits: Music Supervisor - David Taylor
DP - Pawel Edelman
Editorial Company - Rock Paper Scissors
VFX/Online - Asylum

My exams are finished now and that’s one reason why I was ‘missing’ from the blog since last one month. So when I was returning from my university after my last exam today, I saw the advertisement of this internet company called myquest.in. It was a new name and a new search engine which is only focusing on New Delhi NCR at the moment. The home page is not simple (unlike google or guruji) and it seems inspired from yahoo as it displays local weather, local events with live cricket scores and a list of top searches. A neat box which displays categories might assist you in getting the information you seek easily. It all sounds good because google is too international and a need for solid local search engine is sometimes desperately needed. We have seen some local search engines who are focusing only on India and thus the results on these sites are sometimes more relevant and useful than you get on google or yahoo. And it is needless to say that it also saves your PC time which you might use on doing other important things on computer.

The only trouble for myquest is that there are already some sites who have been going local since some time back and thus they are more likely to win in the race to become India’s Google. Guruji is a complete copycat of Google and it has some serious backing in the form of venture capital from Sequoia Capital. Sulekha is another website which focuses on Indians around the world and the site does a good job in local searches. But the question remains how myquest is better than the two sites I mentioned just now. I tried to search with some common keywords across the three sites to see the number of results they yield for you.

Sulekha is a site which owes a lot to its users (a significant American Indian population) for the content on the site and thus its reach is huge in India and U.S.A. while venture funding from Norwest Venture Partners also helped. The real competition for myquest would be guruji because both of them have to take things in their hand . The kind of results that myquest provided (see the box) against guruji are certainly worth an applause considering that it has just started. I do have problem with the user interface of the myquest mainly because the user interace on guruji is smoother. I also felt problem with the loading of myquest last night but I do think that the new kid has the meat to take on guruji. Somebody get the news to some venture capitalist please.

The Indian IT giant Infosys has taken its mention in Friedman’s “The World Is Flat” far too seriously and it is doing everything to capitalize it. It partnered with CNBC during World Economic Forum,Davos this year to articulate a vision for year 2020. The gorgeous Maria Bartiromo hosted the show while Kris Gopalakrishnan (Infosys CEO) along with Paul Saffo (futurist) and Peter Schwartz (scenario planner) facilitated the event. The opinions of global leader and decision makers was taken to compile a list of forecasts by year till 2020. There were startling claims like USA will invade Iran by year 2009 and China will overtake USA as superpower in 2015 and that USA and European Union will become one country by 2015. See more of these forecasts here