To the barking mad like tribal symbols or one I had the other day where an image with musical notes in it appeared. Trying to decipher these images at the best of times is difficult but an image with musical notes? Bit ridiculous no?

For test purposes I tried a couple of ridiculous ones to see what response I would get and the captcha below worked as “pentendo hiili”.

Not a clue how this is correct. I’m wondering could they not be a bit easier to decipher, or atleast get rid of the musical notes and tribal symbols?

Yesterday Google announced their new mobile payment system – Google Wallet. It basically takes advantage of NFC (near field communication) and allows users to make payments using their mobile phones, just by touching them to a spot at the register. Sounds cool. Even better – they’ve decided to integrate it with Google Offers, so that you don’t have to carry coupons and cards around anymore, you just make a payment in a store and the discount from the offer is used automatically.

Google Wallet already has the backing of Citi, Mastercard and Sprint in the US, so it looks like this could be the next big thing in terms of payments, and less likely to go the way of other less successful Google products such as Wave.

While Google says they’re building it as an open commerce ecosystem, we still don’t know if Google Wallet will be available on Windows Phone 7 or iPhone or if Apple will try to come up with their own contactless payment system, possibly in conjunction with PayPal (who as it turns out are suing Google over this whole thing). Google are also a little bit hazy on the security details.

Whatever happens, mobile payments are the next big thing – whoever gets it right first is sure to be on to a winner.

There has been a lot of negative talk in the Irish press about the recent campaign started by Budweiser here in Ireland to promote ‘Budweiser Ice Cold’. With great fanfare Budweiser launched a big advertising campaign which included TV ads, a dedicated website and a mobile App (not developed by us!!). The idea behind the campaign was a good one – celebrate summer by offering discounts on Budweiser Ice Cold if the temperature reaches a certain heat. The hotter it gets the bigger the discount, and if it gets really really hot you can have a free beer. You can check the ‘Ice Cold Index’ via the App or the website, and find out whether you are eligible for a discount on that day. Fantastic!

However Budweiser ran into some problems: they failed to mention that the temperature is measured at midday, so if the temperature doesn’t reach the target by midday, you won’t get a discount even if it gets hotter later in the day. On top of that, the App didn’t work.

I think there are some lessons to be learned here about delivering on your promises. If you promise something in a campaign you must deliver.

The App has now been removed from the App store and the website www.icecoldindex.ie is giving a message about server problems. Unfortunately the damage has already been done to a promising campaign and it remains to be seen how it will be received if they relaunch.

A couple of months back my iPhone kept popping the following message up for no reason:

Since then I’ve been meaning to let everyone know what I did to fix it as I remember how frustrating it was. A lot of the blog posts I came across said this happened when you plugged the phone into speakers that didn’t comply with it. My problem though was that it kept popping up randomly, either when I was just in the home screen or checking mail and there didn’t seem to be a pattern of when it was popping up.

The reason for the randomly popping up message was that there was a build up of dust within the dock connector. There was mutual discouragement of trying to blow the dust out as you could end up blowing moisture against the adapter (which isn’t good). The solution that worked for me was to get a dry unused toothbrush and brush the dock connector very gently or, for the big bits of dust get a piece of paper fold it and gently scrape them out, be careful though because the adapter is very sensitive.

After somewhat of a hiatus, the Furious Tribe blog is back. Over the last few months, we became so caught up in our client work and product development that our blog really got forgotten about. Recently, we’ve only had time to put mini press releases up here, which as all good bloggers know, is top of the list of things not to do if you care about blogging quality content.

We care a lot more about our community than that, which is why we’ve made a mid-year resolution to start blogging regularly, in an effort to start up a conversation and build some bridges with the mobile and digital community. We’d love it for people to check back here regularly, leave comments and tell us what they think. We’ll be approving every single genuine comment (no spam please!) left here, because we believe that criticism is just as constructive as positive feedback.

It’s here that you’ll find the Furious Tribe team waxing lyrical about all things mobile, digital and social. From time to time, you’ll probably find an article that’s got absolutely nothing to do with any of that, but we think that sometimes that’s ok too. So, please check early and often for Furious news and views, and if you feel like telling us something we don’t know or asking about something we haven’t covered, we’d be delighted to hear from you. Enjoy!

Furious Tribe are recruiting for a number of business development roles in:

- London
- Los Angeles
- New York

For more info please contact: patrick furioustribe.com

Our Apps for O2 Rugby are live on Android http://bit.ly/gvVh46 and iPhone http://bit.ly/fci2Ez. Record your roar and get behind the team!!

We are very excited to announce that we are relaunching Apptivate, our App building software in the New Year with lots of new and exciting features. To celebrate, we are giving away ten free Apptivate Apps. If you’d like to get your hands on a free App for 2011, get in touch at dublin@furioustribe.com.

We’re very proud to say that last night we won two awards at the inaugural Appys. We took home the gongs for ‘Best Sports App’ for RTE GAA and ‘Best Educational App’ for FIS Training. Needless to say we’re absolutely chuffed and we’d like to take this opportunity to thank all our wonderful clients who have been a pleasure to work with and also to say congratulations to all the other winners on the night.

Further to our nominations for the Appys, we discovered today that the App we developed for TV3 has been shortlisted in the Mobile App category for the Eircom Spiders awards. Very exciting!