We were excited and honored when Communication Arts editors contacted us to offer Deeplocal the opportunity to be featured in their “FRESH” website column. Congrats to the entire team, especially our talented design team.

We teamed up with PNC Bank to build an Augmented Reality ATM/Branch finder. If you’re a PNC customer, simply point your phone in any direction and the app will tell you if there are PNC locations ahead (and details like hours of operation). Map mode shows you the best route to each location.

You can read more and download the PNC Finder app at the App Store.

Deeplocal is very honored that DecktheScreens made AdWeek’s Top 10 Holiday Cards this year! Our super-talented engineering staff gets the credit for this one!

Last year was our introduction to ad agency holiday card hoopla.

For our friends who aren’t in the ad industry, the hoopla I’m speaking of is this: every December, ad agencies are expected to create a clever “holiday card.” The term “holiday card” doesn’t refer to the typical folded paper greeting card we get in the mail from our families and the ever-dwindling group of friends who engage in this tradition. Rather, “holiday card” can be any self-promotion ranging from a storefront window display that puts the faces of passersby on an entire choir (see W+K London’s A Choir of You) to a video about what happens when you hire Santa as your Creative Director (see Fold7’s Advertising with Bells On).

So last year our friends at Saatchi & Saatchi LA asked us to collaborate on a holiday card with them; the result was the original Nog Pong, which was named one of the top holiday cards of 2010 by AdWeek and various other industry publications. This year, NogPong was polished up with a pretty rad looking set, and NogPong  2011, the sequel, resulted in more spiked eggnog and charitable donations.

In addition to NogPong 2, Deeplocal also created a fun little app called Deckthescreens, which lets multiple devices talk to each other to create a string of lights across devices. It’s a simple idea that combines a few technologies in a totally new way.

We hope you enjoyed NogPong again this year and that you check out Deckthescreens, which was concepted and made entirely by our talented Deeplocal engineers. Regardless of whether we understand how or why the Ad Agency holiday card tradition started, we like doing fun things just for the sake of learning, so it’s a tradition we’ll continue to partake in (although if anyone does know the history of agency holiday cards, we’d love to be enlightened.).

Happy holidays from our team at Deeplocal!

During the last two weeks, many of our team spent long hours in New York City at the Time Warner Center, operating a Hugging/Talking/Vibrating Robotic Loveseat for the Conan O’Brien show. Conan typically tapes his shows in LA, but he taped all of last week’s shows in NYC. We built the Loveseat in celebration of his return, and to show New Yorkers how much he had missed the Big Apple.

Although a Hugging Loveseat is one of the more absurd concepts we’ve dreamed up, it proved to be an enormous success for the show; more than 40% of fans who sat on the Loveseat shared their experience through social media. It’s like we always say, if you create a cool experience, people will talk about it. Over-engineering social media doesn’t work.

So what is the Conan Hugging Loveseat?

The Conan Hugging Loveseat is the first fully-robotic hugging loveseat. Visitors can relax on the Loveseat and let Conan listen to their concerns, express his love (yes, the couch actually talks), offer a relaxing back and bottom massage, and extend a warm embrace. Participants can bring a friend or come alone; we capture the moment with a souvenir photo. Lucky participants win Team Coco gear.

What is the Loveseat made of?

The Conan Hugging Loveseat is 500 pounds of pure love.

However, behind the soft embrace is a lot of heavy machinery. Inside the steel frame are two industrial motor controllers and four industrial linear actuators, creating 250 pounds of strength per joint.

Though the couch is immobile, it features many aspects of an advanced mobile robot, including steel/aluminum frame construction, linear actuators, motor controllers, microprocessors, AGM batteries, and wifi communication. Wheels were not included to prevent robotic joyriding (which as you can see from the photo below, Patrick isn’t pleased about).

Stay tuned; we’ll be releasing a Making of the Conan Hugging Loveseat video soon.

Watch the Video

When it comes to Nathan’s tattoos, I thought I’d seen everything. I’ve heard so many people ask about his Silicon, Carbon, and Electron Cloud Structure tattoos, that I can recite his answer from memory. But I had no idea what kind of splash they’d make in Taiwan.

(photo courtesy of NOTCOT)

To back up- the reason Nathan is in Taiwan is because he was asked to speak and conduct workshops at a Cannes event called I@X. So, he has been in Taiwan since last Thursday, spreading Deeplocal’s culture and process.

Today, Nathan tweeted that everyone at his talk in Taiwan was stamped with custom Deeplocal tattoos. I was amused, amazed, and delighted.

Also, if you missed his tweets, check out some cool photos from Nathan’s trip:

Branding in Taiwan

The Intelligent Transportation Society of America (ITS America) recognized Deeplocal’s ParkPGH app as the best in the nation. ParkPGH is the city’s first “smart” parking solution and the nation’s first predictive parking app to direct drivers to available parking spots, helping to reduce congestion and delays in downtown Pittsburgh.

ParkPGH calculates the number of parking spaces available in Cultural District garages every 30 seconds and delivers available locations to drivers through an iPhone application, a traditional website, a mobile website, text messaging, and through a call-in telephone service. Unlike parking apps available in other urban areas that rely only on real-time information, the Park PGH also includes a predictive parking component.  The predictive parking algorithm uses historical parking trends and current events to predict parking minutes to hours in the future.

ParkPGH is available for download in the iPhone store, at

ParkPGH.org, by mobile web at m.parkpgh.org, by texting PARKING to 412-423-8980, and by calling 412-423-8980.

Just in time for another Pittsburgh winter, we officially opened our second office in Venice Beach, CA, this week. We love East Liberty, but when it comes to views, the Pacific Ocean beats Penn Avenue. But this expansion isn’t all about sun, sand, and Nathan’s need for more low-fat organic food options. We’re continuing to partner with agencies and brands who are based in LA, so having a live/work space making us more accessible to west coast clients is a win-win. (Only one direct flight to LA per day…come ON Pittsburgh!)

We’ll have surf boards and bikes available for clients and friends who want to check out our new digs on Brooks Avenue, at the end of Abbot Kinney.  And coincidentally, our fellow tenants align well with our interests – a skate shop, a tattoo parlor, and a yoga studio. But don’t worry Mo-Gear, we aren’t closing shop in East Liberty, and our loyalties remain with the Burgh.

Remember the Toyota Ideas for Good Firetruck project we worked on?

This Sunday, September 11, during Sunday Night Football halftime on NBC, Toyota is releasing a new commercial that features Ideas for Good and *fingers crossed*, Patrick Miller, Deeplocal Creative Engineer.

The game starts at 8:20 EST. Tune in at halftime to watch the commercial and see Patrick “Hollywood” Miller make his television debut.