Meet Ruby

Poke has a new mascot named Ruby! She is a 10-week-old King Charles Chihuahua mix (Chilier) adopted from a rescue in New Jersey. Ruby keeps her 3.6 lb figure by hopping and running in circles. She loves her Busy Bee, long walks to her puppy pad, making people commit crimes with her adorableness and the internet. Check her out between naps on the Poke Cam live.pokenewyork.com

our internz are heroz

Our Interz are Heroz! We sent in a photo and Little Debbie is sending us 5 boxes of muffins early next week. We can't wait to stuff our faces with delicious muffins!

What is Intern Hero, you ask?

"In these tough economic times, more and more companies are relying on interns to get the job done. The hours are long, the rewards are few, the pay is meager. The interns of America deserve more. They deserve to be heroes." -Little Debbie

YAY.

POKE is up for FOUR Webby's!

We're psyched! For the fifth year in a row, POKE is up for a (or in this case, four) Webby People's Voice awards. Help us land a trophy or two by signing up and voting on the Webby site. 

The Balloonacy Campaign for Orange has been nominated in three categories and our work with Lonely Planet has been nominated once. You have to register and login at the Webby website before you can cast your vote, and there's a myriad of categories, so we hope the following directions (and shameless back-handers) sweeten the deal enough to convince you to partake. 

Once you're signed up and in, hit the Website icon on the left hand side first. Scroll down to 'Services' and you'll find Orange's Balloonacy in Telecommunications and Lonely Planet in Travel. Then head to the Interactive Advertising light bulb icon on the top right hand side of the page. Here Balloonacy is nominated twice, first in Game or Application and then Online Guerilla & Innovation. Make sense? 

At the time of writing, Lonely Planet is in the lead, with Balloonacy needing a bump up from third and fourth places in the other categories. 

We're grateful for any help you can offer (and bribes can be discussed on the sly).

From POKE with Love: BakerTweet!

Last week we launched a new toy that crosses the chasm between physical and digital. (Something in case you haven't noticed, we get pretty excited about). The digital guinea pig was the great crew at Albion (a bakery across the way from our office in London).  And, since "Everyone knows the best time to get your baked goods is when they're fresh out the oven," they figured they'd combine the always-on communication offered by Twitter with the delicious bakery goodness from Albion to create BakerTweet.

BakerTweet is a new device that's bakery-safe – you don't really want your precious laptop sitting next to the baking soda – and offers a simple interaction model: twist the knob until the hot-outa-the-oven baked good displays on the screen, then hit the button to tweet to the world that the baked goods are available. Want to know more? Check out our video here:

Sound cool? Well the world seems to think so! BakerTweet has been covered on Engadget, Apartment Therapy, Slashgear, and, of course, it's all over The Tweet.

Coming soon to a bakery near bakery near you?

Want one? Give  us a shout at: iwantone@bakertweet.com.

POKE wins an Andy AND a Titanium Lion*

*(sorta).

So, a while back we partnered with the awesome crew over at Droga5 to help them develop the Million, a project in conjunction with the New York City public school system that aims to ignite students' interests in their studies by offering a free cell phone that's fueled by merit-based achievements (grades, attendance, etc.). The pilot program was rolled out to 10,000 students across a number of schools last year. Despite some initial skepticism from parents and teachers, the response from students was both immediate and eye-opening!

It was a true partnership where POKE worked hand in hand with the fine folks at Droga to create a comprehensive digital and mobile strategy along with a full-term roll-out plan on how to take Million to the world. It was countless hours of work for a terriffic cause and we're glad to hear some of that work is paying off.

Congratulations are in order!

Last night Droga5 accepted an award for both The Richard T. O’Reilly Award (for Public Service Announcement) and The Innovation Award at the ANDY's. Rumor has it the Million also received a Titanium Lion at the 2008 Cannes Lion advertising festival!

Congrats Droga. Send us a photo of the awards, woudja?

What us POKE peeps do in our spare time...

Believe it or not, we're a little nerdy/geeky here at POKE (shocking, I know!). So what do nerdy/geeky peeps do in their spare time? Well, some of us code, some of us make sweet guitar interfaces, and some of us...compile lists of every Twitter tool online that we can find. And then cull them down to the 15 that are worth looking at first.

Take a look, pass them along, enjoy. There's a tool for just about everything under the sun (and we're workin' on another here in the office for something that hasn't been covered yet!). And give us a shout on Twitter (we're all floating around, but you can catch me @AmongMany and Tom @meat99).

Thanks for Breakfast Mom!

Our usual "breakfast spread" on a Monday morning consists of a bucket o' Starbucks coffee that's supposed to wake us all up for our mandatory morning status meeting. But yesterday was a different story. Yesterday was President's Day. Yesterday our bretheren at Mother were out of the office, leaving their full spread of Dean & Deluca catered breakfast sitting unattended. And we just couldn't settle for that!

So instead of letting it all go to waste, it became ours. And boy did it put a cup'o Farbucks joe to shame! Sixty people's worth of smoked salmon, fresh fruit, bagels & cream cheese, danishes, and fresh-squeezed OJ was enough to make us all pretty happy on a holiday Monday. Not to mention pretty full... We ate it for breakfast. We ate it for lunch. Heck, some of us even ate it for dinner. And ya know what?? There was still some left this morning!

So here's a big thanks to Mother for taking a day off. May you have many more Monday holidays (just as long as you forget to cancel the breakfast order again)!