A Simple But Great Idea: Codename: Avian

Sometimes you stumble across one of those really cool and awesome ideas - I have been wanting to write this post all day - and the other morning just one of these gems arrived in my inbox. Let me just give you a bit of background - The idea comes from an insurance and lifestyle rewards company based in South Africa called The Unlimited and they have pulled together a great little stunt to gain some attention. Basically the story is:

"In South Africa the broadband revolution has come and gone. Seacom, the new cable to the internet, is taking for ever. The ADSL price war is still simmering and is not providing the answers to the connectivity issues in our country. Its time to make a change, go back to the roots of the past, because innovation is often born out of looking at the past."

And so with a funny little twist and more than a little humor The Unlimited unleashed Codename: Avian. or Pigeon Race 2009.

The stunt basically works like this:  "The Unlimited faces great challenges in getting data from its locations across KZN back to its central location for storage. These are large files, and it was postulated that a pigeon could do this faster than a normal landline could."

And so @pigeonrace2009 was born.

The Rules of Pigeonrace2009

•     1.    No Cats allowed
•     2.    The same amount of data will be sent on the landline and via the pigeon, on a SD card ( 4 gigabytes)
•     3.    The race is from Howick to Hillcrest
•     4.    The Pigeon flys from Howick to Gillits, and then will be transported via car to the finish site at Hillcrest.
•     5.    The day will be announced closer to the time
•     6.    Birdseed must not have any performance enhancing seeds within.
•     7.    Data is not to be compressed.

Personally I think it's an awesome idea and a very funny poke at their current broadband problem - it will no doubt get them some attention too. The whole stunt kicked off with a call to the public to name the pigeon, you can check out the sugestions on GottaQuirk.  I also love the way they are using Twitter to drive the whole thing. They are even giving away free t-shirt through South African t-shirt design crowdsourcing website Springleap!

You can obviosuly follow the whole thing on Twitter - @pigeonrace2009 is the one to follow. Alternativly you can check the blog here.