OTTAWA, CANADA, June 29, 2006: —20Q and Darth Vader teamed up to win gold at Cannes’ 53rd International Advertising Festival. The extremely popular online viral ad campaign, which adopts the 20Q.net technology
to let Vader “read your mind,” was one of 22,000 ads at this year’s festival. Licensed by Burger King Corporation, the Sith Sense advertisement took gold in the Cyber Lions category, which also included Volkswagen, Adidas, and
IKEA. The Cannes Lions are awarded annually for advertisements that push the boundaries of the industry. “Inviting an audience to sit still and watch passively is so yesterday,” says Cyber Lions chairman Matias Palm-Jensen
on the festival website, “to play outside the big arenas; in the ordinary streets, is where creativity is booming and new ideas are born.” Using the 20Q artificial intelligence technology, SithSense.com was created as a tie-in
to Burger King Corp.’s Star Wars “Choose Your Destiny” in-store promotion. Award-winning 20Q.net Inc. collaborated with ad agency Crispin Porter + Bogusky and Firstborn Multimedia to create the Burger King/Star Wars website
that pits Darth Vader against the player in a game of 20 questions. The interactive advertisement has already received close to 8,000,000 hits. 20Q.net’s Cannes award is just one of many recent successes for the Canadian-based company.
In addition to being heralded in The New York Times, The Washington Post, Wired Magazine and Time Magazine, the handheld version of 20Q recently won the Electronic Toy of the Year Award at the Toy Industry
Association ‘Oscars.’ The critically acclaimed invention was also recently showcased at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center and has won a long list of awards including the 2006 T.O.T.Y Electronic Toy of the Year, an Oppenheim
Platinum Toy Award, the Canadian Toy Testing Council's Toy of the Year Award, a Family Fun Magazine T.O.Y. Top Toy Award, a Special Recognition Award from the Toy Retailers' Association in the United Kingdom, a Dr. Toy’s 100 Best Children’s
Products Award, and more. Licensed to Radica Games, (NASDAQ:RADA) Ltd., more than 12,000,000 units have been sold world-wide, in five languages, since its release. About 20Q 20Q is an artificial
intelligence, a website, a company and a phenomenon that speaks for itself online at http://20q.net. Players think of an animal, vegetable, mineral or other item, and 20Q guesses what they are thinking in twenty questions, or less. Each time the online game is played it “learns” a little more. After more than 48 million games played, 20Q has evolved from an experiment in artificial intelligence into a software development firm that
licenses games built on the capabilities of the 20Q A.I. Robin Burgener, the inventor, has been nurturing the technology since 1988. The future is promising for 20Q.net Inc., located in Ottawa, Canada. 20Q has been translated
into 21 languages, and the specialty versions of the handheld electronic game, 20Q Rock & Pop, 20Q Sports and 20Q Junior are in stores now. 20Q Mobile for the cell phone is licensed to I–play.
|