How many of these 15 ‘Work Wankers’ do you know, agency folk?

Sometimes you just can’t escape lining up. The portaloo at the festival, the cashier at the supermarket, the coolest new bar. But no-one really likes doing it, so it is fairly hard to fathom why anyone would do it for a new phone. Plenty do, of course (even though they don’t actually know why). And the companies selling them go to great lengths to butter these strange tech fiends up and ensure they don’t get queue fatigue, as evidenced by Vodafone and Telecom’s launch festivities for the new iPhones.

Following in the footsteps of some overseas entities like Wired and Volkswagen, ASB has opened the doors of its new North Wharf head office to the world by creating New Zealand’s largest commercial interior Google Street View tour.

Pizza boxes, bad clothes, poster-laden walls, staying up way too late mashing buttons and trying to clock games … Ahh, the memories. All of this—and much more—has been chronicled by Sony and Drum in an effort to chart the history of the PlayStation ahead of the launch of PlayStation 4 later this year.

Westpac has chosen three winning apps in a competition it launched to find ways of making banking processes faster. The Westpac App Challenge crowdsourcing contest pitted 120 entrants from around the country against each other, with seven finalists participating in a Dragon’s Den style showdown a few weeks ago at Westpac’s Auckland HQ.

There’s been plenty of speculation about when Kiwi golfing phenom Lydia Ko would sign on the dotted line and start chasing the big bucks. But rather than having to deal with a traditional press conference and the obligatory banal questions from nosey parkers, she decided to announce her decision with an entertaining video that she posted to Twitter.

Auckland-based digital agency Union, which rebranded from Federation Media earlier this year, has announced a partnership with world-leading digital marketing and innovation learning organisation Hyper Island that will see it bring its Open Master Class programme to New Zealand.

Sergeant Deanne Teao’s better work story is the latest in M&C Saatchi’s campaign to attract new police recruits. The story shows Teao talking a young man out of jumping from an overbridge by talking about his children and family.

Oh how we laughed when the Twitterati had some fun with the idea of Auckland Monopoly back in April. Now, after the launch of the game this morning, a new wave of Auckland-centric jokes have come spewing forth.

Brandspank, the Rialto Channel, TVNZ Blacksand, Sky Television and MediaWorks were among those flying the Kiwi flag at the PromaxBDA ANZ Awards last weekend. The awards honour top performers in on-air promotion, branding and advertising.

There’s been no shortage of quality animal-related advertising in recent months, with O2’s Be More Dog, Volvo’s extreme hamster and, locally, DraftFCB’s award-hogging Driving Dogs standing out. Now VW and Adam&Eve DDB have added to the canine oeuvre, with a cast of 36 showing that ‘there’s a Volkswagen for all of us’.

Pachelbel’s Canon is the one of the most used backing tracks in TV and film, altered every which way to suit the genre. A new ad for Sony image sensors has another twist on the piece and it’s made entirely from the sounds of dripping water.

The team behind Stqry, an app that lets people find local attractions and immerse themselves in the story around it, has launched a competition to showcase some of our best art, culture, history, heritage and wildlife spots.

Auckland web development company bkaBoom, part of bka Interactive, has created Go Team, a sports picking app which on a deeper level is all about targeting specific audiences with brand messages. As you’d expect for a product being trialled in New Zealand, rugby was the first cab off the rank, but the app can be used in any team sport that has a competition.

Big Fish has steered away from cautionary tales in its Save Kiwi Week campaign for the Kiwis for kiwi trust, preferring fun and frivolity with quintessentially Kiwi former All Blacks head coach Sir Graham Henry. The agency’s worked with the charity since shortly after it formed about eight years ago, and created a TVC and reskinned website for the fundraising week.

Ogilvy and Mather has won what it says is a significant piece of work to create a hazardous substances public awareness campaign for the Environmental Protection Authority (EPA). The multi-channel campaign, set to launch at the end of the month, will target a broad audience with a message that has an element of challenge to deliver.

A new spot for Verizon takes Halloween into the realm of hi-tech – and rolls out some pretty awesome Star Wars costumes you couldn’t really get your mother to make on her sewing machine. The coolest has to be the little Darth Vader outfit.

Our weekly wrap of good things, strange things, funny things and other things from inside the intertubes.

Dunedin-based biotech company Pacific Edge is this year’s supreme winner of the New Zealand Innovators Awards thanks to its novel cancer detection test Cxbladder. The awards also honoured several individuals and companies, including Fonterra for its Alternative Make Cheese process used to produce premium Mozzarella on a commercial scale; StretchSense, which has created a sensor for measuring human body deformation and movement; and 14-year-old Ayla Hutchinson, who developed Kindling Cracker – a device used for making wood kindling.