Taking inspirations from Extreme ironing, Andrew and Paul decided on the Extreme Hanami challenge – 5 Top Tokyo’s Hanami Spots in 5 Hours.

To see how much buzz they can generate from an unannounced event they started a little Viral project  – take a regular activity to the extreme, live cast the entire thing.

Dissecting Extreme Hanami:

Announced a day before the event, a route was planned in mind with several stops to allow people to join along.

Extreme hanami uses Storytlr as the lifestream platform to allow people to track the participants in real time with photos videos and livecasts.

Everytrail – for mapping the event

Flickr – for photos

qik – for video

Twitter – for live microblogging

tweetie – for tweeting on the Iphone

ping.fm – for updating updating all your social networks

mophie – for extended battery power!

Extremehanami within 24 hours of launch made become the number 1 storytlr site for April 1st 2009. not bad for a site that didn’t exist before 6am

For an event that was unannounced, and relied solely on viral nature of the internet, this was quite successful at pulling online and offline participants. Live casting isn’t a new concept, and neither is crowd sourcing, but applied together on a grand scale as part of a marketing effort, this could be an interesting combo. I look forward to seeing what Andrew and Paul come up with next!

So how much hype did it generate? why don’t you take a look for yourself – Extreme Hanami