Well looking at the advert what they've actually done is take a fake translucent ipod put a fairly bright light inside it , have the rest of the scene fairly dark and flat relative to the lighted ipod.
They've shot it as normal and then they've pulled the footage into a compositing package ,pulled a luma key on the bright ipod probably darkened the rest of the image looking at it and then run it through some sort of optical flow based trails generator ( they've been around for donkeys).
Probably something in the sapphire plugin suite for Shake or Inferno ( I'm pretty sure there is one that does exactly this effect) although they might have written their own, Shake being made by Apple by the way....
Then they've coloured it whatever way they wanted (I'd put money on the ipod as shot just being white light). No messing about with cheesy particles (particles suck!) and the trails will behave correctly when they are occluded by the dancer's body without having to roto them behind. You'll also get the nice photographic detail in the trails and you won't have to mess about with tracking an emitter to the ipod.
And why has that guy selected square pixels for 720x480
Actually I'd put money on it being Feedbackdistort or even just Feedbacktrails in sapphire.
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