Frontiering Talk

Flickr, now owned by Yahoo is probably the worlds leading photo sharing site. One of the frustrations of creating an online album, is the hassle of having to get pictures from your camera or camera phone to your pc, and then uploading them to flickr.

If you have one of these handsets, the problem is solved by a cool application called ShoZo. ShoZo handles the sending of your images, text or video and cleverly is able to continue the upload should the connection ever drop out.

ShoZo recently was a winner in the GSM Association 2006 awards.

Auto-tagging and geo-locations is a feature that is coming soon, and I am sure this will only increase the popularity of photo sharing services like Flickr or Webshots.

New Marketing perspectives? This frontiering technology could easily be used to facilitate entries to competitions such as “send in a photo of you enjoying our product”. A phone manufacturer / Flickr joint promotion .. What better way to demonstrate camera phone features, than to deliver this application with the phone encouraging people to create a Flickr account, which in turn would generate a degree of word of mouth buzz (a real product experience worth talking and showing other people).

Tags: WOM

A french company called BuzzParadise has just launched. Their aim is to connect influential consumers (bloggers, experts, passionate consumers…). with Brands, helping to design brand communication campaigns, using word of mouth to spread key brand messages. They are hoping to create a platform that allows opinion leaders to take part in VIP events, providing exclusive information or the ability to be the first to test products.

The business model is similar to Bzzagent where lots of consumers are recruited to test and try new products, talk about them and provide feedback to brand owners. However, BuzzParadise states that is seeks the thoughts of “Opinion leaders” or influencers .. which I think is a far more potent strategy, capitialising on word of mouth marketing.

Recruitment of “opinion leaders” can be a difficult and expensive process, but if done correctly, a very powerful extension of a marketing team.

Note: The BuzzParadise website is in French, to view in English, go to Babelfish and paste http://www.buzzparadise.com/ into the “Translate a webpage” section, and select French to English.
Update: English version now available http://www.buzzparadise.com/en_sommaire.php3

via fluido

Tags: WOM

The L word, a US drama series has initiated a great example of “Open Source Marketing” by engaging their audience to not only get involved with their show, but actually help write the script, and vote on submissions to influence the actual drama itself.

It’s called a “Fanisode” and is described as

where legions of fans are invited to team up with a writer from the show to collectively and democratically script an episode — the “fanisode” — one scene at a time.

Here’s how it works

16,500 votes have already been cast and over 100 scenes created in what i am sure is engaging and helping to build their fan base.

Remember the old campfire game where a group of players sit in a circle taking turns improvising a new passage to a continuing story? Creating a fanisode is like that, except the campfire is encircled by thousands, and voting determines whose passage gets into the story.

Here’s the first winning scene script

It may not be appropriate for all television content, but consumers are definately keen to be more engaged with their content whether through voting (e.g. idol, who wants to be a millionaire, big brother), submitting content (funniest home videos), or in open feedback forums (60 minutes). Productions that fail to engage consumers will continue to lose out to those that allow their audience greater involvement.

Tagging is fast becoming a useful navigation technique, and is key feature of sites like Del.icio.us, and Flickr. I have even implemented tags using Tagcloud, at the bottom of this blog.

Whilst they help in finding things by allocating meaningful category tags to items, it can be a lot of work to tag each and every image, song, or video with all the possible tags you may or may not use in retrieving them.

Riya has some very interesting technology that is due for beta in a few weeks time. The service can automatically learn to tag your photos, recognising people using face recognition technology, adding data about where the picture was taken, and even identifying the same person from behind by comparing dates of photos and what the person is wearing. To learn more visit http://www.riya.com/learnmore

Or you can listen to Richard Giles interview Tara Hunt from Riya, on the Gadget show.

Ever driven past a house for sale, right location, nice house, but wondered how to get more information like interior photos, price information?

Yeah … you can write the agent number down and ring them in the morning .. but often we are too busy to follow up.

House4cell is a frontiering application for the Real Estate industry that allows interested buyers to text message a short custom code to a special House4cell phone number. A few seconds later property information such as price, dimensions, and property photos are delivered to your phone. Buyers can even click a button to directly connect to the listing agent via its “click-to-call” function.

With 3G I can imagine streaming video tours would be a logical extension!

Joanna Wojtalik has come up with a great idea to place a removable label containing a mini-magazine onto bottles. Modern Media Concepts first mini-mag is called iLove, aimed at females and will be attached to bottled water sold in convenience outlets.

I think this is an excellent example of innovation for the FMCG sector. Basically you are adding value to a product by including the magazine, and at the same time creating a unique advertising vehicle. The mini-mag’s pocket-friendly size makes it easy to keep and a great thing to read for the daily commute. Cross promotional possibilities are possible, as well as using the format as a tool to provide brand content to consumers.

For example, recipe books with food products, baby care knowledge, pet care training tips, cleaning information, health care advice etc.

Full article at Gizmag

Having learnt to play the piano at an early age, I have always had a fondness for new and interesting music which is often difficult to discover and can be hard to buy.

I mentioned in an earlier post about Pandora whichis a tremendous site for helping you discover music that you like, based on a clever algorithm that defines music is very detailed genres. I love Pandora and have discovered many new artists that I would never have known about. In fact I often have it on for background music when I am working from my home office.

Today I discovered another music site called Jamendo which allows musicians to share their music, and consumers to listen, tag and review and even download with bit torrents.

Jamendo is a new model for artists to promote, publish, and be paid for their music. On jamendo, the artists distribute their music under Creative Commons licenses. In a nutshell, they allow you to download, remix and share their music freely. It’s a “Some rights reserved” agreement, perfectly suited for the new century. These new rules make jamendo able to use the new powerful means of digital distribution like Peer-to-Peer networks such as BitTorrent or eMule to legally distribute albums at near-zero cost. jamendo users can discover and share albums, but also review them or start a discussion on the forums. Albums are democratically rated based on the visitors’ reviews. If they fancy an artist they can support him by making a donation.

It’s a fantastic concept and a great site to visit if you like original music, curently mostly from Europe. As a user, you can build your own playlist and it will play them using your default mp3 player. Jamendo also has a built in SHARE it function, allowing you to share your favourite albums with your friends .. no doubt capitalising on the viral aspects of new music discovery. For artists, Jamendo is a great way to share your creations with the world, both on the Jamendo site, and on your own site by simply copying the script of your playlist.

A great example of “open source” music, and a potentially disruptive business model.

Here’s an interesting mashup, called Garbage Scout where the Google Maps API is used to provide the whereabouts and pictures of garbage left out on the street. Currently covers downtown New York and as you can see from the photos, it’s cold in New York at the moment!

via Web Jungle

Source Sense .. an open source development company is running a contest to create a logo for the company. For the cost of a new Mac Book Pro, the company has already had about 80 submissions, some of them are excellent.

Just goes to show how you can make both economic sense and engagement by letting consumers in to help collaborate with your brand!

For those of us who are often on global audio calls, it is always a challenge to keep up to date with the moving goal posts of daylight savings time changes around the globe. Various applications have been written to deal with the issue, but I have just come across perhaps the simplest and most effective tool to manage global times called Gchart.

Gchart solves the “What time is it in Chile?” challenge with a remarkably simple interface and presents you with a Map of the world (using the Google Maps API) and then you simple click on the country or city where you want to know the time. It not only provides the time, but pictures. Gchart also has and currency conversion map which operates under the same simple interface.

Officially launched yesterday, Stickem is a service that allows users to easily load video, audio, and images, and then provides additional tools to easily post these files to a website with a code snippet.

Positioned as a kind of an “add-on” to community sites like Myspace, Xanga, and Livejournal, Stickem is positioned as a place to store your multimedia files, and the tool to “stick’em” on your site.

Flickr, who this week passed 100 million photos, already lets you add images to your site by pasting a code snippet, as does Vidilife for videos. The new feature that Stickem is trying to be a one stop shop for sharing multimedia files to websites and also includes the ability to add a snippet of live video to your site. Most of the webcams displaying under the Whose Live link are people working on computers either at home or at work.

I think this tool is interesting and will appeal to the youth of today, and if it takes off, I would expect to see a response from the big Instant Messaging tools like Yahoo, MSN messenger by incorporating the ability to broadcast webcams to web pages as part of their community groups features.

Coke has hired 6 student bloggers from China, Germany, Italy, Canada, Austria and the US to write about the Winter Olympics, for a new site called Torino Conversations.

Coke is paying to fly and house them and the bloggers and the bloggers have agreed to keep their posts positive. Coke sponsorship is subtle and is linked with their softdrink sponsorship of the Olympics. The site allows for podcasting, the posting of photos and comments from readers. The site follows a similar site initiative last year from Visa setup to encourage Olympic hopefuls to blog about their journey.

I think these are good attempts at bringing real stories from real people, and providing a hosting media channel to spread the message louder than the standard blogging clutter. Expect this trend to continue.

via Mediapost

An update to my earlier post, the successful bidder for 5 ad placements on Rocketboom paid $40,000.