Frontiering Talk

Social networks continue to gain in popularity, and it’s no surprise that niche social networks have started to emerge.

Take Geni .. the social network aimed at family relatives. It has an extremely nice family tree interface, which lets you add in your relatives. Pretty soon, those relatives add their relatives .. and the tree grows. My tree started with about 10 people and within 2 weeks now has nearly 100 entries. (only the first 10 were added by me).

Geni also is a great place for storing family photo albums. Unfortunately it doesn’t allow you to embed photos from Photobucket or Flickr, so for now at least people will have to upload photos to Geni. And Geni is well funded recently raising 100 million in investment.

Perspective: I’d like to see some of the face recognition features of Riya (http://www.riya.com) built into to the tool. Nevertheless, as someone who lives away from most of my relatives, this is a great online tool to stay in touch with latest photos, and also provides the perfect tool for the inevitable family tree kids assignments.

Update: Video review of Geni from Technology Evangelist.

Tags: Social Network

To help celebrate the 30th Anniversary of Star Wars, they have partnered with eyespot and have made 300 star wars clips available for fans to mashup into their own customised clips.

Perspective: this provides a great interaction point for a brand that has already engaged a generation of audiences

Sitepoint is a business that is linking businesses requiring design services such as logos, flash banners or web pages with freelance designers.

The site describes it’s service like this

Here’s how it works:

1. Write a short design brief describing what you want done.
2. Choose one (or more) prize amounts you’re willing to offer.
3. Post your contest and watch as Designers from all over the world submit design concepts.
4. Provide feedback on each entry, pick a winner, and pay out the prize money directly to the designer.
5. Once payment is made, all rights to the winning design will be transferred from the Designer to you.

It’s that simple!

Judging from the contests on offer, businesses are paying 200 to 300 for a logo which is pretty good value .. given they are often getting 20 to 50 entries.

Perspective: Whilst the payments aren’t huge .. this is a great way for budding designers to connect with potential clients, as well as establish some reference sites.

Here’s another example of personalising a product .. this time Dolls.

The company was created after a couple created Dolls of themselves to help their daughter adjust to day care. The idea spread through word of mouth, and now Tiny Pocket People ships dolls all over the world.

Perspective: This is a great concept. I wonder why they don’t sell kits so that you can “make your own” doll … perhaps that is one for the patchwork quilting industry to run with. Perhaps the next version should include a small mp3 player that plays pre-recorded sounds of the person the doll is modelled on.

Tags: WOM

Lots has been said about banner ads not delivering results, but a new study called An Examination of Different Explanations for the Mere Exposure Effect shows that banner ads do leave an impression.

Most of the exposure occurs when there are gaps in the flow of things requiring attention, such as flipping through a magazine, waiting for a tv show to start, or ironically while surfing the web during a tv ad break. Ads can be repeated up to 20 times without wearing out their impression on audiences. These brief ad exposures lead to familiarity and create warm positive feelings according to the report.

Perspective: There are many ways to buy online ads these days and combining the correct choice of creative, and advertising network can be an extremely cost effective communication method.

It seems that scrap booking is becoming more popular with stores popping up in many suburbs. Therefore it’s hardly surprising to see an online scrapbooking product appear .. and this one is surprisingly good and easy to use.

It’s called Scrapblog, and it allows you to add pictures, videos, to many scrapbooking templates to create an online scrapbook .. or blog.

I thought i would try it out for Mother’s day .. and here’s the result.
Ok .. scrapbooking isn’t a passion of mine .. so here’s one that has a lot more pages and formats to give you a better idea.

Perspective: I think this is a great product, and the social networking features, as well as the way this product integrates with other social media products like flickr will be a successful formula. I also think companies could use this type of tool to record events, product displays, or even provide opportunities to enhance internal hr profiles.

Tags: Social Network

Hoohaa is a new business that promises to provide relevant offers and promotions to your mobile phone via Text messages. The business model is similar to what other companies such as Emailcash and Pureprofile, have been doing with email offers.

I spoke to Hoohaa’s CEO James Robinson this week and he spoke about the types of offers that will be coming to Hoohaa’s members. These could include last minute tickets to the opera, free pizza, exclusive tickets to see a band, and cheap plane tickets from your location. These are all tailored to your profile. This provides a unique advertising opportunity particularly for time dependent products and services.

Perspective: The timing of this service appears to be right with mobile commerce starting to grow. The main challenge for Hoohaa will be whether they can attract a critical mass of members quickly. They will also have to overcome concerns of being spammed with irrelevant messages. James assured me that members would not receive more than about 4 or 5 messages a week, and that they can unsubscribe at any time.

Dell’s ideastorm is a great website that asks it’s consumers for ideas that Dell should consider in future product innovations.

Perspective: It’s great to see this kind of site, a kind of consumer democracy sharing and commenting on ideas, suggestions ranging from what should be loaded on the std operating system, to types of hardware components.

Whether it be a small part to fix something, or to personalise your next Barbie doll with your mother-in-law’s head, 3D printing is becoming more and more viable for consumer use.

For design shops it will make the logistics costs of getting widgets to people very simple. You download the plans, print and you have the object.

The NYTimes tells of the Desktop Factory which is specifically aimed at low cost 3D printing. I suspect that there will be a market for the ad hoc 3D printing needs and perhaps post offices .. or camera print shops will fill this void.

Perspective: Consumer generated widgets, designs that are looking to find a way to distribute to a global audience will find this exciting and printable material technology is changing all the time. Perhaps Barbie could outsource their next design to your mother-in-law?

Tutorom is an e-learning community that has created a marketplace for students and teachers.

Anyone can submit lessons to the site and content ranges from computer lessons, cooking to languages. Lessons can be submitted as text, or even video files. Premium users (paid) get access to premium lessons without ads. Teachers of lessons, can either charge or earn 10% of ad revenue by becoming a registered member as well.

Some social media tools are present with the ability to rate courses 5-star scale.
Tutorom tracks every lesson you look at and gives you a report on how many times it’s been viewed.

Perspective: The success of this site will depend on reaching critical mass of courses, but it’s great to see sites like this connecting people together in a kind of global training ground. What I think would be interesting in linking relevant ads to the courses being offered. E.g. cooking ingredients with the cooking lessons, French holidays with French lessons etc.

L-mail is a great service that lets you send physical letters to 22 worldwide locations electronically.

Either type in a letter via their browser utility or attach a PDF, or Word document. L-mail print it out at one of their 22 worldwide locations and then deliver it to the address you specify.

You can even use L-mail to send multiple letters to a mail list. Costs are around AUD $1.4 to AUD $1.7

Perspective: It’s great to see the emergance of “off-line” tasks being merged with the electronic world. Customers can even link L-mail into their back office systems for regular newsletters.

Here’s a cool new business known as Buddy Gift, which offers real gifts to virtual friends.

Aimed very much at the social media space where people meet, but may not know each others physical address. The way it works is you provide Buddy Gift your friends email address and Buddy Gift then send a secure message to which your virtual friend can reply to with their physical address .. and your gift is then sent on.

Current gifts include flowers, gift hampers that type of thing.

Perspective: Reminds me a little of doing what paypal does for money exchanges .. and it surprises me that Ebay, who know owns Paypal, has not entered this space.