Articles in Feature
Twitter Co-founder Evan Williams talks about the ideas for driving twitter’s growth in the future.
Sweden is known for it’s innovation which not only expresses itself in design, but also in creative campaigns.
Agency Forsman and Bodenfors decided to use one of Facebook’s built in features of “Tagging” to get the word out about Ikea’s Malmo store opening. First, they created a Facebook profile for the store manager, Gordon Gustavsson. Then, over the next two weeks, uploaded images from of IKEA showrooms to his Facebook photo album.
Here’s an updated video from the team at Socialnomics which includes some great examples of how social media is used to deliver real business results.
Augmented Reality is still quite new, but that hasn’t stopped some innovative agencies tapping into the technology to promote their client’s products.
First is the “Eminem Augmented Reality Competition” website which encourages fans to “spray art” on a 3D “E” and then submit it into a talent contest in the hope to win a whole bunch of prizes! The site was created by Outside Line and you can enter the competition here.
Looking like a big brother to the iPhone, the CrunchPad tablet PC from Techcrunch is likely to shake up the tablet computing market.
Crunchpad
At 18 mm thick, the tablet only works when connected to the internet. The device takes advantage of clever touch protocols that make for efficient and pleasant consuming of content. Rumoured to be priced at around US$300, the device could become a widely adopted method for reading online content.
Social data portability has been a hotly debated topic with a range of emerging standards competing for adoption.
Afterall, single signon to the web offers a great deal of immediate benefits for users.
Dataportability open standards group has been marketing the concept for a few years now, which supports the OpenID login standard and has been adopted by Yahoo, eBay, Photobucket, and Twitter, and MySpace. Google’s Friend Connect and Facebook’s Facebook Connect are both offering open API’s to developers who can integrate their own login details with one of these major players. Mashable has a good coverage of both of these tools here
Australia day is here for 2009, and a good chance to review the way digital has brought about change to the way we live.
Here are some key events from 10 years ago in 1999
- Mark Taylor was the 1999 Australian of the year
- Companies spent millions protecting themselves from the Y2K bug
- Google moved from their garage to their first office with a search market share of < %1
- George Bush criticised President Clinton on Kosovo saying “We need an exit strategy before going to war”
Emarketer confirms that the Internet is more popular than Newspapers for news
I would expect that the internet will reach TV by this time next year.
Here’s a list of 10 Digital Marketing predictions for 2009.
1. Mobile apps
Goldman sachs estimates 210 million iphone apps will be dowloaded by 2010. Much of this will be monetized by the emerging mobile ad market, e.g. www.admob.com
2. Video streaming from mobile
e.g. www.qik.com www.kyte.com www.ustream.com
Soccer mums through to corporate presentations will be beamed from mobiles directly to the internet
Social scientists refer to the craving for online contact as “Ambient awareness”. They liken the feeling to being similar to being physically near someone and sensing their mood by their body language, mood and comments.
I think the desire for ambient awareness is what has driven the popularity of Facebook, which through it’s provision of the news feed feature, is supplying a stream of up to the minute updates on what your friends are doing. In many cases this feed substitutes the need for email. Twitter is another service which streams snippets of thoughts into a single stream.
Whilst the craving for ambient awareness of our social graph (or friends list) might be strong, it is surprising to me that the use of RSS feedreaders to supply a personalised interest based news feed is still quite low.
Gartner has released some new research which describes how various people engage in online communities.
Using the term “Generation V”, the research confirms that segments do not relate to age, gender, geographic location or social class, but instead are grouped by their interactions and behavioural usage preferences of digital media consumption.
The 4 levels of engagement in Gartner’s model are creators, contributors, opportunists, and lurkers.
A report by emarketer predicts that Australia will take top spot amongst industrialised nations growing from 63% in 2008 to over 76% by 2012.
Note: that’s top spot for %, not for speed !
Also reported are these figures from Nielsen which highlight preferred online activities.
The BRW has officially launched it’s top Australian web2.0 applications.
Here’s a selection of the ones I am familiar with :-
5. Engagd
Website: http://www.engagd.com/
Person/Company: Faraday Media (Chris Saad/ Ashley Angell)
Description: Web service application that creates ‘attention profiles’ of users, and enables these to be used in customising services and content for users.
6. MyVirtualHome
Website: http://mvh.com.au/
Person/Company: Greg Lane/ Paul Condon
A new social network has launched in Australia which hopes to address some of the key insights from online social media research.
Vibe Village is a social network which is hoping to connect brands to social influencers, by targeting 3 needs.
Being First.
I still remember running home to tell my brothers that I had found a way to get through the lane way at the back of my house, only to be disappointed when it became apparent that the news wasn’t news to them.
When I was young, radio shows such as American Top 40, or Billboard were the established authorities on determining the most popular artist or album.
The internet has revolutionised the distribution of music and it’s no surprise that there is no shortage of innovation in the delivery of informational services.
Recognising that popularity includes discussions, consumption as well as purchase, the BBC has created an index of bands and tracks.
