Frontiering Talk

MSNBC have released a NewsWare site, which provides an interesting news spectrum which can also be customised into a widget to embed on your blog, social network profile, or desktop.

The news experience includes this spectrum which is very engaging.

There is also a Newsblaster tool which lets you read the news while you are playing an online game.

To promote this feature, MSNBC setup the world’s first interactive cinema crowd game.

Cinema goers became human joysticks as the collective crowd body movement controls the functions of a game controller.

NBC New’s social education iCue site is also mixing news videos with study guides and educational games in what they hope will satisfy Generation Y’s shorter attention span.

New interactive technologies can help to bring brands or big ideas to life.
Bullseye in partnership with 808South are pleased to announce Australia’s first client demonstration of the iBar™.

Speaking about the technology, Ian Farmer Senior Brand Strategist for Bullseye said

“The iBar™ has received many innovation awards in Europe and we are excited about the digital possibilities this technology can provide to Australia. Designing a creative set of interactive experiences is an integral part of producing a rewarding and engaging brand interaction”.

Intelligent surface system

iBar™ takes consumer interaction to a new level. Integrated video projectors beam content onto the bar surface and the intuitive tracking system creates a new connection between real life products and dynamic digital content. This turns the bar into a giant touch sensitive screen allowing multiple people to interact with the content at the same time.
Coloured lights, animations or any rich media content can illuminate, link and follow every movement of a hand, bottle or glass.

The iBar™ software consists of two parts – tracking and displaying. All objects are tracked and their position is transmitted to the displaying-software. The displaying software can be adapted to your needs. The use of pictures, text, movies, animations or any visual content is possible. iBar™ is a modular, stand alone system that can be configured to suit your needs. The modules are 2m long and can be linked together to form a seamless interactive surface of virtually any length.

The iBar™’s can also be networked wirelessly to allow interaction between two or more separate units. Content can also be streamed via the net and bars can be fitted with Bluetooth technology to allow consumers to download content. Each portable module consists of its own cameras, projectors and computers. Any number of iBar™ modules are available for hire on short and long-term arrangements.

Sleeveface is defined as "one or more persons obscuring or augmenting any part of their body or bodies with record sleeve(s) causing an illusion"

This unique art-form has inspired over 1400 Flickr photos, a series of Youtube videos, and even a Facebook group with over 10,000 members.

This is a great example of a self powered community linked by the single common objective of creating art from record sleeves.

David Armano is one of the great visual thinkers best known for his Logic + Emotion blog which is full of creative visuals that clearly explain concepts.

Here’s his talk from this years Interaction 08 conference which describes how the convergence of design and experience are having an impact of the roles people play and the way we work.

The User Interface (UI) of any system is critical to the success of the application, and that is why major software companies have roles for UI experts. But now you can record and then watch the trail of your consumer clicks thanks to a product from ClicTale.

Clicktale has a useability study (part 1 and part 2) which discusses findings based on their tracking service.

The key ones are

• While most web pages have a vertical scroll-bar, visitors scrolled all the way to the bottom in only 20% of the recorded visits.

• Users scroll based on relative position inside the page, not based on absolute position in terms of pixels. In other words, the same number of page viewers will tend to scroll halfway or three-quarters through a page, regardless of whether the page size is 5,000 pixels or 10,000 pixels.

• The top and bottom of a web page are the most valuable areas in terms of visitor attention. Users spend an average of 24 seconds near the top and 14 seconds near the bottom as opposed to 8 seconds at the middle.

In addition ClicTale has release a heatmap product which describes

• Attention Heatmap shows how much attention a specific webpage area is getting from the visitors who visited that area, as measured by average time.
• Total Time Heatmap shows the total time that all visitors were exposed to a specific webpage area.
• Visitors Heatmap shows the number of visitors and the percent of all visitors that looked at every area including the page bottom.
• Pageviews Heatmap Given that a single visitor may visit a webpage several times, the Pageviews Heatmap shows the number of pageviews recorded at every area on the webpage.

I think this service is a great tool for monitoring the way people navigate your site.

Many consumers are frustrated when wanting to interact with corporations. Phone calls met with “please hold” notices, or emails that get a “thanks for your input” reply, but nothing further.

Getsatisfaction is trying to solve these challenges by providing a place where consumers and marketeers can communicate. They call it “people-powered customer service” and allows consumers a platform where they can converse about customer service issues specific to a particular company or product.

Examples are this request on the Product “I want Sandy”, which is a pretty cool reminder service that I have been testing out.  The replies to the initial request include suggestions and claficiations from a representative of “I want Sandy“, and demonstrate how effective this is.

Participants in the conversations can include other consumers or employee representatives (declared as such), and the ability to rank useful posts enable the community rated posts to bubble to the top.

Discussions are controlled by the community, providing a freedom that is harder to provide inside normal corporate consumer response services. From a corporate view, representatives are encouraged to respond to feedback in a collaborative way.

Currently the service is free, although I suspect it gains traction they could monetise the service by either charging corporate participation on a monthly fee, or offering extended offerings that are paid for.

Perspective: More and more consumers are willing to express their opinions about your products and services, and brands that ignore these conversations do so at their own risk.

My virtual model gives consumers the ability to try things on, before buying.

You enter in your measurements, upload your face and presto .. now you can see what you would look like before purchasing. Brands such as Speedo, H&M, Sears, Lands End, Best Buy and Marie Claire are represented.

In addition, the site allows you to share and comment on saved outfits to tap into others opinions.

To expand this capability it is now offered as a Facebook Application.

The site is not the fastest, so a little patience is required, but I can see the appeal to overcome some of the unknowns about purchasing clothes. I suspect technologies like this will only get better.

It would be great if they opened up their API (for turning designs into virtual clothing), as this would allow individual designers to upload their own outfits. I also think is a taste of how you might be able to integrate selling fashion with entertainment. Imagine watching a movie, and then clicking on an actor/actress to add their outfit to your virtual model, get some input from your social network before deciding to purchase !

Tags: retail

I like to listen to visual communications, and I am most comfortable talking while drawing images and diagrams. So the idea of a visual search engine appeals to me.
Quintura is just that. You start by typing in a search string, and then navigate across a visual cloud map to zoom into the accurate definition or meaning you are after.

Here’s the result when you search on Frontiering.

As you select related nodes to the original search string, additional words are added to the search string which refines the search, which is supplied by Yahoo.  Notice if you steer towards People, and Process you will end up with a link to ReCareering.

You can also embed the result of a search into a webpage as I have done above.

Quintura even have a special portal for Kids searching which is worth checking out.

There were 2 reasons why I decided to move my blog from B2evolution into Wordpress. Firstly, was to provide a greater management of unwanted SPAM, and the second was to get access to the growing number of available Widgets that various sites are now providing.

One such widget that has been produced by HP for both Wordpress and Movable Type is their Printing Widget.  (hat tip to Neville Hobson for bringing it to my attention)

I now have a button on the right of this blog, which allows you to print one or many blogs from the page where you are browsing using this selection pop-up.

Perspective: I think this is a great initiative from HP and reinforces the brand with Print Leadership.

Wii’s NiGHTS: Journey of Dreams, will soon include a mini-game called A-list that will utilise Wii’s Weather channel to incorporate real weather into the game’s play.

Perspective: Whilst this is a cool feature for a game, I can see this technology being used by computer controlled houses to alter lighting, update shopping lists, display pictures to remind younger kids of what to wear, etc.

Tags: Frontiering Websites, Gaming

Widgets are all the rage, and it’s no surprise to me that many new businesses are creating business models on the creation of them.

Gydget is one such company, and it focused around creating Widgets to promote musical artists.

Not only is it a great way for people to show their support for their favourite artist, it’s also a tool for sporting clubs or brands to engage their passionate fans in the promotion of their products.
Here’s a test Gydget i have setup which includes the RSS feed from this blog, a video from youtube, as well as a test event.

Polls and Surveys are 2 easy ways to engage opinions, and Polldaddy has just made things simpler by providing an easy way to embed these utilities into websites / blogs etc.

I’ve put one on my blog in the right hand column and true to form it was easy to add, use and manage.

Perspective: I think Widgets like this are a growth area and Polldaddy’s Open Social commitment will only help to expand it’s 70k footprint of users.

Tags: Campaigns, Products, Websites