Frontiering Talk

Fixpicture is a pretty cool online picture editor that runs in Flash or HTML.

Like Picnik it allows you to upload pictures, resize and add effects and will appeal to the growing audience of consumers who what a simple, easy to use free picture editor.

Monkey See is a new site containing a collection of "how to" videos ranging from Parenting, Pets, Auto & Mechanical

There is even a video series on how to carve a pumpkin.

Perspective: I think this site exemplifies the growing demands for videos in online content, as well as the emergence of niche content sites (in this case "How to").

His New York City apartment had to be fumigated. All of his friends have tiny studio apartments. Hotels in New York are insanely expensive. Left with few living options, Mark thought it would be fun and make an interesting video to move into an IKEA store where he’d live and sleep for a week. Never in a million years did he think IKEA would go for it, but miraculously they have a agreed.

Mark moved in early morning Monday January 7th to the IKEA in Paramus, New Jersey and will stay for the week through Saturday January 12th. Every day people can watch a video recap of his day. He will be living in IKEA 24/7 and eating all his meals in the restaurant (he may order Domino’s take out once or twice). Thankfully they have a shower for him in the back offices.

He has a website to record his week in Ikea

http://marklivesinikea.com/

Perspective: This is a great initiative by Mark, but also by Ikea who will gain lots of free publicity from Mark’s live recording of his experience.

Domino’s have created a very flash "pizza builder" which not only provides excellent visuals, but allows you to custom make and then order your creation.

Perspective:  I like this site because it is both engaging, and relevant to the product that Dominos are selling.  It should also provide an excellent source of information that Dominos can use when coming up with new pizza creations.  Perhaps they could even allow consumers to name and vote for their favourite toppings.

Truveo (a video search engine) has just launched several country specific video sites Australia, Brazil, Italy, Mexico, The Netherlands, Russia, Turkey.

This is the top rated section in Australia sports category, which you can “snag” as a widget.

It’s incredible just how much video content is now available, and the ability to create and serve niche channels is quite powerful.

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.

I have just installed another cool widget to this blog from Snap Shots that enhances links with visual previews of the destination site. This gives you the opportunity to see a small snap shot of the destination link as well as interactive excerpts of Wikipedia articles, MySpace profiles, IMDb profiles and Amazon products, display inline videos, RSS, MP3s, photos, stock charts and more.

If you don’t like it, it’s easy to disable, just click the Options icon in the upper right corner of the Snap Shot and opt-out.

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.

FreeRice is a clever website that donates 10 grams of rice every time you correctly answer an english word defintion. So in principle, you expand your english vocabulary and feed the hungray at the same time.

Perspective: I think “Not for profits” are succeeding in leveraging the demand to help global issues, by both producing engaging sites. The combination of these reasons produce a powerful incentive for people to spread the site through word of mouth / mouse to others.

via CTV.ca

Tags: Frontiering Websites, WOM, Word of Mouth

I have just migrated my site from B2evolution to Wordpress. All the old posts came across, and I have taken the opportunity to re-categorise my posts, which i will finish over the weekend along with reformatting things.

Tags: News