Search results matching tags 'digital' and 'Google'

Nine Top Digital Trends for 2010

2672735 — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 14:50:00 GMT

1: Facebook replaces personal email Question: Google has it, Hoover has it (in the UK anyway), TiVo had it, lost it and has somewhat got it back. Xerox had it, but nobody really cares anymore. So what is it? It’s when a brand name becomes the verb associated with its use. So rather than searching, you Google, or TiVo when digital recording a television show.

Arguably an even more powerful synonym is when a brand becomes a noun, such as Polaroid, for instant developed photograph, although that didn’t end so well. The newest one would seem to Facebook, although it has too meanings. ‘I Facebooked you’ could mean that you the person has added you as a Facebook friend or they sent you a private message though Facebook. The latter would seem to be of more interest as no-one has really owned this type of communication before. No brand ever became synonymous with email. To Hotmail or Gmail someone just never happened.

So the interesting and overlooked disruption of Facebook is its displacement of personal email as a communication tool. Completely permission based, no SPAM (yet), and no address book required - your friends are already on Facebook.

2: Open source software starts making proper money, thanks to the cloud There’s something starting to happen within the open source software world. Projects that were typically for the purview of programmers, or at least technophiles, are now available to the masses. An example is Beanstalk www.beanstalkapp.com a fully hosted, version controlled code repository that uses the Subversion open source project. The big deal is that to set up and maintain a Subversion repository can be a pain - plus you need a server if you want to give access to anyone. Beanstalk has created a subscription based service that, for a small fee, removes the hassle.

Services like this can only really exist with cloud computing infrastructure - so companies such as Beanstalk don’t have the huge upfront capital outlay for servers, they only pay for what their customers use. With the right skills any open source project can be commercialized in this manner.

3: Mobile Commerce - the promise that has never delivered, yet. As annoyingly tantalizing yet esoteric as the word ‘convergence’ has been over the last 10 years, mobile commerce has promised much but never delivered.

Mobile phones have delivered real benefits to societies world wide and in developing nations are used commonplace as devices for the transfer of money. However, until only very recently in the nations that invented and first adopted mobile technologies, has use of your most precious device been extended to payment for goods and services.

With the advanced browsers of iPhone and the Android platforms one could pay for goods through full e-commerce sites, but who really wants to fiddle around with a phone in one hand and a credit card in another? The game changer is the iPhone / iTunes platform. In-app purchases on the iPhone can tempt users to buy small items, upgrades, updates, etc, while iTunes holds their precious credit card information.

All, of course, is done in seamless fashion, enough to promote impulse purchases. Would seem like an easy task for this to be extended to other platforms with PayPal or Google Checkout. But we have been here before haven’t we?

4: Fewer registrations - one sign-in fits all I use a great application on the Mac platform that securely holds my login details for upwards of 50 different sites. It means that I don’t have to use the same password for each site and that I don’t have to search around for post-it notes (my 1998 method) to log into the site I joined a week ago. However, I’m starting to resent having to register for anything ever again. I don’t see why, to leave a particularly pithy comment on a blog or news site, I have to register all over again. I’m sure I’m not the only one and that’s why services like Facebook Connect and OpenID are particularly useful and will continue to be adopted at great speed through 2010.

Who knows where these might go? Perhaps next year I’ll be able to pay for something using my Facebook login.

5: Disruption vs. Continuity - Alternatives to the “Big Idea” As the significance of social networks continues to grow, businesses are investing more in community building as a marketing driver. According to the recent Tribalization of Business study released by Deloitte, 94% of businesses will continue or increase their investment in online communities and social media and, for the majority of these companies, their marketing function will drive this investment.

At the same time, as evidenced by Google’s recent release of “free floating” social tools, such as Google Waves and Sidewiki, there is an increasing shift towards online identity and social activity being an integrated part of the network as a whole, rather than concentrated within discrete platforms such as Facebook.

With the increasing emphasis on marketing and advertising through social networks and the increasing pervasiveness of social tools, marketing objectives come into conflict with advertising techniques.

While advertising has often sought to distinguish itself and stop the consumer in their tracks with a disruptive “big idea,” the emphasis is shifting toward persuasion through fitting organically into the consumer’s social sphere. It will always be the objective of marketing to provide creativity and novelty, but the way in will increasingly be one of persistence and continuity.

6: Self-Sufficiency – The Continuing Evolution of Web-Driven,Open Source DIY Culture Much has been said about the power and potential of collective intelligence. From solving complex problems through crowd-sourcing, to reconfiguring industries to be leaner and more innovative by harnessing the expertise of a network of independent suppliers, many of the breakthrough solutions of tomorrow appear to lie in more effectively pooling the resources and intelligence of our increasingly networked world.

On the other side of the equation, the power of pooled intelligence and networked resources have empowered individuals to take on more and more complex undertakings themselves. From drawing on the collective intelligence of blogs and university open courseware to educate themselves, to services like ponoko, spoonflower and cafe press that facilitate small-scale production, to offline resource pooling like pop-up retail and collective office spaces, individuals are discovering that it has never been easier to try doing it themselves.

While we find new ways to thrive in a still struggling economy, expect to see lasting changes coming from empowering individuals to work together to become more ever more self-sufficient.

7: Info-Art Where we once had pop-psychologists and pop-philosophers, we now appear to have pop-statisticians and pop-economists. The growing wealth of data and the access to rich and diverse data sources that are significant byproducts of information networks have made the art of data analysis a defining skill of our time. By the same token, the skill of elegantly visualizing that data has become a defining art of our time. The art of the infographic is becoming increasingly pervasive as people look more and more to the growing amount of data at our disposal for insight, and more refined as the interactions of that data becomes more complex.

With an ever increasing need for real-time analysis of a growing torrent of raw data, expect to see greater innovation spurred by more elegant ways of capturing and visualizing information by a growing number of info-artists.

8: Crowd Sourcing Across many industries and organizations, crowd sourcing will become a growing tool as part of elance outsourcing strategies. Organizations will mobilize the passionate special interest groups to not only carry a message but, even more importantly perhaps, to lead and take part in activities on their behalf.

Predictions for 2010 are not as rosy as we all hoped and budgets for just about everything continue to be cut, encouraging ‘creative’ thinking regarding getting things done and done well. From political canvassing to software development, from people journalism to environmental activism, we will see huge growth in crowd sourcing models provoked and led, largely, by digital social media strategies.

9: More Flash, Not Less Outside of the obvious brand sites, micro-sites and media sites (video, games, etc.) Flash has often been looked down upon if not completely discounted by techies and search engine optimizers alike. It seemed to face an uncertain future as a viable tool for serious websites and applications such as eCommerce tools and corporate websites.

As it is, Adobe’s rich media tool has enjoyed the grit and determination of its advocates and external development community. Several tricks, authoring tools and server side scripting workarounds have meant that Flash built websites no longer serve up a single, impenetrable page. They offer deep, searchable, indexable sites that will allow acute, detailed traffic and behavioral analytics and search engine optimization. As websites continue to increase in their importance as a company’s storefront, the demand for rich, brand-extending experiences will also increase. Further proliferation of (lightning speed) broadband will reduce download issues while the adoption of Flash on mobile devices will dramatically increase and fuel reach and the desire/need for highly usable, brand transporting, conversion oriented experiences

Google strengthens mobile range with Google Voice launch

2371004 — Thu, 12 Mar 2009 11:28:00 GMT

Google seems intent on flexing its telecoms muscle once more with the introduction of Google Voice, a new product that creates transcriptions of voicemails and archives SMS messages.

The service mingles Google's Gmail product with mobile phone voicemail, storing the transcribed document in the Gmail inbox, using speech recognition technology that it developed for its Goog-411 directory service.

The product, which also allows low-cost international calls, is currently only available to users of GrandCentral, the mobile start-up Google acquired two years ago, however a public release is expected in a number of weeks.

It's a nice companion to Google's Android product, and will no doubt feature prominently on the new Google phone, the HTC Magic, which is being launched via Vodafone in April.

There doesn't appear to be any immediate benefit to Google for offering such a product, as no revenue would be acquired from simply transcribing voicemails, besides the international call thing.

Which is sure to fuel speculation that Google could be culling this information for more nefarious purposes, bringing up the same argument about online privacy and Google's all-conquering reach across the internet.

As far as privacy goes, you would have to be an idiot to have Google transcribe all your voicemails if you've got something worth hiding.

It would appear Google is aware of this, as shown by its tongue-in-cheek video explaining how Google Voice works, in which a voicemail is transcribed, reading: "Hey, I left the secret plans for the project on your desk, keep them safe."

The product is pretty handy in a number of ways, for example, when voicemail-inept callers leave a longwinded message, only mentioning their phone number at the beginning, Google can send me a text of the transcribed voicemail.

Same goes with addresses, emails, etc.

Oh, there's more, like being able to send an ex-girlfriend a transcribed recollection of her 3am drunkdial voicemail. Instant humiliation and gratification, which I guess can be used vice-versa. Perhaps someone should develop a drunkdial blocker for Android's app store.

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Google vs Twitter, Thrilla in Mozilla

2371004 — Fri, 06 Mar 2009 15:14:00 GMT

Heads have been rolling over Google CEO Eric Schmidt's recent Twitter snub, when he called the ridiculously popular (too early, too late to call it a phenomenon?) microblogging service a "poor man's email", one he doesn't "get".

Personally, I didn't think too much of the slag-off - he is Eric Schmidt after all, an "untouchable" in the digital world and despite what many, many (so many) news stories report, Twitter still retains a sort of subversive, grassroots air around it.

Cutesy, that's the word.

Sure its mainstream, but not Google mainstream (even though Google seems a little cutesy too, which is no accident no doubt).

Anyways, techno-pundits have introduced an interesting theory, that Schmidt's rebuke was an intentional act, a stroke, an attempt to devalue Twitter before either acquiring the company under Google's own ubiquitous umbrella, or to sully its name before launching its own Twitter-killer.

The theories hold water, certainly, and for a number of reasons.

First and foremost, there is no way in hell that Google, or Schmidt, can ignore the potential behemoth that the cutesy-Twitter represents.

Behind it's playful mask of those perfectly pointless 140 characters "tweets" lies a powerful tool: search. Something that Google might be familiar with.

In fact, Twitter is much like a chip-off-the-old-block, a spitting-image of a young Google.

A younger, fresher, dare-I-say better version of itself. Not only is Twitter search, but it's real-time search. Something Google can not (presently) lay claim.

Schmidt knows, and his recent rebuff could really be a hairline fracture in his usually steely resolve. Has Twitter got Google sweatin'?

It's pretty obviously that Facebook is rattled, which, after a failed acquisition of its own, subsequently introduced a swathe of similar services.

After spending the better part of his life putting the boots to Microsoft, painting the company as the evil empire, could "poor man's email" be the crucial first steps towards an all out war against Twitter? Just what is Google planning?

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IE slips again, Billy Idol looks surprised

2371004 — Tue, 03 Feb 2009 15:10:00 GMT

Another month for Microsoft, and another drop in market share for its Internet Explorer browser; now resting at 68%, it's lowest point in seven consecutive months.

Last year, IE sat blissfully, at 75%, however this preceded the release of Google's Chrome, which combined with the growing popularity of Firefox and Apple's Safari, have repetitively chipped away its unearned dominance.

Prone to attacks and lacking the add-on, open-source muscle of its counterparts, it's a wonder why so many people are still using it.

But again, not everyone really cares about these trivial things.

Nerdom aside, Firefox continues to grow, now at 21%, jumping up three percentage-points in the same seven months that IE lost seven.

However, all it not lost for Microsoft. It's ready to fully release IE8, the new-classic, which is receiving positive reviews.

Some features include InPrivate browsing, which records no web history when asked not to. Google InCognito function provides this with Chrome and Firefox has its Stealth privacy mode.

The browser itself is apparently faster, though likely not as quick as Firefox, but includes a new feature "web slices" a tabbing function that allows quick(er) access Twitter et al.

Also Microsoft has been enjoying some really good buzz about its new version of Window's (Windows 7) after continual bad press about its flawed Vista OS, which regularly aggravates me on my laptop at home.

With two major, major releases on the horizon, Microsoft's inevitable browser market loss doesn't seem like a huge deal.

As a side note, kind of, have you checked out some of these Microsoft SongSmith atrocities yet? The Caribbean-infused Billy Idol 'White Wedding' is swiftly becoming a YouTube classic, not to be missed.

Should eBay sell Skype?

2371004 — Tue, 27 Jan 2009 14:56:00 GMT

Rumours have been swirling around the eBay-camp as CEO John Donahoe recently hinted that the company is willing, if not ready, to sell its lucrative Skype business.

Donahoe, speaking to analysts about eBay's drastic Q4 profits, said Skype was a "great standalone business", which is apparently enough to get industry-insiders buzzing and giddy these days.

However, he also admitted that "synergies" between Skype and the rest of the eBay portfolio were slim, which could plausibly mean: sell, sell, sell.

Despite the slim-synergy, Skype is clearly a winner, and could attract some decent bids, although eBay might have perhaps been a little too enthusiastic when pulling out its wallet for the online-telephone service in 2005, paying $2.6bn.

Some analysts predict Skype could fetch as much as $1bn, which could provide a much needed boost to the suffering internet company, which reported a 30% drop in net profits in the fourth quarter 2008, $367m to $531m.

Dismal, especially after eBay's usual triumphant Christmas season.

On the other hand, Skype continues to impress, with over 400m users around the world (I myself one of them) and recent reports of a 26% rise in revenue.

Just because it can afford anything and everything, Google's name has been associated as a possible interested party, along with major telecom networks Verizon and AT&T.

Should eBay sell? I don't think so, Donahoe admitted Skype wasn't much getting in the way of the eBay business, which is hurting. He should focus on fixing eBay first (cough, PayPal) as it should surely weather the ugly storm that is braced to decimate the digital industry over the next two years, Skype could very well be its water-wings.

The difference between Reputation and Image

2154489 — Fri, 05 Sep 2008 19:48:00 GMT

To kick off this blog, I should note that I've spent many years happily producing work (mostly digital) for big brands. With the best clients, it's always a privilege to act as brand steward — helping to build a winning image for their products. In other words, I'm both fan and practitioner of advertising and other paid media, on and offline.

But as I morphed from a creative director to a planning director, it was clear how people viewed brands wasn't usually how the creative agency wanted them to. When I joined a different agency, with public relations as the lead marketing offering, I found myself among equally passionate brand stewards. Only they don't deal with image creation. Instead, they are devoted to the care and nurturing of a brand's reputation.

What's the difference? That's what this blog will explore. Fwiw, I think it's like your Google results v your TV spot. Reputation v Image.

What do you think?