Monday, February 28, 2011
Painting with light to show WiFi networks
WiFi is everywhere, floating and whirling around us somehow, but where is it really? In Immaterials: Light painting WiFi, Timo Arnall, Jørn Knutsen and Einar Sneve Martinussen use a rod of blinking lights to visualize signal strength in their college town.
In order to study the spatial and material qualities of wireless networks, we built a WiFi measuring rod that visualises WiFi signal strength as a bar of lights. When moved through space the rod displays changes in the WiFi signal. Long-exposure photographs of the moving rod reveal cross sections of a network’s signal strength.
The stronger the signal strength, the more lights that illuminate in that specific spot, updating as the walker/carrier moves. Then using long-exposure photographs, the lights are recorded for beautiful results. Super simple concept, yet very effective. See the device in action in the video below.
[YOUrban via @wattenberg]
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Friday, February 25, 2011
Google Invades Microsoft Territory, Integrates Google Docs With Office Products | Fast Company
Although Google has pushed hard to make Google Docs a worthy competitor to Microsoft Office, there's always been a sense that Docs just couldn't stack up. As a web-based program, Google Docs lacked the features, ease-of-use, and stability of Office--it's an online convenience, certainly, but no where close to a replacement for Microsoft's suite of products.
But today, Google took steps to grow its role beyond just an online supplement to Office--and, in doing so, is going right into Microsoft's backyard.
On Thursday, the search giant unveiled a new tool to sync Microsoft Office with Google Docs, creating a seamless transition from one program to the next. Called Cloud Connect, the plugin installs to the toolbar of any Office application, whether Word, Excel or PowerPoint, and enables users to "share and simultaneously edit" documents. Using the Google plugin, all files and revisions are synced to the cloud and continuously backed up through Google.
Rather than try to reinvent the wheel, it appears Google is trying to better integrate itself with market leader Microsoft by doing what it does best: cloud computing and real-time collaboration. As an ad for the new plugin says, "You gain all the benefits of the cloud without learning anything new or updating existing software."
Wednesday, February 23, 2011
3 Ways to Encourage Risk-Taking - Harvard Business Review
Over the past few years, the economy has forced many companies to play it safe and take few, if any, risks. If your company culture has become — or always has been — risk-averse, try doing the following three things to turn it around:
- Evaluate risk-taking. Take an honest look at your company or unit and assess whether people avoid risks. Utilize interviews, skip-level meetings, or anonymous surveys to gauge whether people feel anxious or hold back ideas.
- Make idea-sharing safe. Create a "safe space" where managers and employees can voice their concerns, feedback, and ideas — without fear of retribution.
- Experiment. Ask a team in a part of the company you want to grow to conduct a series of rapid-cycle experiments to test new ways of working. Make it explicit that failure is acceptable as long as learning comes
from it.
Benchmarking digital marketing Presentation > Smart Insights Digital Marketing
View more presentations from Dave Chaffey.Why benchmarking your online capabilities matters
I believe that external and internal benchmarking of your digital marketing capabilities is important for managers reviewing their online strategy since it answers these types of questions:
- Are we effective+efficient in our digital marketing?
- What is the “size of the prize” – are we tapping into the market effectively?
- How do we compare to direct competitors?
- How do we compare to out-of-sector competitors – we need to know this if we want to be best in breed?
- How can we see where we’re strong and weak through internal data?
So benchmarking helps highlight failings which can be worked on, but also shows how we companies can strive to be best-in-breed as they progress towards their goals.
4 Great #Mobile #Marketing Presentations from mobilemarketer.com
Tuesday, February 22, 2011
10 Rock Solid Website Layout Examples - Designshack.co.uk
Three Boxes
This is probably the most simple layout on the list. In fact, you’ll be tempted to think that it’s far too simple to ever fit your own needs. If this is the case, you’ll be surprised if you really put some thought into how versatile the arrangement really is.
The three boxes layout features one main graphic area followed by two smaller boxes underneath. Each of these can be filled with a graphic, a block of text or a mixture of both. The main box in this layout is often a jQuery slider, capable of showcasing as much content as you want!
The silhouetted shapes along the top are areas that can be used for logos, company names, navigation, search bars and any other informational and functional content typically on a website.
This design is ideal for a portfolio page or anything that needs to show off a few sample graphics. Each of the images could be a link that leads to a larger, more complex gallery page. Later in the article we’ll see how to mix this idea up even further.
3D Screenshots
As developers continue to create an endless collection of webapps, the 3D screenshots layout seen below, or some variant of it, is becoming more and more popular. The basic idea is to top your page with a headline and then toss in some stylized previews of your application. These often come with reflections, heavy shadows, big background graphics, or even complex adornments such as vines crawling all over the screenshots, but the core idea is always really simple.
Another place I see this trick used a lot is in pre-built themes. In these cases, a designer is selling a stock layout and really needs his/her placeholder graphics to shine, and nothing says cool and modern like some fancy 3D effects!
Advanced Grid
Many of the layouts that you’ll see in this article adhere to a pretty strict grid alignment. However, for the most part, they don’t simply suggest a page full of uniform thumbnails. For instance, the layout below mixes up the size of the images to avoid redundancy.
As with the three boxes example, there’s one primary graphic heading up the page. This is followed by a simple twist on the idea of a uniform grid of thumbnails. The space would allow for a span of four squares horizontally, but instead we’ve combined the first two areas so that the left half of the page differs from the right.
As we mentioned with the first layout, the blocks don’t have to be images. For example, you can imagine this as blocks of text on the left flanking square images on the right.
Featured Graphic
Sometimes you don’t have enough content for a page full of images. So what do you do if you want to showcase one icon, photo or perhaps even a symbol such as an ampersand? The layout below is a super easy solution that is quite popular and reads very well due to the lack of distractions.
The result is a page that is bold, yet minimal and clean. The statement it makes is strong and impossible to miss, just make sure your graphic is good enough to be featured so prominently!
Five Boxes
The five boxes layout is simply an evolution of the three boxes layout. All of the same logic applies, it’s just been modified to hold even more content. It could easily be four boxes as well, it just depends on what you want to showcase. It also makes it look like you put a little more effort into the design!
Obviously, as you add to the layout, the secondary items become smaller and smaller so for most uses, five boxes is probably going to approach the limit.
Just as with the three box layout, this one is so versatile that it can literally be used on just about any type of site. Ideas for switching it up include adding a large background graphic, rounding the corners, adding shadows and/or reflections, or perhaps even adding an interactive element to the smaller thumbnails. You could easily add in buttons that cause them to scroll horizontally.
Fixed Sidebar
Thus far all the sites that we’ve seen have had a top-side horizontal navigation. The other popular option is of course a vertical navigation, which lends itself to creating a strong vertical column on the left side of the page. Often this is a fixed element that stays where it is while the rest of the page scrolls. The reason for this is so the navigation can stay easily accessible from any point in the site.
The rest of the content can borrow from one of the other layouts on this list. Notice that I’ve again modified the three box layout, this time in a four box arrangement. Once you’re done reading this article, look at all the layouts again and think about how you can mix and match the ideas to create new layouts.
Headline & Gallery
Everyone loves a good gallery page. From a layout perspective, what could be simpler? All you need is a solid, uniform grid of images and some room for a headline with an optional sub-head. The key here is to make your headline big and bold. Feel free to use this as a point of creativity and include a script or some crazy typeface.
This example uses squished rectangles to mirror the real site below, but this can and should be modified to fit whatever you’re showing off. The point here is to get you to think outside the box and not default to a square, maybe you could use vertical rectangles or even circles in your own gallery!
Featured Photo
The layout below is extremely common, especially among the photography community. The basic idea here is to have a large image displaying either your design or photography (anything really), accompanied by a left-side vertical navigation.
The navigation might be the strongest in a left alignment, but feel free to experiment with a center or even right alignment to compliment the straight edge of the photo.
Power Grid
The power grid is the most complex layout in this article, but it is one of the most effective layouts I’ve seen for pages that need to contain all kinds of various related content. From images and music players to text and videos, you can cram just about anything into this layout and it stays strong.
The key lies in the bottom half of the preview above. Notice that there’s actually a large container that holds a series of rectangles. This container provides you with the boundaries for your space, and all the content you place inside should be formatted in a strong but varied grid, not unlike the advanced grid layout near the beginning of this article.
Full Screen Photo
The final layout on the list is another that is ideally suited for photographers, but will work on any site with a big, attractive background graphic to display and a limited amount of content.
It can be really hard to read content when it is laid over a background image, so the basic idea here is to create an opaque (or nearly opaque) horizontal bar that sits on top of the image and serves as a container for links, copy, logos and other content.
Rather than using the bar as one really wide content area, try splitting it into a few different sections. This can be done by varying the background color, adding some subtle vertical lines as dividers or even actually breaking the big box into smaller disconnected boxes as I’ve done above.
Check out Designshack for real life examples of each layout.
Is this the start of the second dotcom bubble? | Business | The Observer
Alan Patrick, co-founder of technology consultancy Broadsight, says we are at the beginning of another bubble and that the first breaths have been blown: "A bubble is defined by too much money chasing assets, greater production of those assets, then the need to find a greater fool to buy them."
So far, money is chasing a small group of companies – Facebook, Groupon et al – that could prove to be good investments, says Patrick, who also writes the Broadstuff blog. That was true of other bubbles too: at the start of the US property boom, for example, it was the best houses in the best locations that took off first. Only later did people start speculating on grotty flats in Florida.
According to Patrick, there are 10 tell-tale signs that a bubble is being blown:
■ 1. The arrival of a "New Thing" that cannot be valued in the old way. Dumb-money companies start paying over the odds for New Thing acquisitions.
■ 2. Smart people identify the start of a bubble; New Thing apostles make ever more glowing claims.
■ 3. Startups with founders deemed to have "pedigree" (for example, former employees of New Thing companies) get funded at eye-watering valuations for next to no reason.
■ 4. There is a flurry of new investment funds catering for startups.
■ 5. Companies start getting funded "off the slide deck" (that is, purely on the basis of their PowerPoint presentations) without actually having a product.
■ 6. MBAs leave banks to start up firms.
■ 7. The "big flotation" happens.
■ 8. Banks make a market in the New Thing, investing pension money.
■ 9. Taxi drivers start giving you advice on what stock to buy.
■ 10. A New Thing darling buys an old-world company for stupid money. The end is nigh.
This time social media is the New Thing. Its most earnest acolytes claim that the likes of Twitter and Facebook are a revolution in human communications unseen since Gutenberg started printing the Bible. They aren't making money, but they are worth a fortune. Two smart cookies – Arianna Huffington, founder of the Huffington Post, and Michael Arrington, creator of the influential technology blog TechCrunch – have sold their publications to AOL, a company not noted for the astuteness of its recent decisions. Tick off stage 1.
The second stage looks tickable, too. Fred Wilson, investor at Union Square Ventures and a veteran of the 1999/2000 dotcom bubble, has been sounding the alarm for some time. In a recent interview with TechCrunch, Wilson said he was worried that a two- or three-person startup could get a $50m-$100m valuation. "To me that's not in the realm of reasonable," Wilson said.
He even went as far as to name names – in particular Quora, a questions-and-answers site set up by Facebook alumni Adam D'Angelo and Charlie Cheever that raised $11m in funding last year at a price that valued the company at $86m. Now it is reportedly fending off offers for $330m. See stage 3 above.
Mark Cuban, the investor who made a fortune in the first dotcom boom, has compared the current funding frenzy to a pyramid scheme. In another recent interview, David Cohen, managing director of the well-known Silicon Valley start-up fund TechStars, says there is a bubble in the number of companies financing startups. Cross off stage 4.
The last dotcom boom really took off after the flotation of the internet software company Netscape in 1995. Patrick says this time it's likely to be Facebook that lights the fuse. So far, private investors have been locked out of the New Thing. But JP Morgan is setting up a fund, and Goldman Sachs recently tried to get its clients' money into Facebook. That would take us all the way to stage 8, in which case we're just waiting for stages 9 and 10 – where cabbies get in on the act and the game goes into reverse.
Friday, February 18, 2011
10 things you need to know about the Fortune 100’s use of social media | Articles | Main
1. Twitter is the most popular social media platform. More Fortune 100 companies are using Twitter than any other social media platform, according to the study. Seventy-seven percent of companies have accounts, up from 65 percent last year.2. Companies are interacting more on Twitter. Last year, the Burson-Marsteller study noted that while Fortune 100 companies are using Twitter, they’re mostly broadcasting their messages. This year, the companies are engaging with stakeholders. The study found that 67 percent of Fortune 100 Twitter accounts are using the @ mention to communicate with people on the social network, and there was a substantial increase (78 percent) in the number of retweets from these accounts.
3. Fortune 100 companies have more Twitter followers. The average number of followers per account increased 241 percent.
4. More people are talking about companies on Twitter. Eight out 10 companies on the global Fortune 100 are talked about on Twitter, according to the study.
5. Facebook use increased by 13 percent. And the number of “likes” on these Facebook pages increased by 115 percent, the study said.
6. Companies are giving their stakeholders a voice on Facebook. Nearly 75 percent of Fortune 100 companies let people post comments on their Facebook walls. Among U.S. companies, 72 percent with Facebook pages responded to people on the wall.
7. The number of YouTube accounts increased. Now, 57 percent of Fortune 100 companies are using the video-sharing site, compared with 50 percent last year.8. More companies are using “all four” social media platforms. This year, 25 percent of Fortune 100 companies have Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube accounts, and maintain a blog. Last year, it was 20 percent.
9. Asian companies are helping fuel the increase in social media. The study said there was a 6 percent increase in Fortune 100 companies using at least one social media platform. Among Asian companies the increase amounted to 34 percent.
10. Companies are embracing the blog. While only 36 percent of Fortune 100 companies maintain blogs—which basically held steady from last year—those companies are increasing their use of the tool. For instance, among U.S.-based Fortune 100 companies, the average number of blogs per company increased 63 percent.
Here’s the full study.
Burson-Marsteller 2011 Global Social Media Check-upView more presentations from Burson-Marsteller.
Google Opens Up Infographic Tools for Everyone's Use | Co.Design
Today, Google has opened up the tools on its Public Data Explorer, so that you can use them to chart any old data set you might have laying around. "If you're a student or a journalist or a teacher, you can upload your data and get the same visualizations that we have for our own product," Ben Yolken, Google's product manager for the Public Data Explorer, tells Co.Design.
The tools were first rolled out a year ago, after the company bought up the Gapminder Trendalizer, a bubble-chart data-viz technology invented by Dr. Hans Rosling, the infographics guru/health researcher/acclaimed TED genius.
[Dr. Rosling showing off the Gapminder Trendalyzer, upon which Google's Public Data Exporer is based]
Thus, on the PDE site right now, you can see all manner of amazing time-based data animations, such as the relationship between fertility and life expectancy in the last 50 years; 20 years of U.S unemployment data; and even STD transmission in the last 15 years.
[Dr Rosling show how rich the tools are]
Now, to use all these nifty charts, you just have to put your data into a special format developed by Google, which is adapted to each of these visualizations. Afterward, you can share that data with anyone you want as a Google Doc.
Gawker’s Gulp Moment: Big Redesign Is Driving People Away
About ten days ago, gossip blog Gawker and its sister sites Gizmodo, Lifehacker and others switched over to a drastic redesign which was met with plenty of jeers. People always complain about design changes, but this time it looks like several of Gawker’s sites actually took a major hit to traffic.
According to Quantcast, which directly measures the sites, Gawker’s U.S. daily unique visitors were cut in half from a high of 561,000 to 257,000 (see chart above). Gizmodo dropped from 746,000 to 420,000 in the U.S. Sitemeter shows an even more harrowing freefall for Gizmodo (see chart at right). Jezebel and Deadspin also took hits. Only Lifehacker seems to be holding steady.
Here's How To Make Your #Facebook Ad Campaigns Work
Here's a few tips on making Facebook ad campaigns work:
- Fun/entertainment focused campaigns work better than other types of topics;
- People are more likely to click if they're older and if they didn't attend college;
- People who attended college use their friends as a filter to determine who to click on more than people who didn't;
- Facebook ads need new creative after three to five days;
- In general, the better your targeting is, the highest the click-through rates, though you still need to change creative quickly.
A Bias against 'Quirky'? Why Creative People Can Lose Out on Leadership Positions - Knowledge@Wharton
In a paper titled, "Recognizing Creative Leadership: Can Creative Idea Expression Negatively Relate to Perceptions of Leadership Potential?" to be published in the March 2011 issue of the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, Mueller and co-authors Jack A. Goncalo of Cornell and Dishan Kamdar of ISB undertook three studies to examine how creative people were viewed by colleagues. The troubling finding: Those individuals who expressed more creative ideas were viewed as having less, not more, leadership potential. The exception, they found, was when people were specifically told to focus on charismatic leaders. In that case, creative types fared better. But the bottom line is that, in most cases, being creative seems to put people at a disadvantage for climbing the corporate ladder. "It is not easy to select creative leaders," says Mueller. "It takes more time and effort to recognize a creative leader than we might have previously thought."
That reality should be of concern to those who sit in corporate boardrooms around the globe. In a recent survey of 1,500 CEOs by IBM's Institute for Business Value, creativity was named the single most important attribute for success in leading a large corporation in the future. That finding is hardly surprising to Mueller. "There is research that shows that those who have their own creative ideas are better leaders," she notes. "Those individuals know how to recognize good ideas, are open to them and know how to get creative ideas through [the organization]. Selecting creative leaders is the critical challenge organizations face."
But understanding the need for creativity within a large company is not the same as actually fostering it. Indeed, Mueller's work shows that those who think outside the box may be penalized for it. In the first study included in the paper, Mueller and her colleagues examined this trend at a division of a large multinational refinery in Central India. A total of 346 employees took part in the study, with 291 of them being evaluated for leadership potential and 55 employees making those evaluations. The raters were asked to fill out questionnaires on these 291 individuals, grading them on both the degree to which they came up with new, useful ideas and the extent to which they were likely to "become an effective leader" and "advance to a leadership position." In analyzing the data, Mueller and her team controlled for the likelihood that some creative types were simply not interested in moving up the management ranks.
Thursday, February 17, 2011
Turkish taxi of tomorrow design beats Nissan, Ford proposals among New Yorkers [w/video]
The people of New York City have spoken, and they've found the taxi designs from both Ford and Nissan lacking. You may remember that the New York Taxi and Limousine Commission recently set about polling residents on which of a handful of taxi designs they preferred for the future of transportation in the city. Automakers from around the world submitted their designs for a cab that was safe, offered a small environmental impact, complied with Americans with Disabilities Act requirements and was physically smaller than the tried-and-true Crown Victoria. Well, the votes are officially in, and a cab from the Turkish company Karsan is the winner.
Around 66 percent of respondents either liked or loved the design of the Karsan V1, and that was enough to seal the vehicle's fate as the people's choice for the Taxi of Tomorrow. The V1 boasts a number of appealing unique features, including a panoramic glass roof and wheelchair ramps on both sides of the vehicle for easy access. It's also a hybrid, which means that cabbies can expect to save fuel in the future if the commission picks the V1 as the city's new cab, and it is easily adaptable to other fuel sources as needed, including diesel, natural gas or fully electric.
Letting Gen Y Lead a Management Makeover - Vineet Nayar - Harvard Business Review
Some of the most interesting themes emerging from the entries so far:
Increasing democratic influence on the appointment of leaders. ("The Organization Structure as Free Market").
Giving people the chance to shape their work and organizations ("Ideas.com"; "The Management Tree"; "Internal bidding for task assignment").
Creating ways to bypass the filters that impede direct communications ("Can your organization handle the truth?" ; "Live Stream Coffee Chat"; "Who's the Boss?").
Correcting the in-built bias towards incrementalism ("Stop incremental change and foster 'Bold Moves'"; "What if customer delight was our only measurement?").
As diverse in scope and ambition as these ideas are, they share a central theme: They describe the business world as the Millennials think it should be. This new generation is driven by the unwillingness to inherit some of the negative features of traditional management; indeed, by a sense of indignation that corporate citizens haven't already demanded better for themselves.
The Organisation Structure as Free Market | Management Innovation eXchange
SummaryGood manager deliver good results while motivating and growing their employees. Bad managers might still deliver good results, but not focus on doing the best for their employees, slowly de-motivating their staff and thus losing performance and ownership. Often, managers are made based on their achievements in other areas than managing people rather than their potential as a leader, with negative implications for the organization and all parties involved.If employees could choose their own boss, their performance would increase and the organization would be optimized, since those who are most capable at leading people become managers.
We propose a new management system, which introduces a market mechanism to the human resource management. Each employee chooses his/her manager. Each manager gets evaluated based on the result their team delivers and is rewarded with responsibilities, budget, and budget to salaries.
Wednesday, February 16, 2011
Landing Page Best Practices: the definitive guide #infographic - Visual Website Optimizer Blog
Importance of Landing Pages
How important are landing pages for paid marketing? Why can’t a company simply redirect traffic to its homepage? What is the actual purpose of landing pages?
Landing pages are critical for any promotion specific marketing – but in particular for paid marketing where a measured ROI is essential to your success (and your ability to gain budgetary approval). The reason why you want to direct your paid traffic to a landing page vs. your homepage is that your homepage is often designed to be a generic entry point to your brand and business. It may contain references to many products or services – rendering the ability for a potential customer to find your intended conversion path amidst 40-70 links unlikely at best – impossible at worst. Which leads nicely into the third part of your question. The purpose of a landing page is to provide a hyper-focused experience that is designed to accomplish the singular conversion goal of your marketing campaign.
Tuesday, February 15, 2011
HTC Facebook Phones: First Press Shots [Update x2]
HTC is indeed preparing a pair of Android handsets with dedicated Facebook buttons, and they are pictured above and below. While no specs were available, it is clear from the images that one is a QWERTY candybar a la the Motorola Droid Pro, while the other is a more traditional touchscreen slate.
7 Deadly Sins of Business Storytelling : Lifestyle :: American Express OPEN Forum
1. Chronology. Unless you’re telling the story about the proper assembly of an IKEA bookshelf, your story probably shouldn’t begin at the beginning. Chronology matters much less than having your story follow an interesting arc. Events need to build, one after the other. Your story should describe increasing risk and increasing consequences until the final, inevitable conclusion, but not necessarily in the exact way that the audience expects.
2. Telling. Show, don’t tell, is the most fundamental maxim of storytelling, and for a good reason. Your audience should see a picture, feel the conflict, and become more involved with the story -- they’re not receptacles for a series of facts. If you tell a story as though you were not there, it distances your listeners. Describe what is happening as if it were in front of you. As Mark Twain said, “Don’t say the old lady screamed. Bring her on and let her scream.”
In practice: Go to the page on your company’s website where you describe what you do. Does your “About Us” section include only lists and categories? Is the information purely factual or are you using stories to help illustrate who you are?
3. Jargon. Filling a story with technical terms, acronyms and superfluous words will only serve to lose or bore your audience. Hippocrates (if you’re in medicine you may know him as “The Oath Guy”) wrote: “The chief virtue that language can have is clearness, and nothing detracts from it so much as the use of unfamiliar words.”
4. Pulse-free. People connect with other people, so make sure you focus on the real-life characters of your story. It doesn’t matter if your organization designs computer hardware or sells medical devices, human beings are still driving the action. So concentrate on the people involved. Personalize the protagonist of your story, making him seem real enough so that the audience feels a stake in what happens next.
Want more on storytelling? Check these stories out:
5. Fabrication. Your story needs to be authentic. A major cancer center in Washington asked a customer named Audrey, who happens to be a triathlete, if they could use her photo in a cancer awareness campaign. When the bus and magazine ads appeared, much to Audrey’s surprise (and her large network of friends, family and fellow athletes), she was positioned as a cancer survivor.
How much more powerful would this campaign have been if the featured image was that of an actual cancer survivor? For everyone who knows Audrey (or heard her story), this reputable institution now has tarnished credibility. The power of appealing to emotion is detailed in Wharton professor Deborah Small’s groundbreaking research. She shows how the use of statistics by non-profits, as opposed to a vivid “identifiable victim,” results in lower giving. People want to hear and be moved by real stories.
In practice: Make stories a part of your organizational culture. For example, insist that staff meetings start with a story instead of a progress report.
6. Bulletproof. Engaging stories do not chronicle a straight line to success. Imagine if Rocky won every fight… yawn. Hone in on your protagonist’s problems or barriers to achieving her goal. What is standing in her way? By incorporating moments of vulnerability or doubt, you create empathy and lend authenticity to the story.
7. Proprietary. Companies with a stranglehold on what the corporate story is, and who can tell it, miss a world of opportunities, especially at a time when social media makes it easier than ever to connect and share. Stories told by employees and by customers are significant assets. Recognize the value in stories from internal and external sources, design ways to collect them, and allow your customers, advocates and employees to also be storytellers.
In practice: Create an internal storybank, or database of stories, where employees and even customers can write and submit stories complete with titles. These stories are then keyworded, so that people looking for stories can easily find them. Employees looking for stories can reach out to the authors. Nike, Apple and eBay harness stories as tools to crowdsource ideas, such as what consumers are really passionate about. They do this as a way to give employees language and initiative to tell personal stories of meaning, and to amplify and distribute brand initiatives in story form.
Monday, February 14, 2011
WSJ: New smaller iPhone real, MobileMe may become free, iTunes music streaming coming soon
Call it the "iPhone Mini," the "iPhone Nano," or just another cheap smartphone, a smaller version of Apple's flagship product is on its way, the Wall Street Journal reports.
The rumors of a new, less expensive iPhone are true, reports the Wall Street Journal. The device — which is codenamed “N97″ — will be roughly half the size of the iPhone 4, weigh “significantly” less, and sport an “edge-to-edge” screen. The smaller iPhone will also include voice-based navigation, a virtual keyboard and cost roughly half the price of the current iPhone.
Apple currently sells the iPhone to carriers for an average of $625 per phone. With carrier subsidies, customers can get the iPhone 4 for as little as $199. Because of the low cost of the smaller iPhone, says the WSJ, the carrier subsidies would allow users to get the phone for very little, or possibly for free.
A free, or at least less-expensive, iPhone would allow Apple to compete with the swarm of “mass-market” (i.e. Android) handsets that have come to dominate the smartphone industry. In fact, it’s curious — and not at all surprising — that this news of a new, more competitively-priced iPhone arrived just after Samsung’s Sunday announcement of the Android-based Galaxy S II smartphone at Mobile World Congress 2011.
Attentionomics Captivating Attention in the Age of Content Decay
Slide #8:
71% of Tweets get no reaction.
92% of RT are within the first hour.
85% of @replies are within the first hour.
Friday, February 11, 2011
PayPal's Micropayment Solution Opens to the Public
Online payment company PayPal has opened up its micropayment solution to "game developers, media publishers, or anyone interested in selling digital content on a global scale." The solution was first announced last October when the company said that the upcoming feature would offer "a competitive fee structure for micropayments, with pricing at 5 percent plus 5 cents for purchases under $12."
Today, PayPal's two-click micropayment solution has gone public and it has the potential to change how publishers and other online merchants interact with their customers.
The major hurdle for micropayments is getting the consumer through the process with as little friction as possible. The more a consumer has to do to make a payment, the less likely they are to do so. This is PayPal's answer to that problem.
Nokia Confirms Microsoft Partnership, New Leadership Team, Organizational Changes
Here’s the meat:
- Plans for a broad strategic partnership with Microsoft to build a new global mobile ecosystem; Windows Phone would serve as Nokia’s primary smartphone platform.
- A renewed approach to capture volume and value growth to connect “the next billion” to the Internet in developing growth markets
- Focused investments in next-generation disruptive technologies
- A new leadership team and organizational structure with a clear focus on speed, results and accountabilityWindows Phone to become Nokia’s primary smartphone platform = huge. Microsoft reportedly offered Nokia hundreds of millions of dollars to make that switch.
Nokia will use Bing for search functionality across its devices, while Nokia Maps will become core to Microsoft’s mapping services. Nokia’s content and app store will be integrated with Microsoft’s Marketplace. More info about the partnership is available here.
Google Rolls Out 2-Step Verification to Help Protect Your Account
Google warns that it may take up to 15 minutes to go through the setup process for this, but honestly kids, it's worth it.
The process requires two indepedent factors to authenticate your identity. In other words, when you log into your Google account, you'll need the usual username and password, but then you'll also need a second code in order to move forward - a process similar to the one that's available on most banking websites.
This second code isn't one that you'll write down (and potentially lose) on scraps of papers or one that you'll use again and again on multiple sites (decreasing its security). Rather, it is generated by Google, then sent as an SMS message to your phone or via an authentication app (available for Android, Blackberry or iPhone). This code will be generated for each log-in. And, in Google's words, "when you enter this code after correctly submitting your password we'll have a pretty good idea that the person signing in is actually you."
You'll have the option to have your computer remember this second verification step for 30 days, so you won't need to re-enter that code every time you boot up your machine.
Thursday, February 10, 2011
The Real Story Behind the "Facebook Phone" [PHOTOS]
Facebook may not be launching a branded phone of its own, but INQ has built a phone that is all about Facebook.
INQ has unveiled the INQ Cloud Touch, an Android smartphone deeply integrated with the world’s largest social network. Thanks to the help of some Facebook engineers, this phone has countless custom Android apps, widgets and quick jump links that dive into every aspect of Facebook. It’s not a Facebook-branded phone though, so don’t expect Zuckerberg to be touting it as the iPhone killer in a press conference anytime soon.
Last Friday, INQ CEO Frank Meehan stopped by Mashable‘s office to give us a private demo of the INQ Cloud Touch. The first important thing to note about the phone is that it runs on Android 2.2, so it runs apps, connects to your Google accounts, and does everything else an Android phone is supposed to do.
Facebook has been built as a layer on top of the phone, though. The home screen has been customized with a Facebook Widget that delivers the News Feed. Not only will users see their friends’ status updates when the first unlock their phones, but the phone will also bring up multimedia content like YouTube videos and photos automatically.
The second core part of the INQ Cloud Touch is its bottom scrollbar, which links directly to the Android Facebook App’s many features. Photos, Chat, Contacts, Messages and more are easily accessible on the device.
Wednesday, February 9, 2011
Startup Launches to Link Loyalty and Social Media at Point of Sale [EXCLUSIVE]
New startup SNAP launches Wednesday to help businesses automatically connect the dots between their existing in-store loyalty programs and their customers’ social media behaviors. The SNAP service is now commercially available after having been piloted by Tasti D-Lite for more than a year.
Once deployed, SNAP’s patent-pending technology implicitly “checks in” the customer to his or her configured social networks each time a transaction occurs. The platform enables businesses to automatically reward customers with points, badges, discounts and the like for socially sharing that in-store activity back to Facebook, Twitter and Foursquare.
SNAP exists as a business layer that sits on top social channels. The system plugs into the APIs of Foursquare, Twitter and Facebook, but it has APIs of its own that not only allow for rapid store integration at the server level, but also enable SNAP to receive and track transaction data in real time.
When Viral Campaigns Fail and Social Media Mobs Rule - Online Fundraising, Advocacy, and Social Media - frogloop
Measuring Viral Campaigns
Even though both of these campaigns were successful in terms of traffic and generated much discussion on social media channels, Paine says the real question that needs to be answered is how many customers did they loose? “This is the problem with measuring results in terms of AVE (Advertising Value Equivalents). What’s the value of a ‘trending topic’ vs a customer or a [supporter],” said Paine on Twitter.
Lessons Learned
- Test your campaigns. Don’t work in a bubble. Just because you think something is funny or great, doesn’t mean your target audiences will agree.
- It’s ok to be edgy and push the envelope but use good judgment.
- Speak up (quickly) when you mess up. It’s ok to admit you were wrong.
- ROI should not just be measured in traffic, number of tweets, and FB shares. Analyzing the impact your campaign had on your target audience and current members is critical. Did it resonate? Did they hate it?