World of Warcraft: New potential through tapping Offline world

July 16, 2008December 16, 2012 marco Leave a comment

Jusr saw this over on GigaOM and I have to say I really love this great post titled: Real World of Warcraft: Is Offline Part of the Plan?

A real-world MMO has one more advantage: Revenues. The opportunities for sponsorship, or for driving players to real-world locations to make real-world purchases, make Blizzard’s current revenues look tiny by comparison.

I think the Offline world is often overlooked when it comes to Online worlds and social media sites and the fact that it is very impotant to link the On- and Offline worlds together, let them interact.

Some of this is certainly happening with e.g. Facebook, Google, Yahoo! [… you name it] dev events, but why not for “everyone”, the normal user?

feedalizr: micro-blogging & read updates from friends – Adobe Air app

July 13, 2008December 16, 2012 marco Leave a comment

In my previous post I wrote about ping.fm and their service to send notifications out to many social and business network/apps.

Feedalizr Screenshot A different approach is used by the Adobe Air based app called Feedalizr. It lets you share your texts, photos, videos, etc. as well, but also allows to read and interact with posts from friends. All of this on your local desktop, no web browser required (although you need to have Adobe Air installed on yout computer.)

This is a very interesting approach and they try to be your central application to post AND read (and interact), resulting in less application switching between your different websites and services. They currently support Twitter, FriendFeed, Flickr and Jaiku.

The software just came out off public alpha and is now available as a beta version. Go, check it out and respond in the comments if you use the app or know of other cool apps helping you with keeping up with your social network buzz.

Ping.fm: Keeping your social networks in sync

July 12, 2008December 16, 2012 marco 3 Comments

Ping.fm is currenly in beta and trying to help you with kepping ALL your friends, followers, business contact (etc., etc.,…) up-to-date!
On the website the services describes itself as:

Ping.fm is a simple service that makes updating your social networks a snap.

Use AIM, GTalk, iGoogle, WAP, iPhone/iPod Touch, SMS or E-mail and let Ping.fm relay your message to a multitude of social networking sites.

Available social networks and services are: Twitter, jaiku, Facebook, Myspace, Bebo, Tumblr, Pownce, Brightkite, Xanga, Plurk, Plaxo, Linkedin, Mashable, identi.ca, more coming…

The latest additions of supported services and functionality are mentioned in their recent blog entry entitled More Features, More Awesomeness:

Alas, we bring more gifts from the Ping.fm laboratory. We have added a Yahoo! Messenger bot to our bot arsenal. So, for those Yahoo! users who were without GTalk and AIM, you now have the power of Ping!

Also, we’re proud to announce our custom URL posting capability. Now you can have ping messages delivered directly to your website! This will encourage developers to write incoming-bound scripts that will do cool stuff with your Ping messages. Just another way we’ve put the power in your hands.

Last but not least, we’ve enabled support for picture uploading.

Check them out! Use this beta code to get in: pingbewithyou
Leave a comment if you need a (current) beta code and I will update the post with the latest one.

Radiohead Part 2: IN RAINBOWS FROM THE BASEMENT – Live Video Recordings

July 1, 2008December 16, 2012 marco Leave a comment

Radiohead pic After Radiohead released their Album on this (inrainbows.com) site, full album download available for an amount of your choice (from free – x), they are now making Live video recordings available as well. You will got them on iTunes first but the live recordings also aired on VH1.
It will be bery interesting where they want to take it from here.

Below you’ll find the full email from them:

RADIOHEAD IN RAINBOWS FROM THE BASEMENT

Exclusive Live Videos Set Available on iTunes June 24th
Radiohead are releasing ten live performance videos recorded at The
Hospital studio in Covent Garden, with the team from the band’s
longtime producer Nigel Godrich’s ‘From the Basement’ TV show
(http://www.fromthebasement.tv/).

The collection will debut exclusively through iTunes beginning today,
June 24th. The videos feature live renditions of songs from ‘In
Rainbows’ and its bonus CD included in its deluxe discbox edition.
The full track listing of video performances is:
.
Bodysnatchers
House of Cards
Nude
Weird Fishes/Arpeggi
15 Step
Reckoner
Go Slowly
Videotape
Bangers & Mash
All I Need

Captured in a day, with direction by David Barnard and sound by Nigel
Godrich, the videos represent the best recorded representation of
Radiohead’s live performance to date.

The recordings were also aired on VH1 and the videos are available on the site here: Radiohead – In Rainbows – From the basement
More great artists and recordings (White Stripes, Beck, Sonic Youth, etc.) are available at From the Basement as well. Check ’em out.

What I find very interesting is the fact that they chose iTunes to publish their recordings and did not make them available on their original site, were they also released the album. What do you think of all this?

—- Update —

And they are now featured on Google Code with their video / making of: RA DIOHEA_D / HOU SE OF_C ARDS

Video blogging: Kyte vs Qik vs Flixwagon and Viif

June 29, 2008December 16, 2012 marco 1 Comment

There are many posts out the in the blogosphere talking about the superior service/application from kyte.tv, comparing them to Qik.com or Flixwagon.com. See the Techcrunch post from Robert Scoble: why-kytetv-will-kill-qik-and-flixwagon-in-cell-phone-video-space

That led me to this post. Here’s why I think Kyte will dominate over Qik and Flixwagon:

The distribution system that Kyte has built is much better than either Qik or Flixwagon. Translation: the embeddable player that Kyte.tv has is much better than Qik or Flixwagon, more on that in a second.

The chat room that Kyte has built is much better than Qik or Flixwagon and can be participated in from other cell phones, something that Qik and Flixwagon can’t do.

The ability to mix videos from your webcam, live videos streaming from your web cam, recorded videos from camcorders, or from places like YouTube, along with both recorded and streamed videos from your cell phone goes way beyond what Qik and Flixwagon have done today.

Kyte.tv can play videos on an iPhone today. Neither Qik or Flixwagon can do that.

Kyte.tv can play videos on a Nokia today. Both from your recordings and other people’s. Neither Qik or Flixwagon can do that.

Kyte.tv is partially funded and supported by Nokia. That might not sound like a big deal, but it is. Nokia is using Kyte’s service internally too, and I’m sure Nokia is giving Kyte better engineering support than it’s giving Qik or Flixwagon.

Kyte.tv is way ahead of Qik and Kyte in getting real mainstream celebrities like 50 cent on its service, which means its growth is way stronger.

and Oliver wrote about them, too:

The only thing we need are mobile phone internet flatrates and I hope that the carriers are seeing in the iPhone that a flatrate helps. I don’t believe the increased usage comes form the iPhone only, but for a large part from not having to think about being online or not. When you have to think in terms of MB used or something, you do start to think and you use stuff less.

All services have in common that you have to download an application to your phone to use either service. This is a big advantage in terms of control and usability of the app. But still you need to download an application in the first place. The iPhone might leed the way as people are used to buy (select) e.g. mp3’s from iTunes and have them transfered (downloaded) onto their device. We will see if Apple is leading the way, once more.

Wanted to add my 2 cents to this discussion and throw in an approach which is a little different than the one taken by the previously mentioned companies:

What do you think about the German start-up in Berlin called Viif (site mostly available in German only, sorry)? Their application enables every 3G cell phone (with video call capability) to record live video, which gets recorded from the Viif video server and than publish to your blog. The service is not allowing love video blogging for now but they could very easily make this into one without the need to download an application!
I don’t want to keep quiet about the little disadvantage you have: No 3G signal = no video call. A local application might be able to record on the internal memory of your phone and upload the content after your signal gets better (is back at full 3G).

Leave a comment if you know of other mobile video applications out there or want to chip in with your commentary! Thanks!

Mashup Editors Everywhere – Google, Yahoo!, Microsoft, Intel

June 15, 2008December 16, 2012 marco 3 Comments

Google is now also in the game of mashup editors with their very own Google Mashup Editor. The editor is still in beta and access is limit to developers who have received an invite. You can request an invite via the mashup front page. Currently it’s not taking long (~few days) to get access to the editor and I am sure Google will fully open up access soon.

Google says about the editor:

Take some AJAX UI components, data from your users and Google services like Google Base and Google Maps or external feeds and mash them all together using our simple framework. We make it easy with the Google Mashup Editor.

Google Mashup Editor - Screenshot

Google provides a lot of example “mashup code” to get you started and you can find more information at: Getting started doc. Check out the mashups published from other developers listed in the Mashups Gallery.

If you want to ask a question go to the Google Groups page, you can also vote for features there. Another good source to take a first look at how things work are the screencasts. If you want to get a full overview of the Mashup API and/or want to use it for a different mashup project of your own: JS API.

The editor is very easy to use and also has code coloring. Even a mashup with several pages is easily to handle in it. Go, make your own Mashup!

Other Mashup Editors you might find interesting to check out are briefly listed below. I plan to check them out in more detail and will make follow up posts to this one.

Yahoo! pipes: Yahoo! launched pipes several month back and it was an instant hit. Google might have been thinking: Something this clever should come from us! (And they came up with the Mashup Editor.) Yahoo says about pipes:

Pipes is a powerful composition tool to aggregate, manipulate, and mashup content from around the web.

Microsoft Popfly: MS is trying to hit it big. Not only can you create Mashups, but also Game, Web pages and more!

MS Popfly - Mashup Design

It was difficult to check out some application listed on the site, as I had to log in to the service to get to the mashup I wanted to see.

But on the other hand you are getting a very powerful tool which enables you to even more than simple mashup. And you can use it for “simple” things like making a nice looking Flickr photo gallery, or dive in deeper and develop your own game etc.

Target group ranking from less experineced developer/experienced “web users” to experienced developers.

Intel Mash Maker: Intel takes a different approach when it comes to mashup editors. They provide a web browser plug-in which you have to install.
This enables Intel to have a lot of control over the capabilities of the editor but might also hurt the adoption of this tool as you have to go through the plug-in installation process. The target group is certainly the less experienced web developer.

If you know of other great editors, feel free to post them in the comments! And if you have first hand experience, let us know in the comments, too!

Media Planning in a Web2.0 World

May 18, 2008December 16, 2012 marco Leave a comment

A very interesting post from Darren Herman (his blog: DarrenHerman.com) over at AdAge.com: How to Plan Media in a Non-Linear World :

We live in a non-linear world but are taught linear business processes. Yikes. We’re doomed. Grab the Starburst and let’s head down to the cellar to hide.

It’s 2008. Wake up. Drink some Patron and lets start thinking rational: How do we harness our non-linear world?

New digital brief given to [insert agency name] by a client.
“Can someone put together a ComScore run?”
RFP the top 25 on the list
Media planning time …
[…]
Linear thinking would lead us to pick the same process over time and usually select the top sites on the list and work with them. Non-linear forces us to work harder and sometimes, chaotic, but allows us to participate in a non-linear world much better. With this said, we need to start developing the tools, processes and technologies to harness our knowledge in a non-linear world. I haven’t seen many tools that do this, but I’m certainly willing to listen.

Darren is asking for input on new ways and tools/technologies to support and tap into the new possibilities which arise in this very fragmented Online world.I think the “chaotic element” is what makes this question really challenging. How do you account = plan for this?

Are you gunning for the big properties or what is your process to target your audience?

US Blogosphere = Big Business

May 17, 2008December 16, 2012 marco Leave a comment

The blogosphere in the USs is growing into “big biz” says eMarketer in its recent article called: Who doesn’t read a blog now and then?

US Bloggers 2007 - 2012

So, we would have 16% of the internet users in the US “producing” content! A really significant number which needs to be reflected even more in marketing campaigns in 2012 than what we see today.

Let’s look at the numbers on the “consuming” side of the blogospere:

US Blog Readers 2007 - 2012

We’ll reach 70% of “blog readers” of all Internet users in the US. This underlines the important role blogs will inhabit by 2012 and how important it is for brands to “play nice” with the still young “communication channel”.

Next: What money will be spent on advertising on the pages of blogs in the US 2007-2012?

US Blogs Ad Spending 2007 - 2012

From the eMarketer article:

“A big factor driving the increases is the niche orientation of the blogosphere,” says Mr. Verna.

“Once a haven for techies to communicate with each other in their own lingo, blogs have long since shed this mantle and tapped into the zeitgeist of American culture,” says Paul Verna, eMarketer senior analyst and author of the new report, The Blogosphere: A Mass Movement from Grass Roots. “There are blogs for virtually everything under the sun, from celebrity gossip to political commentary to the most mundane personal minutiae.”

Are you writing your own blog or contribute to one?

Google Friend Connect to be announced at Campfire One

May 12, 2008December 16, 2012 marco Leave a comment

UH!

Techcrunch says:

Friend Connect is a new data portability initiative for spreading social connections around the web. It’s the third of such announcements to be made in less than a week; MySpace Data Availability and Facebook Connect are the other two.

To find out more check out the live coverage over at techcrunch. You’ll find a live videostream broadcasting from the event.

Update: Techcrunch shows now the recorded stream from the event.

A blog post by Forrester’s Charlene Li fits quiet well to this announcement from Google. She writes on her blog:

The future of social networks: Social networks will be like air

“I thought about my grade-school kids, who in 10 years will be in the midst of social network engagement. I believe they (and we) will look back to 2008 and think it archaic and quaint that we had to go to a destination like Facebook or LinkedIn to ‘be social.’

This gets interesting now 🙂