Emotional tagging of memories

Emotion And The Formation Of Brand Memories

by Gord Hotchkiss from MediaPosts Search Insider


In my last column, I looked at how beliefs can affix labels to brands, which forever after form our first brand impression. Beliefs are a heuristic shortcut we use to reduce the amount of sheer thinking we have to do to come to quick and efficient decisions. Today, I'd like to focus on emotions and their part in the forming of memories.

Why "Selfish Genes" Remember

First, from an evolutionary perspective, it might be helpful to cover off why humans are able to form memories in the first place. To borrow Richard Dawkins' wording, memories are here to ensure that our " selfish genes" are passed on to future generations. While memories are incredibly complex and wonderful things, their reason for being is mindlessly simple. Memories are here to ensure that we survive long enough to procreate. This is why emotion plays such a huge role in how memories are formed and retrieved.

Researchers have long known that emotions "tag" memories, making their retrieval easier and the resulting effect more powerful. In fact, very strong emotions, such as fear or anger, get stored not just in our cortical areas but also get an "emergency" version stored in the limbic system to allow us to respond quickly and viscerally to threatening situations. When this goes wrong, it can lead to phobic behavior. Emotions add power and urgency to memories, moving them up the priority queue and causing us to act on them both subconsciously and consciously. The very meaning of the word emotion comes from the latin "emovere" -- to move.

Driven by Emotions

Emotional tagging works equally well for positive memories. Our positive emotions are generally affixed to three of the four human drives identified by Nohria and Lawrence: the drive to bond, the drive to acquire and the drive to learn. For the selfish gene, each of these drives has its evolutionary purpose. We have the strongest positive emotions around the things that further these drives the most. We reserve our strongest "bonding" emotions for those that play the biggest part in ensuring our genetic survival: partners, parents, children and siblings. In some cases we share a significant portion of our genetic material; at other times, the complex sexual wiring we come with kicks into gear.

If we look at the drives to acquire or to learn, millions of pages have been written trying to decode human behavior in pursuit of these goals. For the purpose of this column, it will have to suffice to say that markets have long known about the power of these drives in shaping human behavior and have tried every way possible to tap into their ability to move us to action, usually through consumption of a product.

In summary, we reserve our strongest emotions for those things that are most aligned with the mindless purpose of the selfish gene, passing along our DNA. These emotions tag relevant memories, giving them the power to move us to immediate action. Perceived threats trigger negative memories and avoidance or confrontation, while positive memories drive us to pursue pleasurable ends.

Brand + Emotion = Power

This emotional tagging of memories can have a huge impact on our brand relationships, in both positive and negative ways. While I've painted a very simplistic picture of the primary objective of emotions and memories (and the heart of it is simple), the culture we have created is anything but. Memories and emotions play out in complex and surprising ways, especially when we interact with brands.

Brand advertisers have become quite adept at pushing our evolutionary hot buttons, trying to tag the right emotions to their respective memories. Their goal is to affix a particularly strong emotion (either negative, referred to in marketing parlance as prevention, or positive, which we've labeled promotion) to their particular brand construct so that when the memories that make up that construct are retrieved (along with the attached beliefs and brand label) they are powered with the turbo-charge that comes with emotion. If the marketer is successful in doing this, they have unleashed a powerful force.

When emotions play a role, our motivation comes not just from rational decisions, but a much more primal and powerful force that sits at the core of our subconscious brain. The most successful brands have managed to forge these emotional connections. And when the emotions remain consistent for a particular brand, there are coalesced into a strong brand belief that is almost unshakable once formed. This is why your father buys nothing but Fords, Mac fans wouldn't be caught dead with a plain grey laptop ,or coffee connoisseurs swear that Starbucks is worth the price.

Bunch of interesting digital things

Thanks McCrudden for these

http://www.summize.com (twitter search tool)
http://www.netvibes.com/rgleeson (Renny's netvibes page that shows what he reads to keep up)
http://www.compfight.com (a flickr search tool that WILL FIND YOU PICTURES YOU WANT)

http://www.twistori.com (the twitter/summize tool searching twitter for 'love', 'hate', etc.)
http://tinyurl.com/5lgtrk (MadV on YouTube - he did the "one word" video thing where folks wrote on their hands)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HoOCiaxIZF4 ("Follow Your Instinct" Choose-your-own-adventure video)
http://www.thewhalehunt.org/ (jonathan Harris's whale hunt site)
http://www.wefeelfine.org/ (Jonathan Harris's blog 'feeling' scanner)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6fwQTHYTJQA (Star Wars "Revelations", the first ten minutes of the Fan Film.)
http://thisissand.com/ (The falling sand toy. Try it. You like it)
http://blip.fm/invite/rgleeson (Blip.fm - the endless playlist and song recommendation tool - this is an invite from Renny to join)

Http://www.ted.com (great website, clean interface, amazing films)
http://www.conversespellingbee.com/ (the converse spelling bee)
http://flickr.com/groups/whats_in_your_bag/ (the flickr group where people dump out their bags and photograph and tag the contents)

http://www.brandtags.net (clicking 'whatever it is they say it is' link lets you choose by brand to see responses to date)

http://digg.com/ (the user generated news source that feeds many blogs around the web)
http://labs.digg.com/ (different ways to look at the stories and experience of digg through some pretty freaking cool interfaces)

http://www.dipity.com/ (the timeline builder into which you can import flickr, blogs, twitter, etc, and see them on a timeline)

http://www.constantsetting.com/ (pulls sunset images from flickr in an endless slideshow)
http://www.noonebelongsheremorethanyou.com/ (Miranda July's stovetop interface)
http://www.opensourceresistance.net/ (the video of the NIN secret concert and "raid" by SWAT team - the conclusion of the Alternate Reality Game)

and as a bonus,
the future of pornography (mapping avatars/real world persona over robots you can interact with)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s-hg4qCaR74

the robot that will hunt down the last surviving humans:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cHJJQ0zNNOM

Bringing music to mobile

Jonas Brothers: Live & Mobile
AUGUST 8TH, 2008 BY ALLISON

Thanks to NGT
Finally we see young artists (or rather, their “people”) using mobile to give fans a sneak behind-the-scenes peek. According to PopCrunch

The Jonas Brothers have teamed up with MTV to document live online video content with the band as they prepare to headline New York’s Madison Square Garden this weekend.

Jonas Brothers: Live & Mobile runs live online beginning Friday at 4 p.m. ET through Saturday, August 9, from 8 a.m. through 8 p.m., when the band opens at the Garden.

Fans can visit jonasbros.mtv.com on Friday and Saturday to watch the live streaming video of the brothers preparing for their show

What this post doesn’t mention is that the livestreaming will be done via handset, with mobile broadcasting from Flixwagon. We’re seeing more and more artists (from 50 Cent to David Hasselhoff) embracing mobile video to give a glimpse of inside action and a more personal experience for fans. Other popular sites are Qik, Kyte and Zannel.

The moblogging is going on now, so check it out. The Jonas Brothers have also recorded some ads for MTV of backstage footage with their mobile phones.

The tween-tempting trio will also be broadcasting their tour onto the big screen in 3D next year. (BTW, looks like boy bands have adopted the same nerd-chic as rap stars.)

jonasbros.mtv.com

KROGER GOES FOR MOBILE COUPONS

Thanks Branding Unbound

Score another supermarket for Cellfire.

Cincinnati-based Kroger, the nation's largest standalone grocery chain, will beging offering mobile coupons in markets, according to news reports.

Major consumer brands that will be offered via coupons include Clorox, General Mills, Unilever and many others.

"We're constantly seeking new innovations to provide our customers with more ways to save," Glynn Jenkins, the director of communications of the Atlanta Division of Kroger, tells the Nashville Business Journal.

It's the usual Cellfire deal - consumers sign up to receive coupons via mobile phones.

Personally, I'm not that into coupons - mobile or otherwise. Nothing to do with the technology. It's about the store. It's just that I expect to get an every day low price, not have to sign up for something to get it.

And I'm not clear on how this all gets marketed. I hope there's a Kroger-branded experience for its customers to sign up for the coupons, not some general "go to Cellfire.com" to sign up and then have to search for the stores they want to sign up for - which is how the Cellfire site seems to work.

And, as I've said before, I'm not big on apps you have to download in order to get, in this case, coupons.

However it works, Cellfire seems to be on a roll, and supermarkets seem to love 'em for it.

http://www.bizjournals.com/nashville/stories/2008/07/28/daily14.html

Andriod - applications

Thanks adverlab

Barcode, Iris Scanners for Google Android

Tuesday, July 29, 2008

Among the applications that won the first round of Google's developer challenge for its Android mobile platform in May, two stand out.



Android Scan "is an Android application that finds pricing and metadata for anything with a barcode." (See a post about a similar barcode scanner app for iPhone and what it might mean for retailers.)





BioWallet is "a biometric authentication system currently supporting iris based authentication." There must be a dating/social networking angle here somewhere.

No Comment | Subscribe to feed | Read more about devices, future

Also see this: http://scan.jsharkey.org/

Urban gaming

Thanks psfk
Urban Gaming by Jeff Squires

Lately, we’ve seen a lot of great projects utilizing high powered projectors. Many of these, such as TXTual Healing, involve an element of social commentary. It’s refreshing however to see a project that panders to plain old simple fun - who hasn’t wanted to play video games on the biggest screen possible?

There is not a lot of information on the campaign, but Xbox has set up a myspace page for what they’re calling “Urban Xbox 360 Gaming,” where, along with the below video, they are requesting people submit photos of the various locations where they are playing video games.

Urban Xbox 360 Gaming from UrbanXbox on Vimeo.

Advergaming

Thanks Futurelab for this on how businesses get get into the advergame game

10 Ways Your Company Can Use Advergames (Part I)

by: Alex Eperjessy via Business and Games Blog

So what about them advergames? Some people simply ignore/dismiss them, other swear by them. Then there's that category of people/companies who figure that all they have to do is buy some silly casual game, slap their logo all over it, put it on their website and voila, mission accomplished, budget well spent. The only problem with that approach is that it's the least interesting thing you could do. It's so boring and uninspired that most people don't even notice the company's game, despite the PR flood that comes with it.

That being said, let's look at some ways to make it more likely that people will talk about your company's advergame, should you decide to get one. (Five ideas today, five in the next installment).

1. As a way to give people some casual insight into what is it that your company actually does and how it does it. This is simple - say you're a delivery company. The game you can comission is one where the player is put in charge of managing a part of the delivery network. Keep it simple and fun but do keep one final goal in mind. Once I'm done playing the game, I need to have learned something about the way you go about your business. Although this is quite intuitive, it's still surprising to see how many companies release games where you have to get a frog across the street.

2. Advergames as a gateway to discounts. Or what Ian Bogost calls 'coupongaming'. The one thing to remember is that the game doesn't have to feel like a chore. And of course, if it's also educative, all the better.

3. Advergame your way into charity (yes, I'm using advergame as a verb there). See Red vs Blue or FreeRice. So you've decided to support a cause. Well why not engage some consumers into it? The best part? You can still jump on this particular wagon without being called a 'me-too'. Not for long probably so you might want to hurry up.

4. As swag. 'Hey, thanks for dropping by. Here's a CD or a login for our website where you can play this new game we have.' You'll have to admit, that's cooler than getting a pen or an USB stick.

5. As a way to let consumers rehaul your other marketing efforts :-)
This takes a bit of extra explaining so here we go. Take for example Volkswagen's Night Driving. What those guys did is take footage from the TV ad and let people mix it in any fashion they want to. Then they made a contest out of it with a jury and a prize for the most popular clip. Now - you may argue that this isn't exactly a 'game' and in a classic, technical sense, it isn't. You don't have a fixed window with a start button, levels and a highscores list. However, what you have here is a ludic, engaging, creative experience that follows a certain rules frame. Doesn't that sound like a game?

So the big idea here is - let people play. Let them show you how they would've done things, that's important feedback right there. And at the end, reward them for it. Does the idea of letting just about anybody tramp all over your carefully planted tulips scare you? Well, tough luck, they're doing it anyhow. They have this thing called youtube where they can post re-edits and spoofs of your ad. So why not make them play by your rules?

Original Post: http://www.businessandgames.com/blog/2008/08/10_ways_your_company_can_use_a.html

Twitter phone

just what the world was waiting for: http://www.twitterfone.com/

Stream me

Some interesting mobile live streaming sites: http://www.nextgreatthing.com/wordpress/2008/08/08/jonas-brothers-live-mobile/
http://www.zannel.com/index.htm
http://www.kyte.tv/home/index.html

Social network for festivals - Converse Festivals

Thanks Contagious for this post on a great approach to brand community building through relevant value

How would you define a sense of community at a music festival? Is it about sharing your warm, flat can of beer with the stranger next to you? Perhaps it’s about remaining calm and smiling politely at the 6’4 guy who keeps blocking your view of the main stage and treading on your feet. It may even be about that sense of unity and ‘mucking in’ that you experience when trudging towards the lines of ruined portaloos, toilet roll in hand and heart in mouth... Perhaps.

If this leaves you feeling a little non-plussed, then we suggest you check out the brand new website from everyone’s favourite indie baseball boot brand - Converse. Created by Perfect Fools’ recently-opened Amsterdam office, conversefestivals.com is billed as ‘a state of the art interactive forum’. Here, users can create their own personal festival space online by counting down to the event, planning their itinerary and then sharing their photos, movies and lifestyle experiences with fellow revellers.

www.conversefestivals.com

This is the latest initiative in Converse’s centenary celebrations - a logical continuation of the ‘My Drive Thru’ campaign from Anomaly which saw brand advocates Pharrel Williams, Santogold and Julian Casblancas collaborate on a track which was made available for free download (see Contagious 16). The artwork from this campaign has been carried over to conversefestivals.com, but now the star-studded identity parade has been extended to include a whole host of new/up-and-coming artists. Clicking on each of these provides a brief description along with a link to their relevant website/MySpace page. Converse is Perfect Fools Amsterdam’s first client and the international digital creative agency (with offices in Stockholm and New York) was appointed in May to develop the website. Contagious spoke to creative director Mark Chalmers: ‘The Converse offer is very clear in both product and lifestyle because they've stuck at what they're best at. They've stayed true. The last thing Converse needs is advertising, or a promise re-wrapped. We do know that Converse has fans, we do know that music has fans and we do know that festivals are a great collective experience. Anticipation and planning is huge part of it, so we worked with Converse to create a tool useful to the groups of festivals goers and something that unites the Converse music activity across borders. Not only is it a useful application but it showcases the latest Converse track "My Drive Thru" and the latest talent they're supporting.’

Tech resources

Renny Gleeson's Netvibes page with lots of cool tech links: http://www.netvibes.com/rgleeson#General

Old but cool - photosynth

This is so cool and now available to the public (PC only)

http://photosynth.net/

Twitter visualisation - by emotion

http://twistori.com/

Living skins: Architecture as interface

Nice article from Peter Hall via Adobe Design Center on how buildings can be interfaces

by Peter Hall
Buildings communicate their function and status through a language of visual signs. A cross on the roof generally signifies a church, a grand arch commemorates a triumph, steel-and-glass curtain walls usually indicate there are offices inside, and a duck-shaped or hot-dog shaped building usually means that poultry or hotdogs are for sale. A more dynamic system of communications arrived in the 20th Century with the first “zipper” sign in New York's Times Square in 1928, an illuminated bulletin board that transmitted the day's headlines: buildings henceforth began to communicate in data flows as well as via bricks and mortar. Today, commercial hubs from Times Square to Seoul are showcases of giant moving graphics that fly across several stories, though more often than not they are advertisements that disregard what is happening within the building itself. What if a sign did not simply tout new movies, sodas, and celebrity babies in one-way feeds, but instead revealed something unique about the building, its occupants, or its environment? What if the building could respond, in real time, to the movement of people, the weather, or the whims of bystanders or behind-the-scenes artists? Digital designers and architects have begun working together to move beyond the facade and give buildings a living skin.

The world's biggest beating heart
A pioneering “living skin” is the Blinkenlights project, in which Europe's largest hacker group turned a building in East Berlin into a nocturnal public electronic doodle pad and game board. The system was strikingly simple; to celebrate its 20th anniversary in 2001, the Chaos Computer Club (CCC) gained access to the Haus des Lehrers (“House of the Teacher”) building in Amsterdamplatz and installed a 150-watt lamp mounted on a tripod behind each of the 144 windows of the upper eight floors.

Figure 1: Blinkenlights by Chaos Computer Club.

Each lamp was connected to a control center on the eighth floor via a relay on/off switch and cables snaking through the building (5,000 meters of cable were used in total). From dawn to dusk for 23 weeks, the building's 144 windows — painted white for translucency — were transformed into a monochrome 8 x 18 matrix, each window becoming a pixel with an on/off value controlled by a software system built in Gnu Linux. The CCC described Blinkenlights (the name is hacker jargon for the flashing front-panel diagnostic lights on old computers), as a “public project on public ground:” Passersby could email or phone in simple animations or play Pong with another caller, using the web-based “blinkentools” developed by the programmers. The project was so popular that it was further developed (using dimmer switches to allow grayscale images) for the Bibliotheque Nationale de France in Paris the following September and “reloaded” at the Haus des Lehrers in 2003. Blinkenlights' iconic throbbing heart became something of an international symbol of optimism amid the dour days following September 11, 2001. Blinkenlights attracted 1,000 emailed animations and appeared in at least three music videos.

Architecture wakes up

Across the border in Austria, a more curvaceous living skin was being developed for the new Kunsthaus Graz, a bulbous, creature-like building designed by architects Peter Cook (cofounder of Archigram) and Colin Fournier with Spacelab.UK to house an art museum for the city of Graz. Cook and Fournier's competition entry had envisioned a membranous exterior that allowed occasional glimpses of action within: “signs, announcements, short sequences of film or images,” but with funds and time rapidly diminishing, this looked likely to remain a vision. Enter another Berlin-based architecture group, named realities:united, founded by architect-brothers Tim and Jan Edler, who proposed turning the building's entire curving blue acrylic glass facade into a media screen called “BIX.”

Figure 2: View of the Kunsthaus with the BIX installation from Schlossberg, © 2003 Harry Schiffer.

Figure 3: Night view of the Kunsthaus with the BIX installation, © 2003 Landesmuseum Joanneum, Graz.

Although the installation was to be permanent, requiring a more durable set up than Blinkenlights, the basis of BIX was equally low-tech: a matrix of 930 ring-shaped fluorescent lights behind a 20 x 40 meter area of the translucent skin, each acting as a pixel controlled by computer. The ring lights could be dimmed, or varied at a rate of 18 values per second, but the display was “extremely low” resolution, according to the Edlers: 0.2 percent of the pixels on a typical TV screen. Jan Edler argues that high resolution screens become outdated so quickly that the building would have been sporting obsolete technology almost as soon as it opened; besides, “it was a highly complex shape and we were looking for technology that was cheap enough to cover most of the outer surface.” Equally important was establishing an economic model for sustaining the screen as an appropriate display surface for an art museum, rather than a source of revenue. “We managed to have something integrated and cheap enough that it doesn't have to be refinanced through advertising,” he says.

The museum opened in 2003 with a specially commissioned series of sound installations synchronized with a lighting program developed for the exterior. (BIX software was built for the museum's Macintosh operating system by John Dekron and Jeremy Rotsztain using the MAX/MSP & Jitter platform.) Since the display system was developed before the skin was constructed, the living skin is highly integrated, giving the impression that the images emanate from within the beast itself. The tricky part, according to realities:united, is sustaining an interesting level of commissioned work on the surface and not succumbing to the temptation to hand it over to the museum's sponsors. When the museum's director rented the facade to a local newspaper to celebrate its 100th birthday, the system's creators and some local residents were incensed enough to complain. Chastened by public disapproval of its dalliance, BIX has remained commercial-free since. As Edler sees it, one of the common problems of giant screens recast as building surfaces is that their content is utterly disconnected from the architecture and the function of the building. With BIX, he says, “future improvements are not to the resolution and technology but to the development of concepts to program the surfaces; ones that have something to do with the architecture and don't seem alien to it.”

The disconnect is familiar to most designers: a stunning medium lacking in content.

Figure 4: Light and media installation SPOTS at Potsdamer Platz 10. © 2005 Bernd Hiepe

With a follow-up project, entitled with similar monosyllabic pith “SPOTS,” the Edlers developed an 1,800 lamp light matrix for the glass facade of an existing building in Berlin's Potsdamer Platz. This time a program of curated exhibitions was initiated at the same time to ensure a level of ongoing performance. (To finance the artworks, Mondays were reserved as exhibition-free days when advertisers could rent the facade: though to date, no one has bought space). One of the art pieces, entitled 33 Questions per Minute, by Mexican-Canadian artist Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, invites passersby to type in personal questions on a terminal near the facade, to see their words writ large across the building. If no question is asked, the computer generates its own question from a database of sentence fragments. The piece ran from December 2005 to January 2006 and, in Edler's view, the questions submitted by passersby were far less interesing than the “machine-like poetry generated by the software.”

Information flows in lights

Edler's challenge for a mutable skin that behaves in a manner appropriate to the building — reflecting the activities within rather than simply displaying ads to pay for itself — is more directly addressed in an upcoming project in Minneapolis, Minnesota. The city's new 357,000 square foot central library, designed by Pelli Clarke Pelli Architects (formerly Cesar Pelli) and opening in late 2006, will include an electronic light sculpture provisionally named “Word Up” by multimedia artist Ben Rubin. The project uses a matrix of LED (Light Emitting Diode) tubes on the outer surfaces of each of two elevator cabs.

Figure 5:“Checked Out,” public art commission for the Minneapolis New Central Public Library, Ben Rubin, 2006.(Photo courtesy of the artist).

View the animation

As the cabs ride up and down an inner atrium, the LED displays will reveal, letter by letter, the titles of books being checked out by library patrons. The system is being developed with David Small Design (writing software in C++ and Open GL) so that the elevator position sensors can communicate with the LED displays and tell them when to display the titles. In the context of Pelli's transparent glass atrium with elevated walkways, the climbing and descending book titles seem to evoke the idea that library patrons have become part of a giant reading machine: the LED signs will, says Rubin, “scan as if they were text hanging in the air.” The project also dispenses with old notions of libraries as fusty repositories of dusty books and emphasizes the more current model of a library as a node in a network of information flows.

Rubin is also at work on a project destined for the upper service floors of Adobe's new corporate headquarters in San Jose, which he has titled San Jose Semaphore.

Figure 6: Concept image, “San Jose Semaphore,” public art commission for the city of San Jose, by Ben Rubin, 2006.(Photo courtesy of the artist).

Here the installation is a meditation on the coded nature of communication. Behind the top windows, and visible from several streets and freeways away, will be four giant illuminated orange disks, each nine feet in diameter, and entirely composed of LEDs. A stripe through each disk will rotate every six seconds: each disk has four possible positions, which translates to eight bits of information across all four disks. Using this simple semaphore to encode letters of the alphabet, the four disks will transmit a secret message at the astoundingly slow rate of 10 bytes per minute (60 billion times slower than the 3GHZ processor in most personal computers). Rubin is considering offering a prize to the first person patient enough to decode and identify the source text of the secret semaphore message, though his larger goal is more philosophical. “My initial impulse arose out of trying to take digital communications technology, which is Adobe's business, and make it visible. This and other pieces I've made are really about the impulse to communicate and the basic human need for call and response.”

Figure 7: “Motion Study,” by Ben Rubin, 2004 (Photo courtesy of the artist).

Rubin's project is reminiscent of another architectural icon, the Empire State Building, which in 1984 began observing holidays and special events with the installation of an automated colored lighting system by designer Douglas Leigh. Though much appreciated by New Yorkers and visitors, the meaning is not always obvious. Most viewers need to consult an accompanying website or magazine announcement to decode the three-tiered language of colored lighting. A red/gold/red combination, for example, is traditionally the color of the Lunar New Year, but has also served as the signifier of the 100th anniversary of the subway system; a blue/blue/white combination has been used to symbolize everything from Colon Cancer Awareness to Greek Independence to Jackie Robinson Day. Perhaps a more rigorous ontology is in order.

Buildings that breathe

All of the projects discussed thus far are based on display systems, a reflection that we are still in the midst of a “society of the spectacle.” But what if the building's facade could physically change? Does the idea raise the creepy prospect of the ever-multiplying rooms in Mark Danielewski's novel House of Leaves? Or something more sensuous and practical than displays that are only skin deep?

Columbia University architecture graduates Soo-in Yang and David Benjamin, whose firm is called The Living, have developed a prototype wall that “breathes.” Exploring the idea of architecture that responds to internal or external conditions with movement, Yang and Benjamin came across shape memory alloy technology (SMA)-metals that temporarily change their shape at certain temperatures. Deliberately avoiding the use of fanciful 3D renderings in favor of real working prototypes, Yang and Benjamin (in collaboration with engineers at Columbia) built a prototype window that, on exposure to certain levels of CO2, automatically opens to allow fresh air to flow in. The window can be surprisingly thin, and free of bulky mechanisms. SMA wires are embedded in a pliable transparent plastic and connected to carbon dioxide sensors. When CO2 reaches a certain level, the wires contract, pulling open slits in the polymer. “Something like CO2 is not immediately visible and you cannot smell it, but it is important to the environment of a room,” says Benjamin. “Too much CO2 makes a room stuffy.” Benjamin and Yang now teach a class at Columbia and Pratt Institute titled “Living Architecture: Responsive Kinetic Systems Lab” and are continuing to explore their breathing skin, which they believe has the potential to alleviate conditions like sick building syndrome (where indoor air pollutants cause repeated ailments among occupants). By combining the polymer with thin film photovoltaic strips, they could also make the skin self-powering. Benjamin has boundless optimism for this line of inquiry: “We do really think that people will fall in love with this idea of bringing architecture to life, and that it may capture the imagination of the general public in the way that it captured ours.”

A collaborative future

The future of architecture looks enticingly malleable and increasingly collaborative. Clearly, architects cannot produce buildings that transform themselves in response to a data feed without intense collaboration with artists, designers, programmers, and engineers. And for these collaborators, the building offers a decidedly public canvas on which to see their creations come alive. Back in the 1980s, futurists like Wired magazine's Kevin Kelly imagined a neo-biological era of manufactured hybrids, living silicon polymers and mutating buildings. As buildings gain the capacity to communicate, the potential arises for mutations that are useful, dramatic or, perhaps, downright mischievous.

Related Links

• Blinkenlights project
  http://www.blinkenlights.de
• Chaos Computer Club
  http://www.ccc.de/?language=en
• realities:united
  http://www.realities-united.de/index.html
• Pelli Clake Pelli Architects
  http://www.cesar-pelli.com/flash.cfm
• David Small
  http://www.davidsmall.com/
• Ben Rubin, Ear Studio
  http://www.earstudio.com
• Minneapolis Central Library
  http://www.mpls.lib.mn.us/newcentrallib.asp

Cool flickr search tool

http://www.compfight.com/

Most Popular Sites for Kids, Teens and Young Adults in UK

Thanks to neilsen online and marketing charts for this update.

Those under age 12 have an affinity for entertainment sites, whereas for those age 12-17 it’s games sites - and student and video sites for those age 18-22 - according to (pdf) a Nielsen Online study of Britons under age 23.

Under 12

- Fashion community site Stardoll has the highest percentage (32%) of children under 12 years old among its audience - making it the site with the greatest affinity with that age group.
- Entertainment sites - including Nick, Cartoon Network, the BBC’s CBBC and CBeebies and Disney International - dominate the sites with the greatest affinity with children under 12.

“The Internet is very much an entertainment resource for young children, mainly due to how well TV broadcasters such as Nickelodeon, Cartoon Network, the BBC and Disney have adapt

ed and extended their traditional offering to the web,” said Alex Burmaster, internet analyst at Nielsen Online.

12-17-Year-Olds

- Mobile phone social networking site Frengo has the highest percentage (26%) of 12-17-year-olds among its audience - making it the site with the greatest affinity with that age group.- Online games sites - including RuneScape, FreeOnlineGames, AddictingGames and MiniClip - dominate the sites with the greatest affinity with 12-17 year-olds.

“As children hit their teenage years, general entertainment sites tend to make way for games-focused sites, which offer a massive range of easily accessible games and ensure that teenage gaming activity extends far beyond the PS3, Wii and Xbox consoles,” Burmaster commented.

Young Adults

-The three sites with the highest concentration of 18-22 year-olds (40%) are all student-related - the Student Loans Company, UCAS and Student Finance Direct.
- Sites offering video-related content - such as Sidereel, TV Links, Alluc and Youku - also feature heavily among sites with the greatest affinity with young adults.

“It’s interesting to see that the sites with the heaviest concentration of young adults split into two conflicting groups - functional and entertainment. This mirrors the uneasy transition of growing up from teenage years into adulthood and the associated increase in responsibility,” Burmaster said.

“Whilst entertainment, mainly through video sites, still has a place, this has been usurped by the need to investigate higher education and financing oneself through it.”

McDonald's is Launching Their Own Virtual World

This Is Smart Business.
by: Scott Goodson thanks to FutureLab

What can we learn from McDonald's creating their own virtual world? That they are moving into their own customized world says one thing to me, that it will become more valuable for brands to create and curate their own virtual worlds rather than joining existing public virtual worlds.

The reason being that the brand not only benefits from being in an innovative virtual world, but it owns the media and, over time this media, will become more and more valuable. Very smart marketing on the part of the firm and equally smart business.
From Virtual Worlds: McDonald's is apparently in the process of soft-launching a virtual world to take over HappyMeal.com. It's not clear how old the world is, but the contest is still open for kids to pick the virtual world's name--and, according to the intro video, new games, lands, events, etc., to build the world from the ground up based on videos.. So I'm guessing the transition is pretty new, possibly even just from last week. There is already an eye toward real-world integration: entering a code from actual Happy Meal boxes and bags as well as McDonald's milk cartons and Apple Dipper bags will let users unlock exclusive items in the Flash-based virtual world. Treehouse There are also already a fair number of environments available for play in addition to a customizable treehouse where you can store some of your virtual goods. Other items will customize users' avatars, add interactive pets, or feature interactive characters from movies, comic books, and TV shows. Aside from the cost of a Happy Meal, the website says everything is free for its users. Users can also earn points towards purchases simply by completing activities in the virtual world, but it seems like there will still be exclusive items available only for McDonald's customers. There also appears to be a metagame, where characters earn points and have "smarts," "strength," and "spark," stats. Points are earned through all the in-world activities, and the goal is to "keep your avatar happy" by keeping all three stats at their maximum level while playing. I'm not sure what that does, though. In addition to the casual games, there are also larger quests for users to complete as interactive stories throughout the world. Piratebay The registration process doesn't take much information from users, keeping it fairly private. Users can also simply login quickly as guests without providing any information. Of course, then they can't build their characters and houses over time. On the safety side, users can chat and add to a buddy list, but it looks like chat is done entirely through pre-set phrases. However, while there's a "Parent's Retreat" on the main site, I can't find any information specifically about the virtual world to confirm its safety precautions.

Original Post: http://scottgoodson.typepad.com/my_weblog/2008/08/mcdonalds-is-launching-their-own-virtual-world-this-is-smart-business.html

Fox Mobiseries

Fox buys rights to Cell mobiseries

Posted by Teresa von Fuchs, on MobileCrunch.

Fox International, in its quest to expand its mobile content offerings, has bought the rights to Mobstar’s made-for-mobile series Cell.

First aired in the UK on O2, Cell consists of 20 two-minute ‘mobisodes’ about a man locked in prison with a mobile phone and a mystery caller. The show is produced by Endemol and was originally played in the U.S. on Sony’s crackle.com.

Fox plans to broadcast the mobisodes on a UK-only mobile channel, thecell.tv; Fox also has plans for more UK-only mobile sites coming in the fall.

Mobile Entertainment

Ralph Lauren is first luxury retailer to launch mobile commerce

Every day brings a new technology and another brand that tries to get a head start by implementing it before the rest. Polo Ralph Lauren has become the first luxury retailer to launch mobile commerce. In Asia, it is common for people to buy products like Coke from vending machines through their mobile phones - that started as early as 2001.

What Polo Ralph Lauren is doing now, is aiming to attract business from the tech-savvy consumer in America by allowing them to buy products with codes that they intend to place in print ads, mailings and store windows, which will also be a feature of their sponsorship of the U.S Open later this month. Once users download the software to their phone, the codes can be scanned and they will be directed to a phone-friendly version of the Ralph Lauren site.

From Forbes, David Lauren, the Senior Vice-President of Advertising at the company and son of Ralph Lauren, said:

“We recognize that in America this is going after somebody who is more comfortable with technology. The truth is that in other countries, it’s becoming a part of their culture. The trend is coming, and as a fashion company it’s very important to identify trends and get ahead of them.”

Thanks to NGT and marktd for this post: http://www.marktd.com/2008/08/ralph-lauren-is-first-luxury-retailer-to-launch-mobile-commerce.html

Retailers 'Sell' to Young, Virtually

Not only have Tampax developed a new campaign tapping into social network 'Stardoll' to kick-off its monthly gift club (see here) but now see how other big brands like Kohls, Sears and K-Swiss are setting up shop there to sell virtual versions of their products to girls.

Thanks again to NGT and The Wall Street Jounral for this alert.

Kohl's, Sears Build Brands As Children Clothe Their Avatars Online

Retailer Kohl's Corp. this month launched a new line of apparel, but the plaid skirts and printed T-shirts won't be sold in its 957 stores. Instead, it's selling them on Stardoll.com, a virtual community for teens and tweens where kids can fork over "Stardollars" -- purchased online at a nominal sum -- to buy apparel for their online characters.

With back-to-school sales off to a slow start, more old-line retailers and clothing labels are reaching out to kids online, enticing them to try virtual versions of their togs in hopes of making actual sales later. Kohl's first virtual line features pieces from its new Abbey Dawn collection, designed by singer Avril Lavigne. In its first 16 days, Kohl's Stardoll boutique logged some 2.2 million visits and sold 1.8 million items. Kohls.com lured 97,000 visitors who clicked through from the boutique site.

This month, casual-wear maker K-Swiss Inc. and lingerie and swimwear designer Eberjey rolled out virtual clothes on There.com. And in late July, retail pioneer Sears Holdings Corp. opened its first online boutique featuring back-to-school apparel and dorm-room furniture on teen site Zwinky.com. Sears said the boutiques logged 750,000 visitors and sold 850,000 virtual items during their first 16 days through mid-August.

These mainline retailers hope the virtual showrooms will be more effective than traditional ads in hooking tweens and teens. Users of the sites already can spend virtual dollars on virtual clothes designed by the sites, or by early adopters such as American Apparel Inc. that went virtual two years ago. The sites are places to fashion digital personalities, called "avatars," that participants use to explore new styles, relationships and behaviors. Typically, these sites now offer a click through to buy the real products.

"When you look at an ad, it's pretty quick," said Jennifer Weiderman, vice president of global marketing for K-Swiss. "But when they're in this virtual world, this gets them to spend more time [viewing] your product. It's a little bit more sticky."

Ms. Weiderman said she is dialing back her spending on TV ads this year and expects to allocate 15% of her marketing budget to online initiatives, up from 5% last year. Sears and J.C. Penney Co., which last month made virtual versions of its teen and young-adult clothing available to users of Yahoo's instant messenger service, say they've increased online ad spending this year. Kohl's also said it is allocating more of its online ad dollars this year to targeting teens. None would detail the scale of the budget shift.

Details of the arrangements vary, but a retailer or brand typically pays a fee to have a virtual community host and develop its store and products. At There.com, the fee ranges from a few hundred dollars to a few thousand, depending on how elaborate the store is and how many items will be sold. The brand and the Web site sometimes split revenue from the virtual purchases. But since virtual clothes cost from under $1 to $5 -- brands regard this revenue as negligible.

"It's really a way to get shoppers to test-drive your product," said Carlos Mejia, chief financial officer of Eberjey, a maker of lingerie, swimwear and sleepwear. The brand, which largely sells to women ages 20 to 45, hopes to attract teenagers with its virtual line.

Penney decided this year to put back-to-school outfits on Yahoo after learning that, during a seven-week experiment last summer, 1.5 million avatars wore its clothing on Yahoo and 5 million Penney outfits were tried on. "It casts a very modern, current light on the brand with teens," says Mike Boylson, Penney's chief marketing officer. Before Penney's presence on Yahoo, "perhaps J.C. Penney wasn't on their radar before," he says.

Sears is marketing its virtual boutiques on billboards in the virtual world, and is hosting daily fashion shows on the site promoting its products through the end of August.

Not everyone is pleased. Patti Miller, vice president of Children Now, an Oakland, Calif.-based national children's advocacy group, expressed concern over marketing to youngsters via these virtual shops. The Federal Communications Commission in 1990 established rules governing the hourly amount of advertising directed at children. But the newer, Web-based virtual communities that have replaced TV viewing for some kids have no similar restrictions.

"Some of these younger kids, those younger than 8 and even kids up to 12, can't make the distinction between what's advertising and what's not," says Ms. Miller. She says children may not grasp that the virtual stores function as a brand advertisement.

Dave Bazant, Sears' marketing manager for online and emerging media, argues that children who frequent the virtual sites are savvy enough to know that the stores also function as a branding tool.

"It's fairly transparent -- kids are not very naïve these days," says Mr. Bazant. He notes that Sears is careful to not aggressively push its wares in these sites because teens and tweens are "turned off by direct advertising. We're not giving away our product for free. Most of these items, they have to purchase."

The online pitches are striking a chord with Jen Rediger's daughters, 13-year-old Tyler and 9-year-old Kenzie. In the first week that the Kohl's store opened on Stardoll, they spent about 70 Star Dollars, or $7, on virtual skirts and shoes. Ms. Rediger, 32, an interior designer who lives in Hoschton, Ga., says she doesn't mind her daughters being exposed to such marketing because "it's not worse than what they see on television."

Tyler has already asked her mom to take her to Kohl's to buy the real versions. "They look really cool on my doll," she says. "It's my style so I think I'll wear it a lot."

Using QR codes to check food safety in store

Ever wonder how where your Dairy Farmers milk really comes from? In Japan, QR codes affixed to produce allow the curious shopper to check everything from a fruit or vegetable’s farm of origin to the soil composition it was grown in. Thanks to NGT and psfk for this post.

Homegrown Evolution points us to an interesting adaptation of QR bar codes in Japan. Bar codes are being affixed to produce that give a detailed history of the item’s origin. When scanned with a QR enabled cell phone, the code will tell the story of the fruits and veggies - where they came from, and how they were grown.

Wireless Watch Japan reports:

“Prefectural authorities and the JA Ibaraki Prefecture Central Union of Agricultural Cooperative cooperating with other farming and agricultural associations are adding QR code labels right at the point of origin. In the supermarket, consumers use camera equipped cell phones to scan the QR code on the label. The code links to a mobile website detailing origin, soil composition, organic fertilizer content percentage (as opposed to chemical), use of pesticides and herbicides and even the name of the farm it was grown on. Consumers can also access the same information over the Ibaraki Agricultural Produce Net website by inputting a numbered code on each label.”

Sharing stuff via mobile phone and I don't just mean blue tooth

Sharemo: How Japanese people share used stuff using their cell phones

Thanks again to TechCrunch.
Swapping sites are nothing new (see Dig N’ Swap), but in Japan we like to trade our junk via our mobile phones. That is what the Japanese social sharing service Sharemo is all about. The site’s ambitious idea is to contribute to overcoming Japan’s throwaway society.
This is how it works: Users can offer any item they don’t need anymore (DVDs, comics and clothes are especially popular) on Sharemo. If the item is useful to another member, it can be rented, used and then relisted. This procedure is repeated until one Sharemo user decides to keep the item. The system keeps track of all actions and allocates points to active members, which can be donated or redeemed to rent items.

Sharemo’s crucial point is the complete absence of money and the reliance on trust among the members. In Japan at least, the concept pans out as expected: Although the mobile site isn’’t actively being promoted yet, Sharemo it already racks up 400,000 page views monthly.

Sharemo is operated by Enigmo, a company setting itself apart from other Japanese web companies by an international mindset. Their promotion networks rollmio and pressblog are successful outside Japan already, and Sharemo is set to follow suit in the mobile space. Will this concept work outside of Japan?

Rent your playlist

I personally love this idea and would like to see it available for your iPod too (think of those house party mixes, road trips, 80's themed parties, ad music references, etc). Thanks to Mobile Marketer: http://www.mobilemarketer.com/cms/news/music/1560.html

Virgin Mobile USA renting playlists for ringback mix
LiveWire Mobile and Virgin Mobile USA have launched Ringback Playlist, letting the mobile virtual network operator's subscribers access pre-selected content channels of music.

Ringback Playlist lets Virgin Mobile USA customers personalize their mobile phones by choosing their favorite music genre and setting their ringback tones to a collection of songs in that category. Each time a call comes into a Virgin Mobile USA customer’s handset, a different tune from the Ringback Playlist’s selected station is heard by the caller.

“We’ve been working with Virgin Mobile USA on our ringback tones service since late last year, and Ringback Playlist is a new industry-first service,” said John Orlando, vice president of marketing for LiveWire Mobile, Littleton, MA.

“This takes the heavy lifting off subscribers’ shoulders, since the playlist constantly updated based on the genre they select,” he said.
Mr. Orlando said that this represents a business model translation for Virgin Mobile USA’s partners in the music industry.
“Music is changing from a buying experience to a rental experience, so instead of requiring consumers to buy the songs, someone can actually rent the playlist for that month,” Mr. Orlando said.

“The industry is moving from the à la carte model to a subscription model,” he said.

LiveWire is working with Virgin Mobile USA’s marketing team, which will handle the marketing to the MVNO’s subscriber base.

“Their marketing efforts will focus on their user interface, their mobile storefronts, Web stores and WAP stores,” Mr. Orlando said. “They’ll be launching various marketing campaigns to promote this service.”

Ringback Playlists will be available by music genre or trend with additional personalization options that can be set based on the caller, the day of the week and the time of day.
Ringback Playlist is offered to Virgin Mobile USA customers for $3.49 per month, plus a $1.49 monthly ringback subscription fee. If consumers choose to buy individual songs, they can do so for $1.99 per track.

Virgin Mobile USA customers are now able to choose from 10 different channels that feature five ringback selections each, such as pop, hip-hop, alternative, country and television and movie classics.
Virgin Mobile USA will continue to add other Ringback Playlists. Also, a special Virgin Mobile Festival channel is available, pulling from artists who appeared at the recent Virgin Mobile Festival Aug. 9-10 in Baltimore.

Available tracks include "Mercy" by Duffy, "Let the Drummer Kick" by Citizen Cope, "A Milli" by Lil Wayne, "Flashing Lights" by Kanye West and "Real Wild Child" by Iggy Pop.

Virgin Mobile USA's Ringback Playlist is supported by LiveWire Mobile's Achieve Marketing Team, which will regularly update track selections within the Ringback Playlist and provide specialized campaign support based on continuously collected metrics.

LiveWire Mobile, a subsidiary of NMS Communications Corp., has plans to launch advertising ringbacks, an ad-sponsored model allowing wireless subscribers to get compensated when they allow advertising to be hosted on their handset.

Earlier this summer the company launched its ringtone service on 3 UK, a British carrier. Virgin Mobile USA's full slate of handsets, including the Wild Card, Slash and Flare, are available at approximately 40,000 retailers nationwide, with Top-Up cards available at more than 140,000 locations.

Virgin Mobile USA lets customers earn free minutes in exchange for viewing advertising content online through the Sugar Mama program and contributes a portion of profits from downloadable content to The RE*Generation, its pro-social initiative to help homeless youth.

Virgin Mobile USA debuted the Ringback Playlist Aug. 1. “Virgin Mobile has always been at the forefront of innovative services that are fun for people to use,” Mr. Orlando said. “They believe in the Ringback Playlist service, which has already become very popular, and they’re making it easier for their subscriber base to enjoy them.

“This is a premium service will help Virgin Mobile and its partners, the record labels, sell more content in a different way,” he said. “This is a very different business model, and it’s an exciting one for all of us.”

Staff Reporter Dan Butcher covers banking and payments, carrier networks, commerce, database/CRM, manufacturers, music and software and technology. Reach him at dan@mobilemarketer.com.

E-learning at school?

E-learning is finally taking off in the U.S. Perhaps m-learning is up next, wherein mobile devices let learning continue even after the bell rings? 

Will this provide an opportunity for online advertising to wriggle its way in and reach this highly lucrative market?

Thanks to NGT and the NY Times for this great article.

At School, Technology Starts to Turn a Corner

COUNT me a technological optimist, but I have always thought that the people who advocate putting computers in classrooms as a way to transform education were well intentioned but wide of the mark. It’s not the problem, and it’s not the answer.

Yet as a new school year begins, the time may have come to reconsider how large a role technology can play in changing education. There are promising examples, both in the United States and abroad, and they share some characteristics. The ratio of computers to pupils is one to one. Technology isn’t off in a computer lab. Computing is an integral tool in all disciplines, always at the ready.

Web-based education software has matured in the last few years, so that students, teachers and families can be linked through networks. Until recently, computing in the classroom amounted to students doing Internet searches, sending e-mail and mastering word processing, presentation programs and spreadsheets. That’s useful stuff, to be sure, but not something that alters how schools work.

The new Web education networks can open the door to broader changes. Parents become more engaged because they can monitor their children’s attendance, punctuality, homework and performance, and can get tips for helping them at home. Teachers can share methods, lesson plans and online curriculum materials.

In the classroom, the emphasis can shift to project-based learning, a real break with the textbook-and-lecture model of education. In a high school class, a project might begin with a hypothetical letter from the White House that says oil prices are spiking, the economy is faltering and the president’s poll numbers are falling. The assignment would be to devise a new energy policy in two weeks. The shared Web space for the project, for example, would include the White House letter, the sources the students must consult, their work plan and timetable, assignments for each student, the assessment criteria for their grades and, eventually, the paper the team delivers. Oral presentations would be required.

The project-based approach, some educators say, encourages active learning and produces better performance in class and on standardized tests.

The educational bottom line, it seems, is that while computer technology has matured and become more affordable, the most significant development has been a deeper understanding of how to use the technology.

“Unless you change how you teach and how kids work, new technology is not really going to make a difference,” said Bob Pearlman, a former teacher who is the director of strategic planning for the New Technology Foundation, a nonprofit organization.

The foundation, based in Napa, Calif., has developed a model for project-based teaching and is at the forefront of the drive for technology-enabled reform of education. Forty-two schools in nine states are trying the foundation’s model, and their numbers are growing rapidly.

Behind the efforts, of course, are concerns that K-12 public schools are falling short in preparing students for the twin challenges of globalization and technological change. Worries about the nation’s future competitiveness led to the creation in 2002 of the Partnership for 21st Century Skills, a coalition whose members include the Department of Education and technology companies like Apple, Cisco Systems, Dell and Microsoft.

The government-industry partnership identifies a set of skills that mirror those that the New Technology Foundation model is meant to nurture. Those skills include collaboration, systems thinking, self-direction and communication, both online and in person.

State officials in Indiana took a look at the foundation’s model and offered travel grants for local teachers and administrators to visit its schools in California. Sally Nichols, an English teacher, came away impressed and signed up for the new project-based teaching program at her school, Decatur Central High School in Indianapolis.

Last year, Ms. Nichols and another teacher taught a biology and literature class for freshmen. (Cross-disciplinary courses are common in the New Technology model.) Typically, half of freshmen fail biology, but under the project-based model the failure rate was cut in half.

“There’s a lot of ownership by the kids in their work instead of teachers lecturing and being the givers of all knowledge,” Ms. Nichols explained. “The classes are just much more alive. They don’t sleep in class.”

IN Indiana, the number of schools using the foundation model will increase to six this year, and an additional dozen communities have signed up for the next year, said David Shane, a member of the state board of education. “It’s caught fire in Indiana, and we’ve got to have this kind of education to prepare our young people for the future in a global economy that is immersed in technology.”

The extra cost for schools that have adopted the New Technology model is about $1,000 per student a year, once a school is set up, says Mr. Pearlman of the foundation.

In England, where the government has promoted technology in schools for a decade, the experiment with technology-driven change in education is further along.

Five years ago, the government gave computers to students at two schools in high-crime neighborhoods in Birmingham. For the students, a Web-based portal is the virtual doorway for assignments, school social activities, online mentoring, discussion groups and e-mail. Even students who are suspended from school for a few days beg not to lose their access to the portal, says Sir Mark Grundy, 49, the executive principal of Shireland Collegiate Academy and the George Salter Collegiate Academy. Today, the schools are among the top in the nation in yearly improvements in students’ performance in reading and math tests.

Sir Mark says he is convinced that advances in computing, combined with improved understanding of how to tailor the technology to different students, can help transform education.

“This is the best Trojan horse for causing change in schools that I have ever seen,” he said.

Social media goes mobile

Thanks again techcrunch for this from japan:

There is a lot of hype and hope in the U.S. around taking social networks mobile, but mobile social networking is still in the fledgling stages in the West. In Japan, it is already a reality. One company in particular, DeNA, has taken Japan by storm with its mobile SNS/virtual world/gaming platform Mobage-town. DeNA opened a US office in San Mateo earlier this year, with plans to offer an English version of Mobage-town this fall.

Subscribers can exchange messages, chat in communities, share music, read pocket novels, and blog, among other things. The site’s “killer feature”, however, is the vast selection of free games that makes most users register in the first place.

Each of the 11 million Mobage-town members is represented by an avatar “living” in a virtual room. Both the characters and rooms can be pimped out with new clothes and wallpaper, for example. In order to do that, users must acquire “Moba Gold”, a virtual currency established by DeNA, by clicking on ads, signing up for affiliate services and inviting new members.

The circular business model has paid off for the company, which is listed on the Tokyo stock exchange (market cap: $2.3 billion). Mobage-town alone raked in $46 million in sales in the first quarter of this year and saw nearly 15 billion page views in June. And yes, this is Japan- and mobile-only.

Andriod - the OS for everything?

Thanks Eric from Techcrunch for this interesting perspective on android and what it could become

As the world waits for the first Android phone to appear in the wild (from T-Mobile), questions are being raised again about whether Google’s Android ambitions will stop at cell phones. In a speculative, but well-thought-out piece, VentureBeat’s Eric Eldon reports:

Industry sources tell us that although Android will indeed start as a mobile OS, Google intends to expand it to be a sort of universal operating system that will span set-top boxes for televisions, mp3 players and other communication and media devices and services.

If what Eldon is hearing is true, that means that Android could one day spread beyond mobile phones and set-top boxes to a multiplicity of devices. After all, if we are moving towards an Internet of things, those things will need an operating system. In this case, however, the operating system will reside partially in the cloud, and applications written on Google’s App Engine, for instance, will work across devices and the Web.

That is easier said than done, and Android will have a hard enough time simply establishing itself on mobile phones. But the more devices Android apps can work across, the more appealing it will be to developers and startups.

And for at least one other device, it does make sense. In fact, I’ve been hearing similar rumors in regards to a Google set-top-box project that I first caught wind of last year. As far as I know, that project is still alive and is very Android-like in its aspirations. As I wrote in my post in November, 2007:

If creating applications for set-top boxes was more like creating applications for the Web, we’d be able to do a lot more things with our TVs—especially if those set-top boxes were also connected to the Web. Want instant messaging and caller ID on your TV? No problem. Want customized information widgets for the TV that scroll breaking news, weather, sports scores or stock quotes from sources you choose in your own ticker at the bottom of the screen? No problem. Want to turn that annoying ticker off? No problem. Want to control the camera angles on that basketball game? No problem. Want to add the live video stream from your friend’s cell phone who is at the game? No problem. Want to create your own video mashup of fight scenes from various movies that you can edit right on your TV and share with others on their TVs? No problem.

What other devices could Android conquer?

Here's another techcrunch post on T-Mobile in Germany being the first to market with an android handset