Starbucks, Unilever team up on Facebook

Thanks Rob and thanks WARC

SEATTLE: Starbucks, the coffee house chain, and Unilever, the consumer goods giant, have teamed up to promote their jointly-produced ice cream brand on Facebook, using an application that encourages consumers to download coupons via the social network.

It has been argued that the current financial crisis has forced Starbucks to reassess its priorities after years of growth, and the company has also come under increasing pressure from rivals such as McDonald's.

By way of a response, it has not only sought to move into the retail space, but also to utilise social media like Facebook and Twitter to connect with consumers.

Unilever signed a licensing agreement to produce an ice cream range based on some of Starbuck's most popular coffee flavours, such as Caramel Macciato, Mocha Frappuccino and Java Chip Frappuccino, last year.

Simon Clift, the FMCG giant's chief marketing officer, has also previously championed the use of social media as a means of engaging a broad audience.

Running for two weeks, the two firms' current Facebook campaign will see 20,000 pints of Starbucks ice cream being given away each day.

Some 280,000 pints will be available overall, with members of the social network being required to download a voucher which they can then send on to a person of their choice.

According to a statement from the companies, "participants can treat others or – if the temptation is too great – indulge themselves by claiming one of just over 800 coupons available at the top of each hour."

Other brands that have recently been active on Facebook include Volkswagen and General Motors, which have used "widgets" – applications that feature on "profile pages" – produced by RockYou.

Gap has similarly employed some of the company's products, which vary from games and quizzes to video and tools that allow users to "decorate" their personal profile.

Microsoft and Experian are also among the major advertisers that are now using Facebook's own "engagement ads", which appear on user pages and contain interactive features.

Marc Andreessen, a board member of the social networking pioneer, has predicted that the company will make "over $500 million (€357m; £309m)" in revenue this year.

Furthermore, he added that "if they pushed the throttle forward on monetization they would be doing more than a billion this year."

"There's every reason to expect in my view that the thing can be doing billions in revenue five years from now," Andreessen concluded.

Data sourced from BrandWeek/Forbes/Reuters; additional content by WARC staff, 08 July 2009

10 Stunning (And Useful) Stats About Twitter

Thanks Influential Marketing Blog

10 Stunning (And Useful) Stats About Twitter

UPDATE: Follow me at @rohitbhargava if you liked this post!

Last month a social media analytics provider named Sysomos released a comprehensive report on Twitter usage. The problem with most analysis on Twitter, though, is that it is limited by the minimal amount of data that Twitter collects. So, to fill the gaps, most reports do things like guessing gender based on real names or pulling data from keywords in people's biographic information. This often yields some questionable results - and the Sysomos report is not immune to this (for example, they find that 65% of Twitter users are under the age of 25, but base this on only the 0.7% of users who actually disclose their age).

Looking past these small points, the report does share some fairly interesting observations and stats as well if you dig a bit deeper. Here's my read on the 10 standout conclusions that the report offers to help you (and your brand) better understand the potential uses of Twitter:

1. 21% (One Fifth) of Twitter accounts are empty placeholders. These are the percentage of Twitter accounts that have never posted a single tweet. They may either be registered simply to hold a username for later use, or be experimental accounts started up but never used.
2. Nearly 94% of all Twitter accounts have less than 100 followers. In a finding perhaps consistent with the newness of the tool as well as the fact that many people may currently have an account simply to start experimenting with the tool, Sysomos found the vast majority of Twitter users have an extremely low followership.
3. March and April of 2009 were the tipping point for Twitter. During these months, Ashton Kutcher launched his quest to get to 1 million followers faster than CNN, Oprah started using Twitter, and the steady flow of new users to the site continued. For many, it offered a safer and easier way to get their feet wet with social media, 140 characters at a time.
4. 150 followers is the magic number. In a particularly interesting data point from the survey, Sysomos found that Twitter users tended to "follow back" all their followers up until about 150 connections. Then the reciprocation rate fell off dramatically, which seems to indicate that this number may be the crossover point where people shift from using Twitter for more personal use to using it more for "lifecasting" their thoughts and actions to a community of people who they feel varying levels of connection to.
5. A small minority creates most of the activity. A steep curve of a small minority of actively engaged content creators generating most of the activity on a site is common among social networks, but it is steeper and more pronounced on Twitter. 5% of users account for 75% of all activity, and 10% of users account for 86%. This seems to suggest that the site has managed to engage a mass audience beyond those who typically engage with social media.
6. Half of all Twitter users are not "active." If you take a general description of being "active" on Twitter to mean that you have posted a tweet at some point in the last 7 days (1 week), then the survey learned that 50.4% of all Twitter users fit this category. If you remove the 21% from point #1, this leaves about 30% of users who have an account and have tweeted before, but happen to be inactive now.
7. Tuesday is the most active Twitter day. One of the most useful data points from the report is that it clears up the common question of which day of the week is the best day to tweet something. Sysomos found that Tuesday stood out as the most popular day for tweets and retweets, followed by Wednesday and then Friday.
8. APIs have been the key to Twitter's growth & utility. In terms of tools that people are using for Twitter, Sysomos found that more than half (55%) of all Twitter users use something other than Twitter.com to tweet, search and connect with others. This may, in part, be due to Twitter's notorious reputation of failing/crashing, but also is a credit to all the third party applications that have been built on top of Twitter and do their fair share to bring new users to the service.
9. English still dominates Twitter. When exploring Russia as part of a class that I am teaching this summer at Georgetown, one of the barriers we learned about was the difficulty of fitting some Russian language words into just 140 characters. Twitter is, however, extremely English-friendly. As the Sysomos report found, the top four countries on Twitter are all English speaking (US, UK, Canada, Australia). Of these, US makes up 62% of all Twitter users, followed by UK with nearly 8% and Canada and Australia with 5.7% and 2.8% respectively. The largest non-English speaking country on Twitter? Brazil with 2%.
10. Twitter is being led by the social media geeks. This particular finding should likely come as no surprise, but 15% of Twitter users who follow more than 2000 people identify themselves as social media marketers. These individuals are more likely to post updates every day (sometimes more than once per day) and also use Twitter more actively for direct communication.

Bonus Geographical Stat/Quote: "The cities with the biggest Twitter populations are New York, Los Angeles, Toronto, San Francisco, and Boston. Los Angeles is the fastest growing city on the list."

Download the full report from Sysomos at http://www.sysomos.com/insidetwitter/

Ready For a Multi-Touch Web?

OK, and the following re-posts might be a little old, but i liked em when i read them

This one, from Read Write Web on a keyboard free net! Cool

Imagine a world without keyboards. Futurist Ray Kurzweil did 10 years ago when he predicted that by 2009 most portable computers would not have them any longer. Chances are you're still using a mouse and keyboard to point and click your way through this post (and the thousands of other Web pages you view every week). Yet a change is fast approaching, and it's based on touch.

Gesture-based interaction has been around since the dawn of computing, really, and Kurzweil's vision has come true, at least in part, thanks to the widespread adoption of trackpads for laptops (not to mention their predecessors: the trackball, stylus, and light pen). Meanwhile, touch-enabled screens are all around us: in ATMs, GPS navigation systems, grocery checkout lines, bars and restaurants, and TV (think CNN's election maps, and remember Star Trek: The Next Generation from the 1980s?). Yet single-user desktop systems are still mostly dependent on mice and keyboards.

With the advent of Apple's wildly popular iPhone (soon to be joined by the Palm Pre), we've gotten a taste of the potential of multi-touch technology, at least for mobile devices. Now they're being joined by a new wave of interactive walls and tables: Microsoft's Surface, Hitachi's StarBoard, and Sony's new multi-touch LCD screen.

The New Metaphors of Touch

Multi-touch and other touch surfaces offer a more intuitive and natural interaction with PCs, transforming the way we use computers, much the way GUI systems did when they were introduced 25 years ago. While some tasks may still be easier to perform using traditional input devices like the keyboard and mouse, multi-touch is ideal for manipulating objects; creating, editing, and scanning pictures; navigating maps; and even surfing the Web. Gesture-based human/computer interaction represents an evolutionary step, not just in the design of hand-held devices and PCs but also in the look, feel, and functionality of websites.

"Pinch," "de-pinch," "flick," "stretch." This is the growing vernacular of multi-finger and gesture motions. Our current devices (mouse, trackpad, etc.) are designed to focus on a single point and manipulate that point around the screen. With multi-touch, no longer are you limited to double-clicking, dragging, button-pushing, and working pull-down menus. You can sketch, paint, re-size, and crop with a single finger, multiple fingers, multiple hands, and even multiple users. Objects become things you swipe, zoom, push, pull, spin, rotate, and flip.

A More Interactive, Collaborative Experience

Following the introduction of the iPhone, Surface, TouchSmart TX2 multi-touch tablet, and N-trig's DuoSense digitizers, we wonder, too, what's coming next? More intriguing for us as a Web hosting company is how this will transform the online experience: the look and feel of websites, their functionality, and your interaction with them?

There are a few hints of the multi-touch future to come. Bill Buxton is a pioneer in the field of multi-touch. His "Multi-Touch Systems That I Have Known and Loved" outlines degrees of freedom, a concept central to expanding the boundaries of how we interact with computers:

"The richness of interaction is highly related to the richness/number of degrees of freedom (DOF) and, in particular, continuous degrees of freedom, supported by the technology. The conventional GUI is largely based on moving around a single 2-D cursor, using a mouse, for example. This results in 2DOF. If I am sensing the location of two fingers, I have 4DOF, and so on."

DOF then opens up nearly endless possibilities for one-surface computing based on your actions: discrete or continuous, horizontal or vertical orientation, pressure sensitivity, angle of approach, friction, and so one, all influenced by the single or multiple points and gestures you use.

Multi-Touch Made Real

Buxton, Kurzweil, and visionary Jefferson Han provide only a glimpse of what tomorrow's multi-touch websites might look like. No one really knows for certain. Yet they will likely contain at least a few of the following elements:

• Virtual buttons and signatures;
• A faster, more efficient GUI in which the user can customize their own site menu size and shape: for example, by representing layers as individual cards of a card deck;
• Items with 3-D characteristics, with fronts and backs that can be flipped over and rotated.

Joel Eden, a user experience consultant, provides some excellent suggestions for "Designing for Multi-Touch, Multi-User, and Gesture-Based Systems," listing several characteristics that apply as much to website design as to software development. These include:

• Affordances: focus on features, actions, and interactions that can be represented visually;
• Engagement: focus users on simple, quick, natural interactions;
• Feedback must be immediate and easily noticeable by all concurrent users;
• Don't make us think: minimize hidden functionality, except for contextual features that only make sense when revealed during specific interactions.

It may not be time yet to ditch your keyboard and retire your mouse. But sometime between the iPhone and Surface table-top computing, laptop and desktop multi-touch applications will emerge. Interested in a sneak peek at what a multi-touch website might look like? Take a look at these prototypes, and share your examples and ideas!

• Digital Volvelles 1.0
• Kyle Phillips: What Matters Most
• Multitouch-Barcelona Natural Interaction Project

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Augemented reality

OK... i've been totally slack and not posted a damn thing for ages, apart from those annoying delicious links which are mostly of use to me, but anyway, trying to get back on track now.

Starting with a nice little, practical summary of AR that our Interactive CD, Fred Hass wrote:

Technologies

There are two main ways to achieve Augmented Reality in a browser.

1: Total Immersion:This French company has been the leader in the Augmented Reality field for commercial use. If you are after the best quality 3D this is the one to go with.
Pros: Higher quality 3D
Cons: Costly licence fee, no community, single vendor, custom code language, large file size, new plugin required
Links: Official Site

2: Flash: Can be integrated into any flash site and works with Flash 8+
Pros: No plugin, small file size, open source, community, flash is a common skill
Cons: Lower quality 3D
Links: FLART

There is also various other technologies which could be used but all have limited web capabilities.

Many universities have Augmented Reality research labs and I think we'll start to see this technology get more mature over the next few years as commercial applications for it start to materialize.

EXAMPLES

Living Sasquatch - Papervision - Augmented Reality
http://vimeo.com/4233057?pg=embed&sec=

Mini Augmented Reality
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HTYeuo6pIjY&feature=player_embedded

Doritos Sweet Chili
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tJ_4tYUIQ8Y

Eminem Augmented Reality Screencast
http://vimeo.com/4666030

Assassins Creed 2 Teaser
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ky7unZQl5nc&feature=player_embedded

Augmented Reality Mobile Game: Catapult
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lfp8id6bpDU&feature=player_embedded

Augmented Reality Snow Flakes
http://vimeo.com/2577927

Augmented Reality Toys.v2
http://vimeo.com/3853814


More Reading

I got most of the examples and more info from the following sites/articles.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Augmented_reality
http://www.notcot.org/tag/augmented%20reality/
Yotube Search
http://replicatorinc.com/blog/2009/04/augmented-reality-going-mainstream/
http://blog.zeusdidit.com/web-design/augmented-reality-campaign
http://www.nickburcher.com/2009/05/augmented-reality-5-more-examples-of.html
http://adverlab.blogspot.com/2009/05/augmented-reality-microsites-first.html
http://www.adverblog.com/archives/003689.htm
http://www.basderks.nl/blog/?p=118
http://www.regalatucorazon.cl/
http://www.squidder.com/

There are also two blogs dedicated to AR which have even more examples

http://augmentedblog.wordpress.com/
http://www.augmentedplanet.com/