Friday, July 17, 2009

7 Technologies Shaping the Future of Social Media

thefutureMike Laurie works as a Digital Planner at UK Integrated Agency JPMH where he helps brands get the most from digital media. You can follow Mike on Twitter.

In 2019, when you look back at the social media landscape ten years earlier, you might laugh at how hard you had to work. You had to type things into forms (ha! remember those?), type URLs in the address bar (how archaic!), and put up with irritating communications about irrelevant products. Social media in the future will be effortless and everywhere. Here’s a look at some of the new technologies in store for us over the next 10 years that will make our social (media) lives easier.


1. The Arduino – One Tough Little Italian


Arduino is a small circuit board commonly used to prototype electronics. Its low cost and ease of implementation has meant that this little device is now leading a hobbyist revolution in connecting real life objects to social networks, like Twitter (Twitter). It has allowed one man to create a device attached to a chair that tweets at the presence of noxious natural gasses (ahem), another uses Arduino to monitor when his cats are inside the house or out, and a small bakery and cafe in East London is now able to tweet what’s fresh from their oven. This may all seem like pretty pointless stuff, but the pointlessness is the point.

The revolution of objects notifying human beings of their state (e.g., The Internet of Things) isn’t happening in the R&D labs of large multinational conglomerates, it’s happening in the spare rooms, garages and bedrooms of developers. The printing press, possibly one of the first inventions to aid information sharing, was invented by Johannes Gutenberg with investment intended for an altogether different enterprise: polished metal mirrors intended to capture holy light from religious relics, presumably to sell to hapless tourists. In other words, what might seem like silly tinkering today, might be a key contributor to our future world.


2. RFID Tags & Transponders


While Arduino will help household items become involved in our social media world, transponders such as Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) tags are truly breathing life into our objects.

For a number of years RFID tags have been used in passports, ID cards, travel cards and credit cards as a means to identify us when scanned, and they are used commercially for inventory tracking. Brands including Abercrombie & Fitch, Levis and Kleenex have experimented with RFID tags to track their inventory at an item-level. Transponders can be made as small as a grain of sand and can be produced very cheaply. So it is widely thought that they may one day be installed in everything from a packet of biscuits to a pair of underpants.

Close up rfid tags

But RFID tags have potentially valuable real-world applications. It may be possible, for example, to create a very cheap device which sits in your trash can or recycling box and monitors the contents by scanning RFID tags as stuff is thrown in. You might ask why anyone would want to do this with their garbage, but there is a lot of valuable data to be had in what is, in essence, scrobbling for your trash. Your trash is a goldmine of consumption data in the same way that your search data or browsing history is, and could be used to track brand loyalty and consumption habits.

And mobile phone manufacturers, particularly Nokia, are currently experimenting with consumer devices that act as readers and scanners, meaning that your mobile device might be able to do things like exchange information with other phones by bringing them near to one another, or gather information directly from products and find out instantly if anyone in your network has purchased the item in the past. Within the context of mobile phones, this technology is generally referred to as NFC (Near-Field Communication).

Of course, just because we could do this, doesn’t necessarily mean we would, or should. There are clear privacy implications involved that might make the idea of monitoring consumption via your trash or tracking your underpants dead on arrival. Privacy advocates such as CASPIAN are highly motivated to prevent this from happening — the notion that RFIDs could be on our person without us knowing is akin to web sites sharing knowledge about us without our consent. The anti-RFID site spychips.org has more information about the privacy concerns of the technology.


3. Geomagnetic Sensors in Mobile Devices


The compass is hardly new — it’s been around for thousands of years — but Yamaha has created a tiny 2mm x 2mm chip intended for use in mobile phones as a compass. When used in conjunction with GPS, AGPS or Wi-Fi triangulation and an accelerometer a compass heading could be extremely useful to give more granular positioning data to mobile applications.

Some older phones used to come equipped with these compasses, and though they have been phased out in recent years, they’re starting to make a comeback. Apple Insider suggests that the next generation of iPhone hardware will contain a “Magnetometer,” the feature already exists in the HTC Dream (the T-Mobile G1), though it is currently used for very little.

But the real world applications are many. For example, let’s say that you’ve just come out of a subway at a roundabout, and the first thing you do is take out your GPS-enabled phone’s mapping application to see where you need to walk to get to your friends waiting for you at a bar. In order to orientate yourself correctly, you’ll need to find street names. But if you happen to be in London, where I live, you know that street names are rarely in convenient places, they’re usually hidden behind trees and other signs (where’s the fun otherwise?). So a compass heading is a perfect way to let you know which direction you roughly need to walk in. Likewise, if you want to scan an area at a certain location for a great place to eat, your device is going to need a heading in order to overlay information over the top of your screen.


4. Optical Pattern Recognition & Augmented Reality


Imagine you’re on your way to a conference and you have a couple of hours to kill so you park yourself in the corner of a local bar to catch up on Mashable (Mashable). You’ve barely begun reading when an attractive girl or guy catches your eye. You’re transfixed, your heart starts to race — you’re in love. But being the shy type you can’t just go over and introduce yourself, so instead you do a quick scan of the room with your cell phone to pick up any latent metadata. Unfortunately, a social network profile pops up informing you that the object of your affection is in a relationship. Your initial excitement rapidly dissipates and you get on with your reading.

That scenario is pretty far-fetched, but it’s one potential promise of Biometric Face Recognition technology that is already used by police and security services to help identify known criminals. 3 years ago Google acquired Neven Vision, a company that provides such technology. Google reported that it is using this technology in its Picasa product to help keep your personal photos organized without you needing to do any of the actual organizing. I have literally thousands of pictures of my children and family on my computer at home. It would take me days to go through and tag each one so that I could search them more easily in the future. But at some point, Picasa might be able to tag everything for me automatically by recognizing faces and objects in my photos.

That’s still not quite to the level of our hypothetical, but Tochindot’s Sekai Camera and Wikitude are making in-roads into rich and immersive ambient metadata, too. Their current goals revolve around tagging inanimate objects, but someday biometric face recognition could be used to attach metadata to real people.


5. OpenID, OAuth, and the Identity Graph


Having to remember passwords for multiple accounts can be frustrating, and answering the same questions over and over on registration forms becomes tedious. Ten years from now, filling out our information once and then easily transferring it from place to place might be commonplace.

OpenID is an open authentication protocol that lets users use a single set of login credentials for every site they visit. It’s already in use at hundreds of smaller websites and large sites like Facebook (Facebook) are starting to accept OpenID accounts. Once you’ve authenticated, a second open protocol called OAuth will help you share data about yourself with other sites you use. OAuth lets your grant authorization to sites to collect data from other places you participate online, which ultimately could eliminate the need to fill in redundant information about your profile and who your friends are at each new site you use. And companies like Cliqset and DandyID are creating platforms that will allow you to share your entire identity graph information from your profile to your contacts to your lifestream.

Together, these technologies could essentially eliminate the need to fill out forms and register for sites all together.


6. Mind Reading


My favorite scene from Back to The Future 2 is one in which Marty visits a 1980s-theme cafe where he sees some kids looking at his old favorite arcade game. Marty tells them he’s a “crack shot” but when he demonstrates the interface, the kids complain, “You have to use your hands!? That’s like a baby’s toy.” Classic.

mindread

But the idea of being able to control an interface without the use of your fine motor skills has massive implications for human computer interaction. Consider the ability to tweet what you’re thinking without having to pull your phone out of your pocket, type your message and hit send. Imagine being able to think ‘Facebook’ and your screen presents you with an overview of your friend’s activity stream. This method of interaction is at a very experimental stage but there areproofs-of-concept that exist. Most of this kind of innovation is currently intended to help people with limited motor skills, and not lazy social media addicts, however.


7. Natural Language Processing


Like Optical Pattern Recognition, Natural Language Processing (NLP) seeks to automatically categorize and understand that which humans understand with ease. By doing so, computers will be able to understand the requests and needs of their human users far better. Of course, talented programmers can already tell their computer to do things with ease, but the rest of us would benefit from applications that understand our curious ways of speaking.

Firefox’s Ubiquity is one project that’s attempting to change the way we interact with the web by allowing people to use natural language commands. Further, in the future, applications might exist that could analyze your tweets or comments with NLP, and suggest people or brands for you to follow.


The Future


Many of the technologies explored in this post are in their infancy, but they could have a profound effect on how we use the Internet and social media in the future. If you know of any other technologies that you feel might advance the future social media landscape please mention them in the comments.

Mike Laurie works as a Digital Planner at UK Integrated Agency JPMH where he helps brands such as BlackBerry, Nestlé, Johnson & Johnson, and Hasbro get the most from digital media. You can follow Mike on Twitter.


More social media resources from Mashable:


- Tweet Street: 7 Extraordinary Twitter Uses in the Home

- The Evolution of the Social Media API

- 10 Most Extraordinary Twitter Updates


Older stuff i've not posted yet, round 2 - The Flowing Data guide to visualisations

Nice rundown on data visualisation tools from the Guardian and flowing data... yum!

Nathan Yau, the statistician beind data blog Flowing Data, presents his guide to what you can do with all those numbers

It seems like every week there's a new Web application that promises to harness the power of the masses and unlock the secrets within large datasets. Others aim to be the YouTube of data: a site that makes data fun and entertaining while starting conversations that would've otherwise never began.

This all sounds good on paper - tons of people analyzing the world's data - but there's still quite a ways to go before social data analysis becomes useful to the data-oriented crowd and an even longer way to go before data goes mainstream, if it ever does. Let's take a look at what's available now.

Many Eyes

Many Eyes, from the IBM Visual Communications Lab, is the front runner. The application provides a large toolset from your standard line, bar, and pie charts to your more advanced network and tree graphs along with the more abstract visualizations like wordle
and phrase
net
.

Alongside these visualisations that anyone can use, Many Eyes provides ways to bookmark and discuss, which is really a huge selling point in social data analysis. I mean, you can't exactly analyze with a group of people if you can't exchange ideas, right?

Swivel

While Many Eyes feels more like a research project, Swivel has tried to commercialize the idea of social data. It came out a little after Many Eyes. It's geared towards businesses while trying to make data fun, although it seems like they might be getting away from that. The visualization offerings are for the most part your basic charts.

Data360

Now we move farther away from Many Eyes and more into business. Data360 is all about business and the site looks it. Very sterile, I think is the best way to put it. While I remember there
being a social aspect to it, I don't think there was a whole lot. It's basically putting your data online with a simple time series chart.

Google Docs

OK, so Google Docs isn't social data analysis per sey, but it's in the genre and it's worth mentioning mainly because it allows for syncrhonous collaboration. You can edit a spreadsheet and create a chart with a group of people in real-time. All the other apps are asynchronous where you leave a comment, and people can see it after you've posted it. Google Docs, however, let's you chat and collaborate, which is important with social data. Again, the visualization is not much farther advanced than your standard Microsoft Excel, but it's a start.

The Rest

Finally, there are plenty of other sites that are more data-specific and others that are springing up every day. SpatialKey, for example, provides mapping tools; while Predictify attempts to predict future events by tapping the wisdom of crowds. Dolores Labs is making heavy use of Amazon's Mechanical Turk to accomplish large-scale menial tasks.

The world of social data anlysis is really just at the tip of the iceberg right
now. However, as more data becomes available, visualization advances, data analysis starts to factor in, and more people take notice, there could be potentially big things in store for social data analysis in the future.

Nathan Yau is editor of Flowing Data


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Thursday, July 16, 2009

Cross Reality: When Sensors Meet Virtual Reality

Food for thought on where the world is heading. Thanks Mashable

Written by Richard MacManus / July 14, 2009 12:00 AM / 3 Comments

During my recent visit to MIT in Boston I met with Joseph Paradiso, Associate Professor and Director of the Responsive Environments Group at MIT Media Laboratory. He showed me some demos of what his lab is up to, focusing mostly on what is termed "Cross Reality". This is when sensor/actuator networks meet online virtual worlds.

Paradiso co-authored a paper that has just been released in the July-September edition of the IEEE Pervasive Computing Magazine. The paper outlines and analyzes Cross Reality experiments done within Second Life, the most popular virtual world with 15 million current subscribers. In this post we'll give you a layman's overview of the paper, because we think this trend is important to the Web's future.

What is Cross Reality?

Cross Reality is about connecting "location-specific 3D animated constructs" in virtual worlds to in-building sensor installations.

The paper notes that "the convergence of shared 3D virtual worlds with popular web-based data sources to form a "Second Earth" has been broadly predicted." It's also been the topic of many a science fiction novel. So it's interesting to see the latest practical experiments in this "hyper reality."

It should be noted that there are already commercial applications. The paper points to IBM's visualization of datacenter operation and VRcontext's ProcessLife technology. The latter "uses high-fidelity 3D virtual replicas of real plants or factories to remotely browse and influence industrial processes in realtime."

Billowing Power Strips

In one of its projects, MIT created a cross reality environment called "ShadowLab," which is a Second Life map of the Media Lab's third floor animated by data collected from a network of 35 "smart, sensor-laden power strips" (a.k.a. PLUGs). MIT chose to use power strips "because they are already ubiquitous in offices and homes," plus they have power and can be connected to a network.


Virtual DataPond in the Virtual Atrium (left) and a real DataPond in the real Media Lab Atrium (right)

MIT added other features to the power strips via expansion boards - such as motion sensors, temperature sensors, and memory cards for local data logging.

Ubiquitous Sensor Portals

MIT has also created a whole portal network that maps sensors to virtual worlds, called the Ubiquitous Sensor Portal. There are 45 portals currently in the Media Lab, each one featuring a myriad of environmental sensors - such as motion, light and sound level, vibration, temperature, and humidity. They have a small touch-screen display and audio speaker, for user interaction.

The Portals also act as base stations for an 802.15.4 network inside the lab, "enabling wireless communication with a variety of wearable sensors." Each portal has an extension into Second Life, allowing people to visit the Media Lab virtually. This isn't just a one-way process either; as well as affecting virtual worlds, portal interactions can push virtual phenomena into the user's physical space.


Two views of the virtual extension of a Portal into Second Life; the first shows sensor data over time, the second streaming real-time audio/video into Second Life.

Mobile

MIT expects that handhelds and mobile devices will play an important role in future Cross Reality applications, "both as a source of data to animate their users' environments and avatars and as augmented reality terminals through which local sensor networks can be explored and programmed." The lab has already begun to experiment in this area, with a Star Trek-inspired device it calls a Tricorder (image to right) and a newer device called the "Ubicorder." Both devices provide a real time interface to sensor data.

MIT expects the mobile area of cross reality to expand rapidly "once smart phone Augmented Reality becomes better
established." ReadWriteWeb has been following this trend closely; read our recent Augmented Reality analysis here and here.

Conclusion

The projects of the Responsive Environments Group at MIT are enabling real world data, increasingly being provided by sensor/actuator networks, to be plugged into virtual and physical interfaces.

The group is still exploring both the technical and practical sides of this, so it's uncertain what it will lead to in the commercial world. But we're certain it will fuel future startup innovation in the coming year or two. Watch this space!


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6 best job lessons

Nice outakes from Rohit Bhargava's Influential Marketing blog on Fast Company.

  1. Make it believable. Many marketing groups would never make a claim if they can't provide substantial evidence. How might Tourism Queensland prove that their job is the best in the world? They can't. But it is believable because it is a beautiful place and fits what many people's definition of a dream job might be.
  2. It's not about how much you spend. One of the major benefits of smart public relations and social media is that it scales in a way that advertising typically doesn't. In other words, you don't have to pay more to get more. The real trick is to have something worthwhile to say that people can't help talking about. You need a good story.
  3. Focus on content, not traffic. The typical marketing campaign focuses on traffic to some kind of site. For Tourism Queensland, the biggest payoff of this campaign was having over 34,000 videos on YouTube from people around the world talking about how much they love Queensland. Aggregate the views of all those videos, and multiply them over the long term and you'll start to understand the true impact of their campaign.
  4. Create an inherent reason for people to share. Another element of this campaign that worked extremely well was the fact that there was voting enabled on the videos. What this meant was that after someone submitted their video, they had an incentive to share it with everyone in their social network online to try and get more votes.
  5. Don't underestimate the power of content creators Most recent statistics point to some number between 1% and 10% of the user base of any social network are the active content creators. Though these percentages may seem small, the potential impact of some of these individuals are vast online. It could easily become the secret weapon for your next marketing campaign.
  6. Give your promotion a shelf life. The best thing about this campaign may just be the content yet to come. Ben, the winner, just started blogging and sharing videos and photos, but the content is already engaging, high quality and inspires you to dream of making it to Queensland yourself. Over the next six months, his itinerary will take him across the state of Queensland and unlock many other unique opportunities. Best of all, this content will live on far beyond the time span of the campaign.

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Wednesday, July 15, 2009

Mobile shopping


Net a Porter, the world leading online fashion retailer have just released the NET-APP™, a unique shopping application for the iPhone and iPod touch.

The application syncs with your phone and automatically downloads content automatically so you never miss the latest arrivals and fashion news. Scroll through you favourite designers with ClosetFlow™ designed so you can choose how to view the hottest pieces, either vertically or horizontally or even zoom in.

The app allows you to shop wherever you are, create wish lists on the move, keep up to date with weekly fashion news, shop new arrivals twice a week and share your choices with your friends.

COOL AR GAME

Thanks Mr. Holly for sharing this.

This technology is just getting started and already we are getting some really nice, rich and useful applications being deveopled. Now how to make it work for a brand...

Eight Ways to Improve the ROI of Online Games

Thanks Nat Factor for sharing this post on game ROI

Jun 30, 2009 6:02 AM, Patricia Odell for PROMO Xtra

The Subway Scrabble game, which incorporates hundreds of millions of game pieces on Subway cups and sub wraps, has just begun its annual run. Each year the response has improved significantly. So, how do they do it? Take a look at these eight best practices from Catapult Action-Biased Marketing.

1. Attainability Boost the odds of winning by offering more lower-level prizing. Last year, an online instant-win chance was added to every game piece, which doubled the number of game codes entered online and sent more people back to the stores to buy product.

2. Communicate Emphasize the number of prizes and odds of winning at all touch points: P-O-P, mass media, FSIs, tip-ins, paid search, search engines, banners etc.

3. Give away a free code This gets consumers to register for the first time, try the promotion and then drives them back to the store to collect more game pieces. It’s also a significant opportunity to boost op-in and build the in-house database.

4. Split registration Optimize the registration process by collecting only the necessary data up front—name, e-mail address, age—then on the back end collect redemption information—address, phone number. The benefit? A consumer who has privacy concerns is more likely to complete the registration, minimizing drop-off rates. “The last thing you want is for someone to come to your microsite and then drop off because its not a good experience,” says Jason Katz, executive vice president of emerging media for Catapult Action-Biased Marketing.

5. Offer multiple ways to enter Expand entry points for an online promo with a text-to-win option. Some 10% to 50% of sweeps entries now come in through SMS, according to John Ross, account supervisor at Catapult.

6. Virtual prize partners Build excitement by seeking a partner to use for prizes that can be instantly won online, like music downloads or ring tones. This allows for an immediate reward to the players and increase response and viral sharing.

7. Build relevant landing pages These pages should be grounded in insights about your target audience; how, when and where would they like to be intersected and what’s the most compelling message. For example, a female, 35 plus should see a very different landing page than an 18-year-old male.

8. Paid Search This also allows marketers to optimize response by moving marketing dollars around based on response to key search words.