Wednesday, April 29, 2009
Great use of the site around the player
Friday, April 24, 2009
DARPA Makes Progress with Programmable Matter
April 22, 2009
Clean Technica reports that the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency has been making headway with their exciting programmable matter project. In a nutshell, programmable matter is a way to create and disassemble solid objects on command - a kind of miracle material that can be instantly molded into anything.
From the DARPA press release:
The five research teams are pursuing a variety of scientific approaches. The Harvard University team of researchers led by Professor George Whitesides is developing a sort of “generalized Rubik’s Cube” that acts as a central organizer to encode information and assemble matter. Professor David R. Liu’s Harvard team is relying on DNA base pairing as a sort of molecular Velcro to program the assembly or disassembly of “smart” materials. At the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Professor Daniela Rus has created an innovative computational origami of two- and three-dimensional functional structures, through the “folding” of matter. Also based at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Professor Neil Gershenfeld’s team is pursuing a concept called “milli-biology,” in which digital components are employed to engineer mesoscale analogs of biological structure and function. At Cornell University, Associate Professor Hod Lipson’s team is using jamming to create extreme strength in materials that are assembled using enzyme-mimetic building blocks of matter.
Clean Technica: “DARPA Passes Key Programmable Matter Milestone”
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Cars, twitter and a new adserving model
First this overview from Contagious
www.thevolvotwitterad.com
The initiative is in promotion of the new automatic braking or 'city safety' feature on Volvo's latest XC60 sports utility vehicle - a system which is being debuted at the New York Auto Show, from which the brand is providing constant Twitter updates that get displayed in the banner.This Twitter feed has been enabled thanks to Google's DoubleClick technology, which relays the 'Tweets' via an RSS feed. The most recent update is displayed, although users can scroll down to catch up on previous news. The brand launched its Twitter profile 3 months ago and currently has over 1200 followers.
www.thecarthatstopsitself.com
As the very best 'must-see' viral adverts have shown (think Cadbury's Gorilla) when content is engaging enough, its consumption can become something of an event. By squeezing its campaign into one banner ad, Volvo has streamlined this process for the user. Furthermore, the inclusion of a Twitter feed not only keeps it up to date, but also gives the initiative a human voice that should set it apart from the more standard intrusive banner ad.
In other automotive Twitter news this week, Tata-owned brand Land Rover has also been documenting its presence at the New York Auto Show using a Twitter hashtag, #LRNY, which filters conversations, aggregating chat and information about the brand.
updates.
www.twittad.com
Then, this more in-depth piece of the LandRover work from AdAge
------------------
Land Rover Taps Twitter as Campaign Cornerstone
'Hashtags,' Fledgling Ad Network Help Get the Word out Across Microblogging Site
CHICAGO (AdAge.com) -- Land Rover last week became the first national brand to execute a national Twitter campaign in a bid to promote its newest models' debuts at the New York Auto Show.
While brands as diverse as Southwest Airlines and Smirnoff vodka have been tweeting and accumulating followers for months, Land Rover attempted to use the burgeoning social-media platform in a more ambitious way, seeding so-called hashtags (words used in tweets that make it easier to follow an ongoing conversation via online searches) on billboards, taxi TVs and other out-of-home venues; spreading word of the Twitter effort through auto-obsessed blogs and online publications eager for a peek at its latest bells and whistles; and paying a fledgling Twitter ad network to spread the word among its army of compensated, heavily followed Twitter users, all of whom wallpapered their Twitter profiles with Land Rover branding.
While it's too early to know what sort of return Land Rover will receive for its efforts, "it cost us virtually nothing," said Keith Rhodes, VP and account director at WPP-owned direct-marketing firm Wunderman, which orchestrated the effort.
Mr. Rhodes said he was particularly encouraged by the Twitter-fueled traffic to a blog post he wrote about Land Rover's initiative. Posts on his site typically draw about 30 views; this one grabbed more than 200,000 views.
Land Rover is not likely to remain the only national marketer doing this for long, said James Eliason, CEO of Twittad, the Des Moines-based "social-media affinity network" Wunderman tapped to boost Land Rover's launch.
Mr. Eliason said the next national effort using Twittad's roster of 4,500 Tweeters, whom it pays to post on topics and brand their profile pages, with nearly 5 million followers, will be for Elations, a glucosamine-enhanced beverage from the makers of Sunny Delight targeted at women over 40.
Twitter machine
All told, the Land Rover effort was Twittered to more than 300,000 followers, Mr. Eliason said. Twittad used 15 different Tweeters with at least 5,000 followers, although the majority had between 2,000 and 4,000 followers.
Most won't get rich doing this anytime soon. One paid Tweeter, willconley777, wrote on his blog that he was paid $2.50 for letting Land Rover sponsor his profile page for seven days. Mr. Conley has 1,160 followers. Still, for those few Twitter users with huge reach, real money might one day be possible. The most-followed Land Rover campaign participant, queenoftheclick, boasts nearly 25,000 followers and was paid an amount "in the hundreds" for her participation, Mr. Eliason said.
Other larger-scale marketers are also eyeing Twittad, which is in talks with Sears.
The appeal to marketers is obvious: It's a cheap way to reach people through their trusted contacts. And Twittad's technology is able to sort its users by geography, demographics and interests, which can both lead to more targeted appeals and, perhaps, prevent Twitter users from feeling under siege by advertisers, a major concern.
"We were worried it would be considered spam, but we didn't get a single complaint [about Land Rover]," Mr. Eliason said. "What that tells me is that our connectors have influence."
Less clear is whether the model is sustainable. Mr. Eliason, who launched Twittad eight months ago, said he expects it to break even by the end of its first year. He said he has contacted Twitter about a revenue-sharing agreement but has yet to hear back.
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Thursday, April 23, 2009
Zappos Launches Realtime Ordering Map
April 16, 2009
Want to know what shoes people are buying in Montpelier, Vermont? Then just watch the realtime map on the Zappos website long enough and you just might find out. With this new feature, the popular online retailer is giving consumers even more reason to keep up with the Joneses, as users are granted the ability to zero in on their home towns and wait to see what items pop up. Currently, monitoring a specific location requires a bit too much active participation to be a worthwhile endeavor - the map continuously scrolls as new orders are being placed - but down the road we suspect Zappos will offer a static view for members wanting to make sure they don’t miss out on the latest trends in their area.
Tuesday, April 7, 2009
Hyperlinking the Real World (Redux)
This project goes beyond today's mapping applications like Google's Street View, for example, which first identifies your location either via GPS or triangulation and then shows you pictures of that area. Instead, MOBVIS actually lets you "see" the world through your mobile phone. This is computer vision, or rather, mobile vision.
There are obviously numerous potential applications for such a technology. On the MOBVIS homepage, they offer up some scenarios for how their application could be used, including the following:
Tourism/Augmented City Maps: The MOBVIS technology could be used to inform visitors about the objects in an area be they buildings or landmarks. The images could also be annotated with additional information like history, event information, or information about nearby shops.
Visual Localization: For phones without GPS technology, triangulation could be combined with the computer vision technology to locate a user's position and orientation in a manner that would be comparable to GPS and just as accurate.
Motion Estimation: Also comparable to GPS, MOBVIS could enable continuous position updates to determine the location of objects in motion as well as their speed.
Incremental Map Updates: MOBVIS supports incremental updating of maps which would allow for the automated authoring of the urban infrastructure. No longer would Google need to send their vans around taking pictures of streets - the data could be uploaded from users' phones as they took their photos.
Picture-Driven Search Engine: Because the mobile phone could now "see" the surrounding landscape, the world - reality - becomes the backdrop for a sort of picture-driven search engine in which the objects in the world are all hyperlinked and annotated like a real-life semantic web.
How It Works
The MOBVIS system begins with a pre-populated database of geo-referenced panoramas (such as Google's Street View, perhaps). The objects in the images are then manually annotated with information. Once that's complete, the system is ready for search queries from mobile users. After a user takes a picture, MOBVIS compares the photo to the photos in its database and returns the relevant links.
The challenge here is getting a mobile phone picture to match up with the more pristine photos found in the database. The database photos would likely be clear, crisp, and detailed, but a user's photo could be grainy, taken on a dark and cloudy day, or taken from an odd angle.
The MOBVIS system's main strength comes from its feature-matching algorithm developed by the University of Ljubljana in Slovenia, one of the partners of the project. This algorithm can very accurately detect minute differences between similar objects. In real-world tests, it's reported that this system was highly accurate, detecting the right building 80 percent of the time.
Aleš Leonardis, head of the Ljubljana team, believes that number can be improved. He also notes that that the system, though not always right, was never wrong. "It was remarkable that there were no false positives," he says. "Sometimes the system couldn't identify a building, but it never put the incorrect link on a building."
You can read more about the research here on the MOBVIS project's homepage.
Monday, April 6, 2009
Axe does a Skittles
Interesting to see companies creating their own 'webs on the web', rather than a a series of more or less independant sites and microsites. Having a series of branded and unbranded social media presences, linked to from a central hub and ideally plugged into freiend freed, tumblr and a load of other streaming platforms really does seem like a smarter way to get your brand online. I have to say i prefer Axe's approach to that of Skittles (http://www.skittles.com) as it gives that brand and how it like to portray content much more of a role (and a much more of a bill i imagine), rather than just tapping into content and keywords on existing sites.
Thoughts?