Twitter: What’s happening? Death of traditional information media companies

I think that Twitter made a great move by changing their tag line. I doubt that three years ago they were foreseeing that they had created an information network. Projections are that there will be 18 million users by 2010, that's about 12% of internet users.

There are many reasons to use Twitter. For one it can be fun. There are hilarious posts out there. But this is not the main thing it morphed into. As often, crowds have appropriated this new communication medium and made it what it is now: a unique real time information network. Because of its reach, ease of access (even in countries where acess is restricted by using proxies) and most of all instantaneousity Twitter proved to be a great way to communicate many to many and share information as it happens. We've seen it with the wild fires in San Diego in 2007 and people posting info about what they could see in their streets, with the recent Iranian elections and protesters organizing themselves using Twitter. One more example today with Tiger Woods car accident: the info was available on Twitter 45 minutes before CNN put up a breaking news. One last example, closer to home: a few months ago I was waiting for a friend coming from London to Paris using the Eurostar. Four hours after the scheduled arrival time, still no news from her. Nothing on the Eurostar's website either. So I turned to Twitter and sure enough I got info from people stuck in the trains and talking about electrical problems. It's the CB radio of the 21st century. With a platform where everybody can post and listen.

So this new tagline will hopefully help people understand what Twitter is about, better than the old "What are you doing?". Twitter is not a social network. It's an information network. Granted there is some filtering to do to find relevant information but the community is getting organized, using hashtags for instance and the platform is adding new features every day. This is the new preferred way of communicating: many to many. With self monitoring by the community. Think Wikipedia or eBay ratings. That is were marketing will need to get closer to sociology to understand how to communicate with their customers. They won't trust a brand just because of pretty ads anymore, no they trust and listen to each other.

Will Augmented Reality iPhone Apps be the driver to upgrade from 3G to 3GS?

The iPhone 3.1 update enables a new realm of “augmented reality” iPhone apps, which use the iPhone’s GPS, compass and accelerometer to impose a virtual layer of information over a view of the real world as seen from your iPhone’s camera.

Augmented reality iPhone apps will revolutionize the way we access information on the go.

The iPhone is already becoming the multimedia tool used to access the web on the go, doanload and read books, take pictures, watch tv and movies, read the news, play games, check emails, stay in touch with social networks, listen to music etc, etc and.... make calls! Now, with the new capabilities brought by the AR apps, the way we interact with the world will change forever. Information Age is taking an all new meaning!

Check out a few amazing apps available today in the App Store:

1- cAR Locator


cAR Locator is an iPhone 3GS app that shows you in the camera viewfinder where your car is located and how far away. Just press “Save Location” when you get out of your car, then point your iPhone camera in any direction and you’ll be reminded where your car is.

2- Cyclopedia


Cyclopedia shows you information about nearby landmarks and historic locations in your iPhone’s viewfinder. Point your iPhone’s camera at the Statue of Liberty, for example, and it will overlay the Wikipedia entry for that landmark. Cyclopedia relies on the 65,000 entries on Wikipedia that are geotagged.

3- Nearest Tube (UK only)



Nearest Tube is a UK app that shows you train/tube stations in the vicinity.

Source: appleiphonereview.com

Twitter on TV a reality in Europe

Twitter can be used for as many purposes as there are types of communication, many of them of great social and political importance as well as to monitor what is happening in the world. For many of us, it’s also way to discuss TV shows as they are broadcasted without running the risk of swamping a traditional message board forum with one-liners.

The one big hassle with this – and let’s be clear that “big hassle” is a relative term – is that most people have the TV show on one screen and their Twitter application on another. That can mean switching your attention between the TV and a smartphone, or switching back and forth between the TV and a computer including, in some particularly catastrophic cases, actually having to walk into a different room to share your views.

But not for long.

Viewers in France, Spain and Poland will soon be able to send and read Twitter posts directly on their television screen. That’s because mobile phone operator Orange provides integrated TV and broadband packages in which the TV signal is sent via the broadband phoneline, allowing interactive services to be built directly into the TV picture.

It’s not yet clear whether the Twitter function will be limited to particular programs or will be able to be used at any time (as imagined in our mock-up image).

Source: www.geeksaresexy.net

Why a Mac user will now feel like killing herself only a little bit when using a PC

So today I spent most of my day hooking up my mother with a new laptop and her first printer (yahooooo!). Yeah, I know, I am a good daughter (sometimes). But the point I wanted to share is that her new PC came with Windows 7 and I was curious to put my little hands on this new OS. And I have to bow my head down to Microsoft for such an upgrade from the usual Windows experience. Granted, it's just a first impression: I need to spend more time playing with it and I am sure that I'll give you updates. But then again, you only have one chance to make a first impression, especially to someone who is a die hard fan of your arch enemy. And Windows did it. I read everywhere that Microsoft admitted themselves having found inspiration in the Mac OS experience and they did a fair job at it.

Now the most ironic part of all this is that my mother, who had never used a Mac, was more confused than anything by the "Mac-like" features.

So my first thought is: with Windows 7, Mac users won't feel like traveling in another backwards dimension anymore, but Windows users will need some training like the ones provided by Apple to the Windows escapees!

Why is everybody so shocked by Orange’s customer service quality level?

So an Orange customer received his monthly bill for internet access for a total of... 45 923€. Mistakes happen, it's not the issue. What is typical of (way) too many French businesses is the level of customer service he was confronted to when he contacted Orange:
- first call: the agent hung up on him
- second call: another agent tells him that everybody has problems, deal with it
- third call (and final decision from Orange at this point): he was generously offered a 40 years plan to pay off his bill!
Morale of the story: Orange makes the headlines with all of France ridiculing them and customers checking their contracts to see how to terminate their contracts, when they had the opportunity to handle this case appropriately and improve their image already compromised by the wave of suicides in their employees ranks (yes, too much stressed by the quality of work expected from them).

It is sadly very representative of the attitude customers can expect from businesses in this country. Who has never had the feeling to annoy the sales people when asking a question, or has never been snobbed by waiters, etc. ?

Three lessons: 1- From a business perspective, someone needs to tell them that it costs 5 times more to gain a new customer than to win a new one. 2- In a world of hyper communication, every customer interaction is an opportunity (or a risk) to make headlines 3- Treating poorly customers is just plain and pure bad karma.

It reminds me of the attitude of an IT PM in my last job who put a very low priority on improving the online user experience by arguing that "if someone doesn't understand how the site works, he's just an idiot and there is nothing we can do about it". The most ironic part is that management agreed with him and fired me for being disruptive when trying to be the customer advocate. I guess nobody had told them about the two golden rules of business: 1- the customer is always right 2- Refer to rule number 1. With this kind of attitude, no wonder their business is going down. Which might also be Orange fate if they don't make a radical change in their policies and don't start putting the customer first.


Image source: http://www.pcinpact.com

It’s Harder to Get a Job At the Apple Store Than It Is to Get Into Harvard

It's apparently significantly easier to get admitted to Harvard University than it is to get a job at the Apple Store. At least for Apple's newest store in New York.

At a press event today, Apple said that 10,000 people submitted applications to work at the new store on Manhattan's Upper West Side, according to Gizmodo's Matt Buchanan.

Of those, just over 200 got jobs, for a 2% acceptance rate.

Meanwhile, Harvard's acceptance rate was 7% this past year, according to a March report in the Boston Globe. That's 29,000 applications for about 2,000 admissions.

Obviously, the requirements and admission processes for college and a retail job are much different -- these aren't direct comparisons. But it's amazing how selective Apple can be with its retail employees. And it's amusing that, at least statistically, the odds of getting into Harvard are better than getting a job selling iPods.

This may put new meaning into the term "Genius Bar."

Source: Business Insider

Google on what the Web will look like in 5 years

Google CEO Eric Schmidt envisions a radically changed internet five years from now: dominated by Chinese-language and social media content, delivered over super-fast bandwidth in real time. Figuring out how to rank real-time social content is "the great challenge of the age," Schmidt said at last week's Gartner symposium in Orlando.

Highlighted comments include:

- Five years from now the internet will be dominated by Chinese-language content.

- Today’s teenagers are the model of how the web will work in five years - they jump from app to app to app seamlessly.

- Five years is a factor of ten in Moore’s Law, meaning that computers will be capable of far more by that time than they are today.

- Within five years there will be broadband well above 100MB in performance - and distribution distinctions between TV, radio and the web will go away.

- “We’re starting to make significant money off of Youtube”, content will move towards more video.

- “Real time information is just as valuable as all the other information, we want it included in our search results.”

- There are many companies beyond Twitter and Facebook doing real time.

- “We can index real-time info now - but how do we rank it?”

- It’s because of this fundamental shift towards user-generated information that people will listen more to other people than to traditional sources. Learning how to rank that “is the great challenge of the age.” Schmidt believes Google can solve that problem.

Watch the interview on YouTube

Source: www.hotelmarketing.com

Apple Store Opening in Paris!

The opening of a retail store near the Louvre draws huge crowds in Paris

Who says Parisians are blasé? Tout Paris, it seems, turned out Saturday morning for the opening of Apple's (AAPL) first retail outlet in France. The video posted below shows lines of shoppers that stretched for blocks.

Planning for the store, located in the Carrousel du Louvre, an upscale shopping mall beneath the Tuileries garden and adjacent to the museum, began more than two years ago. A second store in Montpelier was actually ready before this one, but its opening was postponed, according to ifoAppleStore, in deference to the City of Lights.

Source: http://brainstormtech.blogs.fortune.cnn.com by Philip Elmer-DeWitt



Video Source: piratec.net