Monday 22 February 2010

Still don’t understand what Twitter is useful for?

Leaving aside marketing endeavors or knowledge sharing, we've already seen how Twitter beats traditional media for real time information updates from people at the the heart of the action. Think wild fires in California, earthquake in Haîti, protestations in Iran, and Eurostar breakdowns.

Here is a real life example of another facet of Twitter's usefulness: propagating the news of someone disappearance and looking for information. Because of the mass of readers it reaches, it is a great complement to things lie the Amber alerts on US highways for missing kids or the Police scrolling messages on French television (also for kids). Now nothing exists for missing adults (besides Without a Trace that is) so we see more and more cases of friends and family tweeting about their missing ones to reach out to them or get information.

Case in point: Headline- Depressed Growing Pains Star Andrew Koenig Vanishes in Vancouver

The parents of Andrew Koenig—who played Growing Pains neighbor Boner Stabone—say their son was "suffering from depression" at the time of his disappearance. Last seen on Valentine's Day, the star was in Vancouver.

Koenig—who hails from a Hollywood family (his father was Chekov in Star Trek)—was last seen February 14, when he stayed at the home of Vancouver burlesque star Jenny Magenta, who has since updated her MySpace status to "anxious" and tweeted about suicidal friends. With the Twitter effect, more and more people are propagating this quest and hopefully the story will have a good ending.

Missing person Tweet
Missing person Tweet
Missing person Tweet

In conclusion, like many new products, Twitter has found it's own unique place in our little networked world, far from its original"What are you doing?" concept to inform close friends about the flavor of your morning coffee.

Now you know. Twitter is about: "What's happening?". So use it to spread first hand information you can have or stay in tune with what is happening in the world.

Source: www.gawker.com

Thursday 18 February 2010

Virtual travel: the final frontier?

Moscow-Vladivostok: virtual journey on Google Maps

Google's new video map of the Trans-Siberian Railway is a thing of beauty, says Benji Lanyado, but can virtual travel ever replace the real thing?

Yesterday I browsed the Trans-Siberian Railway. Yup, browsed it. I loitered on the platform at Yaroslavsky station before accelerating into identikit Muscovite suburbs, then glided across the Volga, raced through the Lower Urals, sped across the Barguzin Mountains, before pulling up in Vladivostok a few minutes later.

My humble steed, of course, was the wonderful new map-cum-video guide unveiled by Google Russia and Russian railways. The project sews together a series of videos shot from the window of a Trans-Siberian carriage as it spans the 5,752-mile length of the world's most famous long-distance railway.

Various images and bite-sized history lessons pop up along the way, and, from time to time, the window seat footage is complemented by city video tours courtesy of the perky Yelena Abitayeva. Even the soundtrack is considered - with optional Russian radio, balalaika music, Leo Tolstoy's War and Peace read in Russian, or simply the rumbling of the train wheels.

Desktop travelling has become an increasingly all-inclusive experience over the past few years. There was a time when all we had were actual holiday snaps. Then came online albums and video clips, usually aimed at office-bound friends on Facebook.

Then it got a bit weird. Rather than risking the imperfection of a real-life holiday, people began living out their getaways virtually, saving up their Linden dollars for a holiday home on the outer rim of a floating unicorn island on Second Life.

Then we were all at it, escaping grey Tuesday mornings for a 360-degree peek around the Vancouver Winter Olympics venues, or for a wander around stately British landmarks. And then we all started hooking our brains up to wires and transporting into worlds populated by strangely attractive blue people and exploring the floating mountains of Pandora on dragons and... oh, wait.

There's only so far this can go, really. For now, anyway. But it's fun. As far as I'm concerned there's every reason to get deeply excited about video-maps of the outskirts of Irkutsk, and yes, these desktop adventures probably can go some way to sating our ever-itching, increasingly penniless wanderlust.

And there's that gnawing evolutionary thing, too. If seeing distant lands is increasingly unaffordable and/or unsustainable, perhaps these online portals are the best we can hope for. And when things of beauty like the Trans-Siberian map arrive - watch as dawn breaks through columns of steel over the Zeya river - I begin to wonder: could this ever replace the real thing?

Could rather odd little projects like Twinity, which aim to create virtual, navigable versions of cities across the world, be the cut-price holiday fad of the future?



Hmmm. On second thoughts, hopefully not.

Source: Benji Lanyado for guardian.co.uk

Wednesday 17 February 2010

THE FUTURE: Take A Picture Of A Word In A Foreign Language And Google Will Translate It For You

Google is working on a text translator for its experimental mobile app Goggles, the company announced today.

Google Goggles analyzes pictures taken with a mobile phone, then runs a Google search on objects it recognizes. When this feature goes live, it will also recognize text in pictures, and, when that text is in a foreign language, run it through Google Translate.

At the moment, the feature can only handle German-to-English translation, and Google says it "is not yet ready for prime time." Google won't be the first company to tackle this, however. Fotozio's PicTranslator for the iPhone already translates from 16 languages.

Here's a demo of the new feature in action:



Source: www.businessinsider.com

Monday 15 February 2010

Social media is the new search engine

Social media is the new search engine
Web measurement firm Compete Inc recently announced that Facebook has overtaken Google as the top source for traffic to major portals like Yahoo and MSN. Analysts say that as people spend less time browsing the Internet on their own, and more time basing their Internet time on recommendations from friends, social media begins to surpass traditional search engines in being a major driver of web traffic.

This change in dynamic may shift advertisers' focus significantly. Although search engines offer a great way of providing directed content for advertisers, consumers spend the vast majority of their time at their destination on the web, not on search pages. SEO isn't gone for good, but keep your eyes peeled for new, innovative methods used to harness the marketing potential of social media.

Sources:
www.sfgate.com
holykaw.alltop.com

Monday 8 February 2010

2010 Digital Revolution Trends: Special drum roll for humanitarian microjobs

givework microjobs
I always claim that the biggest revolution brought by the net is ethnological and sociological. This year findings from Netexploratrend are supporting my beliefs.

After the 2009's "Web to the World"trend (how the web allows us to interact in the physical world), 2010 is the year of the "Spray World" (how the web cloud is surrounding us and melts the frontier between physical and virtual worlds).

Netexploratrend identifies 4 sub trends: the emergence of the GreenNet (how the Green Business is taking over Green Tree Huggers), the Catchmarketing (online tracking), Insight Command (evolution of the interaction user/technology) and Microjobs (micro tasks outsourced online).

In this latest category, I want to highlight the humanitarian microjob project "Give Work", created by Leila Janah, President of Samasource. Basically you perform a small task online that will be used to train refugees in diverse camps in Africa. Once they reach a 75% accuracy rate, they become workers and get paid. In the mean time, your work finances their training.
There is even an iPhone app for that! So between these Bejeweled 2 games, put your iPhone to useful work!

Sources:
lafemmedigitale.fr/
netexplorateur.org/
samasource.com

Sunday 7 February 2010

The 3 Oddest Apple-Themed Products

Apple fandom has inspired a generation of designers to create products that complement, contrast or clash with design guru Jonathan Ive’s cleverly thought out consumer electronics.

Mashable.com pulled together a list of Apple-themed products — both real and conceptual –- that ooze wit, and celebrate those that nod to the fun side of life in their product designs.

Here is my Top 3:

1- iClooly iPhone Stand
iClooly

The iClooly stand makes your iPhone or iPod touch look just like a mini-me for your iMac. Described as “the perfect little buddy for your iMac,” the iClooly is made out of aluminum and features a 90-degree pivot joint to hold your favorite gadget in landscape or portrait mode. It also offers tilt functionality, and a speaker cable cut-out. So cute!

Cost: $39

2- TwelveSouth BookBook
Bokbook
So you’ve got a MacBook right? Well the BookBook hardback leather case for MacBooks and MacBook Pros makes your Apple laptop look just like that, providing not only protection, but a cunning disguise for your pricey portable.

Cost: $79.99

3- Notepod
Notepod
Originally designed for iPhone developers to get a to-scale, real-life canvas to sketch their app ideas and designs on, the Aussie creators behind the Notepods also suggest they are ideal for “jotting down the phone number of a hot geek,” so good luck with that. At the very least, they might make for a good conversation starter.

Cost: $17.95

Source: www.mashable.com

Saturday 6 February 2010

Google Maps suggest new places you might like


Google keeps adding new features to Google Maps and Google Earth. The latest: As of today you can type in a restaurant or other place you like in Google Maps and receive recommendations of nearby places you might like just as much or more.

Sure, it’s not quite as radical as something like the rumored store interior pics in Google Street View, but it’s always good to see more robust location services. Yelp offers something vaguely similar with a “people who viewed this also viewed” box, but Google’s algorithm is probably more sophisticated.

Google has beaten location-focused services like Foursquare to the punch with this. That’s too bad, because we imagine Foursquare could in theory use your check-in history to provide much better suggestions just like Netflix suggests films based on which movies you’ve already rented or streamed and how you’ve rated them. It’s not surprising that Google did it first, though; Google has a lot more experience using algorithms to determine what you’re looking for than Yelp or Foursquare do.

Google wasn’t very clear about how its algorithm works in its blog post on the subject. You’ll just have to try it for yourself to see if the results are helpful to you, but your mileage may vary.

We viewed the place page for the Indie Cafe sushi and Asian fusion restaurant on the far north side of Chicago and received a bunch of — you guessed it — sushi and Asian fusion restaurant suggestions in adjacent neighborhoods. But when we looked up Big City Swing dance studio in the same city, the results were a bit less precise. Some were great, like the Lincoln Tap Room and Tango Chicago. Others made a lot less sense, like a barber shop and other unrelated venues in a distant suburb almost an hour’s drive away.

Source: http://mashable.com

Wednesday 3 February 2010

Gov 2.0: France 1 – US 0

Obama and sarkosy
Everybody agrees that Barack Obama was the first politic figure to (seem to) use web 2.0 during the presidential campaign as a way to enroll citizens in his campaign and leverage the grass root movement.
- And by the way, Barack Obama wasn't the only winner in November 2008 presidential election. Thomas Gensemer, whose company Blue State Digital managed Obama's slick online campaign, built his website my.barackobama.com, recruited 13.5 million supporters and raised $500m for the Obama campaign, is also doing very nicely out of the victory. He then moved on to the UK to help Gordon Brown and it's no surprise that the UK Prime Minister party is doing a great job at leveraging new technologies. -

To come back to Barack Obama, he was also the first one to create a position of Chief Technology Officer at the White Office. And he just innovated again when not only had he his State of the Union broadcasted live on YouTube but more interestingly in answering live, in real time, questions from citizens on YouTube. The questions were selected by YouTube staff and they swear that the President didn't know them before hand.
The interest of the exercise is not so much in getting questions directly from citizens: Clinton had done it on TV with MTV a few years ago.
No, what's interesting is the "real time" approach. The "live" factor. It creates a "real life" feeling. No security net. However, if web 2.0 is about creating a conversation, for once the French President maybe ahead in a twisted way.

Last week Sarkosy answered questions from a few French citizens, live, on a TV set, with the citizens in question being there and actually dialoguing with them. So from a technology point of view, nop, it's not web 2.0. It's TV 2.0. But neither is it when Obama just broadcasts his answers on the net, without opening the floor to real conversation. There is nothing 2.0 about that.

Without getting into politics, it's quite representative of Obama's approach. He seems to be cool and use web 2.0 to be close to his citizens, but it's all smokes and mirrors. He only broadcasts a controlled environment interview on the web instead of the cable. But then again nothing surprising from a man who does 90% of his speeches with teleprompters... even when he visits a 5th graders' classroom!

On the other hand, French politic actors are still figuring out how to use the technology. We had some terrible websites or FaceBook pages (Gensemer we need you!). But they get the 2.0 aspect. They do Pizza 2.0 parties where public elected figures invite citizens to talk with them.
Just this morning, they were on Twitter to comment on an interview of the Prime Minister on radio while it was taking place on the air. We are one step from forcing a debate on a single interviewee who no doubt will want to be able to address these comments from his adversaries.
Now that's interesting.

So in conclusion, the most important in gov 2.0 is not the use of the technology to use internet to broadcast staged event, it's the 2.0 dimension of creating a dialogue.