Archive - 2007
November 10th
Am I, Though, Really?
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Sat, 11/10/2007 - 14:10That was the response that a social networking guru friend of mine at Yahoo! wrote in response to my inviting him to join the group “i'm making a difference”.
On Friday, I received an email from the Sierra Club which said,
I'm writing because, with your help, we can get Microsoft to donate an additional $50,000 to the Sierra Club. Here's the challenge: If more than 50,000 people join their "i'm Making a Difference" Facebook group *through* today, Nov. 9 (until midnight EST), they'll give $50,000 to whichever organization gets the most votes.
This sounds an awful lot like the urban legend kicking around the Internet for ages that Internet users can receive a cash reward for forwarding messages to test a Microsoft/AOL e-mail tracking system.
If it hadn’t of come from the Sierra Club, pointed to a Facebook page, and been something I heard folks from Microsoft talking about as a successful marketing strategy at ad:tech, I probably wouldn’t have believed it.
However, this one isn’t a hoax. The Instant Messaging space is pretty calcified. Everyone has their favorite IM client by now and people aren’t changing clients much. There just isn’t that much difference. It is sort of like Coke and Pepsi.
Recognizing this, folks involved with marketing for Microsoft decided to try and use social media and people’s philanthropic interests to get people to pay attention to the latest release of their Instant Messaging program. I haven’t seen any studies on changes in market share of instant messaging programs recently, but folks involved with the effort are touting this as a great success.
The ‘i'm making a difference’ group now has over 50,000 people in it. I suspect that $50,000 is a pretty small price for a marketing campaign like this, but can be a significant help to various non-profits.
So, yes, I believe that my joining the Facebook group, ‘i’m making a difference.’ A chunk of money will go to non-profits as a result. Marketing people will see that using social media and appealing to people’s philanthropic interests can be an effective marketing strategy. Both of these are ways that I hope my social networking guru at Yahoo! is also hoping to make a difference. The third difference may be an increase in people using Microsoft Live Messenger instead of Yahoo! Messenger, which might be a difference that my friend doesn’t want to make.
Now that the 50,000 people have joined the Facebook group, Microsoft is keeping things alive with this:
The i’m™ Initiative from Windows Live Messenger™ makes helping your favorite cause as easy as sending an instant message. Every time you start a conversation using i’m, we share a portion of our advertising revenue with some of the world's most effective social cause organizations. Each of our partners will get a minimum of $100,000. As for the maximum? There is none. The sky's the limit.
Let’s hope this puts pressure on more organizations to share a portion of their revenue with effective social cause organizations.
Community Novel Writing
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Sat, 11/10/2007 - 10:25Humans, by there very nature, are storytellers. From the gatherings around campfires and drawings on cave walls, to the modern day novel, people have always told stories. The problem with the modern day novel, however, that like so much of media in our recent history, it is broadcast. The writer sits down, writes the novel, revises then novel, tries to get someone to publish it, and eventually, it is out there in a static form, broadcast to anyone that will read it. There is very little interaction between the writer and the audience, except maybe at a book signing or in random hate mail. At least that is how it has always seemed to me as strictly a consumer of novels.
Now, however, I am making my first attempt at writing a novel. Sometime this weekend, I expect to pass the half way mark. I’m not sure where the point of no return is, but I believe I’ve passed it and now have to finish the novel.
During this experience, I went to a write-in. To people who view writing as a solitary experience, a write-in doesn’t make a lot of sense. I know that I write better when I am alone and not interrupted or distracted. A bunch of writers getting together to write, and chat about their writing and eat curly french fries, well that just seems too distracting, and at my first write in, I only accomplished 800 words. I probably would have done twice that if I stayed at home.
Yet, I’m finding that writing isn’t a solitary experience, or it doesn’t have to be. The municipal liaison for NaNoWriMo in my area sent out an email to all of us, encouraging us on. It had various statistics about the average number of words written by various groups of writers and the writers that attended write-ins were the most prolific.
More significantly, I’ve been speaking with friends about my novel. I’ve sent them sections of my first draft and they’ve provided great suggestions. I’ve worried about whether I’m bugging them too much, but they’ve commented about how much fun they are having watching my novel unfold and making suggestions.
Perhaps this returns the story telling process to a little bit more like the stories told around the campfire. The audience asks questions and the story take shape with their participation. If you are doing NaNoWriMo, I would encourage you to get to write-ins and to talk with trusted friends that can give you good advice. It makes the experience all the more fun.
November 9th
Technology Adoption Curves and the Twitter Lifecycle
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Fri, 11/09/2007 - 16:08In a previous post about ad:tech, I mentioned how I learned about NY Times' Facebook page from a twitter by Steve Rubel. I commented about this in the press room, and one of the reporters was surprised to hear that twitter was still around and active. I reflected back on hearing speakers at OMMA predict the demise of Twitter, Facebook and Second Life and it struck me that the standard technology adoption curve that we all hear so much about, may have a lot of interesting nuances.
One nuance that gets talked about a lot is the chasm that Geoffrey Moore talks about between the early adopters and the early majority. Perhaps Twitter is currently hiding in that chasm. Perhaps that chasm is tied to what happened at OMMA and other shows. Here is my proposed narrative for understanding a little of this.
As the innovators go out and try to convince people of a really cool new technology, and the early adopters start piling on, the laggards hear about this and try to convince everyone else that there isn’t really any value to the cool new technology. The innovators and the early adopters happily keep using the cool new technology. It keeps getting better and better, and then crosses a threshold where it becomes easy enough for the early majority to start using it and discover that the technology really is interesting.
This fits nicely with Twitter. Yes, us innovators and early adopters continue to play with it. Today, I received an email on the Second Life Educators mailing list, another gathering place for innovators and early adopters, talking about Twitter. Several twiterholics, myself included, came forward and talked about our experiences and the neat new tools that have come along to make twitter easier and more useful. Will it be enough to get Twitter to cross the chasm? Well, we’ll just have to wait and see.
Meanwhile, I’m following some new friends on Twitter, and even found a version of the the Twitter Life Cycle
Overload
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Fri, 11/09/2007 - 10:03The first snow of the season graces the fallen leaves as I dally in bed. It has been a busy week and I am on overload. Wednesday, I went to ad:tech, and there is still more to write about that. In the evening, I received additional emails about the alleged trademark infringement in Second Life, which deserves much more attention. Thursday, I addressed various business concerns and the never-ending effort to get a little more cash in the door. Last night, I went to a panel, “The State of Student Free Speech” at Quinnipiac University School of Law, sponsored by the American Constitution Society. It was a wonder session that deserves a write up of its own. Through all of this, I continue to work on my novel for National Novel Writing Month, NaNoWriMo, and process the great input I’ve been getting from a small set of friends who are reading the rough draft of my first write through.
I’m not officially participating in National Blog Posting Month, NaBloPoMo, which has a goal of putting up a post every day during the month of November. This is in part because I’ve got too many things going on already, and in part because the goal of putting up a post every day is one that I’ve been seeking for the past few months anyway, and intend to keep pursuing. I only missed one day in October, none in September, and two in August, so I’m in pretty good shape there.
However, on the email side, I’m not in as good shape. The unread emails in my inbox has expanded back up to close to 1400, and for the first time during NaNoWriMo, I didn’t write the 1,667 words for my novel which is the average number of words needed to be written each day to complete the 50,000 words by the end of the month. However, I am still in good shape with the novel. During my first week, I averaged close to 3000 words a day, so I’m currently at 21,306 words and interesting new subplots keep hatching
So, I’m overloaded. I’ll get my blog posts up as soon as I can. I’ll get back to emails as soon as I can, and I’ll try to keep my novel goals on track. Wish me luck.
November 8th
Ad:tech Tales from the Bleeding Edge
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Thu, 11/08/2007 - 11:52Before heading down to ad:tech yesterday, I paused to wonder if it was worth it. All the conferences tend to look and sound the same. Rarely does a panel ever live up to the ‘tell me something I don’t know’ request that so many writers seek. Tales from the Bleeding Edge was different. It was the best panel I’ve been to in ages and Lori H. Schwartz, SVP and Director of Emerging Media at IPG Media Lab deserves kudos for putting together such a panel. The write-up alluded to all kinds of cool technologies, many of which were not touched upon, but the ones that were, were wonderful.
Bill Capodanno, Director of Digital Marcom Planning and Effectiveness, Microsoft led off with a brief discussion of Microsoft Surface. He asked how many people in the audience had heard of it and a majority had. He spoke about a brief video they did about Microsoft Surface as well as the parody that was produced. It is a very funny parody, well worth the watch.
I think it was Bill who used the phrase, ‘Conversational Marketing’. I think this is an important concept to unpack, so I’ll save that for a more meta-post about ad:tech. After Bill spoke, Marc Ruxin, SVP and Director of Digital Strategy at MCCANN Worldgroup spoke. At least I think he was the next speaker. Whoever it was didn’t show any neat technology. Instead they spoke about the importance of following "not yet ready to scale" technologies and the importance of failing as often as you succeed, because often the real discoveries are in the failures.
This was followed by Patrick Ream, VP of Marketing at Next IT Corporation. They produced the ‘avatar’ Sgt. Star for the U.S. Army recruiting effort. As a Second Life aficionado, I thought it was a bit of a stretch to call Sgt. Star an avatar. Sure, some of the natural language processing and the data gathered was interesting, but the panel was starting to lose my interest.
Next up was Larry Harris, President of Ansible Mobile. He spoke about mobile bar codes. The idea is that you take a picture of a mobile bar code with the camera that is part of your cell phone. The information gathered is then used in the cell phone for various purposes. As an example, you could have your contact information in a mobile bar code. When the bar code is scanned by the cell phone’s camera, the contact information could be stored in the cell phones address book. At a party, could wear name tags with their barcode on them and when the bar code is scanned, the persons website is displayed on the cell phone. The bar code could be an invisible water mark in a poster, and when the poster is photographed, a trailer for a movie or a track from a band could be downloaded. In addition options to buy tickets to special sneak previews and so on could be presented to the consumer.
Apparently, this technology is already available in 70% of the cell phones in Japan and is widely used. It seems to be used mostly in ‘smartphones’. I wondered what it would take to read mobile bar codes from my Motorola Razr. Has someone created an app that I can download and test things out? The Razr supports Java. What would it take to build a Java app like that? If it isn’t possible on the Razr, and for people with less powerful cell phones, would it be possible to set up a mobile bar code gateway. Take a picture of a mobile bar code. Send it to the gateway and get a text message back pointing to whatever information is sought.
It was a very interesting presentation and one that deserves a follow up post of its own, if I can find the time.
This presentation was followed by Karen Rostmeyer, Co-Founder of Dutch Umbrella. Dutch Umbrella is a very simple idea. In Holland, there are places where you can borrow a bicycle at specified locations, and drop it off at other specified locations. What if you made umbrellas available that way in shops in the United States. If it starts to rain, you simply duck into a local shop and borrow an umbrella from a ‘raindrop’ stand. You use it as you go about your day, and drop it off at some other ‘raindrop’ when you are done. The umbrella would feature logos of the various shops participating.
It is a brilliant idea. It gets people into the shops, which is always a big hurdle. It gets people to carry around advertisements for you. The question is, where is the bleeding edge technology in this. Well, marketing people want to track things and gather data. So, add an RFID tag. Dutch Umbrella is using a small RFID tag on the umbrellas, that has additional information directing people to their website and ‘pseudoblog’. Karen demonstrated the sort of data that they were gathering. It was what you expected about number of umbrellas picked up and dropped off. The business could then tell where its customers where coming from based on the information from the dropped off umbrellas. The RFID reader could scan a full umbrella stand in about 15 seconds. Future versions may include RFID readers in the stand to provide real time updates.
Following Karen, Oliver Barth, Pre Sales Director of Total Immersion spoke. He started off with a brief discussion of Augmented Reality. Essentially, augmented reality is capturing real life images and then augmenting them with three-dimensional models. As an example, he took a Lego box and placed it under the camera, on the monitors a three-dimensional model of the Lego when it was put together then appeared. He used a game controller to move the three dimensional model around the screen, during which time it interacted with objects on the table as viewed by the camera. It was very impressive.
These are tails from the bleeding edge, so it may be a while before I get a chance to work with some of these technologies, but I look forward to exploring these further as soon as possible. It will be especially interesting to see how data from some of these technologies can be used with the complex event processing technologies that we at Toomre Capital Markets are so interested in.
(Cross posted at Toomre Capital Markets)
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