Media
Media
#IWNY - A #QRCODE Moment in Time Square
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Fri, 06/11/2010 - 12:09In the never ending contest to be digitally hip, we have come to expect announcements out of San Francisco and sometimes Boston or Austin. This is where the innovators and early adopters reside. Yet it is foolish to overlook New York. New York might not be the hotbed of innovation that San Francisco is. Instead, it is a city that excels in promotion and commercialization of the great ideas that come out of San Francisco and beyond.
Thursday morning provided another great example of this. New York City Media launched The City at Your Fingertips. At 11:15, the large Reuters Screen in Time Square began showing a series of QR Codes.
“Quick Response” or QR Codes are nothing new. They are two dimensional barcodes introduced in Japan in 1994. They have been used to share data, send text messages and access websites. One of my favorite examples of the wise use of a QR code is taxi stands in Japan where a passenger can scan a QR code with her cellphone which will automatically send a text message to the dispatcher requesting a pickup. They provide great opportunities for people to create hyperlinks in the real world. Just put a QR Code up at your business to make it easier for customers to follow your company on Twitter or like your business on Facebook.
Unfortunately, we’ve had a little bit of a chicken and egg problem with QR codes. Not many people have downloaded QR Code Readers for their cellphones; there just aren’t enough QR codes to scan. Companies have been reluctant to start using QR codes because there just aren’t enough people with QR Code Readers on their smartphones.
New York City Media, by placing QR Codes in a prominent place in Times Square has the potential to jumpstart the adoption of QR Codes. It is the sort of thing that New York always does well, helping ideas cross the chasm from the innovators to the early majority.
Various city officials were on hand for the QR Moment in Time Square. Commissioner of The New York City Mayor's Office of Film, Theatre and Broadcasting Katherine Oliver, who announced the moment at the Internet Week New York, #IWNY, kick off press conference was there as was Commissioner of the Department of Information Technology and Telecommunications Carole Post. The QR Moment at Time Square illustrated how New York’s focus on film, theatre and broadcasting is leading the way into the digital world. It also provided a new way for people to find out about important information about what is happening in the city.
I scanned the QR codes with my Nokia N900 and it worked very nicely. As I looked around, I saw a couple New York City Police Officers holding up their smartphones to also scan the QR codes. Will the QR Code Moment in Time Square be what it takes to get wider adoption of QR Codes in the United States? We will have to wait and see. Whether or not it does, it clearly illustrates the leadership that New York City is seeking to establish as being the city that can take great ideas and make them successful in the broader world.
#FF #IWNY
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Fri, 06/11/2010 - 09:52@jack_benoff @LizatHP @joemull @DenisHurley @TheRecruiterGuy @geekychic @ckieff @Rasiej @rushkoff @carbonOutreach @jaymesgrace
It used to be that people would judge the success of a conference based on how many good contacts they made, in terms of qualified leads, business cards gathered, or other metrics. My office is littered with business cards from various conferences, people whom I’ve forgotten why they are interesting and am unlikely to ever contact again. Twitter changes things. Instead of exchanging cards, you can follow someone on Twitter. You get frequent reminders of who they are, and hopefully, why you found them interesting. With that, I let me highlight some of the interesting people that I am following in regards to Internet Week New York.
Monday at Internet Week, there was a tweet about Augmented Reality from @jack_benoff. After a few twitter messages back and forth and a little searching, I found his booth and had a great talk about his company. It was a good example of using Twitter to drive traffic to your booth.
Later in the day, I had a good chat with @LizatHP. She was, of course, at the HP Media Center and I met her face to face before I met her on Twitter. We have since retweeted various messages and she is doing a good job of getting information about HP out on Twitter.
At the Future of Location Based Marketing @joemull or @DenisHurley did a pitch for Mobile Meteor. They suggested checking a website that didn’t work properly with my Nokia N900. To make things worse the non Mobile version of the site played obnoxious music and I wrote a #fail message about it on Twitter. @DenisHurley and I exchanged messages over Twitter and soon they had modified their code to recognize the N900. It is a great example of proactive customer service using Twitter that helps build up goodwill for the company.
@TheRecruiterGuy sent out some interesting Tweets during Internet Week, and I’ve started following him, even though, to the best of my knowledge, I did not meet him face to face. In his case, the message was simple, send good content with a hash tag, you are likely to get new followers.
@geekychic extensively tweeted the Digiday:Target conference, which I also tried to do, as did @ckieff. This was as Twitter started having Fail Whales, so I suspect none of us tweeted as much as we would like. I’ve met @ckieff at other events. He’s a bright guy, well worth the follow and it was great to get to know @geekychic at Digiday, both on Twitter and during cocktails afterwards.
@Rasiej @rushkoff were two good speakers at #thepromise that are also well worth following. Also, during the long lunch line, I had a great discussion with @carbonOutreach. We ended up connecting the old fashioned way of exchanging business cards, but I later followed her with the information from her card.
Finally, I need to shout out to @jaymesgrace. I’ve know @jaymesgrace from New Haven social media activities and it was great to connect at Internet Week as well.
I still have a deck of business cards that will probably get lost or trashed before I know it, but at least I’ve found some interesting people to stay in touch with via Twitter. I hope others have as much luck with Internet Week.
#IWNY – If You Can't Afford Acid, Watch TV
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Thu, 06/10/2010 - 12:12“If you can't afford acid, watch TV”. It was a mantra of some of my college buddies, but back in college, I couldn't afford acid, and had already developed a dislike of television. We had gotten our first television when I was in elementary school. It was a small black and white TV with two mechanical dials, one for VHF and the other for UHF. The VHF dial gave the choice of twelve channels, from 2 to 13. I never figured out what happened to channel 1. UHF added around 70 more channel options. However, where I lived, we only had three VHF stations.
Acid, I was told, was like sitting down to watch a nine hour show, which you were the star of and which you couldn't turn off or change the channel. It was liked being trapped inside a your own bizarre movie. For years, I had been trapped inside my own little world. I was socially inept and had a speech impediment. Sure, I was mobile and verbal, but I had problems establishing friendships.
Yet for those trapped in a more socially responsible world, acid was an opportunity to look at things from a very different angle. Perhaps that is some of what makes Hunter S. Thompson so interesting. His acid crazed mind looked at Los Vegas, political campaigns, and so many other aspects of American culture from a drastically different viewpoint. This viewpoint resonated with many, thanks to his masterful wordsmanship.
I've been reading Fear and Loathing in Los Vegas on the trains to and from New York during Internet Week this year. Even without the acid, it seems to be helping me look at all of this from a much different viewpoint. It would be too easy to either fall into Internet Fanboydom on the one hand, or some sort of cynicism about the same forces that brought so much crap to the airwaves of my childhood now bringing it to the Internet.
Yet there is an interesting middle ground. The Internet can be a tool that enables people to authentically and creatively connect with other people. Yes, I realize I scored several buzzword bingo points with that sentence, but there is some truth to it.
The first hint of this interesting middle ground was my discussion with the guy from the Not Impossible Foundation who was showing the Eyewriter. This is a cheap do-it-yourself project where you can take parts of a standard pair of sunglasses, a webcam and a few other components and create a pair of glasses that track a persons eye movements. For a person who has lost all ability to move, and perhaps even speak, this is an incredibly enabling project. By moving ones eyes, a person can control a computer and connect with the people around the world. I talked about how this could be used in virtual worlds, like Second Life, and about the acessibilty projects friends of mine who are mobility challenged have done there.
Another toy that caught my eye was the makerbot project. This is essentially a three dimensional printer. If I recall properly, for about a thousand dollars, you can build a printer that will 'print' three dimensional objects. There are a group of people sharing things they have created.
Moving back closer to the field of television, there were a couple people pushing their Augmented Reality wares. Zugara had a couple great demos up. They have built their Augmented Reality code into Flash. The Flash code connects with the webcam and you can have games or shopping experiences on any Flash enabled computer with a webcam. Unfortunately, it seems to use Flash 10, and my Nokia N900 phone only supports Flash 9, so I haven't been able to test it on my phone. Total Immersion was another augmented reality player at Internet Week which apparently had a great Iron Man augmented reality game. Unfortunately, there wasn't anyone at the booth when I sstopped by, so I haven't had a chance to check it out.
The other vendor that particularly caught my eye there was Innovid. They provide interactive preroll for people creating advertisements for online videos. Their authoring language is very 'flash like' and it seems like an inspired video artist could do something very interesting by adding Zugara's Augmented Reality to Innovid's interactive preroll. This could be used for more than just the crass commercialism of online advertising, it could be part of a toolkit for a highly interactive video art form.
This weekend, many of my old college buddies will be gathering for a college reunion. They might trot out their old mantra about acid and television. On the other hand, if they've been following Internet Week, they just might come up with ideas even more creative.
#iwny - Prologue
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Tue, 06/08/2010 - 10:01The storms had broken the hot and humid weather of the weekend, and it was a crisp and clear Monday morning. I had gotten up early to shower, check my email and other social media messages and then hit the road for Internet Week in New York City. Since I was only driving down to the station, I took the old black car. There are plenty of traffic lights between my house and the New Haven Railroad station, and as I approached each one, they turned red. The pessimistic old soothsayer that often joins my thoughts tried to warn me that this was not a good omen, and when I got to the train station, I couldn’t get on to the public Wifi. Yet the more optimistic internal soothsayer pointed out that it was just stop lights slowing me down, and I could still get cellular connectivity. I hadn’t hit any detours, roadblocks or dead-ends.
I skipped the coffee and donut at the train station. I didn’t sit in one of those seats I’ve scoped out that is always squished but has a power outlet. I figured I’d try to get a little more rest as the train propelled me into New York. It was an express which only makes four other stops. Half a sleep, I heard the train whistle as it approached stations and the various rattling sounds as it blew past them.
I love the train ride into New York. So often there are interesting stories to hear, like the young woman from a rich section of the gold coast talking about her struggles with her younger brother’s emotional problems. The story sounded like it could have come straight out of Gatsby. There were no fun stories to listen to, so when I had rested enough, I pulled out my copy of “Fear and Loathing in Los Vegas” that I had picked up at the local library the other day.
It had recently struck me that Hunter S. Thompson captured what blogging and citizen journalism is all about a generation before people started blogging, and I wanted to rediscover his writing and test my hypothesis. No, I did not take a hit of acid and travel with a Samoan attorney, but I carried a little bit of an outsider’s edgy skepticism. Something about marketing people talking about relevancy and authenticity sets off alarms for me. It sounds too much like people talking about things they don’t really do, like some of my nerdy high school friends from years ago that told good stories about their sexual adventures but were probably scared to death of actually talking to an attractive classmate, or the faux-Zen Masters loudly telling everyone what one hand clapping really sounds like.
So, I arrived at the Metropolitan Pavilion ready for the coming week, realizing that it was only stoplights that impeded my progress, and not roadblocks, detours, or dead-ends.
Fear and Loathing at #IWNY #CMSUMMIT #MashableSummit #DIGIDAY #promise etc
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Sat, 06/05/2010 - 21:34It is a hot and humid Saturday evening in Woodbridge, CT. We were going to go camping this evening, but there are thunderstorms. Instead, I sit in my office and try to write my long overdue daily blog post. Last week was Personal Democracy Forum in New York and Journalism that Matters in Detroit. On Monday, Internet Week starts in New York City and America’s Future Now starts in Washington. This year, I’ll try to catch a few days of Internet Week and miss America’s Future Now.
I’ve been looking over the schedule for Internet Week and trying to decide which events to cover. Unlike other writers, I don’t have an editor or assignment desk to tell me what to cover. At times, I’ve asked my readers about their recommendations, so if there is anything in the Internet Week schedule that jumps out at you, let me know.
A while ago, I wrote about blogging inspirations, and I mentioned E.B.White. I’ve always enjoyed the way he combined the personal and the political in his essays. Another writer I’ve greatly admired for perhaps very similar reasons and very different reasons is Hunter S. Thompson. As I read through the Internet Week schedule, I felt a little Thompson coming over me, or perhaps a little J.D. Salinger.
One of the events for Internet Week is CM Summit, “Marketing in Real Time”. They’ve lined up some interesting speakers. Fifteen minutes for Dennis Crowley of Foursqaure, and another fifteen minutes for “The Buzz on Buzz” with Bradley Horowitz from Google.
Yet the big blocks of time are set aside for “a fireside chat between John Hayes, CMO for American Express, and John Battelle, CEO of Federated Media” and “A Conversation with Arthur Sulzberger, Jr., Chairman, The New York Times Company”. To balance out Sulzberger’s talk, on the second day they will have “A Conversation with Arianna Huffington, Co-founder & Editor-in-Chief, The Huffington Post”. One of the cocktail receptions will be sponsored by Facebook and the other by Adobe. What would Hunter S. Thompson have to say about the event, or perhaps Holden Caulfield?
It seems like a lot of Internet Week might benefit from some good Hunter S. Thompson style coverage. Perhaps the event that comes closest to the appropriate level of skepticism and irreverence is “Don't Believe the Hype Day” sponsored by Aquent.
On Tuesday, Dennis Crowley of Foursquare gets a full half hour with Adam Ostrow of Mashable at Mashable’s Media Summit. They also have Duncan Watts, Principal Research Scientist at Yahoo! speaking for fifteen minutes. Another interesting session they have is with Alec Ross, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s Senior Advisor for Innovation. They fill out a bit of the rest of the time with folks in entertainment and were only charging half what CMSummit was charging. Perhaps that is why they are sold out. Of course they are only one day, instead of CMSummit’s two days.
The big event on Wednesday is Digiday:Target. I’ve covered a lot of Digiday conferences and have put up posts on Digiday:Daily in the past. They run good conferences with interesting speakers and I look forward to Digiday:Target, especially since digital targeting has my attention for a bunch of other reasons.
Thursday, ThinkSocial and the Paley Center for Media, in conjunction with PepsiCo, are hosting a one day conference called The #Promise at Internet Week's HQ. This is a conference my literary guides could be incredibly cynical about. GE, Pepsi and Nokia talking about “making socially responsible commitments”. Is it too late for BP to try and get a spot on the agenda?
That said, I have friends working at GE and I know there are some good people that really do want to make a difference through helping corporations be more responsible. Likewise, I really like my Nokia N900 phone and was pleased to read about their Bicycle Charger Kit, which they recently introduced in Kenya. Likewise, I am glad to hear that according to Greenpeace, Nokia is currently the greenest electronics manufacturer.
The rain has come now. It is cooling off outside. I’ve been spending too much time reviewing the schedule and trying to put together this blog post. So, I’ll post it without reading it over as closely as I do other posts. Hopefully, I’ll have more energy tomorrow. In the meantime, if you’re going to Internet Week, or simply have read the schedule, and have thoughts about different sessions, please let me know.
