http://www.wildlifedirect.org/blogAdmin/gorilla
This blog has up to date information from the field about the Wildlife Direct charity’s work to protect gorillas and other wildlife in Africa. It’s a brilliant use of blogging to support fund-raising, and to help people see what their money is buying. There’s video too.
Whenever I’m talking to businesses about blogging, it always has to be authentic, factual and based on something real to the organisation, and all of that’s true here.
I’ve been talking to the team at Walkit.com over the last few days. They’ve got a fabulous website, that creates walking routes for people, showing them calories consumed and CO2 saved if they walk instead of driving, and today they launched walkit.com for Edinburgh, just in time for the festival. The team is tiny, and they’ve produced something that works really well, generating enormous amounts of public interest and PR.
And then there are my friends at Zoomf.com, who’ve produced a fully functional property search engine that spiders websites, has the most attractive Ajax user interface and all sorts of web 2.0 bells and whistles in the pipeline. Again, small team, massive result.
The output of the teams building these sites is phenomenal, when I compare it with some other projects that I’ve seen, and that’s got me thinking about the variables that drive productivity in software development. Both of these teams are immensely self-motivated (driven by love of a cause, their personal work ethics, the possibility of building a business that has value to investors), both have almost total freedom to choose the process and technologies they use, and they make extensive use of software that others have built. Whether it’s Google Maps, Drawlive, Wicket, Thinkingcap, PHP, Apache or whatever, they’re leveraging the work of thousands of coders to create their products. They’re re-using, and making that an art in itself. They’re building mechanisms that allow people to contribute even once their sites are live: feedback, new walking routes, star ratings and comments … So in the end, all their customers become product developers too.
As for the low productivity projects, I see lack of clear, timely decision making on every one of those.
Oddly enough, the problems with technical projects are almost never technical.
It’s very rare for me to really enjoy a video advertisement, on TV at least, the cinema ones tend to be better, so I was really, really pleased to see this one yesterday. It’s a little story, 2 minutes long, and it’s got everything.
Radio 4’s In Business program ran this story about software that is being used to analyse music and movies to determine whether they will be successful or not. For music there were a couple of applications, one being Platinum Blue, that analyse various characteristics (beat, pitch, length, structure and so on) of a sound file and compare it with other sound files, to see how similar they are to other hits.
For movies, there are people coding each section of a script, each interaction, and each second of plot on a database, and then using neural networking software to score the hit quotient of scripts before shooting even starts. The software can even recommend ways to make movies more likely to be hits, perhaps by tweaking the plot, locations, or order in which the story is told. Robot screenwriters can only be months away given this capability.
The program interviewed a couple of record company A&R people, who said that it was helping them, because they were running it to confirm that they’d made the right choices using their own ears. This seemed rather unambitious: perhaps the contributors were finding a way to justify their roles, when the software seemed
to have made the task of spotting pop hits into an algorithm. Besides, it ignored three really interesting potential applications for the software:
This software-driven approach is an alternative to the collaborative filtering of people like Criteo, and it has the advantage that the computer gets to listen to all the music, which probably saves someone a lot of suffering!
Technorati Tags: Radio 4, In Business, Platinum Blue, Garageband, Criteo, Online Music, Innovation
I was on a panel at the Institute of Practitioners in Advertising last night, discussing mobile advertising and ad-funded mobile content with an audience. There were definite moments of deja vu: over the years I’ve worked on WAP activation projects, MMS activation projects, mobile content viral projects and one of the questions that came up a few times was whether we were at a turning point for mobile advertising.
It seems to me that there are some strong grounds for optimism, but these need to be qualified, because different people think differently about what mobile advertising will be. I think some expect banner and PPC advertising to take off on mobile, and that this ad revenue will fund development of sites, services and content somewhat as it has for so many web 2.0 start-ups. I doubt this is true, but other aspects of the web 2.0 thing will cross over, and these are important.
If we compare the web today with the web 5 years ago, it’s gone all interactive. People have blogs, Myspace pages, Flickr and Youtube accounts. My family is collaborating on a Geni family tree, and it’s impressive how many of them are chipping in. Why is this good news for mobile? Because the mobile is already a primary device for interacting: it has advanced messaging and multi-media capabilities, it has a high speed web connection, Java and masses of storage. It’s the perfect extension for people who are interacting online already. Adding Youtube, Myspace and who knows what else to the mobile is obvious, and Vodafone (for example) are already putting deals in place. This development will lead to a substantial uplift in mobile web usage over the next few years, led not by technical feasibility or a business need to recoup investment in 3G licenses, but by a significant change in user behaviour. People are collaborating and creating, and they’ll do that with their mobiles.
There are financial reasons to be optimistic: flat fee mobile data will be normal for most contract mobile users in the UK by the Autumn. Three and T-mobile have it, Vodafone intends to launch it in the Summer. So monthly contract users won’t have to worry about data charges any more. For the pay as you go, ad-funded usage is evolving: customers will soon be able to sign up to receive marketing SMS, or streamed content with ads in the stream. The mobile portals are getting their act together for serving, measuring and billing for mobile advertising. Put these together, and you see a context where mobile data isn’t going to cost anything like as much, which means something users are becoming interested in will also become affordable to the mass market.
What does this mobile landscape look like? I don’t think anyone at the meeting had the answers, and that’s not surprising. What struck me was the size of the eco-system that is developing. Several people approached me after the panel session to expound on their mobile social networking products. People are working on ad-serving, gaming, location based services, all sorts of things. I was told there’s a mobile social networking conference coming up in Rome. All sorts of innovative and interesting things are happening, but it’s hard to say what the killer apps will be.
Clients are definitely interested in mobile, where most thought it over-hyped 18 months ago. They want to know how mobile can be integrated with the rest of our work, they’re looking for clever ways to introduce interaction with their brands into the mobile space. Research I was looking at last week showed (again) that pass-along, word of mouth content is highly trusted, and this has to be one of the biggest opportunities on a mobile. If kids are uploading photos of their schoolteachers to Youtube already, the propensity, technology and knowledge are there already, for sure.
I was walking home the other day when I spotted this poster.
It’s great that the big advertisers and their agencies are starting to communicate in language their potential customers understand (perhaps some of them could try this with their English-speaking markets…) and I am very happy with the Polish influx into London, truly. Daily Mail reader, I am not.
What I’m confused about is why Polish is the first language I’ve seen non-English ads in, in the UK, and why now? We’ve had hindi, arabic, swahili, yiddish, french etc speakers in the UK, in large numbers, for decades, so why is it that it’s taken so long for non-English advertising to arrive?
Typograph is a standards compliant theme with a JQuery powered tabbed sidebar box and an ad under the first post on the index page. This theme has no images and is purely based on CSS elements and typography. Ideal for future customization. Typograph was styled "from the ground up" on a highly customized version of the Sandbox theme.
Designed by Morten Rand-Hendriksen - designer, information philosopher and author based out of Burnaby, BC.
You can change the contents of the tabbed box by editing the tabbedBox.php file located in the Typograph theme directory.