Three Minds On Digital Marketing @ Organic

The Apple App Store appears to have got off to an incredible start.  In a few months there are several thousand applications available both free and for a minimal price, and consumers have responded.  In its first month alone, it generated around 60 million downloads and $30 million in revenue for Apple. Those are incredible numbers when you realize that 90% of the Apps are under $10, and on the applications side there have already been several that have had million+ downloads.  It is clearly a game changer and is going to redefine the nature of not just software distribution, but also software development. 

I however think the model is so much more than that; and that is where the concept of a Trojan horse comes to play.

The new thing for this year are business apps, and nobody has more interesting business apps than those coming out for the iPhone. Tapulous, who some are calling the RockYou of the iPhone app world, is set to release an application called "Handshake" in the near future. The application allows you to put two iPhones together, perform a simple handshake gesture, and swap out business information of your choosing. It couldn't be simpler than that.

Handshake, of course, isn't the only exciting business application for the iPhone. The newly released LinkedIn app was just named the new "Must-Have App" by ReadWriteWeb. It allows you to access your feed, view your connections, and search through your database of contacts.

Other apps include virtual rolodexes, time trackers, and expense recorders. Personally, I can't wait for ScanLife to integrate into an expense recorder somehow. I'd love to just take a picture of my receipts and have them magically upload into my business expense program. One can dream.

Marta Strickland

Increasingly we are all using rich internet applications - be it Facebook, gmail, Pandora or the dozens of others out there. However the downside is that you still have to get to them on a browser - wouldn't it be great if you could experience an RIA as a full on desktop application. Well you can through an application called Fluid and its model of Site Specific Browsers (SSBs) which provide a great solution for your WebApp experience. Using Fluid, you can create SSBs to run each of your favorite WebApps as a separate Cocoa desktop application. Fluid gives any WebApp a home on your Mac OS X desktop complete with Dock icon, standard menu bar, logical separation from your other web browsing activity.

It is a small application that you basically type in the URL's you want to link to and it does the rest. It is a really great app. and a very interesting take on how to integrate a web app. into a desktop experience. BTW - it is only a MAC experience for now.

Check it out at: http://fluidapp.com/

Baron Conway

Yesterday, Google launched a beta feature called "walking directions" on Google Maps. While the directions are limited to routes shorter than 6.2 miles (or 10 kilometers), they provide a few useful advantages for walkers over regular driving directions. First, the walking directions ignore the direction of one-way streets. Second, it supposedly takes into account terrain, giving pedestrians a more flat and walkable route when possible.

Google acknowledges that the feature is clearly in beta, even adding this warning: "Use caution when walking in unfamiliar areas." It's obvious from a quick query on walking from the Ferry Building to Organic San Francisco that Google must not know the layout of the sidewalks around the Embarcadero Plaza, or it might have given me a slightly more direct route. Hopefully, they will be adding more information about sidewalks, pedestrian bridges, traffic, and even crime statistics.

Another feature missing that seems like a given is that there are no walking directions on Google Maps various mobile versions. This feature would be far more useful than its online counterpart, so you would assume it is a feature on it's way. Then again, I've always assumed the same thing about Google My Maps, and I have yet to see results.

Marta Strickland

Every day, the web sees the announcement of another avenue for communication. It could be a new social network, a new microblogging tool, or a new aggregation platform that allows you to start wrangling your social content stream into one space. Even with the move towards more aggregation, the sheer amount of information available is overwhelming. Just thinking about my own digital lifestream in the course of a year, the record of my activity, the content I as a single web user produces, can give me a headache.

It's only getting worse. It's not just the data. Now the tools themselves have become cluttered. I have Twine, Facebook, Twitter, Friendfeed, and MySpace all supposedly providing me a useful feed of top level information, many with their own set of apps and tools to make creating content and sorting through information easier. It's too much. I'm fatigued and I don't think I'm the only one.

We need better social tools. We need applications based on user empathy, applications that understand the mindset we are in. They need to understand when we want to open the social floodgates and when we want to turn them off.

Did you leave early last Friday to get your Iphone? Uh-huh~ So now you have you iPhone in hand, and finally got it activated, let's put some cool apps on it.

Loopt provides a cellphone-based GPS sharing system with the goal of providing an innovative social mapping tool that allows friends to visualize one another using their cell phones and share information about interesting places.

Loopt's geosocial networking services show users where friends are located and what they are doing via detailed, interactive maps on their mobile phones. Loopt helps friends connect on the fly and navigate their social lives by orienting them to people, places, and events. Users can also share location updates, geo-tagged photos, and comments with friends in their mobile address book or on online social networks, communities, and blogs.

Loopt was designed with user privacy at its core and offers a variety of effective and intuitive privacy controls.

Their latest release for the iPhone integrates microblogging and reviews from Yelp into its interface.

Beside iPhone, Loopt also works on Blackberry too!

http://www.loopt.com/

Euphenia Cheng

Information geeks and semantic web watchers have been tracking the progress of Twine since the fall of last year, and I just received an invitation to their Beta test.

It's hard to define what Twine does without diving deep into Web 3.0 jargon, but here goes.  It's a knowledge-sharing platform that attempts to organize streams of information found on the web- pages, images, emails, videos, etc. - into clusters that the company calls Twines.  Unlike a wiki or a shared extranet like BaseCamp, Twine uses the intelligence hidden in way the content is tagged to infer relationships between different pieces of information, similar to del.icio.us. Users who upload information can also define relationships between different pieces of data themselves.

Twine also weaves together a number of Web 2.0 capabilities into one package: 
Like social networks, you can hobnob with other people who share your interests
Like newgroups, you can subscribe to feeds on topics that interest you that are being assembled by the community.
Like an improved StumbleUpon, Twine will suggest different articles and pieces of content based on your information streams and your relationships with others.

It's always tricky to review a new service after only a couple of days of use.  It's a very ambitious undertaking that has the Web geek community buzzing (see reviews from ReadWriteWeb and WebWare).  But as it's currently organized, Twine really does make the Semantic Web concept seem...dull.  Like Wikipedia, the success of the project is entirely dependent on a large, active user base and the power of the network effect.  And that user base currently consists of uber-geeks.  No surprise that #1 topic on this Semantic Web is...the Semantic Web. 

I would love to see Twine remade (ie remarketed) for a more mainstream audience.  Think what plugged-in tween girls could do with a product like this. Forget a Zac Efron fansite- this could be the hub for all things High School Musical, all things Hannah Montana, all things Gossip Girl.  I think acquiring a mass audience is the only way that this product will come to cover the entire Web, which must be the ultimate promise of a Semantic Web application.

http://www.twine.com 

Misha Cornes

Student James Houston of Glasgow School of Art's visual communication department used his final project to answer the band Radiohead's challenge to remix their new single "Nude." Though the project did not make the deadline, the end product was well outside the box and a great example of true creativity being fully executed in craft and concept.

http://www.vimeo.com/1109226

Mike Glowacki

There are a lot of blogs about gadget out there, however this one is a bit different - more than a blog, it is a real-time updated billboard of gadgets and stuff.

If you are a fan of gadgets, design and other stuff check it out.

http://www.oobject.com/

Baron Conway

For those of you who might be interested, Firefox 3.0 is being released today.  Downloads are expected to be available after 1pm. 

According to the article that I read in the Detroit Free Press they are expecting this browser to be much faster than IE.  Will it continue to eat into Microsoft's dominant market share? 

I know I will be trying it.

http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/

Eric Westen