Three Minds On Digital Marketing @ Organic

Top Five Things I Wish Of My Kindle

When I got my first iPod six years ago, it completely changed the way I purchased and listened to music. So, naturally, I had the same hopes for my recently acquired Kindle reader and how I would soon be consuming books. Unfortunately, the Kindle has fallen short of my expectations. Here's a list of the things I find myself wishing for:

1.  A back light. Seems absurd I have to use an attached itty, bitty book light to read from my "electronic wireless reading device". I probably spend half of my time reading in the dark - on the plane or before dozing off to sleep. Which means, half the time I use my Kindle, I have a book light appendage hanging off it. So much for sleek design.

2.  Color.  I hate the fact that many books I order on Kindle don't show the original hard-copy version of the cover art. And those that do, show it in shades of gray. I shouldn't judge a book by its cover, but - well, I do. I miss seeing the cover art of a book and its back cover or inside sleeve reviews. Couldn't Kindle follow iPod's lead? At least they display CD cover art.

3.  A touch screen.  After using an iPhone, it took me weeks to stop myself from touching the screen of my Kindle to order a book or select something new to read. Keying in words on the tiny, tiny keyboard and using the microscopic joy stick feel so 2006.

4.  The ability to do a crossword puzzle.  One of my favorite print-medium past times is doing The New Yorker crossword puzzles. Too bad there wasn't a way to do this on my Kindle. (If there is, please tell me how.) This is another place where that touch screen -- with interfacing keyboard -- would come in handy.

5.  The social part of reading.  Sure, reading probably seems like a solitary hobby. But, when I finish a good book, the first thing I want to do is tell my friends. It would be great if, upon reading the last sentence of a book, Kindle offered the option to write a review and the ability to post it to my Facebook wall. This seems like a lost opportunity for both Kindle and Amazon to create viral advocacy not only for the Kindle -- but the books people are buying on it. I did find a Kindle fan page on Facebook -- but it only had 14 fans! And, at this writing, there are no Kindle apps available on Facebook. However, just yesterday, Amazon announced a SDK (Software Development Kit) which will allow software developers to build and upload applications. Plans are to have an app store up and running by end of year. But could it be too little too late? Until Kindle introduces new social apps, I'll tell my friends about favorite books the old fashioned way: from my iPhone Facebook app.

On the eve of Apple's rumored announcement of their new tablet (iPad? Or islate? They haven't named it yet.) coupled with a possible Barnes & Noble partnership and access to 1 million books (in comparison to Kindle's 400k titles), Kindle's limitations have me worrying about major buyer's remorse. However, the rumored price-point of Apple's tablet at $7-1000 may make me feel a little better.

Are you a satisfied Kindle user? Or are you holding out for Apple's tablet or another e-reader technology?
 
Traci Armstrong
@tannarmstrong

Google recently released Goggles which is arguably the broadest reaching AR program available to date. If you are not familiar, it allows you to do two things:

1. Snap a photo of anything and automatically search for results based on images and text within the photo
2. See location and direction specific google maps results by pointing your camera in any direction

The potential of this tool is that of most augmented reality: quick, easy and highly relevant information. This is also another avenue (along with voice recognition software) for mobile devices without a keypad to access search functionality. To see Google's description of benefits check out the video here.

From my tests the text processing works well so things like book covers, business card, and anything with a URL on it return useful results. Goggles was able to identify flat logos but had much more trouble with 3D object logos, for example it immediately identified a Dodge logo on a sticker, but was not able to identify the Dodge logo on the grill of a Nitro.

While many augmented reality apps have been released recently, Goggles is the strongest indication that augmented reality is coming to the masses quickly. If using the camera on you mobile device to gather information and navigate on foot becomes a commonly adopted behavior this has significant implications to marketers.

How Google Goggles Could Impact Marketing
Many things can be done (or not done) with regard to products and storefronts to provide more value to customers and make shopping easier. An analogy is the way natural search, paid search, and search engine optimization work in concert. Users will see naturally occurring results regardless of where they are.

At some point in the future those results could have paid listing next to them or could be enhanced in some way. For example if a person is walking down the street looking for a place to get a coffee they see a Starbucks .25 miles away and next to that appears an ad for Mom and Pop Coffee Shop .5 miles away. So the person is made aware of a local option just a little further away.

Finally products and store fronts will be able to be optimized to better market themselves. For example logos could be optimized to be easily photographable (make them 2D not 3D). Search results could be specific to a model number to provide end users the most important information. For example if I were in market for a new car and saw one that I liked on the street photographing the trim level/logo could return results of fast it accelerates, the mpg and the cost if search results were properly optimized.

My guess is that Layers on Google maps will offer a lot of opportunities for augmented reality marketing through Goggles. Definitely a product to watch over the next year.

Russ Hopkinson
@rhops

Many smartphones have for years featured front-facing VGA quality cameras, in addition to the better back-facing cams for snapping (more or less) better photos. However, there aren't very many places in the world where video calls between mobiles have really taken off, and bridging video calls between phones and computers has been virtually impossible.

Fring is one of the pioneers of VoIP on mobile, and first launched its app for the Nokia, Samsung and SonyEricsson supported Symbian S60 OS in 2007. Over the years they have extended the app's functionality by adding support for Windows Mobile, the iPhone, and earlier this month for Android, and for several PC VoIP applications including Skype. So far, however, there has been no support for Skype video calls either in Fring or in the native Skype app available for the iPhone, Android, and a few other devices.

The latest version of Fring for Symbian S60 changes that. By offering full video support for Skype, it has the opportunity to leverage the global, widespread userbase of Skype and finally make front-facing cameras useful, particularly to those on networks like AT&T and T-Mobile that don't offer video calling themselves. Fring works on both 3G for, depending on your data plan, inexpensive calls, and WiFi for virtually free video time. Is this what will finally make mobile video calls popular?

Update: And it didn't take Fring long to add video calling to the iPhone app as well. Because of the lack of a front facing camera, it's 1-way only.

Demo: Video calls on Fring for Symbian devices (YouTube)

Karri Ojanen

Audi Car Configurator on Surface @ IAA 2009 from Neue Digitale / Razorfish on Vimeo.

Interaction on a touch screen has come a bit closer to the mainstream with iPhone interaction and news casters using them for presentations. The Audi configurator for Microsoft surface is an interesting next step for automotive configuration.

The Audi surface demo has some strong features, it allows you to view the vehicle at any angle in different colors, wheels and accessories and in different backgrounds. This allows the user to get a very good feel of the vehicle.

The best use of this would appear to be in a dealership setting as a tool for ordering and walking through features by someone who is experienced with surface interaction. The surface demo shows potential for an experienced surface user.

Still there are more touchscreen features I would have like to seen. For one, it might be interesting to have an exploded view of things like the safety cage or all wheel dive and engine -- the ability to get under the skin of the vehicle. If it was done well, users could learn everything about the vehicle while configuring it.

What would you like to see?

Scott Brennen

It seems as though iPhone junkies and coffee junkies are a match made in heaven. Starbucks recently launched two new applications for the iPhone that make it easy for customers to user their mobile to get their daily coffee fix.

The first application, myStarbucks, makes it possible allows customers to remember their friend's favorite drink, locate nearby Starbucks locations, as well as other fun features. But the bigger development is an application that turns your Starbucks card into a bar code on your phone's screen that allows you to pay for your coffee by scanning your phone.

Digital bar codes and digital couponing is a trend we've been following closely hear at Organic. And so I am curious to see how well this new mobile application works for Starbucks.

"Digital coupons apparently have a higher redemption rate due to the discreteness (still looking cool while saving) and convenience." Sarah Jo Sautter

This isn't the first time Starbucks has made a move to support the mobile superuser crowd. In 2008, Starbucks shifted their wifi support from T-Mobile to AT&T, offering their Starbucks card holders two free hours of wifi access per day and completely free access for any AT&T broadband subscribers.

Thanks to Lisa Yamamura for the link.

Marta Strickland

Watch out! You may be outted on Facebook.  MIT students claim that they can tell which guys are gay by checking out their friends on Facebook.
 
Students created an algorithm that first analyzed networks of people who publicized their sexual orientation on Facebook.  Then they looked at men who did not state their sexual orientation on Facebook, but looked at their network of  friends.  Guess what? Gay men have more gay friends than straight men.  Someone had to create a program to figure this out?
 
Popsci.com reports:

"Their computer program was able to correctly identify 10 men whom the students personally knew to be gay in the real world but who hadn't shared that fact on Facebook. (The algorithm didn't work as well with women or with bisexual Facebookers.)"

 
What I find the funniest is that the students completed the project for a class on ethics and the Internet.  Didn't anybody ask whether it was ethical to pry into somebody else's private life when they obviously don't want to state their sexual orientation?
 
Kari Girarde 

In a great example of actually thinking through the experience of reading news, Google has again made a revolutionary new interface (read more at Google Labs or the NY Times). Basically, the site rasterizes the news into low rez and high rez images and allows you to use the now endemic "swipe" gestures and "pinch and stretch" gestures to interact with the images. You can then select to go to the full article in Safari or the high rez image.

What I love about this idea is that they are using the mobile browser to achieve this. Which means this product will likely work across platforms much easier than a single iPhone application. Thereby short cutting the whole cumbersome Apple store approval process.

I think there is something we can learn from this. Thinking beyond "it's just a browser" to "it's an app platform" will be the secret to unlocking mobile web browsing. The evolution of mobile browsers is paralleling the development of desktop web browsers but at close to light speed. Months not years between new capabilities.

Check out http://fastflip.googlelabs.com/ on your mobile phone. Which platforms does it work on? Looks good on an iPhone, does it work for your Pre? How about your MyTouch? Or that Crackberry of yours?

Dean McRobie

What fun is building a following on Twitter if you can't parlay it into a high-stakes game of chance? Such us the premise of betyourfollowers.com, a mashup app/social experiment by a small SF-based collective. The idea is simple: you pick five of your Twitter followers and gamble them in a head-to-head battle with someone you follow. You win, you pick up five new followers. You lose, your friend picks up five new followers. (There's even talk of a "Bet Them All" option - which could mark the end for more addictive personalities such as mine.)

"Isn't this a violation of Twitter's Terms of Service or API usage guidelines?" you may ask. To head off such debate, BYF launched in mid-August with an open letter to Twitter:

"We realize that Bet Your Followers isn't your typical Twitter app. We created it to examine new behaviors and explore the value of Twitter relationships. The reason we made an app that lets people risk their followers was to pose the question: If a mass of Twitter followers constitutes social currency, can it be gambled and exchanged like real currency?

We've been enthusiastic Twitter users since the early days and we genuinely value Twitter as a social service (not to mention as a lovely API -- thank you!). Our own followers are dearly important to us. But as Twitter grows, we've watched the race to accrue followers become a strange obsession. Whenever a sizeable group believes something to be sacred, it historically falls to artists, scientists, and hackers to question and play with that assumption. It is with this curious spirit that we created Bet Your Followers. It was also a lot of fun to make.

We realize our efforts could be construed as a violation of your API Terms of Service but we hope you see the value in our exploration of these issues. We'd love it if you sent us a d-message before giving us the boot, if you're even thinking of that -- of course, we would never risk unfollowing you :-)"

As Twitter becomes an arms race of "Who's got the most followers?" and spammers pollute the social airwaves, Bet Your Followers hopes to tap a nerve. BYF could be indicative of a trend in social downsizing. Or it could just be good for a laugh...only time will tell.

But it does revel in one universal Twitter truth: everyone's got followers to spare. We just didn't have anything to do with them prior to now. Will you be partaking in this kind of social downsizing?

Sam Cannon

Editor's Note: Augmented reality has been a hot topic on the blogs lately as the release of iPhone OS 3.1 is supposed to enable use of the camera, GPS, and compass to layer virtual data over our physical world. While this is not supposed to be live yet, Mashable just announced today that Yelp sneaked it into their new app release via an easter egg technique.

I just installed this and even up on the 4th floor of Organic's San Francisco office it seems to work pretty well. Once you've completed the Yelp app update, shake your iPhone 3GS three times to turn on the 'Monocle' button in the UI. From there you'll see the 'video camera' screen with Yelp links hovering over places or in the direction you're pointing your phone.

Observations so far:
- Well designed and impressive to see Yelp data on top of the 'real world'
- The icons 'hovering' can be a bit jittery as you move your phone around. I found it hard to hold my phone still enough so that I could select the icon on the screen for a Yelp review
- Both portrait and landscape mode work with the Monocle feature; portrait lets you see a taller 'stack' of Yelp icons but landscape seems more intuitive for moving your device from side to side panoramically

As the Mashable post notes, apps with AR are not supposed to work until the next OS release sometime next month. It should also be noted that other devices already support AR functionality. Overall, this first entry in AR apps works great and demonstrates the potential AR has for location-based services on the iPhone and other mobile devices. Could a flood of AR feature updates to other current applications be available in the near future? I'm betting on it ;)

Jay Bain

Hack days are events in which participants are encouraged to create web applications in 24 hours using APIs and open source libraries. The first Music Hack Day specifically organized for the digital music community took place in London, UK about a month ago. Supported by BBC Music and a few established digital music services like SoundCloud and Last.fm, Music Hack Day brought together 200 delegates and 'hackers' who explored the possibilities of using open source software for new digital music apps.

Among the hacks created during the event were the SoundCloud iPhone Music Visualiser, and Citysounds.fm, which fetches musical creations from SoundCloud and organizes them by the cities they were created in. It also pulls pictures for the cities from Flickr. There are a lot of electronic music producers on SoundClound, and that can be heard on Citysounds as well, but listening to sounds created in Auckland, New Zealand and Sao Paulo, Brazil, shows how distinctive places around the Earth can sound.

Karri Ojanen