Three Minds On Digital Marketing @ Organic

Sprint has a really interesting new site to promote it's mobile broadband offering.  It's called "Sprint NOW" and it is a futuristic personal information / news dashboard made of a screen full of cool visual widgets giving you a snapshot of our World now.

There's a broad range of widgets showing, for example, the current National Debt, email sent , forests cut down, energy usage across the globe, new cases of malaria, today's top Google searches and Youtube videos.

When I first saw it, I imagined this being projected up on a huge digital display in my home similar to a scene from "The Island", "Minority Report" or "Ironman".  I imagine myself going up to the display and customizing the data simply using my hands.

There's no hard sell from Sprint - just that soothing synthetic female voice telling you the current time, a stunning glimpse of how diverse and interesting our world is and how this diverse information can be presented in real-time NOW.  

Kudos to our friends at Goodby, Silverstein!

David Feldt

Now this might seem like a given. After all, we have had consumer-rated news sites like Digg for a few years now. But I am talking about something more than consumers choosing what news articles they find relevant at any given time. I'm talking about tools that empower us to create news in an easy and powerful way.

Earlier this year, CNN launched iReport, a consumer-generated news site that claims to be "Unedited. Unfiltered." I would have to agree considering that the top story according to Google today read Ketchup assassinated. That was probably a fluke, because most of the top stories have to do with the election.

What is great about iReport is that it turns individual citizens with a camera, time to investigate, time to write, and decent basic reporting skills into actual journalists. But, what about something even easier than that, what about something even more integrated into our everyday lives and common citizens?

Well, look what is going on at election.twitter.com. This is a place where our chatter is becoming news. Yes, it is only reading the dialogue of people using Twitter, and yes, it is only focused on the election, but I think this is the beginning of something big. When I want to find out the newest hot items in the upcoming election, THIS is where I go. The site analyzes the firehouse of constant conversation and looks for instant trends that are peaking. It's the consumer-generated headlines in an ongoing news story.

Just imagine what this could be if they started creating portals for energy, the economy, foreign policy, disasters, health, fashion... as more and more people use Twitter, we're not just going to be writing articles anymore, we're going to be creating the headlines.

Marta Strickland

Content creation. It is undeniably the one of biggest and most powerful characteristics of Web 2.0. Ever since the web became a platform, developers have been providing the tools for consumers to be the creators of:

Video
Music
History
Social Networks
... even Applications

It's become easier and easier for us to create powerful things. Creation is not limited to an elite few, it's available to everyone. And as each week passes, the lines between developer/programmer and common user blur even more. With each week, we are becoming creators of something new and exciting.

So this week, I will be taking a quick look at some tools that have launched recently and some trends that are gaining momentum. What could you be the creator of tomorrow?

Marta Strickland

Over the past several weeks Organic's Emerging Platforms Group has been working with our friends at Drop.io on a location-aware extension of their already awesome file sharing service. Drop.io understands that there are some unmet or poorly met needs that are inadequately addressed by the services and applications most people use to transfer, share, and store large files. Please don't ever email me a 50mb file. I will not be pleased. Anyone who isn't familiar with Drop.io's drop-based approach to sharing - go check it out - then come back and finish reading this.

Here's how it works: The application provides Drop.io users the ability to assign a physical location to any drop. Drops can then be found from a desktop/laptop PC, blackberry, and of course, an iPhone. The cool part - the mobile app - scans your location within a 1 mile radius of your position and returns any drops affixed to a location within that radius. We see this extension as a hybrid location-specific digital content publishing and distribution utility that has the potential to power a variety of interesting use cases.

One real-world example of how this might be used is at a concert. Say a band wants to give out copies of its latest song and other exclusive content to people who attend their concert, they can use Drop.io Location to publish that content to the concert venue, and make it available only to people at that location. We see people using this in a whole host of novel ways and we're looking forward to seeing some inventive applications that we haven't thought of [yet].

If you would like to join the private beta for the iPhone portion of this service you can request entry at: contact@dropio.com

Dan Neumann

Editor's Note: A few weeks back I spoke with Chad Stoller of Drop.io, a friend of Organic and the former Executive Director of our Emerging Platforms group. So make sure to check out that interview to get more of an idea of what Drop.io is all about.

Esquire made it to the newsstands with the first e-ink cover for their 75th anniversary issue.  Certainly eye catching and PR worthy. Conceptually it's got a lot of potential - a dynamic piece of cover real estate.  As owners of reasonably strong content, Esquire could have done something compelling.  The issue features "75 of the most influential people of the 21st century" - maybe a series of quotes could be teased on the front, then continued inside, for instance.  What they did instead was to create a blinky banner headline, barely better than the infamous blink tag.  

I'm tempted to go off on a curmudgeonly ramble, but I'll just say leave it and say they could have done better.  But yeah, I bought the issue.  Still, I look forward to someone doing something compelling with the technology.

David Lewis

This year, with the release of Apple's Safari browser along with the latest releases of iTunes, the Windows-based browser eco-system got quite a shake up. Yesterday, along came Google Chrome. Based on the same rendering technology as Safari, Google Chrome will change many things in the land of web browsers and the way people access the Internet.

There are three significant experiential changes in Chrome: 1) a single "do everything" box that searches, browses, and navigates; 2) web page isolation in processes (so web page crashes don't take out your whole browser); and 3) a lightning fast JavaScript engine that actually complies code and manages memory efficiently (one of the major bugbears with the complex JavaScript that is possible today). Of those three things, the first is very much inline with the latest release of Internet Explorer 8 and Firefox 3. The second element is most intriguing. It focuses primarily on the poor memory management and bad behavior of browser components. This may just be the single biggest reason for PC users to switch or at least try Chrome. The third element will make a big difference for highly interactive sites and significantly improve performance of Javascript libraries.

One more point to note, setting up Flash, QuickTime, Windows media playing in browsers has always been complicated. The Google Chrome browser "just works". All of those types and pieces came integrated and working right out of the box, no complicated additional downloads, no extra setup steps. All in all, I think Google Chrome will be an interesting change for folks. It will complicate web application development, as we will now have another browser specification to build to, but ultimately it will streamline the web browsing experience for the Windows user. Will it surpass Firefox? Will it overtake IE? Will it be as revolutionary on the Mac? How will Android and mobile browsers use Chrome? These are questions only time can answer. I for one, welcome our new Google overlords to the browser party.

Dean McRobie

 
Like so many of us, John Batelle (of Wired, Industry Standard and FM fame) noticed as cell phones replaced the lighter as the ubiquitous expression of enthusiasm in the hands of the concert crowd.   But John went one step further and set out to take advantage of this shift to change the concert experience.  

His vision was to create a "place where all of us can share and produce our experiences: a many to many celebration of live music, in real time, as well as an ongoing, living archive of what has happened, and what might happen next."  

The official "About Us" seems even more ambitious: "Created by Outside Lands and Federated Media, and presented by Windows, CrowdFire is an online and onsite destination where music, culture and technology enthusiasts participate in a massive, crowdsourced act of digital media creation."

Now CrowdFire.net is beta.  The inaugural live event, the Outside Lands festival in San Francisco has come and gone.  There are now videos, photos and a smattering of comments on the site.  The site promises more features to come.  But so far it's not as exciting as I'd hoped.  Maybe it's just early days.  Or maybe it's hard to get real community going around an ephemeral event.  

Maybe when the new features are added, it will become more engaging. Maybe it will gain momentum as more events are queued up and a stable community can start to gather around it.  Maybe they'll be able to create opportunities between events to keep the conversation going.  Or maybe it'll be another well-intentioned casualty at the intersection of music and technology.  

Any bets?

David Lewis

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.

In the latest in the very ongoing quest to bring interactive TV to life, Yahoo and Comcast just announced that they are partnering with Intel to deliver widgets for digital TV.  Interactive TV a reality?  After so many promises, can it really happen?
Are Yahoo, Intel and Comcast the ones to make it happen?

The announcement seemed to hinge on technology that isn't currently in people's homes.  (I could be misreading this though.) What is already in people's homes?  Tivo.  Apple TV.  Well, at least in a few people's homes.  And PCs.  Mobile phones.

Many people already have 'interactive TV.'  They watch TV with their laptops open. They watch with their internet-enabled phones close at hand.  (Yes, I hit up IMDB on my phone at least once a night.) They watch with the game system on. Mostly young people, but I hear it's all the rage.  Now it's not the seamless experience this announcement is hinting at, but it puts the 'interactive' part where people are already interacting.

They're also starting to watch TV programming on network sites or online TV like Hulu.   Seems like that might be a reasonable test bed for some interactive programming.  

Apple TV? Not a breakout hit, but if anyone is going to put the sexy in interactive TV, Apple is certainly a contender.

If Yahoo is in this to provide their widget platform to the mix, will they be rolling out widgets that interact with existing online programming first?  This does seem to be a good time to get people inspired with the possibilities.

And at the end of the day, do people want interactive TV or just a better designed program guide that gets them to something they can watch as they sink into their couch, leaving the interactivity-filled days behind?  

Maybe Apple, Hulu, Tivo, Yahoo and the like will all start to duke it out, and we'll actually start to see some interactivity in television that's more compelling that texting your vote to American Idol.

David Lewis

"What if your photo collection was an entry point into the world, like a wormhole that you could jump through and explore..."

No, this is not a tagline for an upcoming sci-fi film. This is the tagline for a breakthrough technology brought to you by... Microsoft?

The technology is called Photosynth. It's an application that is able to map hundreds of photos geographically in three-dimensional space. The software creates "orbits" that allow users to rotate their viewpoint and have the photos change based on the new perspective. The result is the ability for users to explore the photos similar to the way they would navigate the actual place in real life. Basically, if enough photos are taken of the same famous monument, like say the Eiffel Tower, you are able to see it from all angles and zoom levels.

Photosynth is actually a 2 year old project and the Microsoft site is jam packed with demo videos, but the incredible tech preview that just debuted this week at SIGGRAPH 2008 kicked it up a notch. The new Photosynth demo features color correction, smoothing, and time of day. Just sit back, and be amazed:

The awesomeness of Photosynth is ultimately reliant on the wealth of photography. With the popularity of photo sharing sites and the continual advancement of mobile phone cameras, that might not be such a big problem afterall. And since Yahoo! owns Flickr, it certainly makes one rethink the value of the Microsoft-Yahoo! takeover, as well as their stakes in Facebook. Maybe Microsoft does know what their doing afterall.

Marta Strickland