Powerset: An Entirely New Way To Search And Discover?

There has been a lot of buzz surrounding Powerset and to be honest, I have chosen to ignore most of it. When looking at new search technologies that claim natural language search capabilities and other mind blowing semantic feats, I tend to tune out. It is not that I am not interested in new search technologies; it is just that I have grown skeptical of such claims and am sick of searching for the next best thing in search technology. I figure, if the technology is so great, I will get to it eventually.


Today was a bit different. Through the power of good press release headline writing, Powerset was able to grab my attention. The release read, “Powerset Reinvents the Search and Discovery Experience for Wikipedia(TM) Articles”. Somehow they must have known that one of my passion points is discovery (as it relates to navigating the web) as it is my belief that social media lay at the cross roads of search and discovery (at least in the sense that social media aids in people’s ability to find new things based on topics and items discussed amongst their friends. I guess this is not just about social media, it is about being social).


Here are some of the new features in Powerset:





  • Factz -- When users enter a topic query, Powerset assembles a compact summary of interesting, and sometimes surprising Factz, extracted from pages across Wikipedia




  • Dossiers -- Powerset creates a summary of information found in Freebase and Wikipedia to give users a quick overview about a topic




  • Answers -- For many questions, Powerset automatically assembles an answer list from sentences in Wikipedia or data in Freebase




  • Semantic Highlighting -- The most relevant search results are highlighted based on the meaning of a user's question




  • Minibrowser -- A result can be expanded to show the snippet in the context of the full Wikipedia article




And a couple of screenshots that I took while exploring:







And finally a promotional video:





Powerset Demo Video from officialpowerset on Vimeo.



All in all I found using Powerset to be an enjoyable experience. When doing research I may try Powerset a few times. I guess the question is will this technology apply to the masses of searchers?



Thoughts?




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Monetizing “Open”

Due to announcements by MySpace, Facebook and Google (not to mention Yahoo’s continual push for open standards) there have been a lot of



talk about DataPortability and the importance of being “open” in the modern web economy. While I am very excited about what all of this openness means for consumers, I am skeptical about the business models of the companies that are making these moves.



In order for any one of these web properties to monetize user data, there will need to be some type of control over the data. The catch 22 is that the brand that exerts more control over data will be the brand that is least likely to get consumers to spend more time with them.



I have some ideas about ways to monetize in an open environment, but one of the reasons that I write this blog is to learn from all of you. I would love to hear some thoughts on how these major web brands will be able to successfully monetize their properties (and not lose consumers) in an open web.




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American Airlines: A Business Traveler's Nightmare

Once again I have been forsaken by American Airlines. This is the third flight in a row where my agenda has been utterly destroyed. It is also the third time (in two months) that I have seen what happens when unhappy workers have to deal with the inefficiencies of a sub par service business.

The worst part of all of this is that no one who works here really cares, and as such business travelers are continually turned off. It is becoming impossible fly American Airlines; as every time we fly American, we lose money (due to lost meetings, time etc.) and we get a little bit older due to the stress of trying to fly on an airline where the staff is working against you, instead of with you (notice I did not say for you, even though they should work for us as we pay our hard earned money. I would settle for working with me at this point).

I have said this before but, I hate American Airlines. Not just for wasting my time though. American Airlines represents everything I hate about the state of air travel and service businesses at large in America.

Note To American Airlines Execs:

Have you guys given up? I know the industry is rough right now, but that does not mean that you should shut down all customer relations and service and scrape along the bottom giving the bare minimum to your customers. As a marketer (and consumer), I know the power of positive perception, and how much a mere acknowledgment can mean.

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eBrick and Mortar

Velaro eCommerce Solution- SaasWhy is it that many online retailers have not adhered to the same standards that have been set offline? Technology has played a large role in this, but we are getting to the point where this is not longer an excuse.

I saw a press release today from Velaro. It got me thinking about the state of eCommerce and the growing number of companies that are creating SaaS soultions. As a thank you for getting me thinking, I am going to focus on some of the things that Velaro is doing right (and I need to mention one thing they are doing wrong. Guys, your demo video does not appear to be embeddable. If it were, I would have posted it and gotten additional eyeballs on it at no cost. Am I missing the embed code?)

  • Co-browsing

    • Offer your online visitors hands-on assistance whenever they need it! Co-browsing allows you to co-navigate with your visitors, leading them through pages and forms. When your agent navigates to a new page, the visitor is brought to that same page. When the visitor navigates to a new page, your agent will also be brought to the same page



  • Click To Call

    • Allow your customers to decide the best way to interact with you! Jupiter Research states that "over 90% of online visitors prefer human interaction" and with Click-to-Call, your visitors are given that human interaction with the opportunity to request an automatic phone call from one of your online agents



  • Live Chat

    • Engage the right visitor at the right time by providing immediate service at the time of need! With over seven years of experience in the Live Chat market, Velaro understands the importance of engaging website visitors in new and exciting ways. Live Chat is a quick and easy way for you to interact with your customers and to let them know you care about all their needs




The beauty of these services is that they work with regular web standards. No java or applets!

There is more, but I am not in the business of selling (and this is not a sponsored post). Head over to the Velaro site and check out Liveinfluence. It is pretty compelling!

Photo Sharing For Dummies/Photo Cloud Computing

I love this guy!


I have seen this type of video for other social media related platforms and I think they are great! For all of us in the fishbowl, this is common sense. In order for us to break out of the fishbowl it is our job to educate. This is when social media will fully realize it's potential!


Have a look:







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Is Google Making Us Better Marketers ?

Is Google Making Us Better Marketers ?


I just got done reading an article in Ad Age entitled “Google Pricing System Plagues Players Like P&G”. One of the main tenets of the article is, due to the fact that Google’s pricing model was not set up for advertisers to achieve economies of scale, large CPG’s cannot achieve the same type of competitive advantage when buying media from Google and other search engines.


This article also speaks of the branding effect of search engines. Impressions on search engines are still not considered valuable to many marketers, but the ones that do consider impressions valuable (I am included in this camp from time to time) sometimes find themselves in a bit of a pickle. If you are buying search merely for impressions, your click through rate will probably be low and your quality score will be negatively affected. It becomes imperative to write compelling copy, bid on relevant terms and bring users to a relevant landing page; all of which result in a higher click through rate and potentially less impressions.


So far I have demonstrated how Google is making us better marketers by:




  • Forcing us to be more strategic

    • We can no longer rely on scale economics alone to get the message across to a large number of people



  • Ensuring we write more effective copy

    • Witty taglines don’t always cut it on Google



  • Making us be relevant to consumers

    • Need I say more?




Google Is Also Forcing All Of Us To Create Media


Pretend for a moment you are a toothbrush manufacturer. You may say to yourself, “I am not a media producer, and why should I be?” Sure, as a toothbrush manufacturer you have created witty commercials, but you paid your fancy Madison Avenue ad agency millions of dollars to do so, and you cannot afford to do it often.


In the slides below you can see how Oral B decided to fulfill the need for content and it seems to be beneficial. Not only is Oral B able to provide more than one reason to go to their site, their content helps to gain visibility on search engines.


Branded content is all the rage these days, but Google and other engines are forcing brands to create both text based and multimedia content if they want to be discovered, and as a result, marketers are adding more value to their consumers than ever before.





The World Wide Social Network

The interactive nature of the web makes it inherently social. It is my contention that one will not realize the true potential of the web if they simply treat is as a magazine on a screen. In fact, I feel one will never realize the true potential of the web if there is not some type of conversation embedded somewhere in the experience they are creating for the web.


The web is a social engine. A really, really big social engine!


A few months ago I wrote a post entitled, "Google: The Web Is Your Facebook". Looking back, this was a silly title for a post, but I cannot change it(you have to love the permanence of the web!).


I started the post by saying:


"when everyone has a blog (or something tantamount to a home base) and can easily push and pull data to applications of their choice (in a well structured web), will we even need Facebook?"


In a short few months my thinking has ballooned significantly! This is not about Facebook, Google, MySpace or any other technology. This shift in the way we view the web is a sociological, psychological, anthropological (and some other -ogical's) shift in the way we view technology.


Okay Adam, What The Hell Is Your Point!


The reason that I am on this tirade today is that Google (once again) has made a significant announcement in the progression of the web-as-social network. Have a look at this video. I realize he gets a little bit technical and this may be a bit tough for the faint of heart but keep in mind that I too have only basic HTML skills. It is the concepts that you really need to grasp, not the code.





The most compelling enhancements to iGoogle are based on the ability to pull in contacts and get updates on their activities (can someone say Facebook Newsfeed).


Essentially what Google seems to be doing is creating a window into the world wide social network!



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The Virtual World is Upon Us; But It May Not be What You Thought

The hype cycle for virtual worlds seems to have come and gone for many marketers and members of the media. For those dismissive of virtual worlds I have one thing to say, hold on tight, the future is upon us!


Last October I wrote a post entitled, "6 Thing That Second Life and Facebook Have In Common". I was intentionally being provocative and got a little bit of pushback on these claims. Well, I am back with similar thinking and wish to reiterate the some definition of the word "virtual" that I laid out in the comments section of the aforementioned post:



  • Adj. Computer Science Created, simulated, or carried on by means of a computer or computer network: virtual conversations in a chatroom.

  • Existing or resulting in essence or effect though not in actual fact, form, or name


As you can see, the word "virtual" has no inextricable connection to 3D graphics, persistence or Furries :) (look it up if you have to)


Get To The Point Sir!


A partnership has been announced by two bleeding edge companies; SeeSaw and LocaModa. The result it an even more bleeding edge media reality (and a tremendous amount of opportunity for marketers)!


SeeSaw defines itself as:


SeeSaw is the most extensive network of digital out-of-home media having aggregated 36 digital signage networks across 25 different categories of locations into a comprehensive national network with 22,000 venues nationally and growing.


LocaModa defines itself as:


LocaModa connects people and places. The company's social platform enables people to access and control media in their favorite places, bringing location experiences to the web and web experiences to locations. LocaModa connects people in bars, cafes, colleges, public spaces and conferences.


Combined the two companies aim to marry digital out of home with mobile social networking; creating an experiential platform for consumers and marketer's alike.


According to Monte Zweben, co-founder and chairman of the board of SeeSaw Networks;


"The mixture of digital signage, the Web and mobile devices extends an advertiser's investment in impressions to engage a larger community of people through viral marketing opportunities on social networks...with LocaModa's mobile social platform, an impression on a digital sign can turn into a conversation among the people at a location, the people monitoring a location online, and ultimately through the people connected as friends on social networks."


When combining all of these factors, the result is nothing short of a basic definition on virtual world, only this experience does not take place in a purely digital environment. This experience is housed by the physical world. While I am sure I can get into examples of the tremendous opportunities this creates for marketers, I will hold off for now. I would however love to hear your thoughts.


In Other Virtual World News


Sociotown has launched a browser based virtual world. Other virtual worlds such as Second Life suffer from high barriers to entry due to heavy clients and the necessity for a large amount of computing power. Perhaps the browser based virtual world will be able to capture more attention due to it's ease of access.





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It’s Not The Mobile Web, It’s The Web

I just got done reading a post on Read/Write web that has me all a twitter. The post is entitled,

“Is the Mobile Web Dead? Some Mobile Entrepreneurs Say Yes”

The post speaks of how ex-Yahoo! Mobile evangelist turned startup entrepreneur Russell Beattie announced that he is folding his company Mowser, a service that lets you view the Web on your mobile phone. Here is a quote from Beattie as to why this decision was made,
"I don't actually believe in the 'Mobile Web' anymore, and therefore am less inclined to spend time and effort in a market I think is limited at best, and dying at worst. I'm talking specifically about sites that are geared 100% towards mobile phones and have little to no PC web presence. Two years ago I was convinced that the mobile web would continue to evolve in the West to mimic what was happening in countries like Japan and Korea, but it hasn't happened, and now I'm sure it isn't going to.

In other words, I think anyone currently developing sites using XHTML-MP markup, no Javascript, geared towards cellular connections and two inch screens are simply wasting their time, and I'm tired of wasting my time."



A few take-aways:




  • Anyone who is creating a service that is only geared for mobility is missing the boat.

  • The notion of the “mobile web” is a farce.


 


The Experience Is the Message


To deem the web browsing experience on a mobile phone as something entirely separate from the experience on a PC is a grievous error. Sure, any service that is going to be viewed on a mobile device must be appropriated for such an experience, but those who do not take into account the fact that people want their data wherever they are, on whatever device they are on, are grossly mislead.


At the onset of the mobile computing era many believed that the handset needed its own software and standards separate from the ones created for the desktop. While it is true that there needs to be differences in presentation and experience, all data needs to reside in the same cloud. This is especially true for personal data in order to create a truly useful, transmedia experience. This is the type of experience that consumers in the next phase of the web will come to demand.


How Do We Market When The Experience Is The Message?


According to eMarketer, total mobile ad spend worldwide will hit $19 billion by the year 2012. $6.5 billion of that is projected to be spent in the US market. The important question is, how will this money be spent?


In order to get a clearer picture of percent growth year over year, I took eMarketer’s data and created the following chart.


 


 



As you can see the largest percent growth year over year (on average) will be in the search sector, followed by messaging. While this may come as no surprise to some, I feel that these numbers support the argument that mobile is an extension of the web at large, as opposed to being its own entity. Search and messaging have much greater potential to lead back to an experience where a user session is longer, and potentially more transactional. As a marketing vehicle it has always been my contention that the mobile device is best suited for extended direct response programs and CRM functions. Many advertisers today are using the mobile space for branding exercises. This is a reaction to the common (but fleeting) notion of the mobile web as an experience separate from the web at large.


When the experience is the message, marketing must become am exercise in adding value to the end user. The advertising paradigm has shifted to the point where experiences are more influential than impressions, and more easy for marketers to create.

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Hey You, Get Off Of My Cloud!


I was a little late to the blogging game (at least in comparison to the David Armano's of the world), but I have been doing it for quite some time.


 I feel that things are coming full circle today. One of my first posts in 2006 was called, "The Magical Disappearing Desktop" (this was pre A Media Circ.us). I was at Supernova in San Francisco when it became quite apparent that the notion of local computing was becoming obsolete.


At the time I could not have predicted that the notion of cloud computing would become so popular so quickly, and that it would make the headlines of such major publications as Businessweek within two years, but I knew it would be a big deal. (for things I am tagging on this subject, check back at this link periodically http://del.icio.us/platter/%22cloud%2Bcomputing%22).


Last night I had dinner with Jeremy Beyda, Real Estate Mogul (and soon to be interactive marketing superstar) and the product SugarSync came up. We began talking about the future of cloud computing and the convergence of information and the divergence of hardware.


Here are some slides I posted this past summer:









Today I came across a video from CloudTrade demonstrating  their new product. It set me back on the path of interest that began a few years ago. With products like Google Docs becoming more popular, the realization of cloud computing for the masses is imminent.


The question is, how much of this cloud will be governed by Google?


How many of these new start-ups already have their exit strategy in mind (sell to Google)?


It is very exciting for me to watch the progression into a clouded world. I, for one have had to many local issues, and lost too much data as a result of local computing to want our current method of computation to continue as is.


Bring on the cloud!






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Mobile Discovery: What Is It Really Going To Take?

I feel as though I have heard (and admittedly said) the words, "this is the next big thing, it is huge in Asia" a thousand times. This statement is of course in reference to the Quick Response (QR) codes or 2D bar codes.


A few questions to ask are, why have response codes not taken off in the US? What is it going to take take to proliferate this technology? Is it possible that the fact that this is huge in Asia is merely a sociological difference and this type of activity will never be that popular in the US?


I found this case study today that sheds some light on these questions. Let me know what you think.






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Who Says You Can't Make Mistakes!

A few days ago, under the pressures of work and urban living I lashed out against a company with a series of harsh tweets (twitter posts for the uninformed). This company was having technical issues and people were receiving a mass influx of email. It was pretty annoying!

A day or so later I received a very personal email with a sincere apology and an offer. This company creates custom search engines and offered to make me one (I thought that was kind of cool). I turned around and acknowledged their integrity and would like to share their official apology:

Three days ago we experienced a critical technical problem with our hosting company. One of the mail servers kept running a script which resulted with some people receiving a huge amount of emails form Joongel.

We are extremely sorry for all the inconvenience caused. We didn't mean to cause any harm to anybody.

We have found out what was the problem and fixed it. Our hosting company caused
us a lot of damage and we will make sure this will never happen again.

Please accept our sincere apology.

Dror Ceder
Co-founder

In case you have not guessed it, the company is Joongel.

Now, I want to be clear. This is not an invite for people to go out and annoy people and apologize in hopes of getting a loving blog post, but in this case I think Joongel is doing a good job of cleaning up their mess and I appreciate it, therefore I am helping them out.

I will be putting up a badge so you can try out the official A Mediacirc.US search bar. I would love some feedback (I am sure Joongel would love it too)

It's The Service Economy, Stupid

Advertising- a form of communication whose purpose is to
inform potential customers about products and services and how to obtain and
use them

In an era where consumers have the ability to tune out sponsored messages with
ease, many brands are left scrambling to find new ways to ensure their voices
are heard. Still, many advertisers, marketers and brand managers overlook a
fundamental change that is occurring in the advertising landscape.

No longer can we count on the traditional tactic of content to garner the
attention of consumers. For many consumers, content is a commodity that is
expected to be obtained at no cost (at least, non premium content).

So what is an advertiser/brand to do in a landscape where consumers no longer
value the content for attention bond that once fueled the ad economy?

Provide value added services (of course)!

I realize that this concept is not new. Advertisers have been doing this
for a while, but in the interactive space the opportunity is potentially much
greater.

One example from last year that I like to use (simply because it is funny) is Cosmopolitan
Magazines Fake Calls which provides the service of helping women get out of
bad dates. While this was a clever idea, it is certainly a one trick pony.

So what is the longer term solution?

While there are many long term "service as advertising" plays, one
thing that is extremely compelling to me these days (probably because I am a
search geek) is Google's recent move to enable their Google Docs
service to operate offline.

In a blog post this past Monday entitled, Bringing The Cloud With You (a reference to the
increasingly popular notion of cloud
computing) the big G announced that they would be making it possible to
access the Google Docs service (via Google
Gears) from your desktop.

Why would Google make such a move you ask?



The answer is simple, to take on Microsoft’s share of the
desktop while maintaining their own share of search (I would put an emphasis on
the latter). What is not as simple is the question, how does Google plan to
monetize this service? One may guess that Google will be placing relevant ads
next to text in Google Docs, but maybe there are other ways? Maybe there are
ways for advertisers to sponsor this service for a segment of users. What do
you think the consumer response would be to such a play? How long would it take
before consumers came to expect their services for free in the same way they
now look at content?

Can the service economy really be monetized and how long can
it last?

I would love to hear your thoughts!


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Why Sprockets Will Change Advertising On The Internet Forever

By Sean X Cummings and Adam Broitman



There has been an incredible buzz over the coming of
Sprocket technology, and many people we have spoken with agree that it will
fundamentally change the way we approach the interactive space at large. Much
in the way the explosion of Facebook enabled breaking down the barriers around
content and engagement as it relates to mining your casual friend network,
Sprockets will, for the first time, provide us with a holistic picture of what
our consumers are doing online, while providing the first truly intelligent
data-mining agent for ourselves.

More interactive than widgets
Sprockets are not widgets 2.0 any more than Facebook is
MySpace 2.0. They are, however, a technology that finally moves beyond the
two-way conversation with consumers, creating an enhanced, multi-directional
conversation among the consumer, company, site, data and -- more importantly
for advertisers -- among the Sprockets themselves.

Allow us to get technical here for a minute. Sprockets use
passive preference profiling (PPP) and interpretive semantics (IS), giving them
the ability to learn. What do we mean by that? Well, remember all the talk we
heard about "intelligent agents" or Google's dream of
"artificial intelligence?" Sprockets are the first applications to
truly approach that level of automated, interpreted content collection.

The beauty does not stop there. If all Sprockets did was
provide consumers with a way they could accomplish more online in less time,
and have it be more relevant, it would be a substantial breakthrough. The
beauty of Sprockets is that they provide advertisers, marketers and analytics
groups with the same type of automation through semantic interpretation; the
data, however, is passed along in the reverse direction.

Most companies are keeping their current strategy regarding
Sprockets fairly quiet, but by Q3 2008 anyone with a decent online presence
will be pushing ahead full-steam. If your company has not figured out how to
implement Sprockets, or you don't have a full-time Sprocket strategist on staff
by the end of the year, you are almost definitely going to be on the tail end
of this beast, and this is one place where you don't want to be riding the long
tail.

 


Benefits: real or imagined?
We are often asked, "Are Sprockets really going to
change the economics of the internet, or are they just another overhyped
technology?" and "What's so game changing about Sprockets?"

First: we have seen Sprockets work. We have seen them work
in the real world, not a demo. We have observed as Sprockets learn and grow in
complexity over the first two weeks of usage.

Second: Sprockets define simplicity. Anyone can develop a
Sprocket. The Sprocket Developer's Kit (SDK) has a simple drag-and-drop,
single-screen user interface. The user just connects tubes, called
"synaptic tubes," linking their basic interest points. This process
takes 15 minutes, tops!

From there the Sprocket takes over, filling in the gaps with
your internet persona while tweaking, augmenting or modifying the few data
points given. It does this by monitoring surfing habits, online purchase
activity and time spent on content, semantically absorbing the it. The genius
is that Sprockets do not store all this data. They retain meta-types of the
data in real time. In essence, every page you hit is crawled, indexed and
semantically related to your entire history. It is then meta-typed and
discarded, retaining only the meta-data.

 


An open-source legend is born
This is one of the most important developments to ever come out
of the open-source community. The initial kernel was programmed by Alexander
Dorsay III over the summer of 2006; however, community did not adopt the
concept initially. It wasn't until Anya Khait, an environmental architecture
student with a Ph.D in genetics decided to apply techniques and theories from
the Biomimicry Institute to the Sprocket kernel that the true power of
Sprockets was realized. She developed the "synaptic tubes" and the
core engine behind the algorithm modifier based on the growth of Ivy, which is
able to grip around any surface and adapt to its environment.

Without getting too deep into the science, let's say that
Sprockets, by design, have a "public you," and a "private
you" setting. By nature, most consumers exhibit a personal dichotomy --
their private and public selves. With some, those two personas are almost
identical; with others they are quite divergent. Other Facebook-style
properties treat you as one self, but you are never just one. The Sprocket
dynamically adapts to your activity, not the other way around. You do not
choose to tell it "I want to be private today." The Sprocket
dynamically adapts "on the fly" to activity that obscures your
secondary profile. They are not separate, but they are distinct. A single
synaptic tube links the two personae as it grabs information.

When a Sprocket shares any of the data in the outward
direction the entire profile is made anonymous, even down to erasing IP
histories, or what is referred to as digital public memory. The intelligence
sits in a data-hash in the Sprocket, changing the internal Sprocket algorithm.
That is what is different about Sprockets, the algorithm itself dynamically
adjusts; not just parameters, but the fundamentals of the algorithm.

The same Sprocket you develop for a website, can be used on
any mobile device, or converted with the Sprocket converter to any computer as
a standalone app -- although you will lose much of the semantically dynamic
algorithm modifying aspects of Sprockets that way. They are what the promise of
Java was supposed to be before Microsoft derailed it with their own version.
However, since Sprockets were built on the foundation of the web, that fear is
somewhat mitigated. In fact, it takes advantages of some of the same AJAX
technology framework that Web 2.0 does.

 



Sprockets are not AI
They are merely a highly sophisticated algorithm that uses
the collective intelligence as a decisioning engine. The advantage is they
don't make the mistake of using the collective intelligence of the web as it
exists now. The sheer volume and mess of the organization of website content
makes the collective intelligence there somewhat. well, stupid. If it wasn't,
you wouldn't need search engines like Google or Ask.com to make sense of it.
Instead, they use the collective intelligence of the
"Sprocketosphere," which uses only the intelligent decisions in the
data, and not the data itself.

Take a look at comparisons to other popular platforms:




  • Standard website: one-way pull request from the consumer

  • Rich media: one-way pull request from consumer, with
    engagement

  • Widgets: customization by consumer and selective
    identification of interest

  • Sprockets: multi-directional conversation with consumer and
    website, customizable ad tracking, alignment checking and reporting, semantic
    web gathering and inter-Sprocket communication.


The user no longer has to request the web pages; the
Sprockets talk amongst each other, among the web, among your email, SMS,
address book and social networking to dynamically deliver to you the zeitgeist
of you. When you choose to surf manually, the Sprockets learn your behavior and
communicate in-between the other Sprockets to adjust your "algorithm"
on who you are and what your interests are online. Best of all? They can do it
with the existing structure of the web, requiring no more tagging or special
codes to be inserted.

We have heard many promises of the next 'big' thing. We have
heard about many hyped technologies. Let's hope that Sprockets don't go the way
of Cold Fusion. In the end Sprockets can only be as intelligent as the user
they are learning from. Hopefully, the users reading this article will be one
step ahead.


Sean X and Adam were so taken with the potential of
Sprockets that they formed SprocketX.com. An open-source company that will
produce tools to leverage the potential of the Sprocket kernel.


www.sprocketx.com


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Let's Just Call It Mobility Week At aMediacirc.us

Here at aMediacirc.us, I tend to respond to things that are prevalent in the news. The number of posts about mobile this week is a direct reaction to the volume of news stories pertaining to mobile (I also have a love of mobile, maybe I just seek this stuff out).

I have a ton of work to do today for my "day job" so I am going to do a little roundup of some things that are on my "mobile mind":

That is all the mobility I have for you for right now but there is a lot more going on. Stay tuned as aMediacirc.us Mobility Week continues :)




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The Mobility Is The Message (Part Two- The Whites)



Okay, so my reference to "the whites" in the title was simply a way to indulge my Lebowski fetish (if you don't get the joke, I recommend going out and renting The Big Lebowksi, today). I am sorry to say that this post will contain no information about The Dude, Walter or Donnie. No, we have more important things to talk about- namely mobility!

In yesterday's post I presented a product that Google is working on that furthers their foray into the wild world of mobile computing. If all goes well Google will be one of the major catalysts behind another giant stride in the mobile world.

According to Google (reported by CNET), if all goes well we will have an extra special holiday season in the year two thousand and nine. It will not be stocking stuffers or Hanukah gelt that will make us cheer. What we will have to be thankful for will be quite different than the usual holiday charms. In 2009 we will have what Google is referring to as Wi-Fi 2.0, or super fast bandwidth for our handheld devices.

Google is currently outlining a plan that will have consumers surfing the web from their palmtops at gigabits per second. This plan takes advantage of unused TV broadcast channels commonly known as "white spaces" (now you see where Lebowski reference comes in).

Google is looking for a "unique opportunity to provide ubiquitous wireless access for all Americans"- Richard Whitt, Google's telecommunications counsel.

One of the ramifications in a world of ubiquitous computing is ubiquitous marketing. Are we ready for that?


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The Mobility Is The Message

Upon the completion of my master's degree I swore that I would never repeat the much touted Mcluhanism, "The Medium Is The Message". Since that time I have come to realize the phrase that I thought was mere puffery is actually deeply ingrained in the communications fabric of the 21st century. And so this phrase has, yet again, become an integral part of my life.

I came across a short blog post on ZDnet today about a mobile feature that Google is launching. The purpose of the feature is to allow one to search without actually entering a search query. A user can sift through relevant content that has been grouped into verticals.

At first I thought to myself, "who cares?", but for some reason I kept thinking about it. When Google makes a move it is hard to avoid scrutiny.

My analysis of this feature can be summed up by a few ideas:

  • Google's realization of the importance of both search and discovery

  • Google's insight into the mobile consumer's behavior


As soon as GPS enabled phones reach critical mass, searching your environment will take on new meaning. It is apparent that Google realizes this and is taking steps towards taking advantage of the impending shift in consumer behavior.

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Two Weeks Of Travel and Marketing Dataportability

I just returned from a long (but enjoyable and very valuable) two weeks of travel. It began at SXSW where I got to hang out with Rynda Laurel of Jet Set Studios, C.C Chapman of The Advanced Guard, John Swords and Giff Constable of The Electric Sheep Company, Mark Wallace of Wello, Kristin Cruscius (Kroosh) of Morpheus Media, Steve Hall of Adrants, Ian Schafer of Deep Focus  and many, many others.

It was awesome!

We even got to hit a local Flickr meetup where we scoured through a massive tower of trash (one man's trash...)



I got back to NYC and in two days it was travel time again. This time on to the iMedia Breakthrough Summit where I was to be speaking on a panel with some brilliant industry leaders.

Here was the breakdown of my panel:

"Data Portability and the Social Graph"
Presenters: David Berkowitz, Director of Emerging Media & Client Strategy, 360i
Adam Broitman, Director, Emerging and Creative Strategy, Morpheus Media
Ben Pashman, VP, Business Development, Gigya, Inc.
Leader: Peter Shankman, CEO, The Geek Factory, Inc.

It was my estimation that the panel was a success, but I cannot say that the panel was a big hit (I am actually not sure, but about 10 people walked out so I know it was not a favorite) even though I got great feedback after the panel was done.

The questions were posed, "What is Dataportability, and Why Should Marketers Care?"

While the answers were not even apparent to myself and the other panelists, I have and will continue to explore the marketing implications of the distributed web. I feel this concept is paramount to any modern marketing strategy and we all must be aware of what this entails.

All of you out there that are working on the Dataportability movement from a purely technical side, I would love to hear what your thoughts are in regards to how this notion impacts marketers. In many instances these days the marketers are at the mercy of the software engineers and programmers (many do not realize this but I certainly do) and we could use your help.

Let's get a conversation started!

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