Filed under: Asia, beta, creativity, Digital culture, Geek stuff, Innovation shops, music, south korea
South Korean MusicShake is a online amateur music mixing service. The service lets users create their own professional quality music using various tools. They hope to provide personalized music for ringtones, and personal websites (blogs, profiles). The service is developed and distributed by SilentMusicBand Corp.
It looks like another great tool for bloggers and I’d tell you more about it but it doesn’t work with any other browser except Microsoft Explorer.. so that’d be their first mistake…
Here I was sitting quietly at my clickboard minding my own business surfing some porn..just kidding, surfing some more boring research sites looking for demographic data or innovation examples and up pops this puppy…www.drivecleaner.com …what the?
You can almost hear the marketing thought process of some bright spark
Q :: Who would most benefit from a drive cleaner?
A :: People with stuff on their hard drives they don’t want anyone to see, people who surf porn
Q :: How do we tell them about our service?
A :: I know! we interrupt them while they’re doing boring mundane everyday things and simply say that we know what they get up to when they’re not doing boring mundane things and that we can keep their secret safe…
When this baby popped up with it’s scaremongering tactics about “files that could compromise your career and your marriage” I was thinking, crap! I better get that sorted, and then I thought to myself…why would my husband care about temporary site files downloaded from Bernard Salt or Innovation Central?
Wouldn’t the place to put these pop up ads be..um…on porn sites?…
Filed under: Digital culture, Emergent media, Geek stuff, The 1% rule, Trends stuff
When it comes to talking about uploads and downloads, there is a theory cited in many newspapers and sites called “The 1% rule”.
It’s an emerging rule of thumb that suggests that if you get a group of 100 people online then one will create content, 10 will “interact” with it (commenting or offering improvements) and the other 89 will just view it.
It’s a meme that emerges strongly in statistics from YouTube, each day there are 100 million downloads and 65,000 uploads which translates to
1,538 downloads per one upload.That puts the “creator to consumer” ratio at just 0.5%, but it’s early days yet and mobile blogging is no doubt higher.
Check out the full story here
there’s been a lot of chat about ‘lifestreaming’ of late, so what is it? well in its simplest form it’s an aggregated view of all your life activities online. it’s a collection of all the ways you communicate, connect and cache your life online.
in it’s simplest form it’s a chronological aggregated view of your life activities both online and offline. it is only limited by the content and sources that you use to define it. most people that create them choose a few sources based on sites that track our activities such as del.icio.us (bookmarking), flickr (photos we take) youtube (videos that we make) etc…then you can either find software to host your own, or find sites that provide a platform for you.
these social network aggregators are a relatively new breed of applications which try to consolidate all our various social networking profiles into one, check it out.
source :: lifestream
abrief example of my lifestream can be found at natuba
Filed under: creativity, Digital culture, Future of Work, Geek stuff, Innovation, Innovative marketing, Trends stuff
Published: September 03, 2007
With the lazy days of summer officially behind us, now is when many start thinking seriously about their career plans. For those who are deeply interested in both technology and marketing, this is your time. A new kind of career is emerging: Enter the Geek Marketer.
While hard statistics are hard to come by, anecdotally I can tell you that dozens of Fortune 500 companies — including some of our clients — are recruiting Geek Marketers either from within or outside. That’s not their specific title, of course. However, it is their role.
With CEOs demanding accountability and time spent online climbing, chief marketing officers are on a push to embed technology into every facet of their strategy. But marketers and technologists are not exactly two peas in a pod. They speak different languages. Marketers like GRPs (gross ratings points). Geeks like APIs (application protocol interfaces). Dilbert mercifully pokes at these differences. It’s all very Mars and Venus.
Enter Geek Marketers. These cross-trained specialists are fluent in both worlds and bridge them. They are marketers by trade, yet they also have a hard-core interest in technology and social anthropology. As curious individuals, they are constantly studying how digital advances are changing our culture and media. Armed with these insights, they regularly apply them in a marketing context by working closely with brand teams to codify new best practices.
Geek Marketers create competitive advantage through rapid-fire testing and learning. The people I know in this role are shepherding the development, testing and measurement of all kinds of groundbreaking marketing programs. Their pilots span from the simple, such as building RSS feeds, to the complex, creating multifaceted community programs. Often they are paired with people like me, who are in a similar role on the agency side.
This may sound like the trendy occupation du jour, but something tells me the position has staying power. To be sure, the entire industry is innovating and everyone’s technical acumen is slowly rising. Still, Geek Marketers are freed to live just a little bit further out on the edge than most. And with no end in sight for what technology can do to transform business, they can continue to play a key role.
Article from Ad Age
Geek 2.0 image from Logic + Emotion
Filed under: Community, Digital culture, Emergent media, FMCG innovation, Geek stuff, Innovation, open source, Social, technorati, unbusiness, Z-list
I’ve just come across the Z-List which was originally started by Mack Collier from A Viral Garden as a way of changing the world order by challenging two concepts — the A-list of bloggers and the Technorati approach to ranking authority.
Essentially you take the list that you find and you add any other blogs that you read & find interesting. The idea being that it’s a way for blogs with less love links to gain more exposure online. To remain on the list you have to have a decent quality blog but it’s basically a user created helping hand for smaller blogs starting out. It’s always good to see a bunch of users helping eachother out & whilst it does have a feel good sort of community aspect to it, it also pointed me in the direction of a bunch of blogs I hadn’t come across before.
So click & enjoy! Check it out here :: Z-list
There’s also a wiki if you want more…
Image from Chaosscenario
Filed under: Asia, Designers, Digital culture, Geek stuff, Innovation, Innovative retail, new product, Nice products, Telco research
Korean handset manufacturers are losing overseas market share. “Ask Korean cell phone makers why they’re losing their market share overseas, and they will tell you it’s because of their focus on top-end products or the strong won”, JoongAngDaily reports. “Some industry analysts, however, take a different view. According to a report released by the research institute of LG, Korean firms are falling behind because they are oblivious to changing consumer demand and because excessive diversifying is eating into their cost competitiveness. The institute noted that today’s consumers are more interested in the “emotional” characteristics of cell phones such as the brand, design, and how the phone feels to the touch, whereas Korean firms are preoccupied with adding new functions. The think tank also criticized Korean firms for having too many models.
Above Story lifted from here
In 2003 Marc Newson designed The Talby for the Japanese market. A stunning handset that looked absolutely beautiful. I remember it because I wanted one so badly. Given the Japanese obsession wtih hyperfunctionality, it was no doubt, crammed with geek goodies. But gee it’s a good looking piece of equipment.
With mobile phones moving further and further down the functionality spectrum, bigger cameras, better screens, more WAP, IMS and other fancy acronyms… when will they stop? I’m looking for a new handset now to replace my Motorola Razr and can’t find any phones that don’t have the fancy bits. For every trend there’s a counter trend, LoFi mobile handset anyone?
I always say ‘good input guarantees good output’ and when it comes to innovation and creativity, I believe that to be true. Some people I know deliberately read a magazine from another industry regularly (fishing or knitting or pregnancy or handyman), others pick a new CD every month and force themselves to find something interesting or positive or appealing in things they wouldn’t normally listen to.
Me personally, I’m addicted to the Internet, so whenever I get online, I always give myself time to follow my nose. I might be researching for a project or looking for some trends info or demographic data for an innovation project but…if I come across a cracker of a site or blog link, even if its unrelated to what I’m doing, I let myself wander… sometimes I end up on a weird nerdy forum or a fancy pants discussion group, it’s usually how I stumble across fantastic research on the web, it’s how I ended up trying out Second Life a few years ago before every Tom, Dick and Barry was buying real estate and talking Linden speak.
So my question is….what do you do to keep yourself fresh? If good input (and varied input) guarantees good ouput, what are you putting in? What do you do to keep yourself thinking differently?
