Posted by Tattletech on Jun 24, 2009 in
Enterprise 2.0,
Social Networking 
Today on the Emerging Web Memo out of Boston from the E 2.0 Conference, ink Communications Director of Social Media, Alexandra Crabb talked about how she is using social media to engage employees of companies internally. Alexandra is using it to extend the enterprise outward through her marketing campaigns. The article goes on to talk about thinking about Enterprise 2.0 in three new ways: 1. Consider ROI Through Imagining Absence 2. Rethink the “I” for Which You’re Trying to Achieve “R” 3. The Nature of Social Media Implies Return. It’s an all around great article on whats happening with Enterprise 2.0 right now.
Tags: Alexandra Crabb, Enterprise 2.0, ink Communications
This week in a ReadWriteWeb article on the changes of MySpace, the writer Marshall Kirkpatrick said “Facebook can’t rule the world for ever. No one can.” We could not agree more - we believe social networking should represent a free exchange of personal data, contacts, photos, videos and any content the user want to share. Instead of a walled garden, we see a community garden that allows users interact, share, exchange, collaborate, and discuss whatever they want to. This raises a question around social networking in general - is it “platform agnostic” or not? Absent any substantial differences in quality, does it really matter whether you park your online persona at Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, YouTube, Flickr or any of the dozens (hundreds?) of other sites?
Obviously, we don’t know exactly what the future looks like - if any of our readers do, please e-mail us! But we do think that the future of social networking is not going to be about the providers/platforms per se, but about the larger community and how providers facilitate user interaction. Open standards or open social may be at the bedrock of this future networking, going hand in hand with the augmented reality demonstrated by LBS. Just a quick glance in the direction of Egypt in the past year or two, and more recently Iran, shows exactly what we are talking about: its back to the old saying that its the message (real time interaction) that counts, not the media (Facebook, Twitter, et al). – JLH
Tags: Facebook, Marshall Kirkpatrick, MySpace, Social network
If you haven’t figured it out already, there are some entrepreneurs that are memorable and some that are not. This one you can’t forget even if you try - Ari Wegter, one of the Co Founders of LoveFilm, the European online DVD distributor like NetFlix but with a better name; and now one of the Co Founder’s of GlibHippo, a new vertical for 18-34 year old males in the Net Generation. Caught up with Ari in his restaurant in Copenhagen - and we warn you, it’s raw and uncensored, like we like him!
Tattletech: Your site says “We Speak European”. I like that - how does it inform your everyday business practices?
Ari Wegter: GlibHippo is an opportunistic play - After years of doing start-ups with capital intensive, bleeding edge technology, I wanted to do something different, something simple that made money from day-one. So I decided to exploit the inherent inefficiencies of today’s online advertising market in which buyers and sellers are both clueless and disconnected. This venture is conceived of as a luxury guide product, a kind of bespoke digital navigator for Alexa 1000 customers. In other words, GlibHippo caters to blue chip publishers and advertisers, connecting them via GlibHippo’s propietary trading platform. Here’s how it works: we buy web traffic internationally, re-package that traffic by vertical media category, e.g. video games, movies or music audiences, and sell it to European advertisers. Since many of our upstream customers are American - who labor under the illusion that the EU is a coherent single market with a common language - we arrived at the tag line “We Speak European”. Just a dash of Monty Pythonesque humor to denote that we are a vintage European internet company.
TT: It sounds like your target audience is 18-34 year old males. Doesn’t that exclude a lot of potential users?
AW: Yes, it does - if you consider a global audience of 250 million users to be a limitation to our reach. GlibHippo specializes in media categories that correspond closely with our publishing network’s core user profile, namely young, tech savvy, digital entertainment-hungry males with disposable income to boot. We understand the behavior of this premium segment because we belong to it ourselves.
TT: Social networking is being cited as the cornerstone for the marketing efforts of more and more companies lately. What kind of sustained or increased growth do you see in social networking, and in what directions?
AW: Social networking as a marketing tool is underused and overrated. The more intrusive facebook becomes in my private space, the less likely it is users will want to return there. Also, social networking traffic is cheap. Traditional online advertising is no different from above-the-line content in that it works in best in semi-public spheres. Only when the message becomes more sophisticated can we expect to see internet user tolerance grow beyond the remote-control response adopted from skipping TV-ads. I believe marketing trends will shift gradually from advertisers preferring major portal channels towards highly targeted niche (i.e. vertical content) social network sites. Eventually, analog channels will be entirely displaced by online / mobile marketing worldwide. And then, whoever owns the pipes controls the flow. And no - content is not king, liquidity is king.
TT: You must have some gamers on staff - what do you guys enjoy playing most, what are some of your new favorites?
AW: That is true! We dig games and gadgets. Between the GlibHippo founders we cover all platforms from console to PC. So Josh is a Call of Duty veteran who “gits some” every day on XBox Live. Søren is a real guitar hero. Maik,our German Sales Director, loves Killerspiele and has developed impressive chainsaw skills on Gears of War. I prefer racing and simulation games with any type of hardware.
TT: How has your success with Lovefilm dovetailed with the development and growth of GlibHippo?
AW: I lost my virginity as an entrepreneur at Lovefilm. As Europe’s largest digital entertainment site today with more the 1.1 millions active users, Lovefilm showed us how hard it is to reach your target audience on the web. Controlling your cost-per-acquisition of new customers is the key to sustainable growth, particularly in a cash-constrained environment. GlibHippo helps advertisers to achieve this goal while connecting them to the right publishers. The next step for us is to build a full-fledged exchange platform.
TT: As the recent economic downturn has dragged on, inventory management and control have become more crucial than ever. Do you have any indication from your partners and publishers that this has started to relent?
AW: Signals are weak, so no real indication yet. Traffic sales are down, inventory prices are depressed and advertisers are still in cost-cutting mode. It’s a bear market out there with little change is sight til Q4 this year.
TT: Word on the street is that Ari Gold is your hero, any others out there?
AW: Want to hug it out bitch? I admit: Ari Gold is my alter-ego. Jeremy Piven has gotten the break he deserves with this role, from playing the perennial best-friend to leading man in Entourage. His abrasive, hyper-American management style is everything Europeans loathe and fear about the land of the free. I find that amusing. Gold is a post-modern superhero, a flawed human specimen endowed with mythical powers of persuasion and greed. Pretty easy to identify with, just like my other HBO favorite Tony Soprano. I think Ari Gold will give Obama a run for his money as Republican nominee in 2012!
Tags: Advertising, Lovefilm, online advertising
We just stumbled on JuiceCaster while doing some research on a story on location based geo tagging (we think this is the space to watch) and now are distracted. Why? Well first the name is just plain cool. Second, their value proposition is simple and does what we should be doing with content from our mobile, geo tagging without having to think to add a geo tag. It’s automatic.
Fierce Wireless reports that JuiceCaster provides one-touch, real-time sharing of pictures and videos directly from a camera phone to many social-networking and blogging sites. JuiceCaster is about keeping people constantly connected to their online communities/social networks. The beautiful thing is that because all pictures and videos are geotagged, users can look for content based on specific location criteria. Isn’t this is what having a mobile is all about - we are on the go, we take a photo and it should be tagged from the spot where were took the photo. It should easily flow to our social networks and better yet, it should pop up on map that not only shows me where my friends are but where that content was taken or where other geo content resides. I want one big snapshot of my content and my social networks. Better yet, give me a real life screenshot of my social network and content. Seeing this already with the visual social network platform IRLConnect where you can now see geo tagged live mobile video broadcasts (via Bambuser), mobile video and photos (via MobyPicture) and all your social networks on a map. Yup, that’s what I want, a screenshot of my life. - JLH
Tags: Bambuser, Geo tagging, IRL Connect, JuiceCaster, Mobile content, MobyPicture, Online Communities, Social network
Nimbuzz, the super fly mobile social messenger, just brought in a new CMO, Neal Fullman. Neal has chops. He is the former International Communications director at fring and is in charge of brand development, marketing and communications strategy for the ever expanding Nimbuzz.
It’s like someone added MiracleGrow to Nimbuzz and they are seeing unprecendeted growth with more than 25,000 new users joining every day. Plus, some very strategic global distribution deals which are not yet announced. (more on that later). – JLH
Tags: Neal Fullman, Nimbuzz
Lot’s of talk out there about location and how to reach users with advertising. Proximity based, location based and now zonal markting takes center stage. As the location based services market continues to evolve day by day, we see constant shifts as both mobile operators, mobile applications and web based location based services struggle to find the heady mix that captures what is at stake: money.
Zonal marketing is different. In this recent article we read about Vodfone’s new zonal marketing campaign launching in Czech Republic and Germany, oddly early adopters for this type of advertising. Instead of traditional location-based services which essentially identifies the current location of the user (s) to process location-dependent information, zonal marketing, according to the article states that “people on your friends list are automatically logged into a zone as soon as they enter it. A zone-based service doesn’t first have to locate your friends for you because in theory it already knows where they all are.”
The article also goes on to say that the technical differences between normal and zonal LBS may be subtle and highly technical. And the big kicker is this — zone-based technology promises to make location-based services and advertising slicker. Does slicker mean more targeted? In a recent Read Write Web article, users have indicated that they are willing to accept ads if they are targeted to their very specific interests and current location. So there is hope, but this would mean that the whole system has to change - that the mobile/advertising/location ecosystem has to get to know their users and where they are, what they are doing when they get there and what is around them. It’s a whole new world out thre and the user will decide what they want in to enter their world, not the advertiser. -- JLH
Tags: Location-based service, Zonal Marketing
All I have to say is cool - geo stuff is just getting down right sexy. This news from Yahoo at Where 2.0 today about adding yet more geo tools to its line up. Why? Cause geo anything is the new frontier. By making this API Placemaker, Yahoo wants to open up the deep geo web - moving from a web of pages to a web of objects.
Developers can feed Placemaker any kind of structured and unstructured data, including feeds and web pages, and the app will analyze the text and extract location data from it. This enables tagging of content with location data and creates hyper-local products based on this data. This opens the door to maturing geo targeted advertising which makes everyone happy.
So we
finally got the chance to talk with Mans Adler, the uber-talented Swede behind
Bambuser.
Tattletech: Bambuser - what is it? It sounds like something you would get from the Flintstones.
Mans Adler: Bambuser is a service that gives the user the opportunity to stream live video from a mobile phone or web-cam to the web by using EDGE, 3G or WiFi network.
The simplicity of the application and the unlimited mobility gives you the opportunity to instantly share your experiences with your viewers and the extremely low latency enables interaction with the audience through the web-to-mobile chat.
To add even more context to the live-stream, we’ve added Real-time Geo-tagging that is enabled via cell-id or GPS. Bambuser has users in more than 100 nations.
In Swedish, bambuser is an old word which if directly translated would mean a sailor which only manage to do easier tasks. Meaning that bambuser should be so simple that even my grandmother could do it. But also mobile on the seven seas.
TT: There is a lot of competition out there for live broadcast streaming from the mobile, what is going give you legs and keep you around in the long term?
MA: Bambuser have developed a slightly different technology compared to our competitors, our untraditional way of sending the data makes us keep latency down to only a second. Our competitors many times can have a latency of 30-40 seconds. But thats just technology, what is interesting with keeping latency down is the magic of real-time - INTERACTIVITY and a feeling of presence. As I always use to say it is hard to be present in history. When you stay with low latency people can actually communicate in a meaningful way. Just ask yourself how easy it is to have a conversation with someone on the other side of the globe with a 3-4 second delay.
TT: The idea for Bambuser was tucked away from your childhood, can you tell us that story?
MA: When I grow up my best friend moved from
Sweden to indonesia since his father had to work there. I was about 4 and even though I am smart I hadn’t learned to write just yet, but I still wanted to stay in touch with my best friend. Calling was heavily expensive, so that was not an alternative. But back then the postal service in Sweden had a magic service, you recorded stuff on a little yellow cassette tape and put that in an yellow envelope and send it across the world. My friend then listened to my side of the tape and then recorded an answer on the other side and sent it back to me. The iteration took about a month and the half an hour of recording was filled with me and him singing songs and a lot of illogical chatter but it didn’t matter that the content was meaningless cause it gave me that feeling of presence. I felt Petter, my friend’s name, was close to me even though he was geographically on the other side of the planet.
TT: We have seen telecommunications change so much in the past 10 years alone with one constant need to connect, where do you see the future?
MA: I cannot say that much about the future without looking back into history. I think Jeff Bezos have a great point when he talks about our belief in bringing light back in the 19th century actually we did something else, we actually brought electricity. We have only seen the first days of the web and we do not have any clue of where it will be taking us. Our technology will only enforce our basic needs as human beings and that is wonderful. I think together with many other that the next revolution will be in biology. Connect your cells to the web and magic will happen, we just need to figure out some good interface between the cell and its wireless communication.
TT: So you always have a smile on your face and a positive outlook on everything you talk about – what’s up with that?
MA: Maybe it is my different approach to life and my belief in freedom of choice. I read a philosopher called Spinoza (Einstein’s favorite) once. His philosophy is based upon that we do not ourselves have freedom of choice but that every choice you make is made for the best of everything. It is a great comfort to have knowing that every decision you make is made for the best for everything otherwise that choice wouldn’t be possible. Also I am living the dream of my life and I love it.
TT: Let’s talk about nuts — in your opinion, what’s the king of all nuts?
MA: All those people talking about how you should do stuff and they havent done jack shit themselves. It is like listening to the second straight hour of lecture from the expert in how often we need to have a break which is about every half an hour. It just does not make sense it is nuts.
I really don’t like voice mail. It’s annoying. This recent article in Slate said exactly what i have been saying at parties, over cocktails, when my mom leaves really long messages about Aunt Betty who was married to Uncle Peter and what they did at Saturday Steak dinner night.
Which is why I love Google Voice -basically it gives you one number that connects all your phones and lets you be the boss about who can call which phone when. Again, with Choice! These companies today are giving us users choice - oh my god! Long gone are the days when we gotta take cause that is ATT made us do.
It’s only in the US now and I live in Europe so I can’t access it all the time, but I hear through the grapevine that they are working on this. I normally don’t get up and do a little dance about anything Google does, but this time, I am dancing baby. See me dance.
Tags: Google Voice, GrandCentral, Telephony
If you have a blog, then you know about comment spam. If you are anything like us here at Tattletech, you must hate it as much as we do. Imagine if you are SonyBMG who manages celebrity websites or if you are an online news service or news paper. A reporter posts a great article on discovering some scrolls in the Dead Sea and the comments that accompany the story are about Viagra and other enhancements, profanity and maybe some unrecognizable characters. That reduces the quality of the article and devalues the comments of your community, costing you advertising due to lost eyeballs.
But even if I am not SonyBMG or the NY Observer, but I run a tech news blog (like I do) and I have to spend all my time reading ridiculous moderator que of spam that obviously should have been dumped before it even got there. It takes up so much time and reduces the quality of these fine editorial exposes if there is spam from a Russian night club in the story about the FCC.
Imagine spam protection that is just plain smarter than what’s out there now — comment spam protection that learns from its mistakes improving its accuracy all the while catching more obvious spam so you don’t have to spend extra time in the moderator window reviewing spam that obviously should have just been removed.
We found it - Mollom.
There are a lot of reasons why Mollom is the next generation for spam protection, but one main reason is that the people that created it came from Drupel which should tell you about the quality of the product they have made. API’s that are maintained by experts, not Joe Random when he feels like it. The product is technically superior to anything out there and is built with the future of the semantic web in mind. They also have a commercial model that currently protecting some big publishing SonyBMG, NY Observer, FastCompany, IDG, JupiterMedia to name a few. Bottom line? Smarter, more accurate and easy to use moderator tools increase the quality of UGC online.
It’s your choice too — with Wordpress they automatically make you use their product, Akismet. You don’t even know you are using it and its not as accurate or as easy to use as Mollom is. We like choice - we think it’s choice is a good thing. You can download the plugin for Wordpress here.
Did we mention that it’s free too?
Tags: Dries Buytaert, Drupel, Mollom
Today on the Emerging Web Memo out of Boston from the E 2.0 Conference, ink Communications Director of Social Media, Alexandra Crabb talked about how she is using social media to engage employees of companies internally. Alexandra is using it to extend the enterprise outward through her marketing campaigns. The article goes on to talk about thinking about Enterprise 2.0 in three new ways: 1. Consider ROI Through Imagining Absence 2. Rethink the “I” for Which You’re Trying to Achieve “R” 3. The Nature of Social Media Implies Return. It’s an all around great article on whats happening with Enterprise 2.0 right now.![Reblog this post [with Zemanta]](http://img.zemanta.com/reblog_e.png?x-id=721b77c5-ec5f-4e8a-956a-9da8342df19f)
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