Dump your brain, use an app

It’s finally happened, we, as humans, can not even imagine what a tattoo will look like on us. So someone had to invent an app for it. Not much to say here other than if you need to get feedback from your Facebook friends on your tattoo design/positioning you might not need a tattoo.

Anyway, this new iPhone & Android app called The ink: Tattoo Simulator from Cat Head Studios is officially billed as a tattoo stimulator with a social component. Yaaay!

Wonder what the talented & extraordinary tattoo artist, Phil Kyle would have to say about this?

– JLH

Tags: Android, Facebook, IPhone, Phil Kyle, Tattoo

Things we’ve learned: Week ending Oct. 15, 2010

It’s not a long list. It’s not an overly complicated list. But it is a list and we have decided that it will be a regular post. As regular as possible. I mean some weeks, you learn nothing. And as that guy on Warehouse 13 said, “we acquire knowledge faster than wisdom” So here goes what we learned.

1. Pity is NOT a sales strategy. Yup. It’s not. When you want to sell something, it’s probably NOT a good idea to say times are tough when you want someone to buy an ad. Not sure, but we think that is not a winning combo.

2. Diplomacy still counts. Just cause you can shout out anything you want, anytime of the day on the old Twitter-o-gram, doesn’t mean that in relations with your fellow humans you can’t be a little diplomatic when it comes to participating in the process of the day. And, if you miss a call you are supposed to be on, you kinda don’t have the right to go back later and re-direct the people that were on the call.

3. Mindless blather is annoying. This false-belief that Tweeting out everything you hear at a conference or event is interesting out of context is annoying. Full stop. Don’t do it.

4. Skype, Facebook and Google are all bonkers. They should come with a warning label that reads like one they put on tobacco. In fact, they are the new tobacco.

5. Shutl is for people that have nothing to do. I’m all for speedy delivery, but how badly do you really need that new purple dingus thingee? Cause if you want to set up a delivery and then sit and watch it being delivered via the route it takes on the internet, you need a job or you fell and hit your head.

6. Blouses are too sophisticated to be a part of the mindless fashion chatter. Yes they are still in and yes it means you might have to shop at a store that isn’t H & M.

7. Universal communication is where the future is for staying connected – voice, chat, IM, texting, all in one wins in the end. See Nimbuzz news.

8. Coffee is key to a good happy, productive workday and its always nice to get little reminders on Twitter about when you need this “said” coffee.

9. Google is bonkers, did we say this already? Yea this week they want us to “log in” more and their display revenue figures prove they are still a one-trick pony. And yet, still no one can really say what Google does…we still say Skynet, but no one ever laughs.

10. Despite our fancy technology, lickety-split delivery, ability to shout whatever we want, when we want, make WiFi calls on airplanes, cries that print is dead — We still live, breathe and behave in a Web 1.0 paradigm.. we all know that a land line call has the best quality, playing a record (so yea Spotify rulz) gives us more pleasure than chocolate, holding the newspaper in your hands on a Sunday with a nice cup of coffee feels right. — JLH

Tags: blouses, Coffee, Diplomocy, Facebook, Google, Nespresso, Skynet, Twitter, Warehouse 13, Web 1.0, Wi-Fi

IBC 2010 and the overflow of crappy HTML emails

It’s that time of year again right before IBC – the telco industry’s big annual party, conference, September 10-15 in Amsterdam, the city where people think there are no rules. Anyway, I digress. The point is that more and more companies in this telco industry are trying to be more like their cooler cousins in high tech by adopting social media and marketing tactics into their communications programs.

But in fact it has just turned into a junk fest full of HTML emails that are packed with so much information that you can’t possibly even know where to look first or what they want you to focus on.. All I focus on is look how adorable they think they are by doing a fancy HTML email with everything they have done all year. Oh and yea follow us on Facebook or Twitter.

Listen up people …. one fancy HTML email + Facebook + Twitter does not give you the right to vomit up every shred of mundane crap that happened to you in the last 6 months. Social media is a strategy, not about taking what you did before and just laying it into a new communications vessel. Please stop. That is all.  - JH

Tags: Amsterdam, Facebook, Intercontinental Broadcasting Corporation, Marketing, Online Communities, social media, Social Networking, Twitter

Feeding Frenzy

We are lucky enough to be able to peek into two tech worlds. One, is a well established, revenue producing, tactile-based yet well understood world of telecommunications, i.e. how you watch TV (set top boxes, TVs, electronic program guides, Video on Demand, PVR, etc.). The other one is the topsy-turvy exciting world of web 2.0 technology that you can’t really get a grip on but you know its there and your friend Trixie uses it, so it must be ok. These are the people that bring you Facebook, the cloud, Twitter, social networks and the like.

The telco world lives pretty much in a fact-based (although somewhat altered) world of actual subscribers, content rights and a general understanding of how to move their industry forward. Now I said “general”. They don’t succumb to hype and when they get a feature that they think will make the vertical trade press wake up and listen, they go for it with gusto – currently the red hot chili in this world is “3D”, multi-screen delivery and social TV (also the cloud). Suffice it to say, they never really cave into hype.

However, in the other world – they live in a bubble that thrives off of hype and works on the premise of “if a few are doing it, we all must be doing it”. This brings me to location based social networks.

Recently there was a great article via CNN about why location apps haven’t gone mainstream yet. When CNN writes the story, it takes on a different perspective because by the time the “hype” of the start-up technology or craze (location based social networks) comes their way, they actually decide to look into it and see what in reality is going on. The article goes on to say that only 7% of all Americans actually are AWARE of location based social networks. This would have to be 7% of all Americans (around 21 million people) But if you tune into any start up technology news source, it would read as if the whole planet is using it and its growing by leaps and bounds. So many issues affect normal users that don’t affect early adopters. Most early adopters (those with smart phones like iPhones, etc. rather than feature phones) tend to care less about privacy than those outside of that market.

VCs still are funding location based start ups and they are putting more pressure on them to monetize and gain traction with users, but how many location based social networks can NON-early adopters handle? And how many of those care more about privacy than the early adopters. If early adopters don’t care about privacy nor the fact that their sign up and usage is just paving the way for targeted advertising, what happens when it hits mainstream and they do care? How will the model be adjusted then? It could be just an issue of usage = complacency, which is normally how technology gets assimilated into our lives, we just get used to it and then we can’t part with it. Or rather, its like a drug, we crave it even though we are forfeiting some of our privacy rights. After all, no one is making you sign up for these services.

Here is our take: Location as it relates to your life where you are in the moment will be relevant to the mainstream user (not early adopter). For example, I am shopping on this street, let’s see what else is around me. Not WHO is around me, but WHAT is around me. If I see that there is something near to me, I want to get there easily, and if there is a money saving voucher or coupon, I am more incented to go there.

According to UK-based Juniper Research, mobile coupons are redeemed at a 5% to 20% rate, compared with about 1% for print coupons. They recently forecast that 1 out of every 10 mobile subscribers in developed regions around the world will use mobile coupons by 2014, generating nearly $6 billion in redemption value. The fact of the matter is that consumers like coupons/vouchers. In the fourth quarter of 2008, coupon redemption was up 7.5% in the US alone. And, according to Hitwise, internet searches for discount vouchers in the UK grew by 47.5% in 2009.

We aren’t the experts, but this sort of feels a bit like maybe how the Gold Rush felt — lots of people rushing in to get their claim, but most of the claims just pinch out. Where LB social networks go from here is up to the user, and they are a fickle lot. – JLH

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Business and Social Media and Flowr

Two words that still make us laugh a little when you see them together and social media and business. More and more businesses are embracing social media to communicate their brand, products and companies, but we wonder if most of them actually want to do it, or feel compelled to do it because that is what everyone else is doing.

The jury is still out on that one, but we do know this: A recent University of Maryland School of Business study concluded that one nearly one in five small business owners are integrating social media into their business processes — Facebook and LinkedIn were the most popular sites. And here is the thing that will blow your mellon: 45% of surveyed respondents even believe their social media initiatives will pay off financially in 12 months or less.

Which brings us to the Social Media World Forum in London, March 15 – two LinkedIn execs will be there to talk about what the heck is going on in this department and why.  Patrick Crane, VP Marketing (with yards of experience from Yahoo!), LinkedIN will be on a panel about leveraging social media in business and on the first day, another LinkedIN dude and fellow Texan, Kevin Eyres, MD Europe, will present the opening keynote.

Now, you say what type of social media in business? The best example we can find that is not Google Wave, Buzz or any other big brand with verb that describes its product, but a start up that is hoping to make it easier for businesses to use social software to be more efficient -  flowr. Pronounced “flow + r”, the company is focused on bringing real-time collaboration into the enterprise. The tech team is out of Slovenia but headquartered in London, flowr is basically an easy to use collaboration software that you don’t need a manual to use. We like that. — JLH

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Tags: Facebook, flowr, LinkedIn, Twitter, University of Maryland College Park

Show me the way (that is a Frampton reference)

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

Geo Location

About a month ago, Mashable’s Adam Ostrow wrote a story abou Geo Location and why it was absent from Facebook and Twitter. You know where this is going right? I am going to say, well it is absent simply because they aren’t doing it. And you know where this is going next? So who is doing it on line? Well no one except IRLConnect. On the mobile, its all over the place, but still not pulling in the numbers like the good old Web does (sure argue with us later about it) but the fact is that there are 506 million or so users on the Web and those users are ready for a new experience. And geo objects is where its at.

So, the next evolution in this post is the fact that today IRL Connect announced that it has integrated Facebook with its application and you know what happened. Floods of people came into the application. I must say, it is the absolutely coolest thing to see all your Facebook friends on a map! I mean, You can see where they are and start up a conversation with them. IRL is the first visual social network.

I am an ex pat living in Amsterdam and today, Boston was flooded with my Facebook friends and the friends of my Facebook friends and I immediately had this connection again. It gave me something  I was missing. Not to sound sappy, but it really brought my social network into focus.

Try it- they have a public beta on April 2, but you can get a sign up  key here, use Tattletech.

– JLH

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Facebook grows and consumes us, but I like it

Normally, I don’t like anyone or anything taking over my life but I must confess, I do love Facebook. I don’t even mind that it penetrates each and every part of my communication with friends, co workers, family and business contacts. I dig it.  This article in CNN/Money was such a good read to me that I found it Tattletech worthy – cause now Facebook has friends in totally high places with corner offices and the White House.

But the mind blowing thing is those stats! The increase from those that update their status from 2008 to 2009 when from 4 million to 15 million. Pieces of content shared – 13 million in 2008 to 24 million in 2009.

Check out the graph about the race to mass market and tell me that doesn’t show you how far we have come and how powerful the Web still is in our lives. IRL Connect – power of the Web and location based social networking still carries a lot of weight.  All mobile.. not yet.  -JLH

Tags: Facebook, Frank Schuil, IRL Connect, Presence based social networking

How to tell your mom what Twitter is

So you know when you have those conversations with your mother and try explain what social networking is all about? And then you get frustrated and just end up telling her she will never get it so why bother? Well this blog should do th trick. Great great entry on what Twitter is all about, and how to use it to grow your business. It’s a great story with fantastic references. Read it and go forth and Twitter!

Tags: Facebook, Social network service, Twitter

Tattletech Hot Seat – Arjen Strijker, Founder of SOMESSO

Over in Zurich, we found Arjen Strijker, the founder of SOMESSO and entrepreneur who saw a lot of commotion and fanfare around social corporate media, but not one event that actually brought all the parties together in its evolving ecosystem to discuss, share and add value to this high growth communication channel. So, he created SOMESSO a series of conferences centered around social media usage in corporate environments. They just finished their kick off event in Zurich and on the Somesso blog you can see why it was a success. - JLH

TT: You just held a very successful corporate social media event in Zurich last month, what made you decide that Somesso was something the market needed?

AS: In my last job, I found myself rubbing shoulders with front-office bankers and other people working in financial institutions in Switzerland. I was (and still am) meeting them on regular basis and many have become my friends. Personally, I believe in social media and like to test and discuss the latest social media tools and solutions on the Internet and found myself quite often explaining to my friends in the financial world why and how they should be using these things to make new business in a better way. Although I knew already that banks and financial institutions generally are not early adopters of such new technology, I found that many people were interested but they just didn’t know where to go and how to start. After some benchmarking, it became clear that there was a need for a think-tank discussion forum / information share point (both online as “offline”) where corporate social media related issues are presented and debated. After some more market research I launched SOMESSO.

TT: You have put on events before in both venture and technology, what was the most challenging thing about putting on a social media event like Somesso?

AS: As the SOMESSO Zurich `08 audience experienced themselves last month, the most unique feature of SOMESSO is its exceptional mix of participants. This was also the most challenging issue about organizing this event: although I strongly believe in the strength of communities, no one could guarantee that all these different groups of people would mix and interact with each other to build new bridges and synergies to each others’ worlds. The audience ranged from sales and marketing experts to recruiters, agency traditional and new media specialists, entrepreneurs and VCs. We found that even at the first break everyone was interacting. It was rare – and pleasing – to see all these different categories of people sharing their ideas about corporate social media and presenting their latest projects and discoveries to each other. We are going to work hard to keep all future SOMESSO events with this same environment so we can satisfy all of the attendees’ networking expectations while recognizing the importance and enormous potential of social media in driving companies’ business values.

TT: Do you think that Somesso has legs? In other words what makes it stand out amongst all the other social media events in the market today?

AS: Yes. The purpose of SOMESSO is to bring together a unique mix of participants from a wide range of industries to discuss and debate the corporate social media trend on continuous basis throughout Europe. Different from all general Web 2.0, new tech or new media conferences, SOMESSO is a highly focused event that covers only the corporate angle of social media. At SOMESSO attendees can find answers to questions like “how will social media change the way a company does business?”, or “how do companies start building their short-term corporate social media strategy?”, or “how does a corporate social media strategy impact employees and external networks?”.

Also, due to the strong variety of people from different industries, the networking part at SOMESSO Zurich `08 was highly valued by the audience. Both the diversity of newcomers to corporate social media, as well as the diversity of industry experts that attended the event ended up doing business together. All this at a one-day event in a European city – next up London.

TT: You are Dutch and Tattletech is very fond of Dutchman, but you live in Zurich – do you see a difference in the approach to social media by country?

AS: Yes, very much.  SOMESSO Zurich was a success because we listened to our audience and gave them what they wanted to hear and learn. By example, Switzerland is still a pretty conservative country, which was reflected at the conference, as many companies – regional and multinational – had not started to look at social media tools or implementing a corporate social media strategy for their organization before they went to SOMESSO.

Furthermore, it was important for this event that we discussed the topic both from a starting point of view, as well as to provide the latest insights and fads on the subject (as the corporate social media and new media experts were strongly represented too). It was successful; the two groups complemented each other and created more discussion that could be handled in just one single day. By the way, this is why SOMESSO has also an online Twitter community where lots of continuous business is being created even now. The SOMESSO Facebook group continues to have new members request to join on a daily basis.

Our next event, SOMESSO London `09 on May 15, will have a more advanced and global character, which reflects in both speakers and topics, as well as in the general setting of the event. Due to a successful first event, we’ve caught the attention of several global industry leaders who want to participate at SOMESSO London and even SOMESSO Barcelona and Copenhagen – the other two cities scheduled for a SOMESSO event in 2009.

TT: If you weren’t doing this, what would you be doing?

AS: This is always a tricky question…  I would probably be working on one of the other business plans that I’ve been compiling over the past few years. Really all of them are (in)directly related to bringing people together to increase their business (not their love-life, in case you might ask .

Tags: Facebook, New media, Social network, Somesso, Twitter