Snowcrashing

Flowtown – Email Marketing with a Social Brain

Posted on 04. Jan, 2010 by Antonella Stellacci.

Social Media Marketing has often an ambiguous fascination for the neophyte. On one side, there is the happy face that promises free viral promotion, on the other a darker and scarier world, where success is an obscure secret for the few. Both faces are false. There are no mysteries to be unlocked, no gatekeepers with a superior knowledge, no secrets. Once you understand that, you’re already ready for success. And luckily a few new start-ups are emerging, which promise to take social media beyond the obscure buzzword fascination, and help make it a profitable channel.

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Forget Bullet Points

Posted on 03. Jan, 2010 by Antonella Stellacci.

Even if you’re not an Apple fan boy, you have to admit that Steve Jobs is one of the most captivating speakers of our days. He has been able to attract a cult-like following based on his public speaking abilities.

In The Presentation Secrets of Steve Jobs: How to be Insanely Great in Front of Any Audience , Carmine Gallo slices and dices Job’s presentations to reveal the “secret”  techniques of his storytelling. Gallo’s main message is that anyone can deliver an “insanely good” presentation: or for the average presenter, at least one that is not deadly boring.

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Wireless Sensors For A Better Life

Posted on 02. Jan, 2010 by Antonella Stellacci.

2009 has been a turning point for the Internet of Things, as ReadWriteWeb names it, a revolutionary ecosystem of permanently connected “sensors” which promise to make our lives better, more “intelligent”.

Mobile phones and new devices have emerged which could change our behaviors in disruptive ways. Here’s a few of them designed to support our efforts towards a better lifestyle.

Chose a Quiet Place – WideNoise

WideNoise is an iPhone application that samples decibel noise levels, displaying them on an interactive map. With WideNoise you can monitor the noise levels around you, and map it to see the average sound level of the area around you. Readings can be shared online with the WideNoise community and tweeted.

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2009 Legacy? Privacy As The New Scarcity

Posted on 12. Dec, 2009 by Antonella Stellacci.

According to new figures released by the Interactive Advertising Bureau and PricewaterhouseCoopers, U.S. online ad spending in the third quarter was down 5.4% from the same period a year ago.

Is the economic downturn the only culprit? It might.  But it is also a testament to the failure of online advertising to deliver innovation, which leaves the web powerhouses scrambling to find effective ways to monetize their traffic.

So what happens when all Beacon-like models fail? If Mohammed won’t come to the mountain, the mountain must come to Mohammed. Wave your Online Privacy Good-Bye.

The facts.

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Why You Should Love Instapaper.

Posted on 04. Dec, 2009 by Antonella Stellacci.

There are services and products that radically change our experience. Google. RSS. Twitter. The Iphone. The Kindle. FourSquare… But there’s also another category of less hyped, but not less relevant services, that help make our lives better. Think Dropbox or Evernote. Instapaper is one of these wonders.

What is it? The idea is simple: we all find ourselves in a situation where we really want to read something, but we don’t have the time. Some of us will keep 100 tabs open, in the hope to find the time later, others will bookmark it. Either way, that post is gone. Chances are you won’t read it.

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Location and Mobile Augmented Reality Are The 2009 Game-Changers. Will Voice Be Next?

Posted on 01. Dec, 2009 by Antonella Stellacci.

FourSquare, SimpleGeo, Layar, Junaio are the start-ups of 2009. Amen! This is good, this is beautiful, and this is the promise of mobile coming true.

But there is an area that is still under-rated and under-hyped, and that is as needed as geo-location and mobile augmented reality for mobile to come full circle. That area is Speech Recognition. 2010 could be the year when it eventually hits mainstream, the year when voice becomes the “next touch”.

Why would that be?

The foundations have all been laid out: advances in speech technologies, speech recognition APIs, faster networks, broadband, cloud computing, better devices with user-friendly interfaces, compelling applications.

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Ikea Marketing Strategy: Mobile, Social, Brilliant.

Posted on 28. Nov, 2009 by Antonella Stellacci.

You might not love Ikea’s furniture, but you can’t deny that Ikea’s marketing strategy is nothing but brilliant: a cutting-edge blend of mobile, emerging technologies and social media.

Mobile Augmented Reality App
You see something, you like it. You don’t buy it! Why? The most common reason is that you can’t picture it in your own house. Visual memory is not a common talent, planning by the sheer power of imagination is even rarer.

The Ikea mobile application, dubbed Portable Interior Planner, is your new bionic eye. With a very clean and easy-to-use interface, it gives customers the ability to see exactly how the new designs will look in their home. And to do this, it uses mobile augmented reality features.

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About Twitter In-stream Advertising

Posted on 24. Nov, 2009 by Antonella Stellacci.

A NYT article, published over the week-end, sparked a heated debate over the legitimacy and value of an in-stream advertising model on Twitter.

-This idea has no official blessing from Twitter, yet.

-Back in September, the start-up changed its TOS to include the option of integrating advertising, in its service and search. And that time is approaching.

Open questions on the in-stream advertising models, and advertising on Twitter:

• Ambiguity- Can a 2chars hashtag (#ad) disambiguate an advertisement  inside a stream?

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The New Retweets: From The EgoSystem To The DataSystem.

Posted on 20. Nov, 2009 by Antonella Stellacci.

Twitter did not invent retweets. Its users did: they created a mechanism, to allow word-of-mouth within the 140 chars world. Retweets are the vehicle for virality: you like an article, you pass it to your followers,with or without your comments, and they do the same.

Like in real-life, the original retweets followed the subject-object syntax: “I” recommend “you” read this, which was recommended by @friend1 which was recommended by @friend2, etc.

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Kevin Kelly On The Next 5,000 Days Of The Web: Bridging The Gap Between Virtual and Real.

Posted on 09. Nov, 2009 by Antonella Stellacci.

It’s that time of the year again, when we’re about to get bombarded by predictions for the next 12 months, 99% of which, let’s say it, are going to be wrong.

In this TED video, recorded at the Entertainment Gathering in December 2007, Kevin Kelly, co-founder of Wired , writer and futurologist, starts by observing that the Web is only 5000 days old, and offers predictions for the next 5,000 days. That should spare us up from a few years of wrong blabbering about unlikely futures.

Kelly postulates that the next Web will differ from the actual one because it will be:

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