Snowcrashing

In Between Virtual And Real- A Mobile Augmented Reality Demo

Posted on 14. Oct, 2009 by Antonella Stellacci.

Augmented Reality  technologies spilled sci-fi fantasies into real life. Mobile Augmented Reality is pushing the envelope, by allowing virtual worlds to creep into the physical environment that surrounds us and “alter” it.

Hand from Above provides an artistic example of what is to come. Inspired by Land of the Giants and Goliath, it shows pedestrians at the mercy of a giant deity who in real-time tickles, stretches or removes them. Hands from Above is a joint project, between the Foundation for Art & Creative Technology, FACT, and Liverpool City Council for BBC Big Screen Liverpool and the Live Sites Network.

Hand from Above from Chris O’Shea on Vimeo.

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Fun And Innovation

Posted on 14. Oct, 2009 by Antonella Stellacci.

FourSquare

In less than 24 hours, FourSquare hard-core users, the newly elected SuperUsers, have helped dropping the duplicate venues in  the company’s database from 2000+ to 400.

Crowd-sourcing + Engagement under the forms of a Social Game= Disruption. Location-based services will never be the same after FourSquare.

Volkswagen and The Fun Theory

Volkswagen is crowd-sourcing a challenge to invent new “fun” ways to change people’s behaviors. The first results are in. Judge for yourself

-66% fewer people to take the escalator by adding a piano to the stairs case

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Spotify To Napster, Like Amerigo to Columbus?

Posted on 12. Oct, 2009 by Antonella Stellacci.

Columbus – which America celebrates today – was a disruptor but he didn’t really know to what extent. He dared challenge the ocean for 36 days, and landed on what he thought was India. He lived with that belief. And changed history forever, for the better or the worse.

It was supposedly Amerigo Vespucci, who realized that it was a new land, and the German cartographer, Martin Waldseemüller, named it after him: America.

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BizDev 2.0 aka Marketing via API

Posted on 10. Oct, 2009 by Antonella Stellacci.

What do Twitter, Facebook, Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Salesforce, EBay, Flickr have in common? They all offer APIs that other companies use to build businesses and products on top of them.

API technology and its standards have been around for a while. But only recently, companies have started to use them as a commercial enabler that creates new business opportunities. Caterina Hack, the mastermind behind Flickr, called this BizDev 2.0, back in 2006!

What are the advantages of using APIs as an integral part of your marketing plan?

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Tired Of Spam On Twitter? It Might Soon Get Worse.

Posted on 09. Oct, 2009 by Antonella Stellacci.

Yesterday news broke that Twitter is in advanced talks with both Google and Microsoft to let them include Tweets in their search. The partnership could be a game-changer. The way search works today is still very 1.0 or top-down: the “importance” of a site is vastly determined by the authoritativeness and number of sites linking back to it (in meaningful ways).  But, as pointed out by viral marketing scientist Dan Zarella, “Page to page links are too slow. And news can take days to get indexed. More and more news is breaking on Twitter, not Google, because it’s not real time”.

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Proximity Marketing 101

Posted on 08. Oct, 2009 by Antonella Stellacci.

What will users do with their cellphones three years from now? Always more industry insiders are ready to bet that Search will be a killer application.
It’s also true that one could build a parallel universe with all the fancy predictions about mobile and there’s probably one out there where users are holed up in their homes, fearing to go outside where they’d get bombarded by local coupons and nearby strangers looking to hook up in an otherwise deserted world….But the leap of faith in this case is not an impossible one. So let’s assume that the future is really going to shape up as a proximity marketing playground.

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The Day The Iphone Stopped Ruling The World

Posted on 06. Oct, 2009 by Antonella Stellacci.

About time! Google’s attack to the Iphone brainwashing of the masses has started. This morning, Google and Verizon Wireless announced an agreement to deliver mobile applications and devices. The companies will develop several Android-based devices preloaded with apps.

The first new phones are expected at market within weeks. Two will be released before the end of the year and they will support Google Voice and have Google’s Android Market preinstalled.

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The Suggested Users List Ambiguity

Posted on 04. Oct, 2009 by Antonella Stellacci.

Say you want to learn a foreign language. You could

• Learn the rules and words – through an interactive course or a class;
• Learn by “association”, finding native speakers or traveling to the country where that language is spoken;
• Turn the TV on and watch Martha Stewart speaking a few words of that language….

Uh? Well, that’s what would happen if you followed the” Twitter methodology”. New users are welcomed by a few instructions and a “SUL”, a suggested users list, which should provide them with guidance. In Twitter’s words:

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Crowd-Sourcing Translations

Posted on 01. Oct, 2009 by Antonella Stellacci.

The monopoly of English in the Internet is long time gone. The Internet penetration in non-English speaking countries is through the roof, and tools to help webmasters and site owners go local are spreading very quickly.

Today Google announced the introduction of a new translation widget that, on the fly, displays the content in the visitor preferred tongue. It is a no-brainer to install it, a simple snippet of code that you can put anywhere on your site. The quality of the translations is not the highest, nonetheless this is a free and  quick way to get your site, or a rough idea of it, spread in roughly 50 languages.

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Video: Seth Godin On The Internet As A Radio for Ideas And Freemium.

Posted on 29. Sep, 2009 by Antonella Stellacci.

How do you get people to use your free stuff? And how do you move people from free to premium?

Seth Godin’s 3 minute answer:

Create Quality > Get Attention> Connect >Monetize= Free to Premium

One example is musicians: the more music they give away for free, the more money they can make from live gigs and records.

Another example is Seth himself: by giving away for free his “Unleash The Idea Virus” book, he ended-up selling more full-priced hard-cover books than his previous book.  Readers check the book and if they decide they like it (i.e. if there’s quality to it), they will buy it and they did. No one buys business books anymore without knowing what they are about.

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