Wednesday, September 30, 2009

Tomorrow, you will not access facebook.com

This is a longish post about how Augmented Reality could revolutionize the virtual space as we know it. The post was featured in the September edition of Technology Sunday.

Today, you probably start and end the day with Facebook. If not you, 70,000 locals do. Facebook, and all the other social media tools, changed the way we consume the web. Prior to that you would read the news on timesofmalta.com but now you get to read a news headline because someone else posts it. Today, you can just get the snippets of your favourite websites on your profile in the form of widgets or boxes. iGoogle is the perfect example of how at least 65 million webpages need to rethink their strategy for staying in touch with you. Similar tools allow you to even do away with Google’s humble homepage.

The social web has re-defined the World Wide Web and added a social context to it. Everything is social. Every site or item which goes online has a social value. Users tag it, post it, blog about it and share it in all kinds of ways.

Tomorrow, the web will experience another wave of innovation which will revolutionize the way we interact with content and communicate with each other. Augmented Reality (AR) will fragment the social web into layers of data, sitting on nothing more than real-time video streams of the real world. We will access the web as layers of information overlaid on the real 3D objects (or people) they relate to.

Before, online games were played individually, through the browser. Then came the social web - our friends could join the game too and play with us in real-time. Eventually, we stopped playing games on the specific web-pages and simply played any game through our favourite social tool.. Tomorrow, we will be playing the same game but the protagonists will not be 3D images which represent objects or users, we will have real objects and real people moving around our screen. They will be fed through the camera of our mobile device (whatever the device may be) and an application will overlay computer graphics on the real-life video feeds.

Actually, we are already seeing hints of this today. To launch the HTC Magic in one of the markets in which it operates, Vodafone has used an AR application which allowed two teams to compete head to head by tagging their rivals through image recognition of coloured shirts using the device itself.

In 2001 the first AR Browser was launched. The browser acted as an AR based interface to the web. Though innovative, the RWWW system was not very practical due to its cumbersome AR hardware which included a head mounted display. 7 years later Wikitude implemented a similar, but more compact idea on a mobile phone. The more recent browser combines location data with Wikipedia entries. This year a similar concept was implemented through Layar. The browser builds on Wikitude’s concept by reducing traditional webpages into content layers sitting on top of each other and overlaid on the real world video feeds.

However, what is most important is not how all this is done but what it really means for us. AR complements the convergence of online and offline worlds. Online social networks are really a reflection of what happens in the offline world. AR blends the real (offline) world with the online information and services. Rather than a reflection, the web will gradually become part of what we see when we move around the real world.

In practice, AR will allow us to consume the web in a completely new way. When in a big crowd, I could poke you without logging onto the Facebook homepage by simply nudging your real-life image, fed into my device through its camera. Paypal’s changehowwepay.com envisages a future in which I could scan images of any product at the supermarket and ‘drag’ them onto my virtual shopping cart.

Industry leaders are aware of all this and they are doing something about it. At the 2009 International Symposium on Mixed and Augmented Reality (ISMAR), AR will not only be discussed in context of scientific and technological advancements but also as part of a wider initiative to make the most of AR technology in arts, media and humanities.

Needless to say, if AR had to become the standard way of web consumption, once again, brand managers would have to re-think the way they put their brand in context of the real world. The fancy online spaces which they have invested in have already been humbled by social networks which feed content from them to our social profile, doing away with the nice design on the brand’s site.

However it is not all doom and gloom. If the social web made brands social and helped them to relate to us through our network of friends, then it should only get better. AR will put brands in context. Tomorrow, brands will not only be able to relate to our circle of friends but also customize their message in context of what we wear, where we go and what we see. In parallel, we will probably see the death of the traditional webpage.

Friday, September 18, 2009

Recap: B2C Strategy 2.0

I came across this conference I had participated in, the slides of which are available at this link: http://www.mca.org.mt/infocentre/openarticle.asp?WsAppId=590&id=1238&pin=podfk5465g4v6e5r4g6

The presentation is almost a year old. I'd like to revisit it and check what's still valid!

Wednesday, September 16, 2009

Two weeks to go to the iCentre competition


The iCentre is again inviting creatives to submit the next TV ad. The competition closes on the 30th of September.

Tuesday, September 15, 2009

New/Re-designed Websites

A number of agencies are re-vamping new online spaces for all sorts of brands. What hit my inbox this week:


Designed by NIU for Ok Ltd. Visit website at ok.com.mt


Designed by ICON for Stephanie Borg. Visit website at stephanieborg.com

Monday, September 14, 2009

Taking the 'ego' out of ego-centric

There are two modes of expression, ego-centric and x-centric, which sounds and should be a lot like 'eccentric' however allowing space for the x to be anything (be it customer, purpose, motive) but your ego.

What's the benefit of the latter?

Primarily, it's not about you;
Secondly, it's not about you and can give in to other complementary or opposing ideas. It follows from the belief that collective ideating is better than individual.
Thirdly, it's not about you and so leaves room for feedback, criticism and listening which otherwise you wouldn't bother to give attention to.

It's harder than we think to take the ego out of ego-centric and be open to alternative viewpoints. It requires questioning all the time whether you stand for your ego or your objective above anything else!

MoMo Malta launching today


Today MobileMonday (MoMo) will be launching in Malta. Event details below:

Date of launching event
Monday, 14th September 2009, from 18:00h to 22:00h

Venue: The Palace Hotel, High Street, Sliema SLM1542, Malta

Speakers:
Jari Tammisto
CEO/President, MobileMonday Global
Madanmohan Rao
Director of Educaton Project, Mobile Monday. International Consultant, and Speaker in over 60 countries.

Topic: Mobile Industry in Malta - The State of Play

Registration:
Attendance is free and only by invite. Register Here

Tuesday, September 08, 2009

Says it all in one big blab - Why 2.0 is not a number or a fad

Wednesday, September 02, 2009

15 minute catch-up

I am catching up on a number of emails and readings. For a change I'll list what I catch-up on below:

23:10: Old School Music by Lauryn Hill at MTV Unplugged. Music is interactive and definately a marketing tool so make sure to listen to as much music as you can!

23:13: Remember Technology Sunday? Well I hope to be able to write some more on the suppliment or elsewhere. Doing some thinking on a possible topic.

23:14: Networking is useful. It starts off from the fact that collective intelligence is more powerful than individual so I've just accepted a LinkedIn invitation from a friend who now works in telecoms like i do.

23:18: Sorting deadlines for some forms I have to fill in.

23:23: Discover new ventures. I planning to post some more interviews about new projects and just got one in my mailbox. Will hopefully BLAB about it shortly.

23:24: Last minute...

23:28 (exceeded catch-up time by 3 minutes) Staying hungry - checking on what to read/study in the coming year

23:30: (2 more minutes) Some more posting about the latest happenings at ICON which emails me regularly with fresh new projects: ICON just launched 'a fresh, SEO-efficient portal' for local artist, Stephanie Borg: http://www.stephanieborg.com/steffiborg/home.aspx

23:32: Back to work!

Blab & steal attention "from anywhere"

I got this Twitter status by email:

'BBC Radio 1 to broadcast Coldplay's Glasgow gig on Sept 18th (listen online from anywhere) - http://bit.ly/Z7qGg'

Have you ever driven for long distances, driving for hours, crossing boarders and countries? Well if you have/had to do that you would know that your car stereo would switch from one radio station to the other on the same or nearby frequency. Some of the radios are specific to the area and broadcast traffic updates as you cross the region. Very useful, however very old school. Today you can broadcast content from anywhere and you don't have neither size nor geographic limitations.

This is great news however not totally: the massive content clutter makes my blog one of many many, and hence, empowered by the internet which allows an unqualified blogger like me to broadcast his thoughts, I am actually less important than ever. If I really had to be serious about being important online, I would have to devise an attention stealing strategy!

However, I may resort to the 'Blab & follow' strategy. I'll blab when I think it is appropriate, as we all do on our facebook, twitter, blogger accounts, and then wait for some attention to be given to me. A long-tail, a big long tail of blabs give us a long tail of attention - little amounts of attention for everyone to be happy wherever ("from anywhere")!