|
Daniela Kortan
DANIELA KORTAN is a research analyst at New Paradigm, working on both the Talent 2.0: Net Generation and the Enterprise 2.0 programs. Daniela has worked as a consultant at the Chartwell Group, a consulting firm specializing in the public sector, and at the Syntegrity Group, a firm that specializes in strategic decision methods. She has also interned at Corporate Knights Magazine — a Canadian Corporate Social Responsibility publication. Daniela holds an HBA from the Richard Ivey School of Business.
 |
|
August 7th, 2007, 11:44am
|
Its not just tech-savvy computer addicts who are spending hours of their time a day on Massive Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games (MMORPG) like Second Life and World of Warcraft. Researchers and scholars around the world are turning to online venues to garner new insights on issues ranging from economic development, monetary policy, human behaviour, and philanthropy. To this group of interested academics, online virtual worlds are more than just fun and games.
At Cornell University – Professor Robert Bloomfield is using Second Life to teach students about regulatory policy, based on the principle that the lack of such policy in the virtual world makes it somewhat similar to the U.S. economy of 100 years ago. As he explains in a recent Business Week article, “Virtual worlds like Second Life give students an opportunity to understand what the purpose of regulation is, why it arises, what forces drive it to look ultimately the way it does.” And we can expect this sort of research to only increase in the future, as new programs continue to emerge that evaluate and study the role of such virtual worlds in society, and vice versa. According to Business Week, Bloomfield is also working on “Worlds for Study [whose wiki you can check out here], a project he initiated that will bring together professors and tech experts to develop a virtual world platform just for teaching and researching business.”
The basic premise behind this research is the belief that people in a virtual world will act much like those in the real world – motivated by incentives and deterrents, be they economic or social. That said, you have to wonder, when your forty year old neighbor is donning the avatar of a 20 year old to peruse his second youth Second Life in, how much of a replica of real world behaviors can these venues truly offer? From an academic standpoint at least, Bloomfield and others seem to believe the macro similarities will outweigh the micro differences.
|
|
July 26th, 2007, 04:57pm
|
“ A cache in computer terms is information usually stored in memory to make it faster to retrieve, but the term is also used in hiking/camping as a hiding place for concealing and preserving provisions.”
~ www.geocaching.com.
Apparently the popularity of a GPS-enabled treasure hunt game known as geocaching is on the rise, so much so that a small town in Ontario called Wilberforce (where?), is looking to get itself ‘on the map’ by branding itself as the new Geocaching Capital of Canada, according to a recent article in the Globe and Mail. Players who want to participate in a Geocache hunt need only log onto www.geocaching.com (or some other caching site), download a cache’s coordinates (uploaded to the site by any player who cares to be a ‘cache owner’), and then, aided by a GPS system, go off in pursuit of the treasure.
There are few rules involved in geo-caching –the game seems mostly to be based on socialist principles of give and take…basically, if you take something from a ‘cache’ or treasure, you put something there to replace it…According to Geocaching.com, “A cache can come in many forms but the first item should always be the logbook. In its simplest form a cache can be just a logbook and nothing else. The logbook contains information from the founder of the cache and notes from the cache’s visitors. The logbook can contain much valuable, rewarding, and entertaining information. A logbook might contain information about nearby attractions, coordinates to other unpublished caches, and even jokes written by visitors. If you get some information from a logbook you should give some back. At the very least you can leave the date and time you visited the cache.”
While the article in the Globe and Mail refers to Geo-caching as an ‘environmentally friendly’ activity, I guess that depends on how many applications will promote pedestrian pursuits which leave little no or environmental impact, vs. those that will employ broadly spun treasure hunts over vast areas, designed, guzzle guzzle, to be raced across in off-road SUVs.
Although for now geocaching appears mainly the domain of the interested public, we can soon expect that dynamic to change. As the game’s popularity rises, companies, ad agencies, and mobile carriers will be paying close attention to this type of technology and thinking about ways to use it as a creative and interesting means to interact with consumers.
|
|
July 20th, 2007, 05:51pm
|
In North America, Google is seen as an information democratizer, in China, it is seen as something to be monitored and censored, and in Europe, nationalist desires to possess ‘best in class’, ‘in house’ technology cause Google to be seen as an entity to compete with, likely more so than anywhere else on the globe.
That said, European attempts to create competing search engines have been plagued by splintered financing and siloed efforts – a trend which we can expect to see continue, if a recent decision by the European Union, authorizing Germany to give $165 million to research aimed at developing a next generation search engine, is a sign of things to come. This sum pales in comparison to the deep pockets of Google, a company whose Market Capitalization is currently $162 billion.
The German funding, going towards the Theseus research project, comes in the aftermath of the breakdown of a larger consortium involving French and German firms, who had previously planned to work together to build a semantic search engine which would allow for the translation, identification, and indexing of audio, images, and text. The consortium project, called Quaero (which means “search” in Latin) was previously billed as “Europes answer to Google”. France is now seeking to subsidize the Quaero project on their own.
But with such splintered efforts, it seems hard to believe that Europe will ever have “an answer to Google”, as Google itself continues to pursue a growth and acquisition strategy which is heavily influenced by the firm’s desire to position itself as a leader in the semantic web 3.0 game.
|
|
July 20th, 2007, 03:32pm
|
Imagine the day that saying ‘cheque please’ into your mobile phone could authorize a purchase transaction of products procured on the web. VoicePay enables a very close reality. The technology, developed by VoiceVault.com, protects against impersonation fraud by employing complex voice recognition analysis to build up a profile of an individual’s larynx. It is therefore considered a rather secure method of authorizing payments, as, although it might be relatively easy to imitate someone’s accent, mimicking the shape and size of their vocal tract is a more steadfast challenge – even for the best accent hacks among us.
Currently, the major utility limiting factor involved in the service is that only products registered with VoicePay can be purchased using it. In order to buy a product the customer will either have to enter a 9-digit VoicePay code that identifies the product, or click on a VoicePay icon while shopping for products virtually on his or her mobile phone. Either action will activate the VoicePay service, which will call the customer and ask them to repeat a set of randomly generated numbers. If the larynx is a match – the customer need only say “yes” to authorize the purchase.
Of course, in classic network effect fashion, the more buyers who use the service, the more sellers who will sign up to sell thru it, and vice versa. That said, these initial offerings are likely only a whisper of what we can expect to hear from VoicePay in the future – according to a recent economist article, the company is already in talks with several banks and credit card companies who could help encourage growth in the technology’s adoption.
|
|
June 29th, 2007, 05:02pm
|
Touchgraph was introduced way back in 2001, right around the time Malcom Galdwell’s book The Tipping Point came out, making applications for visually enabling network analysis (or the ability to identify and discern the relationships and interconnections between distinct units, be they Web sites or people) all the rage. The company has 3 main services available to the public: the first is a Google application that lets you type in a search term and see the relationships between the sites where the term appears – I tried this out with the term Wikinomics, search available here. There is also an Amazon application (quelle surprise)that lets you search for books, movies, and music, see the interrelations between products, authors, and actors, and artists, and (again, quelle surprise) buy any objects that might be of interest from your favourite, mammoth, open-platform-behemoth-formerly-known-as-a-book-vendor. Touchgraph’s newest little innovation, launched in February, is a Facebook browser that lets you visually map the inter-relationships between your friends…kind of like a macro version of the ‘friends in common’ feature that is a staple of the Facebook platform, but visually this version is more reminiscent of an old school kaleidoscope.
After playing with the technology for a bit it still feels a bit too slow and cumbersome to imagine it being a method I would use routinely search for information. However, given that this kind of relationship mapping is already available it can’t be long before a truly efficient means of visual information retrieval is possible . In the mean time, the technology’s redeeming feature is that it can help you succeed at games of a more old fashioned variety - for instance, very handy when trying to win at Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon.
�
|
|
June 22nd, 2007, 05:18pm
|
Text messaging, a medium comprised of encoded words and smiley faces architected out of colons and brackets (separated by a dash by those who are more thorough), rarely seems a communications method of choice for any message more serious than asking a friend where they want to eat for dinner.
That said, as one Chinese petrochemical plant learnt the hard way earlier this month, texting can also be used to coordinate affairs of a more existential nature. A protest organized almost entirely via text messages spurred the government to grudgingly shut down a billion dollar paraxylene (PX) plant in Xiamen, in response to criticisms of the plant’s effect on local population health and on the environment. Over 1 million text messages were sent out in the process, urging residents to join a street protest against the opening of the plant, comparing its inevitable impact on the local ecosystem to an atomic bomb of disaster. The message also urged recipients to pass the text along to all of their Xiamen friends, “for the sake of future generations”. The protest was also reported on by mobile bloggers, although allegedly many of the blog sites were shut down by the government in the days following the event.
China already employs restrictions on the websites and searches accessible from inside its borders. Now that the country has put its foot firmly down on the issue of web content access, can regulation of text messaging or text content be far around the corner? Use of text-messaging (at least by the Net Generation) in China is amongst the highest in the world, so monitoring sms activity for ‘appropriate use’, would be no small order.
That said, it appears China already has some of the tools to crack down, if they wanted to. According to the LA Times:
In 2004, it provoked an outcry among some Western free speech advocates by purchasing a surveillance system for cellphone messages that allowed it to filter objectionable messages and pinpoint their senders. And in 2005, Chinese authorities temporarily banned the use of text messaging after it was used to organize violent anti-Japanese protests.
So maybe the fact that the messages used to organize this protest weren’t comletely shut down means that what we are seeing instead is an era where pervasive computing technologies might actually engender a political period where Chinese officials pay closer attention to democratic movements on the ground and respond in kind, rather than trying to stamp out citizien activism. I know, sounds like wishful thinking. But then, being optimisitc is my preffered way of looking at the world. Smiley face.
|
|
June 15th, 2007, 04:29pm
|
Know the experience of searching for something relatively mundane on Wikipedia, and being surprised with how little you have found? What about the reverse experience, when you search for some bizarro fact and come up with a plethora of well researched information?
A pair of comedy writers for the site Something Awful have turned this duality into a bit of a phenomenon, fittingly called ‘wiki-groaning’, termed after the sound that one might make upon feeling exasperated at the lacklustre (or alternately over-the-top) results of a wiki search. An article in the Globe and Mail today describes how wiki-groaning works:
First, think up two similar topics, one being of genuine historical or social relevance, and the other being useless to everyone but a small coterie of fans. To cite the classic example, you might pick “Knights” and “Jedi Knights.” Next, load up the respective Wikipedia pages of each pair, and notice their respective lengths. Hear yourself groan? There you go - you’re wikigroaning!
The challenge lies in finding the most egregious pairs. The game’s creators … provide an eye-opening list of groan-worthy pairs to start with: The article on “Archaeology” is shorter than the one on “Indiana Jones.” “Latin” on Wikipedia is shorter than “Klingon language.” The entry for “Women’s suffrage” is shorter than the piece entitled “List of fictional gynoids and female cyborgs.”
|
|
June 1st, 2007, 06:02pm
|
It’s the first day of June, and we’ve already had 3 smog advisory days in Toronto. While Mayor David Miller might be closing the book on Facebook in the hopes of increasing city employee productivity, he is simultaneously opening up another type of social networking which he hopes will increase our productivity in solving this little smog problem we’ve been having.
Earlier this month at the C40 large cities conference in New York, Miller and Zerofootprint (Toronto based environmental advocacy group) announced the launch of a new web 2.0 tool that will help citizens of the GTA calculate their environmental footprint. The tool called Zerofootprint Toronto, provides a simple and fast online survey that citizens can answer to determine what their environmental impact is. They can also use the tool to get tips on how to decrease their eco-impact, and also connect with each other to aid the process (one example might be using the social networking component of the application to set up local carpools). The site also lets you compare your results to friends and other citizens, globally. The hope is that rivalries and competitions will happen between friends, employers, and even cities participating in the program. While at first the service will only be open to city employees (while they are working out the kinks), and after this will be rolled out across the GTA.
On the surface, it makes sense. Giving people a tool to measure their environmental impact and discuss ways to reduce it seems like a logical thing to do. After all, if web 2.0 apps can be used to do anything from help people plan their next vacation to plan to help them buy their next house, so why not help them plan ways to become better environmental citizens? That said, as useful a tool as this may be, its important that social networking to save the environment not be treated just another magic bullet.
As once anonymous city employee says: “ When you look at societies (Scandinavia etc) who really are environmentally progressive while there is citizen level support the framework that allows sustainability to be widely prioritized comes from the government/social structure.
Tools like Zerofootprint again shift the emphasis back to the individual and their consumption patterns and away from demanding accountability from corporations and larger institutions who shape the way we consume in the first place.”
|
|
May 25th, 2007, 12:11pm
|
Ever have your mom tell you to play nice in the playground so that the other kids would like you? Well, if Facebook and MySpace are the new virtual playgrounds for youth, there seems to be a whole industry built around a new way to make alliances, with methods that stretch far beyond the bribery of offering to share a chocolate chip cookie . According to a recent Globe and Mail article, there has been a proliferation of businesses and services which, for a fee, will help you ‘explode’ your friends list. Many of these businesses cater to corporations hoping to launch a new product and gain virtual community cred (never mind that the act of buying friends seems diametrically opposed to the concept of credibility). But they also help teens hoping to compete in the online popularity game, or, on the other end of the spectrum, offer to assist those who simply don’t want to look like they are lacking in the friend department. While both purposes seem dubious at best, the growing number of services in this area suggests (sadly) that there is a market for this kind of activity. Recognizing the threat these kinds of services pose to the legitimacy of their network, MySpace is on the warpath, shutting down and limiting the scope and activity of these businesses wherever possible.
In terms of the end-game success of these companies’ efforts to purchase acquaintances, in a market where throwbacks are the new purveyors of cool and anything vintage is coveted, these folks could probably do well to learn a line or two from the old Beatles tune come Patrick Dempsey movie – Can’t Buy Me Love.
|
|
May 16th, 2007, 12:27pm
|
First National Bank has just launched a new Visa credit card, which lets customers accrue loyalty points for the popular online game World of Warcraft. Touting this invention as ‘the only card that pays you to play’, the company is clearly hoping to capitalize on some of the hype (and die hard loyalty) that galvanizes around the game. They’ve also gone a step further, allowing card applicants to chose from one of 13 designs emblazoned with various WoW characters and themes. In many ways, the cards look more like a collection piece than the bland plastic swipe-its most people are accustomed to. Says Paul Sams, COO of Blizzard Entertainment, the company that produces the game “…we feel that the World of Warcraft Visa card is another great way for players to represent their gaming passion out in the real world.”
A strong contingent of World of WarCraft players are in their teenage years and early twenties, so Visa seems at least in part to be making a play for those just entering the credit card market. But will the WoW card really help players get their game on? As one blog commentator posts: “I can just see some poor guy losing his chance at a second date when he pulls out his limited edition World of Warcraft Visa to pay for dinner… .””
|
|
May 3rd, 2007, 02:39pm
|
A team competing in the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s IDEAS Competition – where IDEAS stands for Innovation Development Enterprise Action Service – received an award for an innovative new way to get tuberculosis patients to take their drugs. TB is still a huge health concern in rural communities of poor countries, where getting people to adhere to strict treatment plans needed to treat the infection has proved quite the challenge. The solution, called CellCentives, offers a disposable package which reveals a special code when pills are removed within the required timeframe. Patients can then enter this code into their phones to receive free calling minutes. The catch is that if the pills are not removed within the requisite timeframe, no code is displayed.
This project is a reminder that while there is a lot of talk about how mobile applications will be used to increase commerce and change the corporate landscape, they can also be used for social good. In places like Africa where TB is an epidemic (second in magnitude only to AIDS), and where poor wire-line infrastructure make mobile phones the way that that rural communities connect with each other and the rest of the world, it’s no surprise that this solution won big points for its likelihood to make an impact. While the appetite for medicine may be small, MIT seems to think that the appetite for technology will take the cake in the infection prevention and treatment game. That said, at this stage this IDEA is still in its prototype stage, so we’ll need to wait and see - will a spoonful of technology help the medicine go down?
|
|
April 13th, 2007, 12:39pm
|
Last Monday, Rogers hired William Shatner of Star Trek days of ole to tout the benefits of its new video cell phones. The selection of Captain Kirk as a spokesperson is a fitting choice for a company who appears to be telling consumers, ‘the future is now’. The phones, part of the company’s new aptly named ‘Vision’ line, will enable wireless users to video conference and literally see their conversational counterpart in real time on the device’s screen.
Rogers is delivering these services via its new High Speed Downlink Packet Access (HSDPA) network. With the introduction of this new product line, Rogers is positioning itself on the cutting edge of wireless technologies, claiming ground as the first North American provider to offer video chatting capability on mobile phones.
These calls, during which the phone basically doubles as an audio-enabled webcam , are being offered at the rate of 25 cents per minute, or 5 dollars per month for 50 minutes of calling. Currently the service is only available in and around Southern Ontario’s Golden Horseshoe Region, but Rogers has plans to expand to top markets across the country throughout 2007. In order for the video-calling feature to work both parties must be using a Rogers Vision phone.
Other intriguing features of the Vision suite of services are that it will allow subscribers to download any of the top 50 YouTube videos of the week, access XM Satelite Radio, watch up to 25 local television stations including the Weather Network, BlueJays.TV, MuchMusic, and CBC Newsworld, and participate in redpipe.ca, which according to Rogers is “the music-lovers mobile music destination for free artist generated content like music, videos, artist news, alerts, blogs, pictures and event listings.”
This offering in part seems to in part be a response to Telus’ recent partnership with Amp’d Mobile, allowing the company to deliver gaming, music, and video downloads to members of their cell phone network.
When it comes to real time face-to-face mobile communications, however, Rogers seems to be demonstrating to customers and competitors alike that they’ve got the monkey now.
|
|
April 3rd, 2007, 04:30pm
|
Is Hilary Clinton your friend? How about Rudy Giuliani or Barack Obama? Well if you are an American youth and you use MySpace, you can expect that these and other presidential hopefuls will be knocking on the virtual door of your friend network soon.
On March 19th 2007 MySpace launched the Impact Channel as a forum for citizens to learn more about their favourite political candidates, as well as charitable causes. Despite its recent inauguration, there is already broad speculation about the impact that Impact will have in the 2008 US Presidential elections.
The role of MySpace in the race is of particular interest given the site’s popularity amongst the youth population – folks often referred to as ‘swing voters’ due to their frequently low voter turnout rates. MySpace asserts that by creating profiles on Impact and engaging with the often politically disengaged youth aged 18 through 29, candidates can gain support from a demographic which is otherwise hard to reach. If successful, the Impact Channel could take the concept of ‘viral campaigning’ to the next level.
According to a quote by Jeff Burman, MySpace vice-president that appeared in the Globe and Mail, MySpace is excited about the opportunity that the Impact Channel has to “help to redemocratize politics in the 21st century”.
Although critics say that so far the candidates’ pages are too stale and canned to jive with the colourful and zany tapestry that veteran members are used to seeing on a MySpace page, the opportunity remains for a MySpace profile to grab young people’s interest in ways that are more amenable to them than reading a newspaper or turning on the prime time news. According to Tom Anderson, MySpace cofounder, “In the same way (that young people) learn about their friends, they could learn about a candidate.” (As quoted in the New York Times)
If an election is really just a popularity race, it will be interesting to see, will the candidate with the most friends rock the youth vote? The impact of Impact remains to be seen.
In terms of looking at the effects of other Web 2.0 technologies on the 2008 election, Lee Rainie from the Pew Internet and American Life Project shared some thoughts with the New York Times on this subject: “Right now, social networking and YouTube are the two most striking things about this election cycle that make it different from 2004 — so far, (but) that could change. In 10 months, we could be talking about Second Life or text-messaging as ‘the next big thing.’ ”
|
|
April 3rd, 2007, 04:13pm
|
If you moved to New York with hopes of making it big and landing your name on a billboard, Mini USA might just offer you another way. This division of BMW North America LLC is piloting a new advertising campaign in NYC, Chicago, San Francisco and Miami that uses RFID enabled key tags to trigger the appearance of personalized messages on Mini advertising billboards (dubbed ‘Motorboards’) for participating Mini Cooper drivers.
Mini invited 4,500 out of its 150,000 drivers in the US to participate in this phase of the program, which Mini is calling the Motorby Campaign. In order to sign up, participants fill out a non-invasive and quirky e-questionnaire which, along side asking standard fare questions inquiring after the driver’s occupation and name, also gets playful by asking if their Mini has a name, and what the driver’s favourite features about the Mini are. Shortly thereafter the driver receives the RFID key fob in the mail.
Drivers who see a Mini Motorboard in the distance can expect to see a message, customized and personalized to them, as they pass by. The boards, which carry typical advertising when no registered Cooper drivers are in range, will pick up the RFID signal from the key fob of nearby drivers and transform into a message board with a tailored message for the driver, displayed in big flashy lights. The New York Times article on this subject explains the types of messages drivers can expect to see: “Mary, moving at the speed of justice,” if Mary is a lawyer, or “Mike, the special of the day is speed,” if Mike is a chef.
While Mini plans to test this campaign for three months prior to deciding whether to roll it out to more cities or increase its penetration, many in the marketing press believe it will be met with large success. Not only is this a novel way to solidify the relationship between drivers and the Mini brand, but as Michael Megalli, a partner with the marketing strategy firm Group 1066, as quoted in the New York Times says, “Building evangelists is the holy grail of marketing for a number of industries. This is interesting because the marketing is integrated into the product.”
It will be interesting to see how the market reacts to the use of RFID technology in this marketing application, given the hype around the massive privacy concerns/big brother imagery that notions of RFID often evoke, resulting from the technology’s potential to be used in tracking an individual’s whereabouts. Mini, however, maintains that the RFID tags are in place to support a fun and entertaining advertising campaign, enabling the company to speak with their drivers, rather than to invade its customers’ privacy. It will also be interesting to see how other auto manufacturers and advertisers react when the RFID rubber hits the road.
|
|
|
del.icio.us
Digg it
Furl
reddit