As TechCrunch reported on Wednesday, an interesting new company has moved into beta launch mode - Poptent, a “crowdsourcing platform” for the creation of advertisements. Why I put crowdsourcing in quotes is that they are not targeting a totally open platform where anyone can participate (think: YouTube), but rather a community of “small put professional teams capable of producing TV quality ads.” In the words of Poptent (you can check our a video about them here):
Poptent is a vibrant community of filmmakers (and actors, comedians, grips, animators and more!) who are connecting to each other and to companies that want to pay them for their talents. Through our passions for advertising and commercials, we are exploring a new way of creating branded messages for the Internet age.
Poptent members can show off their work, build a portfolio, collaborate with other creators, leverage our deep set of features, and best of all make money doing what they love.
Poptent brands are seeking new ways to reach their consumers and create new audiences. They are finding exciting possibilities that save them both money and time while staying just ahead of the curve of competition. They are, in a word, trendsetters.
What I particularly like about this “modified crowdsourcing” model is that it deals with some of the inequities inherent in more traditional platforms - too much power being given to the buyers, at the expense of the sellers. In such models, companies post a request to a community (for little or no upfront cost) where pretty much anyone can work it, and then if they deem any of the projects worthy they can opt to pay for them. Among other problems, there’s a scale issue here - as more and more people join, you are less and less likely (as a creator) to be successful, and in turn one might expect the best creators to start shying away.
Last week I wrote an article about Trion World Gaming in which I made reference to their impressive venture capital backing. More importantly, I made an error. I said that Peacock Equity was an NBC venture when, in fact, it was a joint venture between NBC and GE Commercial Finance - Media, Communications & Entertainment.
So I was wrong and a good reader pointed it out, and the mistake was promptly corrected. That’s one of my favourite aspects of the blogosphere: many eyes can spot even small mistakes. So after the favour, I wanted to see if the commenter had a blog of their own I could check out their handiwork. The poster left their email address when they posted the comment so I googled them.
The makers of NBA 2K9 have come up with a very, very cool way to promote the game, and get users engaged in an ongoing way. It’s called The Other Season, a unique combination of video games, fantasy sports, and celebrity endorsement. Eight NBA superstars (real ones like Kevin Garnett and Steve Nash) own “franchises” within the game, which are competing with each other over the season. How they are competing is by selecting a team of gamers to join their respective squads. In other words, I, Denis Hancock, could be drafted by Steve Nash to play for his team, the Nash Potatoes- an MVP staple that always delivers.
Here’s the situation: you are at home watching your favorite television program and just as the scene ends you exclaim, “I KNEW that was going to happen!” Well if you ever wanted to put your powers of prediction to the test, then tvClickr is a great way to showcase your television smarts. As mentioned in my previous blog, tvClickr is a Facebook application that was developed by LiveHive Systems and it is based on the idea of NanoGaming.
As a competitive person I was intrigued by the idea that you could play against other viewers for points and prizes by answering questions about a live television show. Throughout the week I thought about testing tvClickr on a show that I was already familiar with (such as Greys Anatomy) but I decided that my review might be a little biased because I was already engaged by the show and not necessarily by the application. Instead, I opted for a show that I don’t normally watch to see if my attention waivered or if I stayed focused on the show. Enter the test subject: The Amazing Race. Read More »
Eric Picard, the director of advertising strategy and emerging media planning at Microsoft Digital Advertising Solutions, authors one of the most interesting blogs in relation to the future of advertising. Unfortunately a lot of people miss it because he posts basically once a month, which isn’t exactly conducive to getting found on the search engines or staying top-of-mind. When he does post, however, it’s almost always worth the read.
His most recent post is titled Appearing Soon in an ad near you. The core argument is that people haven’t considered the ramifications of Moore’s Law on real-time image processing. While a lot of people have (or are) focusing on the impact it might have on things like targeting and analytics, the intersection with computer graphics is quite interesting - a future where ads directed at you could easily feature you and prominent members of your social network, both past and current.
A hypothetical example he gives about an ad featuring a man’s wife and three kids is interesting - but the example featuring a person that is the composite of the three people you dated in college really gets to how powerful (and scary) it could be. The question in the long-term may not be so much the ability to make these ads, but whether people will accept them - but history indicates the Net Generation in particular will likely glance over the privacy concerns.
I was surfing the web trying to figure out the best way to connect my laptop to my TV (in my defence - I had an idea of how to do it in theory… but wanted to find out in practical terms) when I came across an interesting YouTube video.
It was created by a young, talented kid who lives in Japan called Adrian, aka kidguru. With a straightforward, easy to understand video, kidguru very articulately explained how someone looking to connect their laptop to a tv would go about doing it. Going to his YouTube channel I discovered that he’s been doing this for almost a year now and has turned his site Tech-World into a blogging, vlogging, podcasting, twitter site/community. He’s managed to turn a hobby into a paying job, with sponsors and understands the value of creating community around his videos. He does product and app reviews, and tutorials among other educational things.
KidGuru’s YouTube channel now has over 1,500 subscribers and over 47,000 channel views, and he is now an official YouTube partner. The YouTube partner program is an ad revenue sharing program to reward users that frequently post original content and who have a steady following of thousands of viewers.
If you have any tech related questions I suggest checking out Kidguru’s channel or sending him an e-mail!
Last week I spoke with Andrew Mottaz and Blake Johnson, the founders of Portland-based Site9, about their new software as a service offering: ProtoShare. ProtoShare allows web developers to collaboratively create interactive website prototypes, ensuring that everyone is on the same page during the development process. But more importantly, ProtoShare opens the process up to other stakeholder, such as the marketing team, allowing them to follow the project’s progress over time, and provide timely and effective feedback to developers. By improving communication and collaboration within the project team, and between them and their clients, ProtoShare has the potential to revolutionize the process of web design. Rather than write about it myself, I though I’d share the words of Andrew and Blake. With their permission, I have published an edited and abridged transcript of our conversation below.
WILL: To start off, why don’t you give us a bit of background about yourselves, your company, and both the process and motivation behind the development of ProtoShare?
ANDREW: Sure. We started Site9 back in 1998 as a web development company. We were always building tools to make ourselves more efficient, and we saw that a much bigger opportunity for us was to develop those tools into a platform we could sell. Our first product was Launch, which is an end–to-end web development solution. One of the aspects of Launch that customers really responded to was that it gave them the ability to create prototypes of websites: visual and interactive mock-ups that allowed the entire development team and their clients to have a common understanding of what the final product was going to be. And what we started to realize was that by taking that functionality, and enabling a greater level of collaboration within the development team and between developers and their clients—including those without technical experience—we could make something really powerful.
BLAKE: And with the advent of Web 2.0 technology and the whole architecture of collaboration and people working together online, we started thinking, “That’s how we enable collaboration.” You don’t just run your program on a server in someone’s company; you run it on the Internet where people anywhere in the world can participate in the project. You can have a team with people from all over the world working together.
WILL: What’s the advantage of a prototyping tool?
BLAKE: Everybody in web development should be prototyping. You want to move in an inverse pyramid, from abstract to concrete, working your way up. But a lot of people don’t prototype. And those that do, they often use things like Visio or Photoshop. So it’s flat. When you take that to a client—along with your big spec document—and say, “Here’s how it’s going to work. You’re going to go here. You’re going to here. You’re going to have this,” they all say, “Yeah, yeah, whatever.” And then, when the project is close to being done, they say, “I don’t like this.” And then you’ve got all this rework that could have been avoided if there had been more communication earlier on. So the advantage of a prototyping tool like ProtoShare is that it makes prototyping easier for developers, and provides the interactive and collaborative capabilities that get clients to engage with a prototype.
Welcome back to another edition of the Wikinomics Roundup: Week in Review!In this week’s roundup, I will capture in brief, some of the thoughts, discoveries, and discussions that graced the blog throughout the past week.
In case you missed it, you can catch last week’s roundup HERE. From now on the Wikinomics Roundup will have a nice new home on the left side of the page, under Regular Features. Come visit!
This week I will profile the Seattle based coffeehouse giant Starbucks. In case you missed my last report card on De Beers; you can find it here. You can now find all my previous entries, and posts relating to them on the new Regular Features tab on the top left side of the page.Like all my previous entries, I will be evaluating Starbucks on the Wikinomics principles of being open, peering, sharing, and acting globally.
A couple of months ago Mike Dover wrote about our friend Sean Moffitt (a.k.a. agent wildfire), who was dealing with an unusual problem - he was approaching the 5,000 person limit on his Facebook friends list. Luckily for him me, I managed to slip in around number 4,996, and among other things continue to keep tabs on his always interesting blog. I was intrigued to see that he recently made what I believe is his YouTube debut, talking about his takeaways from the recent “Mass to Grass” conference (which focused on Word of Mouth marketing). I normally don’t link to videos, as I find written summaries much easier and quicker to digest, but am making an exception because it’s a very short (2 minutes, 30 seconds) recap with some very insightful comments. Not to mention I want to stay on his good side - I feel the next potential 1,000 friends breathing down my neck :).
For those that might not know about it, mashable is a great site for social networking news. Today they announced a nifty little “contest”: they are giving away one full month of free advertising, to three lucky start ups, in their new “Start Up Pricing 90×90 advertising zone”. The zone itself is a cool idea, designed to offer more affordable advertising for startups which might not be rolling in cash. The contest is also a cool idea - just leave a comment with your company name / URL, a 20 word description, and 20 words on why your startup is right for the Mashable audience. What I don’t quite understand is this next part:
Winners will be selected at random through a random integer Web app, please leave a valid e-mail address.
Why random? Wouldn’t it be better to select from the submissions based on merit - perhaps even using a community voting application? At minimum, wouldn’t this provide more incentive for companies to really crystalize their ideas in a compelling way, and make the post (and comment section) that much more interesting to readers?
Tamar Weinberg has a very interesting post today, summarizing all the comments she received from a variety of “social media consultants, bloggers, marketers, search engine optimizers, and social media addicts” as to what “traits define a social media marketer?“. My quick count revealed approximately 35 responses - below is Tamar’s summary of her findings, as well as a few of my favorite contributions:
Many agreed that social media is about community-building, passion, and enthusiasm. Creativity, a multi-tasking mindset, and the ability to think outside the box were also heavily agreed upon. Most importantly, those who find the most success in the social media marketing realm are those who are heavily networked and ensure that maintaining ongoing relationships is part of their everyday routine. - Summary of findings by Tamar Weinberg
I must admit - I was caught off-guard and even found it comical when I heard that Rihanna was lauching her own line of umbrellas (or should I say, um-ber-ellas) and I found the song Air Force Ones pathetic - but the blurring of lines between “music” and “promotional piece” is seemingly here to stay.
An increasing number of artists are now signing recording deals with consumer product companies such as Nike, Red Bull and Procter & Gamble, who are acting as de facto record companies - finding, funding, promoting and in cases even distributing new music. In an effort to promote various product lines, these companies have now begun to look outside of their core businesses for a new way to get their brands “out there.” Read More »
It’s no secret that Google sees mobile phones as an emerging frontier for search; as smart phones (and carriers’ data plans) become more sophisticated, it becomes possible to interactively exchange data in new and innovative ways, while also allowing people to tap into existing sources of information, such as the Internet. Google recognizes that the cell phone is developing along the same path that the personal computer did – it is a tool that we increasingly use to connect ourselves to people and relevant information, wherever we go. The question for Google then becomes, in what ways can it enable people by connecting them with the information that they need, as well as advertisements that provide relevant solutions. Read More »
This week’s edition of the Wikinomics Report Card will focus on General Motors Corporation (GM). In case you missed my first report card about Major League Baseball, you can find it here. Like last week, I will be evaluating GM on the Wikinomics principles of being open, peering, sharing, and acting globally.
Company Background: GM was founded in 1908 and is the world’s largest automaker and leader in global sales for the last 77 calendar years. It manufactures cars and trucks in 35 different countries under the brands Chevrolet, Buick, Cadillac, Pontiac, and many more. Under the strength of Alfred Sloan’s revolutionary corporate structure and leadership, GM was once one of the world’s most profitable companies peaking in the early 80’s with a U.S. market share of 45%. However, the legacy costs and complex accounting systems associated with the Sloan era have hindered GM’s efforts to create a more lean manufacturing process. Stiff foreign competition from companies like Toyota and poor strategic decisions like focusing on SUVs and light trucks in a rising fuel market has led GM to one of its weakest points in its history. Yesterday, its stock reached a 53-year low after Goldman Sachs changed it status to “sell”. GM is hoping that it can weather this storm long enough to introduce its new line of alternative energy vehicles like the Chevy Volt and reclaim some of its former glory.
Last week in my post about the evolution of entertainment I used a quote from Will Wright, the co-founder of Maxis, who said “…I think the most important thing that computers do for us…is that they extend our imagination.” And Mr. Wright and his team of programmers have indeed created a computer generated world that extends our imagination, while also being a world that grows and thrives by virtue of how imaginative its users are. This is the world of Spore, a game that is being developed for PC, Nintendo DS, iPhone, and with plans underway for the Wii, PS3, and Xbox 360. Read More »
Wikipedia spends a lot of time paring down business articles because they read more like advertisements than encyclopedic articles. That’s fair — so why not have a wiki for businesses and consumers to work on together, blending what businesses think of themselves with the opinions of consumers? Such a wiki does exist, though it’s still very small: WikiCommerce.
Dave Balter (check out Bzzagent to learn more) has published a new book recently - The Word of Mouth Manual, Volume II, featuring a rather sad but thoughtful looking monkey on the cover. While I can’t speak to the quality of the book just yet (though I’m quite sure it will be good), the way he has brought it to “market” so far is fairly unique. Notably, you can purchase the book in all it’s bounded goodness from Amazon for $45, or alternatively you can download it for free - an offer exclusively available through about 20 members of Dave’s network that he considers to be the biggest, baddest thinkers out there (a social marketing /marketing 2.0 crowd mostly).
I like the strategy for a number or reasons - with being able to skim his book for free at the top of my list of course. I emphasize skim because it’s highly, highly unlikely I’ll read the entire book on my laptop - if I want to read the whole thing, I will probably buy the “real thing”.
From a promotion standpoint, each of the 20 people Dave allowed to exclusively offer the link naturally wrote a blog post the book, which is a great way to generate… wait for it… word of mouth marketing the The Word of Mouth Manual. Seth Godin’s (What Dave just did) was my favorite of all the related posts, but many of them are quite interesting… and the “side” benefit of good publicity for BzzAgent might be is most likely worth more than all of the potential book royalties anyway.
Today’s New York Times features an article about the most serious social networking site, LinkedIn. The article describes what could be a dramatic shift for social networking sites as a whole: the professional networking site will expand its current product offerings by launching new fee-based services geared toward companies to generate revenue. This departure from the industry standard revenue generator, advertising, may lead other sites to copy its strategy.
LinkedIn already offers several fee-based services, like premium accounts and a talent acquisition tool. What is different, however, about many of their new products, is that they may change the community’s identity and betray its members who may not want their company to have access to every nook and cranny of their professional life. LinkedIn seems to be walking a fine line between abusing its users’ privacy and being able to make money off of peoples’ information. Read More »
No kidding — Microsoft has decided to use their deep pockets to buy some market share. From their point of view, either they get more people using their search, and then figure out how to monetize it later, or, if that doesn’t happen, they at least put Google in a situation where customers and advertisers start asking Google for similar incentives, something that I doubt Google appreciates.
Technology and the US election I've written several times about the impact of social networks on this year's US Presidential election - see here and here. And let's be honest, the use of such networks and new web 2.0 technologies has been dominated by Obama. He’s embraced social networks like no other candidate in an attempt to connect with [...]
