Chatterbyte Newcastle - 28 AUG 2008

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What’s big for newmedia in 2008

Its a question that we at emersive have been asked a lot recently so I thought I’d start the new year with my prediction for what is going to be big in 2008. I have four, yes four, I could not slim it down to one as I believe all of these advances are as important as each other.

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Facebook Ads Launch

Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg formally announced the social-networking site’s new advertising system called facebook Ads

Advertisers are able to:
- create branded pages,
- run targeted advertisements
- access the analytics of facebooks users

Zuckerberg stated att he launch, “When you put this all together, you get some pretty amazing things,”

Through branded pages, advertisers can develop custom pages that includes information about the brand and also applications designed to use in facebook. Meaning that users can go to one central location and interact with that brand even becoming the brands “friend”

Targeted advertisements allow marketers to target ads directly to specific profiles from age, sex, relationship states or even music tastes.
Zuckerberg stated “This is some really powerful stuff, and nothing like this has ever been seen before.”

Advertisers aslo have access to tracking and analytics information about exactly how their ad is interacting with facebook users.

YourStreet.com puts Australia in the USA

Always keen to test new web offering I headed out to the www.yourstreet.com site to play with this unique concept that officially launches tomorrow.

YourStreet combines Google Maps and local news, it detects where you are and delivers news stories that have recently occurred in your area as well as comments from people who live near you. It is the first website to map news to a specific location.

CEO James Nicholson explains, “The thing that distinguishes us is that we can get down to a specific street level”. As a business model this means YourStreet can develop advertising campaigns to a specific “street level” audience.

Many people will remember Nicholson from his previous startup NetVentures which was sold to CNET for US$12 million way back in 1999. So far he has self invested around US$400,000 although this figure has not been confirmed.

Now back to the testing. [Read more]

The Rise and Rise of Presence Applications

Whether you call it micro-blogging, mini-blogging or a presence application (PA), one thing is for certain it is changing the way we connect and interact. PA’s like Twitter and Jaiku (to name a few) have extremely simple interfaces, are easy to comprehend and are highly addictive. Although PA’s are not new it seems that they are gaining traction because they offer an advantage over traditional digital expression technologies, the ability to interact via the interface of choice, be it a browser, IM, plugin, custom app or mobile phone. But I believe that mobile blogging can be attributed to the fast take-up and continuity of use that PA’s are currently experiencing. So how is this technology changing the way we connect and interact? [Read more]

What carparks teach us about newmedia

What do carparks and newmedia have in common? Answer: people!

Photo Copyright © Melanie J Cook - go to blog / flickr

I had to go to the shopping centre, not something that I relish, to pick up some supplies for the 23 people that would grace our home for an evening of food, games and socialising. I quickly found a park, raced in, purchased the items and exited to my car. Driving away from my parking space I noted in my rear vision mirror two cars fighting for the recently emptied spot. The sight of flying hands and harsh words bemused me enough to stop and examine what was happening within the confines of the carpark. [Read more]

Stand out from the newmedia jungle

Media fragmentation was a phrase I heard quite a bit this week. New technologies are popping up every week with new ways to connect to smaller and more fragmented groups of people. This consistent fragmentation of people and delivery mechanisms is becoming very frustrating to business who simply don’t have the time to keep pace with the day to day updates of newmedia. Users are now creating their own version of the web and ‘their’ content gets delivered to them. This is an interesting phenomenon as the way people use digital technology has made a total back-flip from people going to the content source, to, people expecting the content to be delivered to them according to their terms. Thanks to RSS and subscription technologies the interaction direction has completely reversed. [Read more]

Physical Hyperlinking

You are walking down a street and see a poster with the new car you are interested in, so you whip out your phone and tag (take a photo of) the hypercode (hyperlink-barcode) in the bottom right corner with the inbuilt camera. The web enabled phone queries the HCS (Hypercode Server) which takes you to the products Hypercode Hub Page and you are presented with the following options: Save to del.icio.us | Goto website | Send to Inbox | Mark for followup.

Sound far fetched. Far from it!! In fact this could become the next big wave presenting an easy way for consumers to “tag” real world items so they can organise, purchase or simply gain more information. The technology is already successfully in use in Japan and Korea and Nokia is embedding the technology into its new S60 and S40 models for the Chinese market, a market of over 500 million phones.

Here is a McDonalds chip package from japan with the code on the back (Photo thanks to Chion Wolf - flickr link)

The possibilities that such a simple but powerful bridge between the physical and digital world brings is simply mindboggling! Simply put, anything in the real world can become a entry point to a world of digital information. That is a powerful value concept!!