Archive for the 'Social Media' Category

MicroHoo: What Everyone’s Talking About

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ron
on May 4, 2008
in Global Strategy, High Tech & Media and Social Media
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Microsoft throws in the towel

Backgrounders on
BBC | Analysis: Microsoft without Yahoo
BusinessWeek | Microsoft Drops Bid for Yahoo
Financial Times | Yahoo under pressure after deal collapse
Bloomberg | Microsoft Walks Away From Yahoo After Fight on Price
CNBC | As Deal Unravels, Pressure Is on Yahoo to Perform
Reuters | Investors eye Yahoo’s alternatives to Microsoft
The Economist | Microsoft throws in the towel
The New York Times | Microsoft-Yahoo: What Everyone’s Talking About
The Wall Street Journal | Microsoft Withdraws Yahoo Offer After Attempt to Bridge Gap in Price

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The New Disruptors

Published
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ron
on April 22, 2008
in High Tech & Media and Social Media
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The New Disruptors Always been looking for the next big thing? Please keep an eye on The New Disruptors - A video series written and produced by Business 2.0 Editor-at-large Erick Schonfeld in conjunction with CNN.

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Politics 2.0

Published
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ron
on April 16, 2008
in Social Media
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Twitter NetworkWhen I first saw that Barack Obama “followed” more than 23.000 people’s Twitters and Hillary Clinton followed 0, I thought it was simply bad PR on Hillary’s part. Like Obama, she probably should pretend she’s listening to all those people, even though neither has the time for it.

Now I was left wondering if Obama’s thousands followers could be valuable data? Perhaps analytics companies could rake through those tweets and give the candidates charts about shifting attitudes and responses to speeches. Costly? Not much in comparison to TV ads at state television I assume. Is it worth it for candidates to mine Twitter?

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Another way with web video

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ron
on April 3, 2008
in Social Media
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Blinkx Broadband TVWeb video. Some believe it’s all about low quality, edgy clips which you can graze on at your laptop - others see the internet as simply a way of delivering quality content in high definition to your plasma screen. Or perhaps you want to be able to click onscreen and get a wealth of information from the web about what you’re watching? That’s what Blinkx, a company launching a new online video service, is betting can make it stand out from an increasingly desperate crowd.

Its BBTV application promises to take a ragbag of content, from news clips to documentaries to independent films, and present it to you online with Blinkx’s added ingredient - clickability. The idea is that you are watching a news item about monks in Tibet, you click and get the entire commentary on screen, use that to navigate to the section which interests you, and then click again to draw down all that rich information that the web can provide.

While watching blinkx BBTV, viewers can access transcripts of a program’s audio track and background information on everything from actors and personalities to reviews and locations shown within the video (MediaPost, 2008)

But isn’t it too late for another video wannabe to enter this market? As far as I can see, the audience has decided that it wants either YouTube or mainstream television - and the likes of Blinkx may fall through the gap in the middle.

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Social Media Rush….

Published
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ron
on April 1, 2008
in Social Media
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Look past the yakkers, hobbyists, and political mobs. Your customers and rivals are figuring blogs out. Our advice: Catch up…or catch you later (Social Media Will Change Your Business, BusinessWeek Online)

“Blogs werethe heart of the story in 2005. But they’re just one of the tools millions can use today to lift their voices in electronic communities and create their own media. Social networks like Facebook and MySpace, video sites like YouTube, mini blog engines like Twitter—they’ve all emerged in the last three years, and all are nourished by users. “

A good primer for business executives that are just starting out in social media initiatives. We’re just standing at the beginning of the social media revolution. In the next three to five years the entire media world will be turned upside down and advertising, communications/PR, market research, etc will be performed in ways never seen before.

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Happy 50th Anniversary!

Published
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ron
on January 29, 2008
in International Business and Social Media
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LEGO LogoHappy 50th Anniversary for LEGO! Hearing or reading the name LEGO always brings up good memories and puts a smile on my face! During my childhood LEGO was my favourite toy! I could literally play all day with it! Yesterday was the official 50th anniversary of LEGO.

From a business perspective LEGO is a text-book example of a company that successfully transformed itself for the 21st century. Late 90s LEGO seemed to have had its best time. However it managed to blend in and fully adapt internet in its business model. Resulting in the fact that you now can first build your very own artwork online and have it delivered at your house in the famous interlocking bricks!

Furthermore, if you do a really good work in making your own LEGO artwork it can even be put in mass production by LEGO and put up in stores worldwide. LEGO gives you royalties of 5%, which in turn can make you a good living. Building and ordering LEGO bricks online now accounts for 10% of sales. So still loads of potential especially if you take in account the long tail. Building and ordering your very own LEGO artwork online is basically an unlimited supply of LEGO artwork variety.

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Wikia Search

Published
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ron
on January 8, 2008
in Social Media
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Wikia Search

Yesterday Wikia launched a new type of search engine: Wikia Search, with results that rely on users’ input and open-source software. Wikia, on the other hand, is a for-profit company cofounded in 2004 by Wales (co-fouder Wikipedia) and British Internet entrepreneur Angela Beeseley under the original name Wikicities.

What separates Wikia Search from many other Web-search tools, including Google’s, is that it will incorporate human input with methods based on computer programs. A potentially more important distinction is that Wikia will publish the code underlying the search engine. Opening the source code fits with the growing movement in the field of technology, including within Google, toward open software.

Still, Wales says it may take at least two years for the engine to reach the standard set by Google and competitors such as Yahoo! and Microsoft’s search tool. That may be too long for impatient Web surfers, says Danny Sullivan, editor-in-chief of the Search Engine Land Web site. “If it doesn’t come through the first time—that’s it,” he says. “People won’t go back again when there are so many other options.”

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OMG Chinese Facebook Copycat

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admin
on November 4, 2007
in Emerging Markets and Social Media
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Facebook China - Xiaonei

Yes, that was my reaction when I saw this webpage. The image above is just a Facebook clone, Xiaonei.com. It looks like the portal was started around 2005 (less than two years after Facebook was born), and since then, it has grown exponentially to cover around 2,000 university campuses in Greater China. They have just recently started to pan out their services to cover high schools and companies.

Facebook is about to enter the Chinese market will they be too late as Chinese fancy local stuff?

The future will tell.Thanks to a friend (since my Chinese is not sufficient) I am enrolled at Xiaonei.com! Now I am a proud student of Nanjing University. Add me! :)

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Google OpenSocial

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admin
on November 2, 2007
in Social Media
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Google OpenSocial

Google unveiled its OpenSocial platform earlier this week, saying it would give outside developers tools to write programs for any of its social network partners.

“OpenSocial is going to become the de facto standard (for developers) instantly out of the gates. It is going to have a reach of 200 million users, which is way bigger than anything else out there,” Chris DeWolfe, chief executive and co-founder of MySpace, told reporters. Source

“OpenSocial provides a common set of APIs for social applications across multiple websites. With standard JavaScript and HTML, developers can create apps that access a social network’s friends and update feeds.”

Head on over to http://code.google.com/apis/opensocial/ to find out what the buzz is all about.

>>UPDATE @ November 3rd<< Nicholas Carr gives his opinion on Google’s OpenSocial.

Google’s introduction of OpenSocial, which, as Marc Andreessen explains, provides a kind of universal two-way connector between web applications and social networks, marks an important moment in the transformation of the World Wide Web into what I term, in The Big Switch, the World Wide Computer. The internet, as Google frequently points out, is the new computing platform, and OpenSocial - whether it succeeds or not - gives us a view as to how that platform may operate. Continue reading

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Human 2.0

Published
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admin
on October 14, 2007
in Social Media
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Human 2.0“We are making exponential progress in every type of information technology. Moreover, virtually all technologies are becoming information technologies. We can reliably predict that in the not too distant future we will reach what is known as “The Singularity”.

This is a time when the pace of technological change will be so rapid and its impact so deep that human life will be irreversibly transformed. We will be able to reprogram our biology, and ultimately transcend it. The result will be an intimate merger between ourselves and the technology we create.” Continue reading

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