Three Minds On Digital Marketing @ Organic

While I agree that the democratization of data is important, there are still significant hurdles surrounding privacy and security. For example, if my small business is in competition with someone else in a similar market space, how much do I trust the cloud with this data? How much can I share without a competitor deducing what I am doing?

While the initial "snooping" concept is simple ... The data is secure therefore they can't see it, what about the in the cracks data. Imagine we are collaborating on a Google document internally for a new partnership in my product space. We have a determined competitor who really wants to find out how to beat us to market. What is they can watch the ad's being served up to me and my employees in some way. What if the information gleaned from those ads (targeted at document content maybe) reveals our super-secret market partnership? Sound far fetched? Maybe not.

I think that the true power of this data comes from aggregating it, smashing it up against other data and then analyzing it. The problem is that doing this kind of data analysis often requires something more than a human mind. Scientists are already struggling with this concept as more and more raw scientific data is made available on the web. What we need is an automated way to look for patterns, clusters, interesting hypotheses in these data.

However, on the flip side, the setup of a business that is not tied to physical location any more. Cloud services like google docs, grandcentral, skype, and zimbra allow people to create a company without a physical office. A globally extended supply chain and global reach for shipping means companies can be created, operate, and grow in a completely virtual way. What will countries do to tax such an entity? How will we deal with this?

Dean McRobie

image credit: point_cat35 [Flickr]

A few years ago, a technically minded (geeky? Who said geeky?) friend offered to set me up with a blog on his personal server. Having kept journals in various forms over the years, I thought, Why not? And hey, good work research.

With nothing in particular I wanted to write about, over the next four years it became a compendium of family and work life anecdotes, not very deep thoughts, links and anything else that came to mind. Few people knew about it, but I was vaguely aware that with very specific searches (eg the name of my band) it would show up on Google, so I was careful not to include client names or even where I worked, just to stay under the radar.

Then two days ago I got a frantic email from my friend (with a subject line that I'm amazed got through my spam filter) saying that while updating the blog software, he'd accidentally wiped away all four and a half years of posts -- about 250 or so. Poof! And he had no backup of his server. Suddenly my lighthearted musings of the last while became more valuable -- there were a lot of nice memories recorded in there that (as every parent knows) don't last on their own. What to do?

Google to the rescue! Knowing that my band name showed up in searches, I started there. Sure enough, it came up, but of course the link itself was useless. On the other hand, the "cache" link... worked like a charm. And best of all, each post noted the name of the post before and after, so with a search string that went something like: "site:www.theservername.net elliottblog blog toronto " I found I could methodically work my way through the posts and extract all the content from them into a text file.

Google as file backup! It was laborious (and Google had lost track of a few of them), but hey, posts with names like "Glove in a Cold Climate" are worth saving. Ahem.

There is much written about the worrisome way that Google is crawling and documenting our online activities, but this is the first time I've really considered it as something with personal benefit beyond getting a decent search result. For once, the idea that Google has been following along behind me like an obsessive court reporter, recording and storing my meanderings, is oddly comforting.

Not that I won't be backing up my own posts from now on.

Elliott Smith

image credit: Irving Geis

We all love statistics!! Whether factual, misleading, or downright wrong... they are bite-sized and delicious. They make this whole crazy world quantifiable and human behavior easier to deal with. This weeks featured statistic comes from the 2008 Cone Business of Social Media Study:

"93% of Americans believe that a company should have a presence on social media sites and 85% believe that these companies should use these services to interact with consumers."

Hurray for social media, which is continuing to seep it's way into the hearts of consumers and companies alike.

What's Been Happening This Week...

Twitter Continues To Grow Up... Mostly
Evan Williams, co-founder of Twitter, got named one of Business Week's 25 Most Influential People on the Web. But what's funny about Twitter's success is that it wasn't intended to be used for what it is now. It's no longer about "what are you doing?", it's about communicating in the fastest way possible to the masses.

A great example of this occurred this week when Laurel Papworth, Australian blogger, decided to pull together an instant consultancy to respond to an RFP from Vodaphone. She put out a tweet and within 4 hours later, she had pulled together 65 people, they had set up a website called The Twitter Agency, and were exchanging tips and strategy via blog posts.

Big Twitter blunder this week came today when citizen journalism falsely reported that Steve Jobs had a heart attack. CNN carried the report, Apple stock dropped, until it was revealed it was false. Could this become a growing trend?

"You've got people who are trying to game the system to (possibly?) game the market or influence other events. The 'news market' will eventually start filtering these reports out, which raises the price of being a reliable news source and slightly degrades the Twitters and iReports as useful sources."
Mike Hudson

Web Apps: Alive, Dead, or Evil?
It was a weird week for the world of widgets and web apps. Mashable basically called web apps a necessary evil. And the rest of the blogosphere couldn't agree on whether the web app was dead or growing. Facebook announced that their apps are now portable to friendster, and Netflix finally launched an API to make their data available for widgetization. But is this all too late... AllFacebook has presented some pretty convincing charts that show a huge decline in web app installation, since the Facebook redesign.

One area that isn't down is mobile apps. Facebook launched a new version of their iPhone app this week. And presidential candidate Barack Obama released an iPhone app to help supporters connect and get involved, stay up to date on breaking news, read up on Obama's position on issues, and more.

Marta Strickland

Just to repeat Frontline's Growing Up Online again, we are calling this the "biggest generation gap since rock 'n' roll". Parents are seeing their children embracing technology in ways they cannot relate to. But this is a shrinking gap. As the next generation of parents were raised on the internet and Nintendo, they will be able to identify with their children and be "digital natives" with them. And the question I have is... are we losing anything along the way?

And honestly, I'm not one to talk, as a "digital native" myself:

"You were exposed to technology. I held you on my lap when you were weeks old as I composed my freelance work on an Apple II computer. Before long you were reaching out to play with the keys and on to the what now seems primitive software we got for you. By 18 months you were loading up your own diskettes."
My Mom

But I don't want to come at this from a biased point of view, because I understand this concept. We are dealing with our own limitations. We are advancing faster than the speed of human evolution, so as one skill comes in, another falls out.

"I compare this to the same problem as when people get a GPS. My friends admitted to me, and I admit of myself, that I no longer pay attention to where I am going. You no longer have a visual map in your head of where you are going. You are riding shot gun in your own car, and when the device freezes up, you are completely lost. You have no barrings."
Scott Lange

In this war for brain power and attention, in this world where there is so much competing to for our time, what skills are we losing by creating technology that makes it so much easier.

Continue reading "The Trade-Off: Technology Is Changing Human Beings" »

image creditSwansea Photographer [Flickr]

In a fantastic post about the different fears of different generations, Laurel Papworth brings this insight to the table:

"Gen Y fear not finding their passion. By not connecting to their passion and with others that share similar passions, Gen Y fear they will not have a voice and will end up being ignored.

Oh and there's no point standing still and trying to figure out something in depth because the world is in state of continual flux, and so you had better keep skating ahead of the changes. Keep changing jobs, careers, stay flexible, until you find what you love..."

It isn't ADD that this generation has, they are just constantly searching for something that will hold their interest and keep them passionate. In the world of information and sensory overload, there is simply no time to waste on the mundane, you have to flip and scan until you land on the exceptional. And it's when children find it, that they prove just how well they can learn, what can hold their interest, and how empowering technology can be.

"My 6 3/4 yr old daughter has given me a very different view into the next information / knowledge age and how different it is from the world I grew up in. Increasingly she's started to spend extended periods of time in front of the computer learning new things, not just playing games or watching videos...

Today she spent 60+ minutes exploring the wonderful world of African Rain Spiders. I watched her use Google, Wikipedia and blogs to read about these spiders, look at images of them and imbibe a huge amount of knowledge. Her mind is obviously able to deal with the hyperlinked world a lot better than her dad's."
David Feldt (Digital Disruption)

Technology is making learning more instantaneous, more exploratory, and more collaborative.

Continue reading "Work Time: Technology Is Changing Learning" »

...because catching up to Firefox and Opera functionality better describes what is happening here. In either case, Microsoft has definitely stepped up their game with this release which allows a ton of new functionality and features.

All of the new functions are neatly packaged and easy to understand, which is a much different experience from browsing through pages of Firefox addons. The Easy Homepage function (see image above) has been incredibly useful and really changes your browsing experience because you tend to use this tab as a navigation page. The page load times seem faster than any other browser I have used to date, probably thanks to the FasterIE prefetching which uses idle bandwidth time to download and cache links so they are ready for you when you click on them. The mouse gestures are fun but this along with many of the services take time to learn and setup, I guess that is why it is called "Pro".

I have tried Chrome, Avant, Flock and other browsers but have always comeback to Firefox. Had it not been acting up this week I probably would not have even tried IE7 Pro. But now that I have spent some time getting acquainted, Firefox maybe knocked out of contention.

http://www.ie7pro.com/

Russ Hopkinson

Play time at Aaron Yacks's house goes something like this... The kids from around the neighborhood come over. A few crowd around computer #1 and the others crowd around computer #2. They invite each other into virtual rooms and the games begin. Shouting can be heard through out the halls of the house as they yell to each other, "I'm going to go on the next quest, are you coming?"

They are doing what all kids do.
They are exploring together... only virtually.

It's much different than the times of playing blocks on the floor or playing tag in the neighbor's yard. And it's quick to judge experiences that were different than the ones we had. But with new experiences come new opportunities.

There is something to this new play time. The New York Times described it best as co-presence. Both teams are playing their own game, but they are also "talking" back and forth, as if they were in the same room, on the same computer. And because of that, they don't even have to be. They could be across the street from each other. They could be across the world from each other.

The new play time is killing the locationality of friendships.

Continue reading "Play Time: Technology Is Changing Relationships" »

Over the past several weeks Organic's Emerging Platforms Group has been working with our friends at Drop.io on a location-aware extension of their already awesome file sharing service. Drop.io understands that there are some unmet or poorly met needs that are inadequately addressed by the services and applications most people use to transfer, share, and store large files. Please don't ever email me a 50mb file. I will not be pleased. Anyone who isn't familiar with Drop.io's drop-based approach to sharing - go check it out - then come back and finish reading this.

Here's how it works: The application provides Drop.io users the ability to assign a physical location to any drop. Drops can then be found from a desktop/laptop PC, blackberry, and of course, an iPhone. The cool part - the mobile app - scans your location within a 1 mile radius of your position and returns any drops affixed to a location within that radius. We see this extension as a hybrid location-specific digital content publishing and distribution utility that has the potential to power a variety of interesting use cases.

One real-world example of how this might be used is at a concert. Say a band wants to give out copies of its latest song and other exclusive content to people who attend their concert, they can use Drop.io Location to publish that content to the concert venue, and make it available only to people at that location. We see people using this in a whole host of novel ways and we're looking forward to seeing some inventive applications that we haven't thought of [yet].

If you would like to join the private beta for the iPhone portion of this service you can request entry at: contact@dropio.com

Dan Neumann

Editor's Note: A few weeks back I spoke with Chad Stoller of Drop.io, a friend of Organic and the former Executive Director of our Emerging Platforms group. So make sure to check out that interview to get more of an idea of what Drop.io is all about.

Is your son or daughter showing signs of digital addiction?

The digital natives of today have been born into an always-on culture. For many children that are growing up with early adopters for parents, they have never known a time without cell phones, they have never known a time without wireless internet buzzing through the walls of their home. Connectivity flows in the air.

Aaron Yacks's son asked without hesitation if he could use his father's laptop to go online on a recent road trip. When denied, his son became confused and Aaron was struck to find words that would explain why his Blackberry could go online in a moving vehicle, but not the laptop. But in a few years, when we are connected everywhere all the time, will questions like this even exist?

We are reaching a new baseline for culture. It's a baseline where "online" is no longer a technical state. "Online" just is.

And this new baseline has some interesting implications on the way we record our children's lives, they way they interact with us, and they way they interact with each other...

Continue reading "The Definition: What Makes A "Digital Native" Different?" »

When I was having lunch with a colleague last week, she told me about an e-mail she had just received from her 9 year old niece. Rather than it being your normal friendly "hello", her niece was announcing the start of her first business, a "family advice" service. But the real hook was the "customer loyalty" program... for every 5 questions you asked, you'd get 1 question for free.

Her niece hadn't really thought through a pricing structure or solid growth plan, but in that moment she had her first idea for a start-up. The viral video, the web 2.0 start-up, the blog... these are the lemonade stands and the "playing house" of the next generation.

I was delighted and intrigued by the story. On a personal note, my husband and I are going to start a family in the next year, and so my ears have been perking up to the kid conversations around the office. How will the lives of my children be different than my childhood? Will it be more difficult to raise a child in today's culture? Is it really as scary as the news media makes it out to be?

And for the past week I have been a vessel, colleting every "child meets technology" story I could grab my hands onto from around the Organic offices. I picked through, analyzed, and arranged. And, I would now like to spend the next week sharing with you, the readers, what does it take to raise a digital native?

Please join me and comment with your experiences as we explore:
1. The Definition, what makes a "digital native" different
2. Play Time, how technology is changing relationships
3. Work Time, how technology is changing learning
4. The Trade-Off, how technology is changing human beings

Marta Strickland

Yesterday, I stumbled upon a fantastic advertisement for the new Wii game "Wario Land: Shake it!":
http://www.youtube.com/experiencewii

My first thoughts were probably the same as most other people's: "What the hell is happening?" What really makes it exceptional in my mind is how it takes something that we're all very used to, and (quite literally) shakes it up. After my initial shock of seeing pieces starting to fall off, I just did a very quick bit of investigation...

So, except for the header, the whole piece is one big Flash movie made into one fantastic optical illusion. They just worked the movie up to look exactly like YouTube, then as the game footage (which is part of the same movie) plays, they use Flash effects to make it look like the page is coming to pieces - a very simple and very smart idea .

I didn't know YouTube would allow somebody to take over an entire page like that. I can only imagine what it cost them! This could give us all kinds of opportunities - I want to see a Jeep Wrangler drive its way up the side and to the top of the video player now, as if it were climbing a mountain. My mind is buzzing with ideas.

Daryl Brewer

I found this post really hard to write. My delicious steam has run pretty dry. My Twine updates have been noticeably slim. The world is understandably focused on other things. The economy, the bailout, the debates, people finding new ways to poke fun at Sarah Palin.

So I've had to breathe deep, clear my mind, and then give some serious thought to...

What ELSE Has Been Happening This Week...

Remember That Thing Called Google Android?
Oh yeah, didn't that phone that has been shrouded in rumors for the past year finally release actual details and a video demo? Yeah, THAT happened this week. And while Apple fanyboys are already listing the reasons why it's no iPhone killer, app developers are lining up for a platform that is going to offer way less restrictions.

The New PC Campaign, Ask And You Shall Receive
After people spent all of last week complaining about the irrelevance of the Seinfeld-Gates commercials, Microsoft turns around with an inarguably better series where people proclaim "I'm A PC". As soon as the commercials debuted, the blogosphere called for a user-generated portal where users could claim their PC-ness. Well, they must have been psychic, because Microsoft launched the very site they described the next day.

The State Of Social Media
All of us are hoping that the new president's first "State Of The Nation" address in January will come bearing better news than the past 48 hours. But in the meantime, this week we got two reports on the state of Social Media. Technorati launched their series, The State of the Blogosphere. And Opera updated their series, The State of the Mobile Web. Each worth a read.

The Twitterverse Is A Reflection Of Us
Alright, I made it a couple of paragraphs without thinking back to our current political situation. But luckily I'm not the only one sucked in by it. You only have to look at the newly launched Twitter Election page to see how fiercely the discussion is raging on. The tweets are flying faster than a news ticker now and are only going to speed up. Many are wondering if the platform will be able to hold up to it's primetime debut in tonight's first Presidential Debate.

Just don't watch the Twitter stream too long, or you might find yourself hypnotized, instead of outside enjoying the last days of warm weather...

Marta Strickland

image credit: wired

Editor's Note: For the entire month of September, the year of Google's 10 year anniversary, they will be marking the occasion by asking their experts, "What's going to happen in the next ten years?" Since their philosophy is that the best way to predict the future is to invent it, their vision of the future of the web comes very much from the flavor of the Google Kool-Aid.

So Organic felt that this would be a good opportunity for us to respond to Google's vision of the future as they tell it, with our vision of the future.

The Future of Mobile by Andy Rubin, Engineering Director

Reading through Google's views on the future of mobile, there are major elements of the emergent mobile world they have completely missed due to their focus on practical function and utility. Where are the opportunities for entertainment? And what about furthering our personal growth?

It's like they are stuck in the same mentality people had about "personal computers" when they became mainstream. Many looked at the practicality and the functionality, but had not focused enough energy on how this device would become part of our homes and part of our lives.

There are two huge points that Google missed:
1. How does the technology engage us?
2. How does the technology transform us?

The knee-jerk way to look at the mobile web and the growth of the smart phone is to think of it as a personal computer in your pocket. But I prefer to think of this intelligent device as always on, always there, and always running in the background. In the future, you won't have to choose to engage it, it will engage you based on the stuff you need to know.

Another big mistake that people make with the way they look at mobile objects and applications is that they tend to think of them as an extension of personal character. They think of blogging and other public reporting mechanisms, and they miss the possibilities of this more private device that is always with you, giving you feedback in real time.

If you look at what is happening in the automotive industry right now, they are building in technology that communicates consumer diagnostic data in real time. The data is analyzed and available so that the consumer will know when their vehicle is in need of repair or whether they could be getting better MPG. It's not unreasonable to think that someday our mobile devices would digitize our life diagnostics, our health, our brainwaves, and let us know when we might be in need of repair.

In the future, the mobile web won't just be an extension of character, it will transform your character.

Tomas Roldan

image credit: maureenld [Flickr]

The exceptional for others has to start with the exceptional for ourselves. We have to feel exceptional and be exceptional in order to provide the same. But how do we find the exceptional in ourselves, when mostly we are just trying to survive - the next deadline, the next meeting, the next commute to work... and the next and the next.

In his book, Stumbling on Happiness, Daniel Gilbert tells us that we are the only species that plans, and that planning takes place all up in our heads. In the meantime, what our bodies are up to is no different than what the rest of the mammals on this planet are up to, and that is "nexting", which means just what it says. We think we plan, we think we anticipate, we even think we create, but mostly what we really do is deal with the next thing coming at us, full speed, to infinity.

It's not specific to work or personal life, it's just life, happening, and we do whatever is the next most important thing, and then we do the next thing after that.

So, where can the exceptional be found, mired in the sea of next?

Continue reading "The Search For The Exceptional In Our World Of The "Next"" »

image credit: akakumo [Flickr]

Editor's Note: For the entire month of September, the year of Google's 10 year anniversary, they will be marking the occasion by asking their experts, "What's going to happen in the next ten years?" Since their philosophy is that the best way to predict the future is to invent it, their vision of the future of the web comes very much from the flavor of the Google Kool-Aid.

So Organic felt that this would be a good opportunity for us to respond to Google's vision of the future as they tell it, with our vision of the future.

The Intelligent Cloud by Alfred Spector, VP Engineering, and Franz Och, Research Scientist

When people talk about Cloud Computing, they tend to lose their grounding in reality. Here are some important things to consider:

1. It's going to take a while for people (and businesses) to come around to trusting the cloud:

"It's not an OS (contrary to anything Mike Arrington says), and it will not be the answer to everyone's problems. People have an attachment to ownership - something that won't go away as easily as we think. Mainframe computing would have never worked as the sole option for the layperson computer user, and it won't work for the mainstream internet consumer/user/contributor."
Alex Bisceglie

But this isn't markedly different from the transition that we are undergoing with adoption of RIAs today. As people begin to view remote data as just as stable and secure as local data (Google Docs v Word), I think the likelihood of adoption goes up.

2. The cloud 'owners' need to work very closely with developers and users of their system to ensure that many of the base assumptions that we currently hold about applications stand true in the new world. eg: currently, there is no good way to do data backups inside of Google's App Engine (their cloud computing product). In reality, I should probably trust Google to have better data redundancy and failover backup capability than I would cook up, but at a very base level its very different from how developers work today.

But... it's going to happen, its going to be incredible and it looks (for now at least) that Google is going to lead the charge. Already they are using user activity to train their systems to very good effect. For example, they've been running Google411 as a free information service for quite some time, with the stated goal of teaching machines how to best recognize and parse human speech. The output? http://labs.google.com/gaudi full text indexing of video and audio content.

In a nutshell: its happening now and overall I think its a very good thing. But it needs to be closely monitored to ensure it doesn't become a very bad thing quickly.

James Vreeland