No more keyboards.. surface computing approaches

I want to talk to you about a technology that I found interesting, that has been under research for some years but it is not taking off yet commercially... Multi-touch or surface computing.

Microsoft developed a product based on this technology that they already commercialize under the name of Microsoft Surface. It is still a caprice for a handful of people (I read its price was about $10.000..). You can see a demo here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LtKQNwqNLLk

Apple's iPhone or HTC phone touch screen already showed us how we can play with screens. This technology is just the next link of the chain, a continuation of a regular evolution process and may be a previous stage of the future trends.

But this is actually what motivated my interest towards this field: a musical instrument called "reactable". It was created in 2005 by the musical technology group of the university of Pompeu Fabra (Barcelona). It is an musical instrument but as important as the auditive aspect is the visual appealing (see pictures above) and the interaction it provides.. all this together makes it a game that everyone would like to play. It sounds quite experimental but we all know that music is about that, in fact there are branches of music basing on the experimentation. Indeed it is fairly suitable for music such as for instance Bjork's, who actually has bought one unit. Check out a demo here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0h-RhyopUmc

It is very interesting how they are "redefining what conventional Human-Computer Interaction means" (as they claim) regarding the music plus animation combination..

About this technology I believe it is going to grow in terms of real usefulness (even as a tool for certain jobs) as well as in popularity. Hence, some day it might be part of our environment as another useful device (home entertainment, educational purposes?). These kind of devices are still unreachably expensive and they lie on an early adoption stage... but let's see the progresses in this field and how people react...

MS Surface official site: http://www.microsoft.com/SURFACE
Reactable official site: http://www.reactable.com

Social networks... money makers?

Facebook rejected to be bought by Yahoo! in 2006... they probably thought: "only $1 billion? we can milk the cow and make more than that.. ". They certainly have ways to do it. The first thing that comes to our mind is the ads they stick along the side of the page. The click through rate is really low (under 0,1%) but companies are willing to pay loads of money to be seen by the huge amount of users that Facebook has.
Not only the ads make this social network profitable but a good monetizer may be the valuable information they possess about their user base. It is a great amount of data for marketers to be used in their favour. They have a representative sample of the trends and demand that society has in real time.
Another way to profit out of Facebook is to charge brands that want a group with their name and logo.

What other ideas are to capitalize on Facebook? imagine an application such as geo challenge (you are challenged to guess the name of several countries with a time limit given only their silhouette). It would be interesting for McDonalds to have a similar application (questions obviously adapted to the matter of hamburgers, for example "when was the hamburger discovered") and offer discounts for the people that top a certain score. This would be appealing for users (challenge + reward in case of win), companies (promotion) and Facebook (companies are charged to have their apps in Facebook).

Banners will turn against you.. if you don't use them well

We were discussing the case of meneame; advertisers, banners, web pages, attention, CPC or CPM...
OK, so from the marketers standpoint if they want clicks in their banners they need to be attractive, and accomplish with what is expected with the brand they try to communicate. That is obvious.. I thought so..

OK, so here the story.. today I was skiming through an online Spanish newspaper and I saw a banner from my beloved business school (Instituto de Empresa) and these sentences on it:
"Titulación oficial. Networking global. Compatible con tu horario. Participativo, práctico y innovador"

Nice look, proper message... "Práctico e innovador"!! (practical and innovative), yes, I agree with that.. but please! take care of details! a rule in the Spanish language says that before a work starting with 'i' instead of 'y' (which means 'and') you use 'e'. So, beware of those kind of things if you really want your banners to be useful! :)

If I want a practical innovative solution of technology for my company I will not click on a banner with an old man holding a bunch of cables... This picture shows what I mean by a bad manner of using a banner (or more technically: marketing misuse).

Don't want people to think bad about my school... Everybody makes mistakes..

meneame.net: some thoughts about a business model

(continues)...
Now let's think about who can profit from the huge traffic generated by meneame, indirectly advertisers do when they get attention through the pages references in the fron page of meneame.. so who sees directly affected their profits through this phenomenon? newspapers for instance.

Newspapers see peaks in their visits and more page refreshes when they figure in the front page of meneame, therefore they profit out of it by a subsequent rise of clicks or views over advertisements in these pages. Why not try to arrange an agreement which stablish a share of the benefits between these parties (meneame and the owners of pages linked in the front page)? it is fair that if meneame contributes to their earnings, meneame gets rewarded somehow. A proposal would be: select a list among the most frequently posted in meneame's front page (the criteria for the selection must point to the ones that get greater impact in their revenues by succeeding in meneame), and negociate with them a share of the revenues caused by the peaks that are due to meneame webpage contribution. If meneame was not there the other parties would not get so much attention. But in the long run substitutes would appear, so there is a threat that clons became substitutes and then the previous proposal becomes weak.

In case other parties didn't accept the agreement of sharing revenues under any conditions.. as an extreme measure, Ricardo (meneame's main creator) could bring a better substitute than the current clones by making use of their knowledge and experience to position as the new meneame, and model it to be better off regarding the economic point of view (more attractive name for advertisers for example).

meneame.net: what users like to read but advertisers try to avoid

Let's talk about a very popular Spanish site called meneame.net. It provides (thanks to active users) a variety of information that people consider interesting and it attracts loads of visitors every day either posting, commenting, voting or just reading. This fact means that there is a huge user base and for a business model it can be a very reach feature to be exploited.

These kind of sites are a paradise for those advertisers who want to be seen and want create awareness of their products. Meneame face several competitors such as Barrapunto or Yonkis and may be, in some way, Google news. The three of them enjoy a lot of traffic but they have different offerings and therefore different kind of visitors. Barrapunto attracts more techies so it is probably a good place to advertise gadgets or technology-related services and products and they probably make good money out of it. Yonkis offer general nasty content and curiosities and therefore their model suggests better opportunities of marketing for sex shops and sex-related offerings, probably at a good CPC (Cost Per Click).
But what can we meneame offer? described as a social content tool, we have to take into account that social content range from science to politics including technology or accident and crime reports, very diversified for an advertiser? However, in a way meneame shows the trends of internet users, so being visualized threre, getting attention from this public is very juicy for popular brands.

But here we have an issue, a factor that may stop marketers from advertising in meneame is the name of the web page itself. Meneame has sexual connotations and therefore brands don't want their name nearby. Change the webpage name and distort its identity all of a sudden? let sex-shops ads to alienate their audience? do not seem to be a good solution... to be continued

Tools of the virtual world for pedagogical purposes

Internet has become an important source for research, thanks the net we can quickly access a huge amount of information from different authors, users, another researchers, experts, etc. Opinions, hypothesis, experiences are more available now due to the net and that becomes an interesting library for pupils.

We students can take advantage of the powerful sharing features that internet provides. The so called cloud let us store our knowledge and make it accessible to as many people as we want, all over the world, which brings up an interesting characteristic such as ubiquity. Given that internet reaches every corner and it is the mean we need to access the cloud, we can actually access our contents from everywhere.. God is omnipresent, and my documents too, very amazing. As I share docs with my mates we all have the chance to edit them from our places and see the changes made by someone else in real time, thanks for example Google docs.

But not only ubiquity and sharing makes internet tools so useful. We need to communicate verbally with each other too, and we don't want to spend all our money in Telefonica, so we take advantage of Skype for instance.

Also, Web 2.0 allows us meet other people specialized in certain technical fields that are not physically reachable. The word "around" is not important anymore due to the virtual world, so for some one what it used to be "none around can help me understand multidimensional databases" turned into "there is this expert from MIT I met in Linkedin that have very nice notes about multidimensional databases". Knowledge is richer and easier to get for students nowadays thanks to these tools.

Blog'o phobia

After rewording several times my first sentence of my first entry of this blog I realised that the title of the entry, that just escaped out from my mind before I thought about anything else, was perfectly suitable for the occasion. I step here, look at the screen, I hesitate, start thinking, get lost, I hesitate again, wonder what this will be like... I start breaking the blank space of a clean white text box, and I feel like in front of a door where there is an intesnse glare coming out from a chink, but I don't know what is behind the door.

I am about to pull the knob to see what is behind to discover this world by myself. I then click publish entry and the phenomenon starts.