Small multi-disciplinary teams are proven to build the best web experiences. Agency segmentation of creative, media, marketing, technology often makes it impossible to build effective online solutions. It appears the trend is continuing in the wrong direction with agencies outsourcing technology. This means that creative and marketing think up the next great Flash microsite and send the cookbook to China or Costa Rica to get built on spec.
This makes Web 2.0 innovation impossible. New technologies and frameworks, open source code, opportunities like OpenSocial and creating portable content that can “go where people are already” becomes impossible. Additionally there’s the great partnership opportunities; imagine the brand manager that partners with the next Facebook or Twitter before it gets big?
“You have to have world-class creative but you have to have world-class tech folks who can translate that into conversations,” said Kvamme, currently a venture capitalist at Sequoia Capital, one of Silicon Valley’s leading VC firms. “…technology is a critical component for success.”
The market for Internet video is exploding. Research firm eMarketer projects that by 2011 more than 85% of the U.S. Internet population will consume Internet video, up from roughly 63% in 2006. The last time this kind of viewership growth occurred in a new medium was when the television was first introduced in the early 1950s.
Last night I was on the MITX Technology Awards judging panel and got to see Visible Measures present VisibleSuite, their end-to-end solution for measuring the behavior of the Internet video audience. I saw Matt Cutler and Rishi Dean first unveil VisibleSuite at the DEMO 08 conference in Palm Desert, CA. The Demo conference is great; Continue reading »
Web 2.0 applications leverage social media and open technology to deliver rich user experiences. The most successful Web 2.0 solutions solve problems in unique ways. Commonly these are simple often free solutions.Consumers are trying to avoid marketers Too often marketers try to add social media tools to advertising, create viral games or other marketing content intended to entertain consumers. Consumers are looking for tools and applications that solve problems; that are useful. Here are some examples:
Flickr: With almost 10,000,000 registered users Flickr is an image/video hosting website, web services suite and an online community platform. It was one of the earliest Web 2.0 applications and one of the most popular social photo sharing sites (Alexa Rank 39). Flickr offers its service free for up to 100MB of uploads per month and unlimited uploads for pro users; the account cost $25 per month. Flickr was purchased by Yahoo in March of 2005. Continue reading »
In January Sprout launched SproutBuilder, a quick and easy way for anyone to build, publish, and manage widgets, mini-sites, mashups, banners and more. Include video, audio, images and newsfeeds and choose from dozens of pre-built components and web services. At first I thought this may be some kind of “prosumer” tool, nice for marketers or brands that that aren’t big enough for real solutions.
After a thorough review I’m recommending to clients and agency colleagues to seriously consider SproutBuilder for several reasons:
Robust design/authoring environment: Sprout provides dozens of ready built templates but its easy for more advanced Flash designers to create anything from scratch. Many of the common design tools are available and you can upload content including images, video, audio, Flash files (swf’s), and more. Adding these assets to your sprout is as easy as dragging and dropping.
Drag and drop components: Advanced components that you can add by simply dragging and dropping. Choose from slideshows, jukeboxes, RSS feeds, and more. Or “Mashup” any of components from our web service partners including PollDaddy, Google, Ribbit, ChipIn, and others. Continue reading »
Microsoft’s agency Avenue A | Razorfish has been developing a method to brainwash website visitors via banner ads. After 18 months of research, the partnership between Australian Advertising Amnesia Group (Part of Razorfish) and Professor Olaf Prilo PHD from the Mind and Brain Institute of New South Wales have developed a method of gaining consumer trust through high frequency (90fps) banner ads that stimulate specific regions of the visual cortex producing instant effects on consumers. Continue reading »
When we think of ‘crowdsourcing’ some of us think of leveraging crowds to do work like oDesk or Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, sites that help you outsource jobs globally. Another way crowds are leveraged is to allow companies create massive focus groups, garner fresh ideas, and even predict the future. Major brands such as Dell, Eli Lilly, Proctor & Gamble, Google, and Best Buy leverage collective insights to shape business strategies.
If you could change a headline, graphic, or promotional text on your website and increase click-through or conversion rates, would you do it? Of course you would. However, knowing what to change can be a challenge. Even more challenging is tracking which changes have the most effect. This was a daunting task, until now. Google’s Website Optimizer gives you the ability to make changes that create alternative layouts on your site. You are then able to track site visitor’s actions from one page to another based on the different scenarios you created. For instance, if you wanted to see if changing a certain graphic increased conversion rates, you could set the Optimizer to change from the original graphic to the new graphic and then track the different layouts to see which one has the better success. Continue reading »
An early pioneer in interactive media, Dean Whitney is a Web 2.0 and Social media technology evangelist. Start-up veteran, President of Garfield Group Interactive a Boston-based digital agency.
solve problems in unique ways. Commonly these are simple often free solutions.Consumers are trying to avoid marketers Too often marketers try to add social media tools to advertising, create viral games or other marketing content intended to entertain consumers. Consumers are looking for tools and applications that solve problems; that are useful. Here are some examples:
