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- That's it, I'm out of here.
- No more boring data: The Joy of Stats (UK only)
- And then there were five (input paradigms)
- Share and share alike
- Kinect hacks point the way to third input paradigm
- Content curation applications and how to get the best out of them
- Canute, Schroedinger and the problem of context
- Brussels: Where the trees tweet and the data talks
- Find your niche, find your revenues
- Paywalls: the triumph of experience over hope
- Xbox Kinect - it's great
- Press release: A Rough Guide to the World
- Taking the wrappers off a 'Rough Guide to the World': an #IE9 beta launch showcase
- Darren Gerry joins the team as new Managing Partner, Digital for Metia London
- If there's only one digital agency article you read this week, read this one
- Flipboard: the user experience is everything
- Quick reflection on day two Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference #WPC10
- World Cup Fever: the final score
- Tech Podcast: Metia interview Martin Hingley, ITCandor on Cloud Computing
- One for Statto: try our World Cup Pivot for player stats
- Elegant, clear and available in 200 tasteful colours, the Uniqlo online calendar
- Can you spot the eight iconic World Cup moments in our video?
- Beach Break Live: Silverlight 4, Photosynth, Spotify and thousands of students
- Nifty. Latest score from Mobile Keepy Uppy World Cup: 6000+ downloads, 2000+ video views
- Mobile Keepy Uppy latest score - four star review and 800+ downloads
In fact, we all are.
The New Marketing just got superceded by a new blogging platform that is more integrated with the Metia web site and provides a platform to a bigger group of the experts in the company to talk about what we do and what interests us.
Youll find me here.
You can see everyone else who blogs at Metia here.
Well leave The New Marketing live but dont expect any updates, so come and find out what we are up to over at the new site.
Recommending the Joy of Stats, a TV documentary that goes right to the heart of so many of the projects that Metia teams are working on right now (available to view until December 14, UK only).
Whether youre involved in data driven design and programming, or writing about the latest advances in finance, healthcare or just about any other industry youll find something to inspire you here.
Plus its presented by Hans Rosling, whose TED appearances are already the stuff of legend.
If you dont have time to see the full programme, then have a look at the trailer below. Thrilling stuff.
A number of people have pulled me up on my post last week when I wrote that Kinect could be breakthrough for gesture controlled interfaces. First of all I neglected to mention voice, a serious oversight. I also should have included EEG technology that uses brainwaves to interact with a device or interface.
So here are examples of both. Firstly Windows Embedded Automotive 7, which brings hands-free e-mail and text to your car and then a demonstration of a mind-controlled robot controlled devised by the University of Washington (via Discovery News).
So Google News now has a most shared section. Its a great example of just how far the sharing model for content distribution has taken over the web. Not long ago we had specialists working on viral campaigns for our clients.
Today, pretty much every piece of content that gets published online has a viral component, in the sense that it can be quickly shared with individuals or communities with the press of a button.
You can find the new section at the bottom right hand side of the Google News page. Top story? New LinkedIn share buttons (via Mashable). Yes, the social echo chamber is as self-referential as ever, but share is still front page news, for content strategists at least.
Hard to believe, but when the iPhone was first launched it was promoted heavily as um, well, a phone.
That was back in 2007, before the app store exploded and the touch screen experience became the interface aspiration of just about every device manufacturer on the planet.
In other words, even the most beautifully crafted experiences become pervasive in ways that the original designer could only guess at.
I think were at the same point with X-box Kinect. Today, of course, its a gaming interface. But thats just the beginning. Give it a couple of years, and motion detection will become the third input paradigm (along with keyboards and touch screens).
Heres a creative Kinect hack that gives an idea of the direction this is heading. Microsoft, by the way, makes no secret that its happy for people to explore the potential of the Kinect interface. (That first iPhone ad follows afterwards).
Several content curation tools have hit computers and tablets in the past six months. Broadly speaking they fall into two categories: automatic curation, where an application pulls in content from a Twitter stream, facebook account or RSS feed; and edited curation where end users select the content themselves.
I’ve already written about Flipbook a tablet app, that turns twitter streams, lists and hashtags into an electronic magazine. It makes for an engaging experience but you don’t really have that much control over what goes in (or what gets left out).
Paper.li presents similar challenges. The ubiquitous Twitter newspaper is a great way of gathering and filtering information from your stream, but it can also throw up surprises, some delightful, some less so.
Where Flipbook and Paper.li do work well is when you put the work in up front to prepare a carefully filtered Twitter list or seek out a consistent, reliable hashtag.
We’ve been running a successful #mhealth (mobile health) Paper.li for a few months now as part of Ideaworks for Healthcare and our followers really love it. It’s also a useful way of sourcing content for additional coverage on the blog.
Bit.ly bundles, Storify (and to a lesser extent Montage) give you a lot more control. With bit.ly bundles, several articles can be combined under one shortened URL. Click on this link and it takes you to a page where each article appears with a headline, thumbnail and introduction copy.
When you pull these links together you can also add your own text commentary underneath each one. Typically each bundle covers the same theme or topic and gives you the opportunity to express your ideas or your personality in greater depth compared with a fragmented stream of individual tweets.
Storify works based on a similar approach, except this time you get to drag and drop content from multiple sources including Twitter, Facebook, Youtube and Flickr. Again, you can also add your own commentary. Storify, as the name suggests, will appeal to journalists. It’s a more versatile than Bit.ly bundles and Montage, but you need to invest the time to search and organise content into a compelling narrative.
Finally, Montage, the most recent content curation-publishing tool from Microsoft Fuse Labs. Imagine building a web page from live twitter streams and news feeds, images and video and you get an idea of how Montage works. It also has a fabulous user interface that helps you to divide a page up into tiles of content.
Here’s mobile health again, this time as a Montage page. Again, you need to be very careful when including live feeds. Either seek out streams where you have plenty of control, or make the client aware of any risks. In both cases you should run the page unpublished and monitor content carefully before pushing it live.
There’s something else to add here. You don’t need to be a designer or a developer to use these tools. But to make them work properly, you do need to have good editorial skills. As a member of the Metia content team, it’s good see new publishing applications that cater to writers as well as developers and designers.
They also force us to think about simple page design, branding and even ease of use. Telling a great story with words is one thing, being able to reinforce that within the wider user experience becomes a real pleasure thanks to these new applications.
You wouldn’t normally mention an 11th century ruler of England in the same sentence as a 20th century quantum physicist. But Canute and Erwin Schroedinger together illustrate one of main challenges facing content today.
Stick with me on this one.
Let’s start with Canute. Most of us know the story and how the King took his throne to a beach and commanded the advancing tide to recede. Then there’s Schroedinger, famous for illustrating quantam theory with a tale about a cat shut in a box containing a toxic isotope. According to the fable the cat exists simultaneously alive and dead until you open the box and one version of reality reveals itself.
What links both these stories is the importance of context. Canute didn’t really believe he could reverse the laws of nature, but he wanted to prove to his subjects the challenges and limits of regal authority. He was commentating on the nature of kingship, not acting it out. Similarly with Schroedinger and his cat. His fable is less a description of quantum science and more an attempt to articulate the shock of a theory that contradicted every genius from Newton to Einstein.
And that’s why context matters. Without this information both our protagonists come off badly: Canute is an arrogant buffoon; Schroedinger a deranged scientist with feline cruelty issues. Hardly fair, but sadly inevitable given our propensity to gossip and share.
Of course this dilemma has been around for years but in the age of retweets, like buttons and do it yourself rent-a-rage community pages, it’s increasingly poignant. Keeping control over context is getting harder and harder, but in the next blog I’ll be looking at some of the latest publishing tools that can help.
Brussels has been home for about six months now. We live to the south of city, near a large park called the Bois de la Cambre. If you’re a Londoner, think Richmond, if you’re in New York it’s like Central - a bit more rolling but with the same mix of woodland, green space and mazy paths.
Bois de la Cambre is also home to the tree that tweets. The messages come from an ancient beech tree that has been fitted with a series of instruments that measure air quality, sunlight, wind speed and rainfall. Depending on the data, the account sends regular updates to its 2,700 followers based on one of several thousand pre-recorded messages. It also has its facebook page as you’d expect, with almost 5,000 friends.
There’s a serious side to this of course. Apart from the eco-friendly message (the tree is sponsored by Dutch science magazine Eos), it’s a timely reminder of the rise of the internet of things: networks that connect millions of objects, each capturing and sending data in real time for measurement and analysis.
Meteorology and the environment and activities that already benefit from this approach. But as cost of hardware and bandwidth plummets, these networks are reaching out to other sectors including agriculture. Here’s an article from the iSoft Ideaworks news page about U.S. farmers using sensors to measure the quality of cotton bales. By identifying common factors that connect healthy bales, they can apply these conditions to future harvests, potentially increasing yields and revenues.
There’s an important urban angle here too. You’ve probably heard of smart cities: urban areas where near real-time data about everything from energy consumption to public transport can be analysed or even used to automatically trigger a system response. Take a look at the video below to find out more.
Quick follow up to yesterdays post about paywalls. This time a good article about politico.com.
Heres the key quote: "Find the right niche – say one that everyone who makes a living out of US government has to be aware of – and you have an audience worth chasing."
Politico, which specialises in detailed coverage of the US political scene now has three million unique visitors each month and, according to the article, is on the verge of charging for some areas of its website.
Back to the app/tablet discussion and its interesting to see that the Financial Times has 180,000 online subscribers but more than 400,000 have downloaded the app for the iPad. That sounds like a lot of people with the app, but no subscription.
This looks, on the face of it, as if Pearson have put the cart before the horse - charging for content, but not for the experience. Bearing in mind how good the tablet experience is, you wonder how long this situation will persist.
Again, where content is ubiquitous and largely free, you need to up the experience. Give your audience a choice, remembering that the market and households will be saturated with tablets in 12 months time.
The whole paywall argument has resurfaced again, this time on the back of strong figures from the Financial Times online and far from transparent numbers from News International about the London Times subscription experiment.
I can see why people are looking evidence of success or failure, but I’m still not convinced that you can measure the value of content when most people are still consuming text, photos and video within today’s largely homogenous browser experience.
For that reason, don’t expect huge subscriptions to existing web sites. The Mirror Group, News International and others are trying to understand paywall models as best they can, but it won’t be possible to make a fair analysis of subscriptions and revenues much before the end of 2011.
The Guardian is taking a more interesting route. The latest version of its iPhone app, to be launched in the next couple of months will cost £2.99 for six months and £3.99 for year.
It’s a paywall by any other name, but what’s significant here is that for the time being you can still get content free on the web site and the mobile-optimised version.
In other words, the Guardian is betting that existing and new iPhone users will be happy to pay for a better experience that combines device innovation with smart presentation and curation.
Understanding the difference between content and experience is fundamental to the successful growth of subscription based news services. The equation is simple: mobile device + app + great content = paywall.
In the next year or two you’ll see hundreds of newspapers delivered via apps running on a mind-boggling range of devices that will be scraping the £150 price point. Things get even more interesting somewhere towards 2013, when we start to see subscription models based on subsidised hardware and bundled subscription channels. All this will be accelerated (or exacerbated depending on your point of view) as telcos, software and publishers grapple for ownership of the user experience.
I also think it’s foolish to discount the role of browsers (disclosure: Microsoft is a client) and that Internet Explorer and other browsers will offer a far richer media experience. No surprise that the launch literature positioned IE9 as a delivery channel for application like web-experiences.
So although the road to revenue is still long, the business models are starting to take shape. It’s going to be a long journey, but the publishers who understand the value of content and experience are the ones who will get there first.
Today Xbox Kinect was launched. Its great !
With some of the projects were working on weve had one for a little while now and Ive had a chance to use it, all in the aspect of research you know.
I remember seeing a WII controller work for the first time (I worked in the gaming industry at the time and was still blown away) and Kinect takes things to a whole new level. I took my 8 and 6 year olds into the office recently to see what they thought and they loved it from the first minute, really intuitive.
The downside is the space you need. Its very much a standing up jumping around device not sitting there on the sofa. This is great for small boys but not their dads who have to keep up/find space for it/ probably buy a new TV because theyll want to use it the whole time.
We have some other soon to be launched hardware knocking about in the office and that could be just as impactful.
Heres the formal release:
METIA CREATES A ‘ROUGH GUIDE TO THE WORLD’ WEB SITE FOR LEADING TRAVEL PUBLISHER
KEY FACTS NOTES FOR EDITORS
You can view the experience at http://makethemost.roughguides.com.
For more information: www.metia.com
MEDIA CONTACT:
ABOUT ROUGH GUIDES
For more information visit: www.roughguides.com
MEDIA CONTACT:
Some time round about now in San Francisco and London, Microsoft is formally taking the wrappers off IE9. Which means our NDA and embargoes time out and we can shout about the Rough Guide to the World.
I suspect the launch will grab a bunch of coverage, because despite a lot more competition being out there these days, Internet Explorer is still the planets most popular browser. Consequently, a new version gets noticed and talked about, so Ill leave it to other posts to review the features and capabilities of IE9.
Our interest is that we have just completed a project with Rough Guides the travel publisher - the Rough Guide to the World - that uses the best of IE9 and the HTML5 standards within it. In fact, for good measure, it also uses Flickrs API, shares via Facebook and Twitter, and just to complete our tech buzzword bingo, it is hosted in the cloud on Microsofts Azure platform.
The site has been quietly live on Azure at makethemost.roughguides.com for a couple of days now. But now that the global launch of IE9 is underway, we can talk about our role in building the site. In fact, the Metia and Rough Guides teams will be in the keynotes at both the San Francisco and London launch events.
If you want to take a look the site youll need to download IE9 (do, its worth it), or be using another HTML5 capable browser.
If you want a teaser there are some screen grabs below. The more formal press release, which describes the site, will be linked as a post here from 10.00am tomorrow.
If you are a marketer who wants to know how to create experiences like this for your brand, or you need to understand the implications and opportunities of these new technologies, then get in touch.
If you are a developer and interested in the story of how we built the site, well we built it in just six weeks, so there is a satisfied but tired team here. In the next few days and weeks well share some insight into the technical story, here and on some developer channels too. Stay tuned.
Tags: Microsoft, Rough Guides, Internet Explorer 9, HTML5, Metia, Make The Most Of Your Time On Earth
Tags: Microsoft, Rough Guides, Internet Explorer 9, HTML5, Metia, Make The Most Of Your Time On Earth
Posts have been few and far between recently. The old fashioned paradigm of work (doing lots of it, offline) has been crashing into the new one (talk about doing it, online). Which is great and gives us many new projects to talk about in the next few weeks.
To spread the growing load of projects and clients, a new face joined Metia in London on Monday. Darren Gerry started this week as the new Managing Partner, Digital.
Darren will own the digital business for Metia London and, with his experience from Sapient-Nitro and LBi, he will be a great addition to lead the team.
Darren joined in an exciting week, the story of which begins to unfold tomorrow as the NDAs and embargoes begin to unravel and we take the wraps off the first of several wicked little pieces of innovation. More of which we can share tomorrow.
Heres great analysis of the future of digital in specialist and non-specialist agencies from www.adweek.com.
The main thrust of the article argues that traditional agencies are muscling in on digital campaigns focusing on content, especially viral video.
_Thanks to social media, the biggest challenge for brands is often less about creating the kind of technically sophisticated "immersive experiences" that digital shops have specialized in AND MORE ABOUT CRAFTING ENGAGING CONTENT THAT PEOPLE ARE LIKELY TO SHARE WITH EACH OTHER. _(my highlight).
Unsurprisingly, so-called traditional agencies are bullish about social because it taps into time-honoured communications skills rather than technology.
"Digital used to be this thing that was a little more computer and Internet based. You had to know coding, Flash and HTML," said Edward Boches, chief creative officer at Mullen. "NOW, WHAT YOU HAVE TO UNDERSTAND IS HOW CONSUMERS BEHAVE IN RELATIONSHIP TO CONTENT, COMMUNITY, TECHNOLOGY AND MEDIA."
Being responsible for content in a digital agency, Im inclined to see both sides of the story. Along with a team of 10 others, I try to hot desk with developers as much as possible to ensure that we achieve the right blend of software/design/content skills at the very start of the campaign.
The goal here is to create a sustained experience that ripples through communities and triggers conversations that flow across campaign platform sites, established social media channels and real world events.
Impact is everything, but the key word here is sustain. Seeding the conversation with compelling content as part of a structured campaign remains at the heart of what we do. Making a splash is all well and good, but for sustained campaigns that maximise audience engagement, you need to cast more than one pebble into the pond.
And thats where you still need the technical expertise. Selecting the right content management system matters deeply if you want a team of community and content managers to feed the campaign with articles, blogs and video. Simple, but effective integration with Twitter, Facebook and other established channels also helps.
Detailed campaign analysis is also critical. Again, some platforms are better integrated with analytics tools than others. Most importantly of all, you need social media and analytics experts to measure the depth of audience engagement and feed these results back to the content team so that they can refine content and themes in response to audience interest.
The adweek article has more good discussion on these points. Strongly recommend you give it a read, and if it stirs up new ideas about the future mix of technology, social and content, drop me a note below.
Theres plenty to read on Flipboard today. Especially if you want to know if its legal, how the technology works, and whether or not servers are crashing under the weight of demand.
But I think this misses the bigger picture.
Flipboard, as you probably know by now, sources content from Twitter, Facebook and others and presents it in an elegant format that looks more like an e-magazine than any of the original publishers.
Its a perfect example of how tablets (or devices) can drive innovation in publishing and not the other way round. It was only when flat screen, wide format TVs started selling in large volumes that publishers upped their game. Remember the first time that you watched CSI on a widescreen with Dolby Surround in 2003? This was TV with cinema production values. Pretty much the norm now for production houses and video game developers, but remarkable then.
The same will happen with tablets. Essentially e-readers (lets not dodge the issue) for consuming content, theyre going to shake up publishing and social media like never before. Yesterday, when everyone was raving about Flipboard, Toshiba launched a dual 7 inch touch screen tablet running Microsoft Windows 7 (Remember Microsoft Courier anyone?). It also put the cat among the pigeons with a super-low footprint Android solid state netbook.
Meanwhile HP have the recently acquired Palm OS up their sleeve, and Cisco have launched the Cius, an Android device thats tightly integrated with its suite of collaboration and unified comms tools. All devices that will severely challenge Apples tablet lead far more quickly than the battle in the smartphone market.
Finally, I think this puts a big question mark over the future of traditional e-magazines. With Flipboard, you have the beginnings of an alternative content aggregation and curation model that just about anyone can use. And once you have an elegant UX to connect with friends and subscribe to channel bundles, the model is complete.
As I said at the start Im no expert on the legal issues that govern RSS feeds versus raw URLs. And maybe Flipboard will be sacrificed to the lawyers. But when it comes to the user experience, its nothing less than revolutionary.
After Cloud, Cloud, CLOUD yesterday (ok, ok we believe you), today we got the consumer angle.
The connectedness of the Microsoft Personal Cloud story worked for me. In the office, IT make sure everything works, but at home Im my own support desk and my community of end users is growing (the two year old isnt there yet, but the other three and my wife definitely are), their devices are proliferating, their use of different services is unfettered and their understanding of where data resides and how they access or protect it, is limited to non-existent.
The connectedness of the Microsoft three screens plus the Cloud proposition makes a lot of sense in terms of offering a great experience and fixing those practical painpoints. If Microsoft can make sure it all simply just works, and they trade on the strengths of their big platforms like IM and Hotmail, then it is a good story to take to market.
But the scene stealer today was the Kinect for Xbox 360 demo. It wasnt so much the technology on display but the engagement of Molly and her young assistant in the game. Aside from being a great demo - watch it on the Digital WPC site - every Microsoft marketer must be drooling at the prospect.
Microsoft doesnt have a great track record in connecting with the consumer but Kinect definitely hits that sweet spot. And it connects to the consumer through the compelling nature of the product itself, rather than trying to buy an emotional connection with an ad campaign.
Im not sure that Microsofts revenues have ever benefited significantly from the impact of pester power (not with Barney, surely??) but as a parent, I for one can easily see Kinect sweeping through suburbia like the Wii and iPod before it.
I know Ill need to order one for my family.
Not everything goes to plan. My World Cup journey ended in a bar in Washington DC, rather than Johannesburg.
While neither England or the USA exactly set the competition alight. Metia came away with more than a few extra fans.
* Metias Mobile Keepy Uppy game has now been downloaded over 25,000 times and continues to get over 1,500 downloads each day.
* The Youtube video has been viewed over 7,500 times.
* The World Cup Pivot has had over 15,000 people use the site to interactively interrogate the player stats.
Football fever aside, each of these projects was conducted as a Proof of Concept (PoC), designed to explore aspects of mobility, social, and data analytics respectively. Aside from the obvious output, each PoC generated learnings about the different technologies, channels and social outreach techniques employed. All of which will now get fed back into our clients projects.
If any of this stuff interests you, or you are curious about how it can be applied to real campaigns and projects, get in touch and well share the inside track.
Tags: Mobile, World Cup, Keep Uppy World Cup, Metia Labs, Microsoft Live Labs, Pivot, Seadragon, World Cup, Metia
In the third of our series of tech podcasts, we talk with Martin Hingley, Founder of ITCandor – a company dedicated to researching the Information Technology and Communications (ITC) industry.
The development team in Metia Seattle has been exploring uses for Pivot, a software application from Microsoft Live Labs that lets users interact with large volumes of data.
To bring Pivot to life, the team tipped in all the player stats for all the teams in the World Cup to create World Cup Pivot.
Filter the different criteria through the lefthand column options. Change the view with the top line nav bar. Pivot is made to be simple to shuffle through large volumes of data, trying out different permutations and options to sift for meaning, so have a play here.
We are already building Pivot into a number of external web sites and services for clients who want to give users the ability to get interactive with data. Bearing in mind the way Infographics seem to have taken a grip on the web, itll be interesting to see Pivots progress.
My World Cup Pivot insight: Lionel Messi, 30 shots, 0 goals. He might as well be English.
Tags: Microsoft Live Labs, Pivot, Seadragon, World Cup, Metia
Heres a gorgeous piece of online content and design from Uniqlo, the people who brought you polo shirts in 200 pastel shades. Like any great user experience, it doesnt need much explanation, although I was impressed by the tilt-shift time lapse photography (the effect that makes the real world sequences look like Lilliput TV). Like all good campaigns these days, you can embed the calendar into your social media platform of choice. And, of course, your blog. (Hat tip to Laurence Krzyzanek for this).
Heres something to occupy the barren hours before kick off.
The creative team tell me there are a magnificent eight moments of iconic World Cup history recreated in the video we knocked up for our Mobile Keepy Uppy game.
Can you find them?
BTW - we passed 10,000 downloads at the weekend.
Tags: Mobile, World Cup, Keep Uppy World Cup, Metia Labs, World Cup of Time Wasting
This week we have had a team over at the Beach Break Live student festival in Wales. Our role was to build and sustain a virtual experience that gave a flavour for the live events happening at the festival.
Live streaming wasnt an option, so instead we created a site that used Microsoft Silverlight 4 to mash Photosynth images and Spotify playlists related to whats on around the different festival stages.
Aside from a few local bandwidth issues caused by thousands of students simultaneously nudging, poking and checking-in with each other, everything worked just great.
Take a look below or check out the site to get the full Photosynth experience.
As England switches off from work and switches on the telly for tonights match, heres a latest score from World Cup Keepy Uppy.
In just one week the patently silly football juggling game for mobile phone users aka Mobile Keepy Uppy has been downloaded an astounding 6,330 times (thats 5,201 times from our site and 1,129 times from Freeware PocketPC).
Which is one download every 90 seconds since it went live. Dont you wish that was Emile Heskeys goals to seconds on the pitch ratio?
And the dodgy video has been viewed 2,200 times on YouTube.
Tags: Mobile, World Cup, Keep Uppy World Cup, Metia Labs, World Cup of Time Wasting
Quick update on our Mobile Keepy Uppy game.
Seems there are a few people out there with time on their hands.
The game is featured here on the Freeware Pocket PC site, and elsewhere on Mobile TopSoft amongst others.
On the Freeware site it has over 800 downloads so far, gets four stars out of five in reviews and has some great feedback.
A few people comment it doesnt work on their phone - which is a shame all round, we agree, but we were pretty upfront about the limited number of phones, HTC mostly, which can run the game.
Here are our favourite comments so far: "excellent game...good graphics and sound effects...great response to g sensor" "Nice little app for killing time. My kids will love it. I like how you can see the shadow of the ball as its coming down. Good job"Tags: Mobile, World Cup, Keep Uppy World Cup, Metia Labs, World Cup of Time Wasting