The X. Paypal goes open source.

November 4th, 2009 • Social Business, Strategy
Tags: Brands, Business, Cool, New, Open, paypal, Paypal X, Social Influence Marketing, Social Shopping, Strategy, Tech, Tools, Trends

Payment provider Paypal has just launched Paypal X. The new system opens up Paypal’s API and lets developers work on new solutions based on one of the world’s best online payment providers. Bascially it is about integrating payment functionalities with drag and drop or making them embeddable. And yes, the preview of the platform is a Wow!

About a year ago Jeremiah Owyang, (then Forrester) published his well known article ‘The Future of the Social Web‘. He sketched the likely evolution of the internet in five overlapping phases, taking us from the ‘Era of social relationships’ to the ‘Era of social commerce’ (an era which he expexted to start in ~2011.

In approximately two years, social networks will be more powerful than corporate Web sites and CRM systems, as individual identities and relationships are built on this platform. Brands will serve community interests and grow based on community advocacy as users continue to drive innovation in this direction.

What has happened today may not yet be the start of Owyang’s era of social commerce, but it’s a dramatic step. Paypal has launched Paypal X – a platform which the payment provider is going to present at Innovate09 these days. PayPal X basically opens up the services of PayPal and gives developers worldwide access to open payement functions like the following (via Techcrunch)

Read more »

Twitter. Finally embeddable in Powerpoint.

Oktober 8th, 2009 • 2 comments Allgemein
Tags: Business, Cool, Ideas, New, Powerpoint, Presentation, Tools, Twitter, visual, We like

High five, SAP.

The software company has just published three Flash objects (Beta) which allow PowerPoint presenters to see and react to tweets in real-time, embedded directly within their presentations, either as a ticker or refreshable comment page. In my case it did work on a PC, but didn’t get it running on a Mac, instantly. But it’s Beta, Baby.

The idea is definitely cool and I am curious how this affects presenting. I am sure it’ll get out of Beta status soon. Download the free software here.

And don’t forget to comment on how you’ll use this slick little plugin.

(via Frog-Blog)

Shiv Singh. Social Media Marketing for Dummies.

Oktober 8th, 2009 • 2 comments Reports
Tags: Books, New, Shiv Singh, Social Influence Marketing

Time for some advertising.

I mean…real advertising. Shiv Singh, my Social Influence Marketing Lead at Razorfish NYC, is about to publish a book (yes, a book). It’s got the catchy name “Social Media Marketing for Dummies”. And as we know there are a lot of dummies out there (pretty often I am one of them), I guess it will be pretty successful.

Here at Razorfish we use the word Social Influence Marketing to describe how we think brands and consumers do interact in our decentralized world. Shiv’s book (will be available in Germany in early November) targets small businesses and start-ups looking for low-cost online marketing strategies, as well as marketers at larger companies who want to add a social media component to their campaigns.

Obviously the title of the book gave Shiv quite a hard time:

Social media marketing is about using the social media platforms to market to customers or in other words to participate in the conversations wherever they maybe taking place in an authentic, trusted and human manner while achieving your marketing objectives too. Social Influence Marketing is about harness social media and social influencers to achieve the marketing and business objectives of an organization. (…) The reality is that social media marketing is the more understood and recognized term so that’s why the “Social Media Marketing for Dummies” title was chosen. (via goingsocialnow)

I am looking forward to reading this introduction. And if you want to preorder your copy, do it here.