Facts and Figures. The world of google.

Februar 26th, 2010 • Comments Allgemein
Tags: Brands, Business, Cool, Diagram, google, Strategy, Tech, visualization, World

Twitter is crowded with marketing people. And what do marketing people really, really like? Right, statistics. Among loads of animated short movies which stage facts & figures from the web, we have seen a lot of wallpaper-like statistical info visualizations lately lately. First I thought “Nice”, until I found out that pretty much everyone nowadays puts his facts and figures into these kinds of banners. Anyway, I think this visualization is one of the better ones. It was created by Pingdom and tries to integrate many interesting facts about google in one place. Interesting!

Wired. Ready to go iPad.

Februar 17th, 2010 • Comments Media
Tags: Apple, Brands, Cool, Creativity, Experimental, iPad, Media, Print, Strategy, Tech, Trends

Wired Magazine has just launched its video preview for its iPad application. And yes it looks yummy! In fact it is very logical for Wired to be among the first to take this step. I think the iPad will be a piece of hardware to make print publisher’s wet dreams come true and offer a digital platform to buy and consume print media.

As a commenter explained: This visual demo is very likely an Adobe Air demo…which does not work on the iPad yet.

Bring the Noise. Why google Buzz will Fail.

Februar 11th, 2010 • Comments Social, Social Business
Tags: Brands, Business, Facebook, google, google Buzz, google wave, Social Networks, Strategy, Tech, Trends, Twitter, World

Two days ago google announced google Buzz, a new socialnetworky add-on to its well known and beloved gmail service. As expected, google is trying once more to advance into enemy territory – social networking. Since its foundation the company is great in search and media but it sucks big time when it comes to content and real, human interactions.

So, yesterday morning I found this google Buzz Button in my gmail account. And what I saw next was nice but two years too late.

One day with google Buzz

google Buzz tries to do anything at once and doesn’t do anything really good. Basically it’s a mixture of twitter, Facebook, Friendfeed and Foursquare. That does not sound too bad, unfortunately I have no idea where google is in this concept.

Apart from the lack in own, new ideas the first finding is – the UX is horrible. Years ago google was on the forefront of UX design. But google Buzz almost looks like google Wave light. Do you remember google Wave? Sure you do (I have 1 gazillion invites left if you like). In short, google Buzz combines at least four specialized interoperable social services in one shitty interface, spices it up with even worse than ususal privacy flaws, integrates it into gmail an calls it Buzz.
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Apple iPad. Endorsed by Print Publishers Worldwide.

Januar 28th, 2010 • Comments Allgemein
Tags: Apple, Burda, Industry, iPad, Media, Murdoch, Print, publishers, Strategy, Tablets, Tech, Tools, Touch, Trend, World

What a week for Hubert Burda! The Grandsigneur of German Publishers, ‘Chairman of the Board and Publisher of Hubert Burda Media, President of the Association of German Magazine Publishers, and co-founder of the European Publishers Council’  must have had a great night last night.

Why? Because it seems to me that he, as one of the most conservative protagonists of paid content on the web, has finally won.  Earlier this week he had opened Burda’s annual digital conference DLD in Munich. A digital conference which looks like all the industry meetings you know from around the world…except that it was hosted by a brand which publicly asked to disappropriate google because of their online media market share. Sounds ridiculous? Well, it is.

Burda described Google as a “killer application” which delivered almost half of all traffic to local journalism Web sites and yet managed to keep almost one-third of all Internet advertising revenues in Germany for itself. “All of that without making any investment of its own in the expensive business of journalism,” Burda noted.

Burda called for amendments to copyright and even suggested that Google should pay for the use of news it had not produced itself. Of course, the search engine wanted nothing to do with this suggestion. (‘Der Spiegel‘, Sept 09)

Actually your failed business model is not my problem

Earlier, in summer 2009, Burda and other publishers had managed to channel their whining about antiquated business model into the Hamburg Declaration of European Publishers. It demanded a ‘fair share’ by search engines like google. Google reacted with an offer to deny robots the access to the publisher’s pages. The conflict went hot. The web manned the battle stations when Silicon Valley started fighting against Munich. Well, and of course it could get even more bizarre when Rupert Mordoch started to ‘threaten’ google to block them from his newspapers and rumors about a Murdoch pact with Bing versus google made the headlines.

Burdoch’s ‘new business model’ was the old one…translated into digital: Making readers pay for stuff they read online.

In the new business model, we will be charging consumers for the news we provide on our Internet sites. The critics say people won’t pay. I believe they will, but only if we give them something of good and useful value. Our customers are smart enough to know that you don’t get something for nothing.

Similar to the music industry publishers never condescended to think about alternative business models. While print advertising revenues worldwide dropped like they were hot, no alternative business model was even explored. The direction was clear: Save mainstream print media at all cost. No matter wether there simply is no need for so many general interest magazines anymore, we do print…with a digital touch to make it look cooler.

The web’s response was unambiguous: Twitter founder Biz Stone commented the Burdoch’s closed payment model will ‘fail fast’ and it would be impossible to ‘put the genie back into the bottle’. Others compared the old men’s inflexibility to the disaster of the music industry etc. In autumn 2009 both, Burda and Murdoch, demasked themselves as dinosaurs – powerful but inflexible, free from creative power and about to make the same mistakes so many others had done before.

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The World. How Much Web How Fast?

Januar 4th, 2010 • Comments Allgemein
Tags: Diagram, Price, speed, Tech, visual, World

Damn it Japan. Here is the average internet speed and price for it worldwide according to the ITIF Broadband Rankings. And Japan and South Korea seem to lead pretty much. Please click here or on the picture to see it full size.

Digital Magazines. Another future for print.

Dezember 18th, 2009 • Comments Ideas, Tech
Tags: Cool, Creativity, Experimental, Future, Ideas, Prediction, Presentation, Print, Tech, Trends, UX, visual, We like, World

Is print dead? If you read my own headlines you will find out that I am undecided as well. I am sure that the majority of mainstream print media nowadays is doomed. But, I think that some traditional print media products might reinvent themselves. Lately Outsider Magazine and Esquire came up with remarkable experiments in this sector.

Publishing thinktank Bonnier plus its partner Berg London have come up with this cool vision of how magazine UX might evolve. It’s a concept video and does not exist yet. But the concept convincingly uses digital media to create a rich and meaningful experience, while maintaining the relaxed and curated features of printed magazines. It illustrates one possible vision for digital magazines in the near future.

Razorfish. Emerging Experiences launches Razorfone.

November 23rd, 2009 • Comments Experimental, Tech, Trends
Tags: Cool, Creativity, Experimental, Ideas, Mobile, Razorfish, Retail, Tech, Tools, Touch, visual, We like

My colleagues from Razorfish’s Emerging Experience team have come up with a new application which furthermore eases shopping processes. Razorfone is a prototype application which simplifies buying processes using the means of touchscreens. Razorfish Emerging Experiences has come up with a lot of innovative touch applications lately. Do also check out the configurator they made for Audi and their Razorfashion application.

Razorfone Interactive Retail Experience from Razorfish – Emerging Experiences on Vimeo.

SixthSense. Redefining Man-Machine-Interaction.

November 18th, 2009 • Comments Experimental, Tech, Tools
Tags: Cool, Creativity, Experimental, Gesture, innovation, Interfaces, Interview, Prediction, Presentation, Tech, TED, Touch, Trends, World

The latest series of Ted takes us to India. Pranav Mistry is a student at the notorious innovation factory M.I.T and inventor of SixthSense, a wearable device that enables new interactions between the real world and the world of data. In this demo he explains this new type of men-machine interaction – including a deep look at his SixthSense device and a new, paradigm-shifting paper “laptop.” In an onstage Q&A, Mistry says he’ll open-source the software behind SixthSense, to open its possibilities to all. Fantastic stuff.

Esquire. Spicing up print with Augmented Reality.

November 17th, 2009 • Comments Experimental
Tags: Augmented Reality, Business, Cool, Experimental, Ideas, Lifestyle, Market, Print, Strategy, Tech, Tools, visual

Okay…Augmented Reality. About a year ago three words which simply had to be said by someone in a digital creative brainstorming was Flashmob, Social Media and QR code, with the latter being replaced in 2009 by Augmented Reality (“Creatives Bingo”).

To be honest…currently I only see few interesting use cases for it (the way it is used by brands nowadays). No, dear brands. I am not interested in an animated version of my cereals box. And no I won’t hold print ads into my webcam in order to see ads.

Don’t get me wrong. I believe, it’s a great technology. Augmented Reality can work – in the moment it delivers added value. Something which is more than just a moveable 3D-version of ads, ads, ads. Take Layar for example, a mobile browser which intertwines AR, mobile and knowledge. Or Invizimals, a pretty cool looking toy for the PSP. And maybe….just maybe….magazines and newspapers might create new, cool experiences intertwined with their print content as well through AR… One year after their 2008 E-Ink issue Esquire has published its first AR issue together with the Barbarian Group.

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Nokia. N900 goes Maemo.

November 12th, 2009 • Comments Mobile, Tech
Tags: Ads, Brands, Business, Cool, Lifestyle, Linux, Maemo, Mobile, Strategy, Tech

Today Nokia will bring out its latest handset, the Nokia N900. For the Finish brand it is not just another smartphone. In fact, it’s it first handset with the latest Linux OS. Maemo 5 renders it one of the first smartphones to have true PC-like multitasking and not only lets it run “dozens” of app windows at once but gives it a simple, large dashboard for switching and closing apps. Of course the pretty idiotic term ‘iPhone killer’ was used here again. But whatever the phone does. The first clip to promote it is pretty cool (won’t use the word viral).