Archive for the ‘technology’ Category

Facebook have released a video to explain the hows and wherefores of their new location-based service addition to the social network Godzilla. You could argue about whether this is sharing too much in one place or what kind of privacy car-crash Facebook will make out of location data but that is for a another time. Here’s the video.

This is cross-posted from my personal blog.

Google has finally left the Chinese market for search, so I thought I would try the alternative Baidu. My trial is gloriously unscientific in nature and not particularly rigorous. I did what most consumers would have done and searched for myself.

I was quite open-minded about this, on the one hand Google has been killing the search market in Europe, nothing can touch it in the EU and they have made moderately successful forays into other sectors as well. I also know that Google is not all conquering, in fact the wheels start to come off the wagon when you venture into areas with non-Roman languages such as Russian, Korean, Japanese and Chinese.

On the other hand, Robin Li over at Baidu is no slouch. Baidu is famous for its huge index and its continued appetite to crawl content whenever and wherever it can find it.

Baidu like its Korean counterpart Naver has also managed to develop a successful social search product running a question-and-answer service like a better version of Yahoo! Answers - largely free of spam and a more middle-class range of participants provide highly relevant quality content.

It is also blatantly obvious that Baidu doesn’t care whether it attracts a potential English-speaking audience as the entire site apart from investor relations is in Chinese.

Methodology

• I searched for “Ged Carroll” on Google’s Hong Kong service and Baidu.com.
• Then I ran the same search on Google Japan and Baidu’s Japanese service.

Outcomes

I was expecting some divergence between Google and Baidu search engine results pages for a number of reasons. Google crawls an estimated 15 per cent of the total web, and Baidu is likely to crawl a slightly larger amount. That means that their search indexes are likely to be slightly different. Secondly the results are usually ‘flavoured’ according to local market preferences such as language and local content.

I was a bit surprised at the level of divergence between Google and Baidu, which was great than I had seen between Google and Yahoo! in the past.

First of all flavouring. A comparison between the Japanese and Chinese versions of Baidu show a high degree of variance between the two versions of the Baidu search engine.

Part of the reason for the difference may be due to Chinese regulations around permitted services, for instance an educational video of me by Econsultancy on YouTube is the top result on the Japanese site and a couple of twitter related hits come in at six and seven. The Japanese site skews much more toward video services than the Chinese site which picked up profile services Plaxo and Naymz.

Interestingly, the Chinese site picked up the re-direct URI for my blog (renaissancechambara.com), whereas neither the Japanese or the Chinese versions picked up my proper domain (renaissancechambara.jp) at all. Even when I clicked a few pages down.

Plotting Baidu China against Google Hong Kong produced an interesting diversity of the results.

Their one point of correlation, my profile on Naymz. Again part of this may be because of my presence on services that don’t do business in China for instance YouTube and Twitter. Google rightly puts more weight and a consequently higher ranking on my Crunchbase and LinkedIn profiles than Plaxo which appears a couple of pages down on Google.

Baidu obviously puts much more emphasis on a historic redirect URI I have for my blog than the ‘real’ one and doesn’t seem to crawl the site in any great depth. I am guessing that this is because of its largely English language content.

In Japan, the Baidu | Google comparison told a similar story. The Google flavouring between Hong Kong and Japanese versions wasn’t that great only showing differences at position five and lower on the page. Baidu Japan managed to pick up my last.fm profile and twitter profile, but didn’t pick up my blog or any professional information on the first page.

In conclusion, Baidu provides a great search experience for consumers, but am uncertain how valuable it would be for people in a professional context, for instance researching foreigners with whom they may be doing business or finding foreign presentations. I can understand why Chinese scientific audiences would be concerned by the departure of Google.

I also suspect that optimising content to make it searchable on Baidu is different to the process that I would go through for Google or Yahoo!, but that would merit far more investigation before I could blog with any confidence about it. This is cross-posted from my personal blog.

Arun Sudhaman at PR Week contacted me last week with some questions on the communications challenges around the launch of Google’s Nexus One, the company’s first smartphone. He’s written an article on this topic in this week’s issue, which includes comment from other PRs.

Arun’s interest was raised by the initially cool reaction from the analyst community. This often happens when a product launches after months – or in this case years – of speculation. With pent-up expectation in the market, however great the eventual product turns out to be, there are commentators who write about how it could have been just a little bit better. When this happens, monitoring of initial reaction is crucial. The communications programme must adapt quickly and address any misconceptions that can quickly spread and threaten product adoption.

The Google brand is now embedded in our daily lives and, for most people, means more than just search. Translating the brand into a physical product-in-your-pocket is something new and potentially risky for the company. It will have to quickly develop competency in consumer hardware communications and manage the huge global interest in its new strategy. Initial media coverage has concentrated on the handset itself. The first challenge is to communicate the benefits beyond a shiny new mobile phone and get the media to focus on the power of the underlying Android platform and associated apps.

Google still has a lot to prove. If it gets things right (and Google isn’t used to failing), it has a huge opportunity to grow a new hardware business to complement its online products. One thing is certain, the battle of the smartphone platforms has only just started.

I was challenged by some of my colleagues to think about digital and social media in 2010. At first all I could think of was the Roy Schneider film 2010: The Year We Make Contact.

I couldn’t nail things down to a 12-month period and as the Koran says ‘the man who predicts the future is a liar, even if he tells truth’. However, here is some trends that I think are going to become increasingly important.

Social media wouldn’t be social media without people and I see 2010 as a time when more people start thinking about how we deal with the trust-based issues that social media throws up. Social media allows people to be more connected, but also affects the fabric of society as we relate to each other in different ways.

We need to think about the implications for etiquette, ethics and what will be the new social norms that we have to deal with. I already get asked about what should you do if your boss sends you a friend request for Facebook or suddenly starts following you on Twitter? Its been eight years since Heather Armstrong, author Dooce.com was fired because of her blog, yet as a society we still haven’t got to grips with what social media means.

I personally live from a worldview similar to that articulated by Singaporean blogger Pat Law “As long as the information is online, even if you’ve placed it on private mode, your privacy is automatically placed on a pedestal for potential abuse. So never publish anything you don’t want people to know online.”

Social media has great power and an ability to mobilise people, from flash mobs to meet-ups with like-minded strangers: the ability to bring people together for good is well documented. However the ‘wisdom’ of mobs is something that is starting to raise its ugly head, from parties on Facebook that get crashed, to the vilification of Jan Moir following her Stephen Gately article. Repugnant though Ms Moir’s views are there is something sinister about the chattering classes online version of Orwellian ‘two-minute hate’.

A crucial part of the relationship between members of society is the role of the government is key. From a government perspective all this self-organising power can be dangerous: people getting together and standing up to authority – we’ve seen it before:

• Climate–change protestors
• Poll tax riots
• Illegal raves

Each time, the government has brought resources and legislation to bear against them. I expect this to be at least considered in the next year. We are already seeing the genesis of thoughts in this area with the three strikes internet connection ban against potential file-sharers.

If you look at countries like South Korea and China the real ID concept is likely to take hold. Where consumers access to web services will be directly tied to their real-world identity. Being the UK, this data is also likely to be sold to commercial enterprises resulting in better online targeting and mapping for marketers. I wouldn’t be surprised with the real ID was floated at a concept for public consumption next year.

A good reminder that government also doesn’t get things right is the current Digital Britain report, which is astounding in its lack of vision and imagination and would have been more appropriately named as a Digital Cripple report. As my pod neighbour Nick Osborne repeatedly points out to me: the Australian’s have set higher speed goals for getting broadband into the outback than the UK has. Finland has made 1MB speed bandwidth a legal right already. I don’t see anything changing in this area anytime soon. The bar being set so low provides a temporary benefit to telecoms companies. These same telecoms companies would like to move to a pay-per-bit model where you pay for each unit of data that you use rather like the way voice calls used to be.

Whilst I can’t see that happening in 2010, I could see it being openly discussed by the likes of BT. If bundles are used, it would only be to confuse and obstificate price comparisons by consumers.

The UK will still have analogue intellectual property laws for an increasingly digital world, I don’t see a dramatic change to correct this coming anytime soon.

From a marketing perspective, I think that marketing budgets are undergoing a long-term disruption. Social media will no longer be special but part of the normal mix.

Changes in marketing spend will come partly at the expense of search advertising. There is an argument to be made that Google Adwords as a platform has matured. With some noticeable exceptions such as some parts of insurance services key word prices are now optimally priced. Two factors have come along to affect search advertising.
Firstly, search is moving into the real-time web slowly, yet much of the interesting content is happening there. Real-time web advertising allows the media buyer to think about location and time slots on a much more granular level. I have already seen promotional deals offered on foursquare for local restaurants when I am at work.

Secondly, Facebook behavioural adverts are still relatively cheaply priced versus their competition, combine this that the trust has engendered after a number of false starts and their ad platform is looking increasingly viable for many of the intent-based campaigns that would have previously run on a search engine.

The good news for the search engines is that consumers are much more open to a curated web via friends and authorative individuals, many of the concepts of social search will be ready for an early majority audience in 2010. All they need to do is work out how to monetise social search effectively.

Continued pressure on spending within business is likely to affect social media in a number of different ways.

I expect there to be an increase in social media rightshoring. In the past, I have used a Philippines’-based moderation company for a large community project, but only the other week a senior international business-to-business marketer was asking me to recommend someone they could recruit to be their global head of social media, to be based out of India.

Given the myriad cultural differences that separate us, I am inclined to think that many of these rightshoring projects will fail miserably. Its hard enough speaking to my bank based out of a Bangalore call centre, what happens we ask these organisations to engage in conversations that are much more culturally sensitive.

Social media will be looked at to provide solutions to problems that businesses continue to wrestle with from knowledge management to customer relationships and workflow. As with previous iterations of solutions, I expect the results to be variable in quality due to organisation factors, culture and a lack of management expertise.

One of the break out trends for 2009 was ‘the web of no web’ where a mix of QR codes and augmented reality allow consumers to interact with the real world with online information. This has a huge potential, but there are two key challenges, the most dangerous one being that someone comes up with a creative execution so bad that consumers reject the ‘web of no web’ concept.

The second challenge is much more mundane and not likely to be solved in the next year: power consumption. Power technology has not improved as fast as display technology or electronic components with modern devices we devices and applications that can flatten a smart phone battery in a few hours. I already struggle to get a day out of my iPhone battery and powerful applications are only likely to exasperate the situation.

There you go, that’s my predictions for 2010, what are yours? This is cross-posted from my personal blog renaissance chambara.

I hate email. There, I’ve said it. It is distracting, time consuming and perhaps just one in ten has anything useful / interesting to say.

So I was mildly horrified to read new research today from TalkTalk which claimed that email would die out within ten years - will it really take that long? I feel that as a personal communications tool it has served its purpose and been superseded by IM, texting and social networks.

And I’d suggest that it is now the biggest workplace productivity sapper since Stick Cricket. I’d estimate that I spend at least 25 per cent of my time reading and checking emails that just didn’t need to be sent. IM is far more effective for quick communication and Twitter also allows me to connect with colleagues, journalists and suppliers - so why cling onto email for another ten tortuous years?

Lets begin the migration of our contacts to IM/Twitter and end this email madness ASAP. Who is in?

So for many of the uninitiated, Call of Duty Modern Warfare 2 was released this week. This has been the most anticipated video game since GTA IV which came out in 2008. CoD MF2 is already a record breaker with over 1 million copies being sold in day one, analysts expect 10 million sales in the run up to Christmas.

That’s mental! Record companies would bite your hand off for those figures especially when the game costs around £50 a pop.

The reason this is relevant to the PR industry is the buzz around this game this week has been incredible, it has secured coverage across not only in the traditional gaming press and blogs but also mainstream broadcast and national press with MP’s debating the games’ release in Parliament. Shouldn’t they be sorting the country out rather than discussing a piece of entertainment that has already been classified and approved by the British Board of Film Classification?

I have no doubt that the game is a great piece of workmanship and entertainment and I am looking forward to playing it. What I was impressed with was the PR launch of the game. Many shops were breaking sales embargoes and there were large queues of fans waiting to get their hands on it. The most impressive aspect of the launch was the permission to use Leicester Sq in London as the site to unveil the game. This is predominately reserved for Hollywood movies, so the fact that there was a massive scale PR event with full military occupation including camo vehicles and personnel added to the drama and event. The launch also had the red carpet feel with a number of celebrities attending, proving that gaming is part of our modern culture just as music, art and movies are.

The revenues of the gaming industry worldwide are overtaking the movie industry very quickly due to huge sales and high prices for games. The scope for executing well planned and large PR campaigns for games has arrived and will be a major aspect of the PR business sector in the years to come. Expect a lot of big agencies to be pitching for software houses such as Activision, EA, Epic, Rockstar, Eidos and Ubisoft as well as crazier and bigger PR launches.

Game on!

‘Has anyone got a Nokia charger?’

‘Has anyone got a Sony Ericsson charger?’

There is nothing more annoying than trying to find a charger when your phone is on its last legs and nobody around has the one that you need, but wouldn’t it be nice if there was one charger that worked with all models of mobile devices so you could always have a way of topping up your battery life?

Well over the next year or so the majority of mobile manufacturers will be introducing the micro-USB connection as the standard means of charging your mobile phone. Nice one mobile phone companies, you have just solved one of life’s little problems.

The benefits of having an universal standard means that most people will be able to charge-up wherever they want through a micro-USB cable. It is also said to be beneficial for the environment as the GSMA estimates that the new standard will prevent 51,000 tonnes of redundant chargers per year and will reduce carbon emissions annually by 13.6m tonnes.

The new standard charger was approved by the International Telecommunication Union, a branch of the United Nations after input from the industry body GSMA recommended that there should be an universal standard for charging mobile phones.

Although this new standard will not be mandatory to all manufacturers it is expected that the majority of mobile phone manufacturers will sign up to the standard as many companies are already using the micro-USB connection including, HTC and Blackberry.

Sony Ericsson has said that they will adopting the new standard on their new products, however other manufacturers such as Apple, may be reluctant to do so due to patents on their connections.

It is nice to see technology companies agreeing on a mutual way of working together for the benefit of consumers as well as a way of helping to reduce carbon emissions.

It will be interesting to see if the other manufacturers follow Sony Ericsson’s lead……. no pun intended!

Winston Churchill, Benjamin Disraeli, the 14^th Earl of Derby, Calvin Coolidge and Mahatma Gandhi have something in common.

They all came from an era when their mistakes, blunders, gaffes were less highlighted. There are no videos surviving of the time when Winston Churchill mixed up his words or when Mahatma Gandhi forgot someone’s name or when Calvin Coolidge accidentally said something inappropriate - but I am certain it must have happened.

Their careers, whether good or bad, are largely remembered by their witty remarks, political judgement or important policy actions. Their careers are not defined by gaffes, because a gaffe is much funnier when seen on television than when reported in the news. If you read about Dan Quayle (see above) misspelling potato, whilst visiting a school, it is funny, but it does not encapsulate the gut-wrenching horror or cringeworthiness that the video brings.

What has spurred me to write this is the fate of Alan Duncan. He is Shadow Leader of the House of Commons and what he does day to day is largely unknown to the general public. His good decisions and policy initiatives are not discussed or made public. What is known about him is that he made an off the cuff remark about MPs expenses that is becoming an internet video sensation. Poor old Alan.

I do not have sympathy for him personally, but I feel that Alan Duncan is not a new breed of blunderer. I’m sure there were many serial blunderers in the 18^th, 19^th and early 20^th century. But, sadly the rise of video combined with the internet has meant that political gaffes now travel the world phenomenally quickly and will last for years. I’m afraid that Dan Quayle will forever be known as Mr ‘Potatoe’. For this reason politics has changed. There is such a thing as a career ending ‘political gaffe’, which may be caused by little more than being filmed at your most tired, most forgetful or when you just seize up in front of the cameras.

At least in yesteryear politicians knew roughly which decisions would land them in trouble with the press. In the modern age of all-pervasive media and rapid distribution of material globally you can go from great television performer (as I have heard Alan Duncan described) to  loose cannon in an instant.

Or in 5 seconds in Alan Duncan’s case…

Interesting list from TechRadar today - few new names I hadn’t heard on here:

Just look for your free images in a library of stock photos, where the photographer has already given away most, or all of their rights. There are plenty of online libraries just packed with excellent free images that you can use, even commercially, for no cost at all - and we’ve found 12 of the very best.

via 12 best places to get free images for your site | News | TechRadar UK.

There has been a fantastic response to our survey  Why there are less Conservative tweeters than Labour and Lib Dems? With MPs, Prospective Parliamentary Candidates, political activists, PR professionals and many more telling us they have filled in the survey, we are building up a great bank of responses to answer this conundrum. The party political range has also been fantastic with Conservative, Labour, Lib Dems, Greens and UKIP supporters tweeting the survey and passing it on to their colleagues.

BUT, we would love even more responses.

We are going to keep the survey up for a little longer and keep pushing it on Twitter, so please join in and help us get the broadest possible snapshot of how people view MPs’ contribution to Twitter.

Please forward it on to friends, family and colleagues and even your local MP so that we can have truly representative results and get the fullest answer to the question: Why are there less Conservative tweeters than Labour and Lib Dems?

Survey: http://www.surveymonkey.com/s.aspx?sm=Jag7hJARKIXxAZB5bkTmSw_3d_3d