Apple Skeeball iPhone application

Wow $181,000 in one month – that’s insane

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/06/technology/06apps.html?_r=1


Cheers,
Dean

Mike Walsh - Fourth Estate Domain interview

So how does Mike keep his hair so silky smooth :) I've been living in New York for 5 years now and he looks exactly the same as when i met him at Newscorp.

Good video - well worth the 30 mins to watch it; http://play.viostream.com/?play=a16a3be4-57fa-4a1a-893f-9b95d8af2651

Cheers,
Dean

How many tweets does it take to make it onto the Twitter Trending list?

Apparently about 100 per minute or so;

Tony Abbot ascended to leader of the liberal party on Tuesday after a Malcolm Turnbull was unceremoniously booted from the top spot. It was an upset victory, most expected Joe Hockey to come out on top, and the Australian twitterverse went a little crazy with the news, with tweets flying think and fast. At one point both the #spill hashtag and 'Tony Abbott' making it to the Twitter's fabled trending topics.

But how much excitement to you need to make something trend on Twitter?
http://www.digital-media.net.au/article/How-many-tweets-does-it-take-to-make-a-spill-trend/507590.aspx?utm_source=20091204&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=newsletters


Interesting..... so if 100 of you post "I Love http://www.livefootballchat.com/" in the next 60 seconds we can make it onto the trending list :)


Cheers,
Dean

NHL trying out Tweetmixx dashboards

Was reading this today;

The National Hockey League (NHL) on Wednesday becomes the first in a handful of companies scheduled to launch a white-label platform from Mixx that aggregates tweets from Twitter on Web sites and blogs. TweetMixx Channels creates a distribution channel for tweets both off and on Twitter. The platform comes with a widget that bloggers can embed on a variety of sites. A plug in to Facebook will launch in two weeks. The product roadmap also includes a snippet of code to personalize iGoogle and other Web pages. The platform has filters to monitor chatter, too.
http://www.mediapost.com/publications/?fa=Articles.showArticle&art_aid=118262


Wondering if there is there any manual 'curation' of the comments? How are they going to prevent another "skittles effect"

One of the reasons that we dont pull Tweets about games into www.livechatconcepts.com websites is that fans want dialog, not lots of "one way shouting".

Technically it is very easy to do (we already do outbound tweets and posts from the chat) just not sure if we would 'want to'.


Cheers,
Dean

Fifa world cup 2010

With the 2010 south african world cup coming closer i'm not sure if we are going to do anything around this yet.

It would be a great way to get real time international interactivity between multiple countries..... but the fifa lawyers scare the heck out of me (compared to those wussy Twitter lawyers :)

http://www.fifa.com/mm/document/afmarketing/marketing/2010_fifa_public_guidelines_0714_12016.pdf

cant use the terms;
• 2010 FIFA World Cup South Africa
• 2010 FIFA World Cup
• FIFA World Cup
• World Cup
• 2010 World Cup
• World Cup 2010
• South Africa 2010 or SA 2010 or ZA 2010
• 2010 South Africa
• Football World Cup
• Soccer World Cup

It appears according to this

we should be ok but then in the same document they say we cant publish the schedule for a commercial use (which is think is BS here in the USA anyway)

Either way no need to make a real decision yet.

What do you think? are Americans ready for a 'football' game that uses a round ball or is soccer still an alien concepts to them?


Cheers,
Dean

Embrace your wobbbly bits....or not.

A friend of mine posted in facebook how she would never do plastic surgery because Miss Argentina just died from it.

A 38-year-old former Miss Argentina has died over the weekend from complications resulting from cosmetic surgery, friends say. "This woman who had everything is dead because she wanted to have a slightly firmer ass".
http://bit.ly/4M7bDz


My counter intuitive advice is do you know that more people die from coconuts falling on their head each year than shark attacks..... yet no one fears coconuts.

The point being if you worry about death from palstic surgery you should probably also stop driving your car...walking across the road... flying is ok but eating the hamburger is definitely out.....

People are lousy at judging risk....but great at judging fat.

Bring on the lypo, and the lasik and the titanium hips and who knows what else when i get that old.


Cheers,
Dean

Is a 'remnant' radio advertisement worth 4 x an online ad?

So i read in Fred Wilson's blog post post that one of his portfolio companies http://www.targetspot.com/ was looking for a SEO and i thought hmmm i wonder how much it does cost to advertise on radio?

So I found out the answer....... "Lots".

Basically for a basic 15 second advertisement, running in the 'sports' genres radio stations with no ability to choose 'what stations' it ran on (in otherwords bottom of the barrel remnant including aol radio) it costs a minimum of $3.74 PCM.

I'm not sure how the 'stations' are estimating their listeners at 3-6pm each afternoon but i wasn't able to actually select what days it could be run on either - just what timeslot (i would really want sat/sun afternoons to target sports listeners for http://www.livefootballchat.com/ and http://www.livebaseballchat.com/ ).

This $3.74PCM amount also didn't seem to go up or down based on total budget either. In fact the flash demo about 'tweaking' your campaign showed a lot of functionality that wasn't possible when it came to setting up the ad spot.

So I'm putting the question to you - is it worth 4-5 X to advertise on radio compared to online?

Do you pay anymore attention to radio ads than online ads?


Cheers,
Dean
P.S. Something that confused me about their 'close the order' page was it automatically selected was even though i put in $500 as my monthly budget....they auto selected $50. I think they might not be taken seriously for this amount alone.

Toyota Yaris

A friend of mine in Australia Laurel Papworth really castigated Toyota and their Yaris social media innitiatives .
http://laurelpapworth.com/australia-toyota-yaris-social-media-campaign-downfall/
Toyota have chosen 5 or 6 agencies and have asked them to spend $15,000 each on a “social media marketing campaign”. Think “stunt” and you have a better idea of what they are talking about.. And while traditional media pitches means war to get content into banner ads, on TV and radio, when it comes to using the same tactics in online communities, there’s damage done. What happened to engagement, respect, conversation, collaboration, dialogue?


Here is a video she created showing her displeasure;



My comments are;
Hey Laurel, first you castigate companies for not 'experimenting' and then when Toyota only throws $100,000 at a test project you castigate them for doing it wrong........

I think it's cool that Toyota are trying something innovative, and sure i think Yaris cars suck and nothing would make me buy one..... doesn't mean something cool isn't going to happen from one of them.

Personally i love the One Green Bean concept, i think it should be run for more than just one night....maybe something like you find the car via a mobile web app and you get to keep the keys as long as you are driving it, once you "drop the keys" someone else gets to take the car to where they want.....would be a great example of Toyota reliability having the car on the road for 24x7x30 days etc. you could have a dashboard where it tracks how many kilometers per day, how fast it was traveling on average and a map showing the trip route etc.

What do you think? is $100k a joke or a reasonable 'experiement'?

Cheers,
Dean

Is the time right to bring back something like Mogi Mogi to the USA?

I was reading an interesting article on Techcrunch about FourSquare and although i've never been a user it's been curious to me how viral the concept got (and what are the elements needed so I can replicate that success for LiveChatConcepts) and how long the 'checkin process' was going to interest people.


Over the last six months just about all of my tech friends have started using Foursquare, a geolocation-based game that was built by the creators of Google-acquired Dodgeball. Some of them will literally pull out their phones as soon as they enter any restaurant, event or even TechCrunch HQ and check in just so they can be named ‘mayor’ of that establishment (whoever checks into any particular location the most times becomes mayor of that location). It’s fascinating and a bit bizarre to watch, and it clearly shows that Foursquare has tapped into something powerful.


But all this time I’ve had a nagging feeling that Foursquare, at least in its current form, is not going to be the next Twitter, as some people have concluded. Because as good as Foursquare is at figuring out where and what your friends are up to, they can’t hope to compete with Facebook. That is, if Facebook does Geo right.
http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/11/28/facebook-foursquare/

So I'm wondring, if 'checking in' isn't enough to keep Foursquare going (and i'm not sure i agree with that statement anyway), Do you think the timing and technology is right to introduce something more complex like Mogi Mogi?
http://blog.collins.net.pr/2006/07/do-you-mogi-mogi.html

Something that introduces gaming/competition points and real time elements to the location based 'check in process'. Or are the FourSqaure guys onto a good thing and there is no need to mess with the success considering they only just launched their '50 city' major push?

What features would you want to add to Foursquare if you are a user?

And if you aren't a user what would convince you to become a user?

Cheers,
Dean

Windows 7 overtakes OSX already

ha ha -

Windows 7 passed the 5% market share milestone of OS X last weekend.
http://www.pcworld.com/article/183325/windows_7_sales_beat_mac_os_x_market_share.html?tk=rss_news

lol already? hasn't it only been out for a month or so?

Wonder how long before it overtakes the entire Apple market share?


Cheers,
Dean