Wednesday, January 31, 2007

Ikea Gets Into a Hot Bed

http://publications.mediapost.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=Articles.san&s=54824&Nid=27059&p=416179

"Ikea has turned to a new kind of consumer-generated video network that designed to motivate consumers to interact with and create videos based on their brands. Unlike others who are treating user-generated content as advertising, PR or buzz marketing, the Ikea campaign is based on a very old marketing model: consumer promotion. The promotion, which is being hosted and managed by Shycast, any early stage company that is going public today with the Ikea campaign, is essentially a contest that offers $5,000 in cash to the user who creates the best online video on making a bed. Actually, the contest asks consumers to "break the rules" of bed-making."

&

"As of early this morning, moments after the campaign went live, Shycast had three video posts: One from Bill showing a bed "making itself; one from Steph, "making my bed;" and one from Robert J. Moore, asking whether, "you can see me" in his bed.
The hope of Ikea and its agencies is that the campaign will prove to be more than just a test bed, and that it will catch on like wildfire, tapping a new undercurrent of competition in the user-generated video space."



How cool is this concept. If you are in the market for an advertising agency you should hire these guys now. I love it.

Cheers,
Dean

Monday, January 29, 2007

Jeff Han finally 'touches' paydirt?

There's a great article in next months Fast Company magazine about Jeff Han and his multi-input touch screen technology.

http://www.fastcompany.com/subscr/112/open_features-canttouchthis.html?partner=rss

For those of you that have been reading my blog for a while would have read about this in March last year.
http://deancollinsblog.blogspot.com/2006/03/neat-ui.html

Whats interesting in the article was the description of how he came up with the concept, walked into a lab and then built a proof of concept walking out with a reasonable demo in a single day. What I also didn't know was that Jeff hasn't taken any VC money. Man this guy is going to be rich.

Good luck to him, personally I cant wait to hand over my cash for this technology.


Cheers,
Dean
BTW If you dont subscribe to Fast Company you should, it is the one magazine a month I devour as soon as it arrives. Page for Page I have never read another magazine that has so many great ideas and is inspiring for the the work I do.

Sunday, January 28, 2007

Microsoft to implement micropayments

Bill Gates announced at Davos today that he had just greenlighted a Microsoft micropayments project primarily to support online transactions.

This will enable content providers to finally charge small currency transactions for individual events or information transfers.

No details are available at the moment but limited information about online API's have been discussed allowing an automated process for these currency transfers.

EG I provide a cartoon website, by you logging into my cartoon website an automatic payment of 1c is deducted from your account and moved to my account. However an API may exist allowing you to purchase or download the cartoon for future reference at 5c.

Whilst a number of these solutions have been offered in the past it's all about critical mass, it about getting the largest number of people registered and putting $10 into their account and then deducting it out to the largest number of content providers.

A number of people though Paypal would have gone down this route but once they were acquired by eBay the mood there has soured along with the number of changes in "user terms and conditions".

In addition whilst Skype is probably the largest micropayment solution at the moment (eg the largest number of people who have loaded money into their 'e'wallet, there have been very very minimal numbers of locations to spend the money and they have all been related to voice related applications.

Most people have missed the next largest micropayment solution in that the last generation of console games (xbox360,PS3) have all had an online currency in order to download additional features or gimmicks.

BTW I don't count Second Life as a micropayment economy, Second Life is nothing but a ponzi scheme as there is no way to actually extract your 'Linden dollars' into hard cash.

A lot of people are going to be reticent to get involved just because it's Microsoft (and to be honest they'll probably screw it up first time around) but guaranteed V2.0 will be a 'killer app' and change the way you access content online.

Cheers,
Dean
P.S. Think I didn't miss the fact that this is totally aimed at taking advertising revenue away from Google - nah, just figured it was a given and if you read this far you already worked that out for yourself.

Thursday, January 25, 2007

Oh the tangled web we weave

lol, I dont know who is more at fault;

- the business exec for starting up a competing company and getting kickbacks while negotiating to sell a company he had an interest in to his own bosses.
- the wife, who obviously knew what was going on but acquiesced for 3 years until she found out her husband was cheating on her and decided to take him to the cleaners.
or
- the company, sweet old HP who used pretexting to access the business exec's private phone records but when this failed, stole the social security information from his employment records.

either way makes for very very interesting reading www.theregister.co.uk/2007/01/25/hp_tv_kamb see that TV you are watching in the corner, who knows how it's development came about, who knew business was such fun.


Cheers,
Dean

Wednesday, January 24, 2007

How to tell you've pissed off an engineer


ROLF this was the best piece of internet humour i've received in a long time.

thanks Bob.

Monday, January 22, 2007

Sean Moss-Pultz

Interview regarding the FIC Open Moko concept and the Neo1973.


Thursday, January 18, 2007

What can you do with Flickr?

http://www.flickr.com/photos/cogdog/265279980/

A great collection of the various Flickr applications (even I was surprised at some of them).
It's a great evolution of the original photo sharing application.

Whilst this may be of general interest the reason for posting this is to highlight....(click on the screwdriver section now)....if you have an application think about how you are going to structure your API's in advance. With open and freely available API's the old adage of "two heads are better than one" is more relevant than ever.

Who knows what one of your users/developers/IT freaks may come up with that makes your product better than you ever thought possible.


Cheers,
Dean

Wednesday, January 17, 2007

Back in New York baby!!!

I'm baaaaccckkkk !

Whilst Sydney was great, (though Tahiti was a washout - I'll update www.collins.net.pr/photo in the next few days) and US Homeland Security was an absolute freaking disaster when arriving at JFK (more about this another time) I'm back in New York baby!

Cant wait to get started with all new cool projects and opportunities.

Talk soon.



Cheers,
Dean

Monday, January 01, 2007

Happy 2007

It's not like I'm feeling old, I've already decided I'm living to at least 123 (long story for another time), but I feel that 2007 is the year it's all going to happen, it's going to be my year.

There are so many cool technologies just breaching and so many parallel synergies to be drawn this is the year that it's going to happen.

My New Years resolution is to have "consistent power and energy to burn".

I want to be an example of whats possible if you have a dream that things can be done a different way, a better way and that if you make technology simple and user friendly and always relevant that people are interested in making a difference.


Cheers,
Dean