Posted by Postmaster in Collaborative Web, Mobile, Social software, eMarketing.
eLab – Video communities.ppt
In the past 24 months, video sharing has become hugely popular. YouTube, one of the most popular online video community, launched in February 2005 and 5 months later had 3 million videos viewed each day. In April 2006, 35’000 new videos were uploaded daily and users watched 30 to 40 million clips everyday.
The top six video sites are YouTube, MSN Video, Yahoo Video, Google Video and iFilm. Together they gain twice as much traffic as the top six US broadcast networks websites.
These videos are usually short (YouTube set a 10 minutes limit for regular users) and targeted at friends and family. The proliferation of camera phones and cheap video editing tools boosted these amateur-shot videos, often quite strange or funny.
However these videos are not always self-made, as it is rather easy to capture a clip of a TV program on a hard disk video recorder and to upload it to a video-sharing site. YouTube and its competitors are trying to remove these clips that breach copyright, but traditional content providers begin to understand that there are big opportunities to promote their existing content using short videos. By making them available, they try to gain popularity for their programs (see viral video example). A report published by IDC predicts that online video could generate $ 1.7 B in revenues by 2010.
Although it is not very clear how YouTube will make money, there are already some hints for online video business models:
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iFilm offers free basic service supported by ads, as well as “premium” services featuring higher-resolution clips;
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besides amateur media and Internet videos, Google Video wants to distribute commercial professional media, such as televised content and movies;
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Revver auto-inserts advertisements directly into videos and shares revenue with the maker of the video.
There are many video services and companies and they do not only provide communities and sharing tools, there are also editing, formatting, or subtitling platforms:
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JumpCut and EyeSpot are online video editors where users can select and arrange video parts by dragging and dropping thumbnails, add music or sound effects, choose transitions, add titles, etc.
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VPod.tv allows users to upload any video formats, edit them online, and also publish them to different sites such as MySpace or eBay. Advertising is built into the system and content can be optimized for mobile phones, PSP, iPods, etc.
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dotSUB provides free browser based tools that allow anyone to translate films’ subtitles from one language into countless other languages.
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Posted by Postmaster in Collaborative Web, Office of the Future, eMarketing.
eLab – Collaborative marketing.ppt
Traditional mass marketing techniques seem to be declining in effectiveness and increasing in costs. Indeed this 2006 survey shows that 78% of American advertisers feel that traditional television advertising has become less effective in the past two years. 80% of them will spend more of their advertising budget on Web advertising and 68% of advertisers will look to search engine marketing. Advertisers are also looking at alternatives to traditional TV advertising and will spend more on: branded entertainment within TV programs (61%); TV program sponsorships (55%); interactive advertising during TV programs (48%); online video ads (45%); and product placement (44%). Furthermore, traditional promotions have decreasing ROI: according to a Nielsen survey, between 1987 and 1997, trade promotion spending increased from 35% of the marketing mix to 54%, yet consumer sales remained relatively stable. One of the ideas to improve marketing efficiency is collective pooling of marketing efforts, information and intelligence in order to bring combined products/services to a greater audience at more economical costs. Collaborative marketing is generally based on commonality (geography, timeframe, audience, theme, etc.) and can be of many forms, for example:
- Lake Geneva and Matterhorn region marketing campaigns organized by the tourist offices of Geneva, Lake Geneva Region (Vaud) and Matterhorn Region (Valais)
- various partners advertising during a music festival or cultural event
- retailers and manufacturers targeting key shopper groups
- consumers become co-creator of a product (see entry on co-creation)
All marketing elements are potentially integrated around a common theme that communicates a brand value for the retailer and the strategic manufacturers:
- product development: for P&G Advisors, customers try new products and provide feedback
- pricing: in HP partition pricing, customers pay incrementally for capacity as they need rather that paying upfront for hardware
- segmentation: Dell allows customers to configure, price and order products according to their needs
- support: Cisco rewards selected network engineers that answer support questions on their online community by certifying them.
For detailed examples, see this article.
Most collaborative marketing initiatives rely on technological platform to connect the partners involved: customers, design/sales/marketing departments, suppliers, etc.
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Posted by Postmaster in Collaborative Web, Office of the Future, Social software, eMarketing.
eLab – Peer production and co-creation.ppt
Peer-production refers to organizing production in a radically decentralized, collaborative, and nonproprietary way, by sharing resources and outputs among widely distributed, loosely connected individuals who cooperate with each other without relying on either market signals or managerial commands. Free software and wikipedia.org are classical examples, but there are many others. For more on peer production, Yochai Benkler's book, "The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom", is a must.
Co-creation refers to an open, ongoing collaboration between employees and customers to define and create products, services, experiences, ideas and information. Probably the best known example is the Lego Factory, where kids design new Lego models and submit them to competitions. These ideas are then used as sources for new Lego products. Discussion, comments and criticism on co-creation here.
TrendWatching.com has an excellent report on what they call Customer-Made, where most of the ideas and examples below come from. Trends to watch in co-creation:
- "Conversations": companies listen (and sometimes answer) to customers; Orange Talking Point, 2TalkAboutHonda, Ikea Positive Fanatics, etc.
- "Create your own ad": videos for L'Oreal, Sony or Toyota on Current.tv, catchwords for MasterCard with Priceless ads, etc.
- "Design your own product": Nokia invited designers for its Concept Lounge; Nespresso had a design contest for leading European design schools; Electrolux Design Lab 2005 received more than 3'000 projects; users can send in their pictures in order to be on the Jones Soda bottles, customize your Converse, etc.
- "Innovation": Connect+Develop where Procter & Gamble is seeking next game-changing products, packaging, technologies, or processes; Leadusers discuss various topics related to Philips new solutions.
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Posted by Postmaster in Collaborative Web, Office of the Future, Semantic Web, Social software.
eLab – Semantic Web.ppt
The main objectives of the Semantic Web are to give meaning to Web content by using metadata to describe documents and thus to offer better search capabilities to users. It is based on standards (XML, RDF, OWL).
Metadata can be based on a centrally controlled vocabulary (taxonomy or thesaurus), such as in Yahoo! directory, or on open collaborative tagging. A tag is a keyword or a label for a Webpage, a document, an image,…
The collaborative tagging system is often referred to as a folksonomy (a contraction of folk and taxonomy) and is for example used in flickr to describe pictures and in del.icio.us to share bookmarks. By using freely chosen labels – tags – Internet users can categorize content and improve search engine's effectiveness because content is categorized using a familiar, accessible, and shared vocabulary. The main criticisms against folksonomy are the users' lack of discipline and ambiguity (synonyms, context, polysemy), whereas some argue that controlled vocabularies are too complicated and in some case not relevant for end users.
Collabulary, "collaborative vocabulary", combines the approaches of controlled and open-ended vocabularies. End users or content consumers can create their tags, which are then validated by other users and experts in the field.
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Posted by Postmaster in Collaborative Web, Office of the Future.
eLab – Web 2.0.ppt
In his article where he defines the concept of Web 2.0, Tim O'Reilly proposes to transform the Internet into an exchange platform for users, notably thank to online services or applications.
Although some say Web 2.0 is a marketing concept or hype, there is a general consensus that Web 2.0 should enable people to share, collaborate and interact. The main ideas behind Web 2.0 are collaboration, participation, rich user experience, trust, and mashup (combined content from more than one source/service). There are many emerging collaborative online (or Web 2.0) applications:
- Word processing: Writely (recently bought by Google), Rallypoint, JotSpot Live, Zoho Writer
- Spreadsheet: NumSum, iRows
- Calendar:30 Boxes, CalendarHub
- Projet management: Basecamp
- Presentation: Thumbstacks
- Drawing: Gliffy
- Office Suite: gOffice
- Group note-taking: Jotspot Live
- Social bookmarking: BlinkList, BlogMarks, del.icio.us, Digg, Furl, Ma.gnolia, Simpy, Technorati
Most of these applications rely on Ajax programming (a combination of XML and Javascript), RSS (web feed formats in XML, used for Web syndication) and REST (web-based pogramming interfaces that use XML and HTTP).
Microsoft follows the trend and offers shared online functionalities with Office Live: e-mail, calendar, document management, online business application (employee/customer/project management), etc.
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Posted by Postmaster in Collaborative Web, Innovation, Mobile, Social software.
Successful social technologies requires cluster effects. Cluster effects require everyone within a particular social cluster to be able to play.
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Being able to get to basic cluster effects is the *baseline* for a mobile social app to succeed. This alone won't make it work, but you need that to even begin.
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Over and over, i hear about cool technologies that involve multimedia sharing, GPS applications, graphical interfaces, etc. In theory, as research, these are great. Unfortunately, without clusters, you cannot even test the idea to see if it would make sense to a given population.
Read complete post on FutureLab's blog
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