1. How a small group can start a trend, create a tipping point and influence greater adoption. Where can we find these early adopters, how can we tell what is cool? Malcolm Gladwell has written a short essay more than 10 years ago on the art of the Coolhunt. If you have  read Tipping Point, you’ll recognise the reference to the rise of Hush Puppies. Love the stories about basketball sneakers and AI!

2. What would it be like to work for Google? Don Dodge discusses what it has been like working for the search giant for the last 6 months, and how it compares to another giant which everyone wanted to work at in the 80′s – Microsoft.

3. Speaking of Googlers, check out the 22michaels blog on careers and risk taking. Ex-Googlers Michael talks about the greatest career risk – not following your passion and dreams. Follow their rollercoaster ride!

4. I’ve been reading this Fred Wilson’s  blog for the last few months, and its quite insightful. He became quite well known as an investor in twitter, foursquare and tumblr. Here he discusses why he doesn’t like share buybacks – an subtle signal that a company is not innovating and has nothing better to do with the money.

5.  The pay for news content model is getting hammered left, right and centre. Clay Shirky, respected academic blogs about why the iTunes model won’t work for news. I’ll give you the short version: each news article is a unique item which consumers only read once. Unlike music or movies where consumers will play or view them multiple times, and there is a longtail back catalogue. Of course, Steve Jobs will tell you otherwise.

6. QANTAS plane boarding passes redesigned. Blogger Jordan Sim discusses how we can improve the user experience of boarding passes based on how users read information (left to right) and ordering the information in a logical order. Size is also an interesting point.

7. Keeping with the travel theme, want to travel to India? I’ve been living vicariously through my friend Pace J Miller who went to Hyderabad, India. I thought the traffic in Vietnam and Shanghai was bad. Here it goes to another level! India, I will go see you one day.

8. Lastly, there is no better place for hip hop music than Kevin Nottingham. Here, you can get a free download of the Just Wright movie mixtape Vol 3. Check this blog for free mixtapes, albums and singles on the regular!!

I’m out like crossing the road in India,

Matthew Ho.

In the past few weeks, we’ve seen the following come out:

- Wolfram Alpha
- Bing
- Google Wave
- Google Squared

I’ve experimented with all of them, except for Wave since it’s not publicly available, though I have signed up for updates and preview =)

 My intial impression is that Wolfram Alpha is very cool. It answers questions as opposed to finding results. You ask it for the distance between Sydney and Melbourne. It will find the distance, time by car/plane and a map showing the distance. Ask a question and it gives you one answer with some stats. I actually believe this is the way search engines will be headed. It’s a new way of thinking about search results.

Check out this video which has a good comparison of Wolfram Alpha v Google by ZDNet.

Bing is ok. Microsoft needed to upgrade their Live search, which I never used. I only used it when I searched in IE and I forgot the default setting wasn’t google.  Live search just did not look pretty. Google was minimalist. It simply worked and had a great UX (user experience). To be honest, I don’t see myself switching from Google to Bing or Yahoo. Google is too dominant in the world of search right now. In Australia, it has something like 70% market share. I might use Wolfram Alpha to experiment. It’s better for unknown answers and simple queries. 

Google Wave

I watched the Developer Google IO preview. Its roughly 80 minutes long and I got through about half of it. Waaaay too long. It’s very ambitious and has the potential to change the game. The potential to change the way we communicate online from email/wiki’s/IM, etc…. I really dig the idea of concurrent editing, because half the time you are simply waiting for the other person to respond on IM. The danger is that it can become a stream of consciousness. 

 
In terms of how I communicate and come up with ideas, I like to have the time to think and reflect and then type it up in a word document or a wiki / blog. If I’m doing concurrent live editing (where people can see my edits and thoughts in real time), I’m really put on the spot to come up with something. I know you can turn this feature off on Google Wave, but this is the danger of concurrent editing and the potential. 

I really dig it though. The ability to combine rich media like photos, video, playback. The developer described is as how email would look like if it was developed now! It’s like a cool mashup of blogs, wiki, photo sharing, microblogging, IM, etc…

You can read an alternative take on it by Jeremiah Owyang.

I’m out like Altavista,

Matt

Check out this video. It shows off the qwerty keyboard with predictive text and corrective text. 

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The release date is 1 May 2009  for the UK and they are accepting orders for it now. There’s been a lot of chatter about it on blogs, tech and gadget websites, and video demo’s are popping up everywhere on youtube, vidder, etc…

Why am I excited about the Android? Because the platform is opensource so it opens up to the possibility of more applications. And you know developers can come up with some crazy apps! It will be superior to the iphone. 

At the moment, the release date is set for the following countries and this is what they are getting:

UK – White version

Germany – black version

Italy – black and white version (why?!!!)

Spain – white version

HTC Magic - Google Android phone

The obvious question is – when will it be released in Australia?  There are no plans at the moment. I couldn’t find anything on the internet. Why am I not suprised? I checked the vodaphone website in Australia, they don’t even list HTC phones on there!! Optus is still flogging off the G1 (first version) aka the HTC Dream. According to ZDNeT:

“As with the Dream, HTC will be announcing the Magic for different countries only after it has secured operator partnerships. Vodafone will be selling it in Europe but there have been no announcements for Australia yet.”

#vodaphoneaustraliafail

I’m out like the G1, 

Matt Ho

Enjoy!

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gMOnqYZjZDE]

I’m out like running in Tokyo, 

Matt Ho

Yuri Narciss, Head of Technology Industry Sales talks Innovation.

The event was held on Thursday 12 March 2008.

This is Part 1 of 4.

Slides will be coming soon.

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I’ve always been curious about technology and the law. And now more so. Technology is an evolving beast, where the business models are constantly changing and new competitors, trends, viral campaigns emerge overnight. Whilst the law is seen as conservative, slow to adapt, and very traditional. Generalisations yes, but ask any lawyer or laymen and they’ll agree with these perceptions. Evidently, these two are at opposite ends of the spectrum. The law seeks to maintain order and protect society, yet also to enable the creation of new ideas and businesses. The internet is disruptive, fast moving, changing and global in its reach. Law is often seen as jursidictional, often applying to only member states (i.e on country by country basis) unless treaties are ratified by Member states.

On Wednesday morning, I attended an Advertising and Marketing law CLE. What is a CLE? It means “continuing legal education”. For those that are unaware, I’m still a qualified lawyer (amongst other things) and to maintain your status as a lawyer, you need undertake ongoing education. It might involve some lectures, preparing presenting a lecture, or watching some videos.

I wasn’t sure what to expect with this lecture but went with an open mind. I heard the following lectures:

1. New commercial models in advertising and marketing using the internet 
2. Comparative advertising 101
3. Copyright in advertising
4. Children & the law

Topic 1: New commercial models in advertising and marketing using the internet 

They were well presented, but the most useful to me was probably Internet Business models by Peter Leonard. Peter is a partner at Gilbert & Tobin, and counts Google amongst his clients. He described some basics about adwords and how it worked – I knew most of this stuff since I do some work on adwords. However, he had some really interesting points on whitelisting v blacklisting of keywords, something which I was not aware of. 

Blacklisting of keywords

Apparently, some brandnames are “blacklisted” on google, so advertisers can’t use them. For example, “Toyota” can only be used by Toyota. A car reseller, wholesaler, etc… can’t use that term. People are very careful which words they blacklist since it does not enable to aforementioned parties to advertise on google. And google applies this policy on a global basis. So if Toyota actually had a reseller in china under a distribution arrangement, they could not buy that keyword to sell a Toyota car.

Contextual and behavioural advertising

The other relevant thing he discussed was contexutal and behavioural advertising, which is becoming quite a big area in the online marketing world. Advertising has always been about relevancy and recency. Erwin Ephron developed the recency theory which is about showing someone an ad when they are in the mood to purchase. The idea of “top of mind”. It’s not about showing them an ad 3 times to get it to stick, rather at the right time when they want to buy. I believe that is what behavioural advertising and contextual advertising seeks to do as well – tying relevancy and recency together. 

 Behavioural looks at your past behaviour on the internet – which websites you’ve been to, how you use the internet. Contextual advertising is 3rd party advertising based on the content on the website (i.e. your current session on the web).  The whole idea is to serve you more relevant ads. Websites now, may reserve a space on their site for advertising local content to you based on your IP address – you’ve probabaly seen it! Look at an American website, yet its giving you ads for Australian flights or credit cards. Online advertising has gotten smarter. It was really insightful because at ad:tech and even in my work, these are topics which people are talking about. third party advertising, serving of ads, affiliate marketing, etc… On the flip side, there are privacy concerns, because your ISP tracks where you’ve been and keeps all the information about each individiual user. To me, this is also two competing concerns – serving you more relevant ads v capturing your private information.

It enhances the user experience and the advertising by having geographically and behavioural based ads, but aren’t you worried that someone is keeping tabs on you?

Other interesting points he discussed was how keywords get bought, and the difficulty of proving trademark infringement for keywords. Since the prices and the allocation of paid ads on Google was constantly changing, its hard to prove in such a dynamic environment. 

I must admit the other seminars weren’t as relevant to me or as interesting, hence my interest did drop off. Copyright issues in advertising were ok, about database compliation and the rights attached to that. Children and the law & comparative advertising was extremely boring, but still handy to know. I learnt that advertising needs to get clearance from legals, very important so you don’t get sued (!) and meets all legal and regulatory requirements. Also, there’s so many various regulatory codes for each type of media (radio, tv, outdoor) and legislation. 

I’m out like Johnny Law, 

Matthew Ho.

Also, high up there are Search Engine Land and Search Engine Watch, which I occassionally read as well to stay on top of the search game. Problogger is up there too, one of the top authorities on blogging and its Australian too!

Speaking of search, I’m going to be doing a few things to get up to speed on the search industry:

- I’m doing the google adwords webinars. They have these web seminars about various topics. It’s like 1 or two a week. There’s one on tomorrow at 11am for Quality Scores. This is free.

- I’m also attending the Yahoo search Masterclass at ad:tech. It’s on the 11 – 12 March at 12pm. Next Digital is actually speaking straight after at 1pm on Digital Marketing Strategy.Free.

Google has put together a mashup from google maps and the RSS feed from Country Fires Authority as to location, danger, and size of the fires. If yesterday was Google Ocean, then this must be Google fire!

Check out the map here.

Now you can look at the ocean, go underneath the ocean, and also check out thing people have landmarked. Like videos of fish they have discovered at a certain point, websites about a certain location. It looks like a mashup feature with geo tagging (tagging the actual location on google earth). I won’t talk any more, and I’ll let the video do it justice.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GSuJq4UzkIA&eurl=http://www.youtube.com/blog&feature=player_embedded]

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I’m out like Google Ocean,

Matt

From a professional perspective:

- Work more with websites. I would like to work with Umbraco, Sitecore, Reddot, Fatwire etc.., which are open source content management systems. More like finding out what the client wants, developing a strategy and design, managing the build and overseeing the process.

- Online Display Advertising – I’ve very keen to look at stuff like banner ads, learn about adblaster, open ex ad serving and the like.

- Become involved with social media. I would like to experiment with online marketing campaigns involving social media. I haven’t done any yet, but I am eager to do a viral campaigns using Youtube, social bookmarking, etc….I’m really into social media from a personal perspective because its interesting. However,  it’s hard to see how it can be monetised & the commerical appeal – there’s no real formula.

- I’ve started up a work basketball team @ Alexandria. Unfortunately, I’ve sprained my ankle but hope to be back soon. It’s the first sports team @ Next Digital, Sydney so should be an interesting ride.

- I’m attending a few events in the next month or so:

• Launch of NRMA’s magazine & website “myway2go.com.au“, Feb
• Digital Tipping Point: The Future of Branding & Social Media, Feb 17
• Ad:tech Sydney, March 10 – 11 (my company is presenting)
• Advertising & Marketing Law, March 11

I would like to attend events,  every now and then to hear industry thoughts, meet people, etc…The event that I really want to attend is Wiki Wednesdays if they ever hold it again. Its for people that are involved in wikipedia’s which leads to……..

- Working on a wiki using Confluence. Its my pride and joy at the moment, and I’m currently the residential expert. I hope to evangelise a wiki culture into our business and show others how to use it. It was my suggestion back in October when I posted about it on my internal work blog, and it slowly coming to fruition.

- continue to find out more about folksonomies, search engines, cloud computing (my favourite topic area at the moment), and RSS.

- I currently have an allocation of work time to study search engines and I will be going for the Google Advertising Professional Exam.

- I hope to find a mentor at work or outside of work.

From a personal perspective

- I would like to do some travelling this year around Australia. I’ve seen so much of the world (Europe, states, Asia, etc.) but I’ve never seen Ayers Rock, WA, Great Barrier Reef, etc… This year I will tick one of them off my list.

- International travel – if not this year then the next. I just had a look at tickets to South America, maybe somewhere like Brazil or Peru would be cool.

- Get my own car & move out!! These two things have long been overdue. They both will be done (or a least one!) by the end of the year.

- I would like to sign up for this local mentoring service. I saw a notice at the library asking for mentors, and I feel like I could help someone. I also believe that I should do some volunteer work if I can find the time (there always is time, I just can’t find it )

- Fix up this website and get a proper website. It’s ok having a stock standard blog, but I would like to upgrade the website.

- Sign up for a gym – something I’ve also been meaning to do. I have the form on my desk and was about to complete it, but then my ankle injury hit.

I’m out like moving out,

Matt