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SEOMoz Blog conducted a very detailed analysis of the breaking news story around the death of Michael Jackson and concluded;

"The events of Thursday demonstrated that Google is falling behind in the emerging real-time web. It was 3 hours and 17 minutes after TMZ first announced Michael Jackson had experienced cardiac arrest before it appeared as a auto completion suggestion on Google's homepage. In the computer age that is a huge amount of time. It is 3 hours and 17 minutes during which consumers may choose to go somewhere other than Google to get the information they want."

With the conversation happening in real-time it appears the search engines are handicapped by legacy systems and process that can't operate at the same speed as competitors Facebook and Twitter.

There seems to be new divisions of time and new concepts appearing around the notion.

Brands need to be flexible and adaptable to operate across all these new facets of time and must have the ability to respond and participate in "the conversation".


Posted by Ed Cotton Modern business has become ruthlessly efficient at producing low cost goods, so much so, it's very easy to ignore the complexities involved in the global sourcing and manufacture of these items.

The Toaster Project by Thomas Thwaites, a student at RCA, is an attempt to come to terms with the complexity. Thwaites takes a $10 toaster and tries to manufacture his version that takes him on an interesting journey into mines, meetings with energy consultants and even smelting iron ore in a microwave.

Step 2, Attempt 2: Smelting Iron Ore in a Microwave from Thomas Thwaites on Vimeo.

Thwaites sums up the real point of the project as follows;

“It seems the need to buy more stuff to save our economy and the need to buy less to save our environment are on a collision course.  So, we either have to value what we’ve got a lot more, or spend as much time and effort taking things apart and disposing of them as we do putting them together.”




Posted by Ed Cotton Obviously, when big news breaks people are increasingly going to the internet and the death of celebrity has people not only searching for news, but also for related content around that individual's life. I found it interesting that the news of Michael Jackson's death caused a huge spike in traffic, but, it's still dwarfed by the election of Obama and strangely by the elimination of the US soccer team by Ghana!

Posted by Ed Cotton Here's another example of augmented reality- this time it's for Android phone users and it comes to us from IBM. The idea here is to help visitors to the tennis championships at Wimbledon to get access to data via data layered on top of a viewfinder. It's seems like a nifty idea, but is it really an easier or better experience than something that could be obtained from a regular mobile web experience.

From the users perspective, perhaps it's easier to see that there's an exciting/close match on Court 5 and to discover where that is. Perhaps this could be done by integrating a maps application?

 


Posted by Ed Cotton An amazing example of a brand using data to create an experience. In this case it's Lufthansa in its brand academy in Frankfurt.



Posted by Ed Cotton Brands and their agencies seem to be constantly grappling with how to bring Facebook to the table as a marketing partner.

Back in December, Razorfish authored a presentation (thanks Dave Knox) which does a very good job of explaining how Facebook's Connect program could change the internet as we know it. While the deck examines the potential impact for big e-commerce players like, Apple's iTunes and Amazon, it's clear that there are also huge implications for brands and it's best of all, it's a very simple solution to implement.

Posted by Ed Cotton