swept up in the wave

what captivated me most in the last week was google's announcement of wave, their new communication and collaboration tool/platform (bing not even close). yes, i may be a little late to the blogosphere in talking about this, but a) i like to read a lot about something i'm posting and b) i'm not a breaking news blog, so i have no imperative in that regard.

i don't fawn over new software/platforms/apps/what-have-you much, but wave was different, it really struck a chord. it is just so radical, unexpected and a shift from the known and norm that it gripped me like darth vader's force choke.

you need to watch this video to get the full jist of what wave is all about. it's a big time investment, but you really get why it's a game changer. you'll really think about just how flawed our current communication tools are and question why we continue to use them.



i love everything about wave and what it supposes as the future of communicating and collaborating. but what is most interesting to me is that this is the dashboard to your life. this is the single source console to manage all your communication streams that i have been wanting for some time. i love all the different tools out there that are ideal for their special area, but i don't like managing so many accounts and tending to each one in a different interface or sharing each in different ways.

wave solves this, and solves it well. the most exciting part, though, is yet to come. now that it is in the hands of 3rd party developers, they are the ones who will truly make wave shine. but the promise of the framework is disruptive enough.

with my marketing hat on, within wave, there was talk of robots, and there is a lot of promise there. tech blog mashable had a great overview feature that talked a bit about robots. this is the social embedding & conversation embedding that i think everyone was promised, but hasn't happened yet. this is a really powerful proposition.

let me throw out a few examples to illustrate. say i'm organizing a trip to the cottage. within the wave is talk of supplies. any of the companies who make those supplies or retailers who sell them can access that and provide anything from suggestions, to price points, to locations, to coupons, to did-you-also-think-of messages. another easy one is travel companies and airlines embedding into a conversation about an upcoming trip providing all the necessary information for you to plan collaboratively. there's a lot more opportunities for a lot more advertisers.

to marketers, robots will be the new iphone application.

Dapper vs. Google

today google announced intentions to go after the online display market, a break from it's core business in search. as the link indicates, google analyzed it's content network and found it to be more cost effective than search, though still a smaller component to overall revenue and searches. where this data leads google is to say that the content network holds a lot of potential for more than returning just textual, search ads.

meet dapper, a tech that contextually delivers advertising based on page contents and inner-site searches and other data based content. much like google, dapper scans the page for relevant keywords and determines the context, then serves ads based on that.

at last, a marriage of the highly effective, and cost efficient search world with brand building image ads. but does it deliver?

immediately, i love the notion of an ad being more relevant to the environment. as a planner, the context is probably my biggest input in site selection and media placement. to add another layer of that is a real sweet spot. it makes the placement a beacon for consumer engagement and interaction.

this holds tremendous potential for a number of advertisers and industries. dapper's video shows some real easy examples of how to dynamically push ads. as with search, the primary benefactors are e-commerce companies. what about true brand advertisers?

where i'd like to see it go is graphical ads where images can be pulled from a library into preset animations with text generated all from input from the contents of the page? doable? hard to say. maybe. will it look good and just how many iterations can really be made? i don't have answers, but it's exciting to see where it goes and how far it can be pushed.

flip video

today the fine folks at google sent me quite the nifty little gadget for a holiday gift. yes it's that time of year where the graft pours in, much of which is shite and useless, but there's usually a gem in there. last year it was the ipod nano, and so far this is the front runner.


the gadget in question is the flip video ultra from pure digital technologies. what we have here is an extremely easy to use video/audio capture device (full specs here) that has 30 mins of record time, that you just plug into your comp with it's usb arm or line-out to your tv. it's got a good sized lcd screen, zoom, runs on two AA's and comes with some quick and easy software to make simple edits and easily upload to youtube and can even take frame captures to make into photos.

it sure beats the hell out of the crap quality of a cell phone and is much less worrisome than carrying around your digital camera. it's really a fantastic little device. all for the very reasonable price of $150 bones. i'm ashamed to say it, but i have to side with oprah in her throwing her considerable weight behind the product (consumerly and physically speaking).

i wanted to post a video filmed with said device, but unfortunately my boring-ass life doesn't accommodate me having anything of interest to film and post here. and my rabbits are not ones for on-demand performances so their equally boring-ass lives were not adequate subject material. but now that i'll carry this on me at all times, hopefully i can capture that one moment of gold and share it here.