Search just finished its first decade! Our US Search teams have put together a look back over the past 10 years and key milestones which have shaped the search landscape today. It’s amazing how far the industry has come in such a short space of time and how much it has changed. Most notably, back in 2000 Google was the default search engine for Yahoo users and now they’re main competitors!
Click here to see The Decade in Search highlights and below our thoughts from Amnesia, it’s effect on the APAC region and what the future is set to hold – for the moment at least!
Why has Google become so strong?
Leading innovation, products and add ons that are simple for consumers to use and make Google the one-stop shop for consuming and sharing online
For advertisers they have developed user friendly interfaces, in-depth reporting and free applications such as Analytics and Insights to make sure we can target consumers as effectively as possible on the Google network
Both Yahoo and MSN have both lagged behind in innovation which has ultimately held back their advancement in the majority of APAC
Key Changes for the APAC region:
Reputation management – the force that is social is an exciting time as online becomes more of an open forum. As search engines start to rank more and more social content the process of reputation management becomes more challenging and also brings up the age old question – is all news good PR?
Censorship – hot topic at the moment especially here in Australia. Is the free availability of information set to end? We’ll be keeping a close eye on proceedings and also the effects this may have on advertisers
China is the key market for change, with recent heavy news coverage that Google may pull out over a combination of high levels of censorship and hacking linked to the government.
Accessibility – the imminent launch of new devices, such as, the iPad and Android phones, will open up the way people can search and the frequency in which they can do it
Bing – Microsoft’s new search engine has reportedly been growing, albeit at a small rate. It will be interesting to see locally if consumers in each market will transition once it comes out of Beta and all features are available. Look out Google? Only time will tell!
All in all we are about to enter the next chapter in Search. Especially here in APAC where there are many different types of market, from emerging to mature and everything in between. The key to success is strategy localisation to ensure your advertising is meeting the needs of consumers from very varied backgrounds.
Fabian Hemmert talked at the TED in Berlin late November last year and he said that technology should become a bit more human and he showed off a few of his prototypes – the weight shifting phone, the breazing phone?!?
I think these are interesting ideas, but as long as we don’t have 3 month of battery life, I can’t see this being implemented.
The almighty animated GIF has come along way over the years.
David Dope and his funky visual china town blog has a whole collection of GIFS that will slowly put you into a hypnotic trance.
A tip O’ the hat to you Mr. David Dope (even though your name sounds like an alter ego like Beyonce’s Sasha Fierce and Prince’s short lived Camille‘.)
Catch a glimpse on our blog now because this bad-boy is coming down soon so other articles can be read in comfort (it’s a bit of a challenge to view anything else on the page lol).
The Human Media Lab at Queen’s University in Ontario wants to use slim, networked touchscreen hexagonal tiles with edge-to-edge OLED displays to play the games.
Check out the video below where they demo the idea by “faking” the hexagons with projectors, because the tech out there is not quite there yet.
Also even if the tech would be around already your board game would be about $1000
The relationship between music and graphics begins with musical notes on paper ahead of a recording session. Interesting to see graphics at the other end.
So how does an iPad really stack up against its competitors? We did a quick analysis and compared it with the Kindle and a ten thousand year old rock. The results are in:
Sidenote: Just for fun ok! Also full respect and homage to the original iPhone Vs Rock parody from a few years ago (author unknown) here:
Good old rock, paper scissors. With this t-shirt you don’t need a friend to play. Just stand in front of the webcam and hey presto. I’m now thinking of ideas to build on this. Watch this space Check it out (via)
I’m very much looking forward to this. Not because I’m jumping on the Banksy band wagon (Back in my uni days I went to one of his first exhibitions and failed to buy a piece of his work for peanuts … foolish) but because I’m pretty sure it will be nothing like the trailer and do something completely unexpected.
Anyway, here’s the trailer if you haven’t seen it already:
Before computers became useful and the internets invaded our homes, people made things from wood and fabric and paint and sticks. It was messy and sometimes smelly and quite often you’d cut your finger.
What I love about these examples is they demonstrate people going out of their way to use real world materials and knowing when to slow down and consider a different approach. An approach that might seem absurd at the time but could lead to great things.
HunterGatherer makes simply beautiful things. Then they make them appear to move. These guys love their wood grain.
Here in the studio at Amnesia Razorfish we’ve been known to occasionally step away from the keyboards to create things out of real materials.
Sandor Moldan and Mike Kleinman worked bizarre magic on the previous incarnation of Mountain Dew’s site for Australia. Claymation zombies and bitchslapped rhinos adorned a hand crafted mountain of delights. (The site is no longer live, unfortunately.)
Great article and helpful insight about Big Spaceship’s experience working with Silverlight.
“I had the pleasure of diving headfirst into Silverlight in building the Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show. I walked in with the same sort of attitude that I believe is prevelant across the industry at the moment — Silverlight is an inferior platform, that we were working with a Flash wananbe and that this would be to the project’s detriment. Why use Silverlight when I can already know Flash so well? It does the same things as Flash anyway, right?…”
My iphone ran out of battery last night … pesky thing. I’m too impatient to wait and see if Steve has a solution to this problem so I started searching. Anyway, I stumbled across this piece of innovation: a phone that runs on pepsi … well any fizzy pop.
This little beauty is made possible thanks to a bio battery:
Bio battery has the potential to operate three to four times longer on a single charge than conventional lithium batteries and it could be fully biodegradable. Meanwhile, it brings a whole new perception to batteries and afternoon tea.
Something that has always bothered me about my MacBook Pro is the power cable. Sure, it has those nice little hook things to wrap the “small” end around, but what if you use the extra long power cable? You know, the other that it actually EARTHED so you don’t DIE? That can only be wrapped loosely around the power pack so it can later uncoil and suffocate the contents of your laptop bag.
Happily, I saw the PowerCurl on an Apple blog the other day and ordered it immediately.
Even more interesting than the product itself is the site that birthed it.
Quirky is a “social product development” community. Users can pay to submit an idea for a product which is then evaulated and refined by a larger community. If the product gets enough love, then it goes into manufacture with a percentage of profits going to all the users involved.
Ok Ok I don’t know anything about the tablet, but I read this article on crunchgear and FingerWorks, a company Apple bought a few years back, has an interesting patent about how to extend multitouch gestures.
Check out the video where some of them are explained – funnily enough with the help of a Microsoft Surface table.
It’s going to be even more confusing if all that gets implemented.
The CES is on in Vegas and everyone is just flooding you with new and exciting gadgets.
And one of the things that caught my eye is the Light Touch by Light Blue Optics.
It is a laser projector that turns any flat surface into an auto-focused and image-adjusted 10-inch touchscreen with WVGA resolution thanks to its laser- based pico projection engine dubbed HLP (holographic laser projection) and infrared touch-sensing system.
When I first saw the press release and all its nice staged photos I thought it can’t be that great and responsive, but engadget had a hands-on and it looks pretty cool.
They show off a few apps and the picture one is a lot like surface if you ask me.
You’ve probably seen the billboards and bus ads by now, but in case you weren’t aware, we recently launched the digital side of Pepsi’s new Hit Refresh campaign. MTV are pushing it on television, we’re running it here on the ‘net.
It’s pretty cool, a mash-up of Pepsi re-inventing their image and placing a huge focus on digital marketing the combination of which turned into a Twitter based scavenger hunt, with the prizes coming in the form of cold hard cash. Well, not cash so much as 101 slick little EFTPOS cards loaded up with $250 each.
A brief run down: the refreshment company activation team (known as Pepsi Refreshers) make their way out into the world, choose an obscure location in a well populated Australian city, and then start tweeting out clues about where they are from the Pepsi Australia Twitter page. We’ve rigged it so that game playing, money lusting, Pepsi fans can also catch these updates on the Facebook Page, or at the Hit Refresh site, in order to more effectively race each other to the prize.
This is excellent because the entire thing can essentially be run from a smartphone, an easy thing for a Pepsi Refresher to have on them at all times. Plus, the players themselves aren’t tied into any particular service in order to keep up with the clues. It’s infectious, interactive, and incredibly efficient – social media at its best, really.
Creative mastermind Toby Caves really took advantage of the fact that APIs and widgets basically rule the internet now, and the main campaign site grew into a deliciously crafted overview of everything that’s happened, and is happening in the competition at any given time.
The latest clues are fed in from the Twitter page, Facebook fans are prominently displayed, a schedule and Google powered map let people know which cities the Refreshers are going to pop up in next and the Winners Gallery shows off all those lucky sods with their fancy new free money cards. It’s all ruled over by an explanatory Flash header, and coated in a vibrant blue that only exists between shades of Pepsi and Twitter.
Speaking of those cards, we feel like they’re a bit of a win. Based on the global Refresh campaign posters and candy colour palette, they are a bit more recognisable and fun than straight up cash in your hand while still being just as usable.
Stamped with the new Pepsi globe logo, we’ve also slapped some helpful thematic suggestions for spending the well won dollars. Things like style, scene, and so on – after all, if you win a prize you shouldn’t be using it to pay your bills (unless you really need to, then it’s ok). As a general rule though, prizes are fun, should be used for fun, should be spent on your self, and we wanted to encourage that.
We wanted the prize cards to be like the campaign, simple, effective, fun and it feels like we nailed it.
No, it’s not modest or polite to rave on about oneself, but this is a pretty exciting project for us, and the response so far has been amazing, so we thought we’d throw out a few more details and see what you all think.
Check out the campaign, hit us up in the comments and let us know.
I have to say that when the first trailer of Avatar appeared I was fascinated by it and even though I haven’t seen the movie, everyone I talk to is telling me how awesome it is so I can’t wait to finally find the time and see it.
What I find interesting is the whole 3D thing about it. There are hardly any movies out there that show it without 3D and a few people that have seen it in 3D have told me that they are going back to see it again without the glasses. Especially the fast moving scenes just blur out and you can hardly see anything. Did you experience the same?
Also the movie made over USD 1 Billion within 17 days of its release – that is amazing. I know the movie was estimated to cost USD 237 million with $150 million for promotion, but that still means that within 17 days they made their money back and tripled it.
I thought that we are all aware of the fact that this movie is fiction, but there seem to be people out there that are getting depressed by the fact that the dream of Pandora is being intangible. If you are one of them than check out this forum – you might find help – http://avatar-forums.com/showthread.php?t=43
But if you still don’t have enough and you want to at least make yourself look like a Navi, here is how you can do it digitally in Photoshop
Anyway – I will try and see the movie as soon as possible and add a few more dollars to the enormous amount they already made.
Let me know what you thought of it in the comments.
A subtle but very interesting social media career opportunity appeared on the AdNews newsletter yesterday. In a bid to find the perfect person to run social media at AdNews (or as the ad says “The AdNews Online Ninja”) AdNews has asked for “an original idea that achieves spectacular results” brought to life using digital means along with the plain old CV. There’s not a lot of time to get busy – applications close on Jan 27.
Have you ever looked at an html web page and wanted to get the content of that page in a feed? Or maybe you use a service like the Google Calendar that has feeds but not in a standard format?
I was recently asked internally to find a way to feed that content in as an RSS feed so it could be loaded into a WordPress.com site – out of the box, they don’t support Google Calendar – and I stumbled upon a tutorial for converting that feed into RSS using Feed43.
The tool works by entering the feed you want, and then setting up some regular expressions to pattern match the data you want, and then outputting that into a feed – believe me, it’s easier than it sounds.
The service allows you to take any site the outputs a structured document – an XML feed, html, etc – and make that into a useable feed. It’s ideal for sites where you want to make an RSS feed, but don’t want the overhead of creating an RSS feed on your server – one less page to maintain.
It even works for those pesky non-standard RSS feeds that people seem so fond of creating (still don’t understand why it’s so hard to stick to a simple standard like that given the benefits of doing so).
The only downside I can come up with is if the source document changes, the feed will stop working until you modify it. Oh, and you might want to make some of the feeds private for your own use. You don’t want to start infringing on copyright do you?
It’s a free tool – they say in the FAQs that it will always be free – but registration gives you an opportunity to manage your feeds more, and the paid service gives you more control and faster updates.
Feed43 is well worth checking out, even if you want an RSS feed for one of your pages without the overhead of actually making the feed.
Posted by chasedavid 
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