Check out Trapster. According to the site..
"When you see a (speed) trap, report it by pressing a button on your phone, or calling a toll free number. Other user’s phones will alert them as they approach the trap. Trapster™ learns the credibility of traps based on how many users agree. It also learns the credibility of each user, over time."
If it works, cool. But I’d love to see the biz plan, who funded it and what their valuation was.
One of my favorite things to watch is when businesses choose to ignore a technology or shift in human behavior, and honestly believe that if they ignore it well enough, it will simply go away.
We saw this in the music industry, where executives refused to believe that anyone would rather listen to thousands of songs on a device the size of a credit card rather than using a clunky cd player and devoting an entire wall for storing that same music.
The newspapers were no better, refusing to consider that carrying a dirty glob of paper with old news was less appealing than simply logging on to a computer and getting the freshest info.
This makes a story Garrett found even more humorous. The Chicago Sun Times has some sports columnists who occasionally draw the ire of their readers. Jay Mariotti is one such columnist. Apparently, people were responding to his articles in a negative way, so the Sun Times made the decision to stop allowing readers to comment on his columns. You can almost hear the conversation, "Well if we turn off the technology that allows readers to write negative things about Jay, then no one can write anything negative, and we won’t have to worry about it anymore. Problem solved!"
Except of course, that it’s 2008 and the world doesn’t work like that anymore. Maybe in 1970 that was a good idea. But nature abhors a vacuum, so if people want to write negative things about Jay Mariotti, and the Sun Times won’t let it happen on their site, the people will find a new home for their vents.
And they have, thanks to crosstown rival, the Chicago Tribune, who have geniusly embraced Social Media by developing a forum where readers can post comments about Jay Mariotti. And for that matter, other Sun Times writers.
And guess what, two giant ads on the page.
So, you have one paper pretending that taking away the voice of the people would be helpful. And you have a other that is profiting on the idea of letting people have their say. By foolishly thinking you can control the voice of the people, you lose all control of the situation, because now you can’t even moderate out the particularly distasteful ones. And your competitor gets the ad money.
Lesson to be learned here: No one has 100% approval rating. The only way to have any control of the situation is to let the people speak on your turf.
Ok, marketers: Here’s your project.
Now you see what the MLS is up against. It’s the equivalent of a European-wide Basketball League trying to compete against soccer in England.
But here’s the thing – For the first time in the 10 or 15 years the MLS has been around, I am actually aware that this is opening weekend. I actually am somewhat interested in catching a few games. I am going to be in LA and actually looked to see in the Galaxy or Chivas would be in town. Why? Several potential reasons. Let me know if you can think of others.
Since Seattle is getting a team next year, i want to learn about the league.Anyway, the point is that I am fully aware that this sport has HUGE marketing and logistical issues in front of it, but I am slowly coming around. And really, I’m the sweet spot for their marketing. A small % of the country would come watch them play in a high school stadium. And you have a huge percentage of the country that wouldn’t watch if they served free beer and pizza all game long. But people like me, who spend too much money on the Mariners, who irrationally go to a bar to watch a college basketball game, and don’t think it’s weird to take a charcoal grill out of a pickup truck when there is a restaurant right across the street, we’re the guys the MLS needs. Sports fans – people who are there for the experience more than the result. And I’m coming around, even though I know the product will not be as good as one I could see on channel 401.
Anyway, MLS starts up this week. Take a peek if you get a chance. And if that doesn’t grab you, start with some EPL and Champions League Games on TV, or even better, at the George and Dragon.
A few months ago I was at Blog World Expo in Las Vegas, and I was amazed at the cult icon status some of the influential bloggers had achieved. It was really quite cool to see these bloggers in person, and to see them interact with their readers.
So now we see the rise of a new web startup based on this phonomenon. You have your tech moguls like Bill Gates and Steve Jobs. You have your giants without household name recognition like Larry Ellison, Sergei Brin and Jerry Yang. And then you have your web celebrities who are really only famous inside the Web 2.0 community. And darnit, these guys deserve press as well.
This is the theory behind Pop17.com a webcast dedicated to the semi-stars of Web land. So if you have your Andy Warhol 15 minutes of tech fame scorecard, you can now add the hosts and writers of this webcast to the list of semi-celebrities who all of us in this alternative world love. Please someone create, "The making of Pop17.com – Behind the Show."
In the very early days of PC Casual games, you had to buy everything you wanted to try. But once the internet hit, and you could try out demo versions of the games for free, the market absolutely exploded.
Well, I think we’ve finally reached that moment in Mobile Games, thanks to our friends at Movaya. Here is their latest release:
The Movaya team is excited to announce the beta release of Movaya TryNBuy: the first off-deck, cross-carrier try-before-you-buy system for mobile game sales in the US.
Movaya TryNBuy is a patent pending licensing system that allows consumers to download games over-the-air to their mobile devices and try games on their handset. Upon purchase, the games are unlocked.
Try-before-you-buy was a major driver in the huge growth of casual games on the desktop and now Movaya is bringing this to the mobile marketplace.
Movaya TryNBuy is configurable on multiple levels including length of play, and number of plays.
Movaya TryNBuy is now available online at www.bustedthumbs.com and will be rolled out to Movaya’s publisher and merchant network over the coming weeks.
To get more information on Movaya TryNBuy, please visit our website.
We’re still nailing down the final date, but the Spring Creek Group will be giving a "Social Media 101" seminar in early March, as part of the curriculum at the School of Visual Concepts in Seattle.
The presentation will have a lot of the same components as we’ve used as a social media agency in Seattle working with our own local and national clients, and will include some real hands-on lessons. It’s likely to be ideally suited for the small business owner or professional who wants to learn what all the fuss is about blogging, Facebook, YouTube, MySpace and other social media tools. We’ll talk about some famous victories and mistakes, some basic do’s and don’ts as well as some "rules of the game." Then we’ll help everyone get launched.
More details to come from both this web site and www.SpringCreekGroup.com.
New product announcement from Movaya today, as they released version 2.0 of Plug N Play, which is a technology that makes it even easier for any online merchant (or even a blog) to sell mobile games from their web site, deliver them directly to the customer’s phone, and directly charge their cell phone bill.
While the mobile game industry is still in its early stages, all signs point to an explosion in revenues of mobile games in the coming years. The new version of Movaya’s product comes after months of research and feedback from the several hundred web sites already implementing the platform.
The entire press release is available in a Social Media form at their blog.
So now that the dust is settling from the BlogWorld / Vegas trip, I’ll sprinkle in a few little bits that I have highlighted here in notes. One curious
company we ran across was the expo’s media sponosor, a magazine called Blogger and Podcasting.
If you recognize the same kind of ironies that roughly 98.6% of the conference attendees noticed, you will chuckle and say to yourself, "Interesting. A print magazine dedicated to an industry whose sole purpose is to put print magazines out of business." Or, you might be less generous and say something far more disparaging or mean. Even the conference panelists on VC funding made special note, commenting on how they would pass on any deal that involved a magazine about blogging.
Is this newsworthy from a "Bubble Watch" standpoint? It certainly shows that there are market inconsistencies. And it probably wouldn’t be too problematic, if it wasn’t coupled with the fact that Exhibitor booths at BlogWorld were peppered with Booth Babes. I think this shocked me more than anything, because I can’t think of a group of people that would be less impressed, and dare I say possibly intimidated and annoyed, by scantily clad models who have no idea what they are talking about. When BlogWorld starts taking on a Comdex feel, something seems off-base.
For months, maybe years, it’s been increasingly difficult to determine the blurry line between "professional" and "amateur" when it comes to news reporting or developing entertaining videos. Now that line seems to be simple enough – If you are developing content, you are an amateur, and if you are a professional, you are on strike.
What a perfect storm for the aspiring amateur writer who never had the stomach to quit their job, move to LA, and battle for seats on ‘Joey" or "The Danny Bonaduce Show."
With the writers on strike, and thousands of cable channels still running 24 hours a day, content will be in demand. Now if I was running programming for a network, I’d probably look two places – International and the Internet.
With only so many countries that speak English, the International channel dries up pretty quickly. So the next stop is YouTube and the Blogosphere. How many ways are there to turn some sort of blog or YouTube channel into a hybrid Internet / TV program? And if a kid is developing content for kicks and giggles, how much do they really need to pay him?
It’s a huge open window for aspiring writers. During the last threat of a writer’s strike, the "reality show" was hatched by networks as a defense mechanism, and that genre ended up dominating TV for nearly a decade. What genre will this strike launch?
So I have to admit being very intrigued by a company called Ripple TV. You may have seen Ripple at a neighborhood Tully’s. The concept is pretty straightforward – a typical High Def TV, displaying canned news and sports information from CBS and ESPN. But the catch is, the screens are designed to run locally targeted ads that small business can create and upload themselves.
Or to put it another way, the two major pains about advertising are the creative costs and the inability to target effectively. Ripple TV solves both these problems. I get to choose which Tully’s my ad runs, and they provide me the tools to create the ad on the fly and upload it.
"Ripple has partnered with many of the World’s leading retail brands to provide a powerful in-store digital media experience that keeps their customers engaged, entertained and informed. Ripple’s user experience is customized specifically for each distribution partner, providing a truly custom experience that perfectly supports the brand, demographic, geographic and user experience requirements of each partner. Ripple keeps your customers engaged with the very latest news, financial information, sports, weather, traffic, local information and entertainment programming from the World’s leading content brands."
So, the only initial limitation, which I’m sure will be solved soon, is that they have relatively few major partners (Tully’s), and so the audience is not very diverse. But, that’s hardly a criticism. Instead, I applaud Ripple for landing such a great anchor partner. That really is quite a coup.
I don’t this affects agencies at all, because if anything the Ripple system grows the advertising pie, catering to small business owners that agencies didn’t really care about anyway. And the small business owner only needs a rudimentary sense of style and analytical skills to run a test ad for $75 in a neighborhood, so the cost to get started is minimal.
Fascinating concept, and I hope it does well.