Leap Motion gesture based interface

Ever since it was made popular by films like Minority Report (which I'm extremely proud to mention that Possible Worldwide's Chief Interaction Officer, Dale Herigstad was behind some of the UI concepts used in the film), using gesture to manipulate devices have been somewhat of a holy grail from a user experience standpoint.

Had the chance to work with Dale in the past, its almost next to impossible try to keep up with his ideas in UI with current available technology. He is always pushing technical dudes like me to the limit of what is feasible.

This gadget however looks really promising. Gesture based interaction with your computer to replace your keyboard and mouse. The ipod sized device allows you to control a computer as an I/O device with natural hand and fingers movements. 

The intro video on the site looks really good.

Only catch? Its not on sale yet. Expect delivery of the device in Dec 2012/Jan 2013.

Read more here.
http://www.leapmotion.com/

Image credits: Screen cap of leap motion video on http://www.leapmotion.com/

Death of SEO as its commonly defined.

SEO has always been a big part if what we deliver. For a long time it has not been sold as a separate add-on to any web projects that we deliver. It is a basic hygiene factor. From the creative design, to the frontend development, to the copy and file/folder naming. 

Ongoing SEO has always been a relatively dodgy business. After you have deliver the initial SEO 'friendly' site. There is the external SEO activities to raise your search engine rankings, much of which are geared towards beating the SEO rules that the major search engines employ.

This recent Forbes article now highlights how that 'dodgy' part of SEO could now be changing. With the recent "Penguin release", Google is changing the rules. More emphasis will be placed on backlinks from social media, in terms of likes, comments, views, tweets and shares.

This is re-emphasising what we at PWW have been trying to tell our clients for a long time. Content is king. Relevant, timely and targeted content that your readers, users and customers will appreciate and share; will do more for your SEO than anything else.

Read more here.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/kenkrogue/2012/07/20/the-death-of-seo-the-rise-of-social-pr-and-real-content/

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Choosing the Right Social Marketing Platform

Social Marketing. How do one make sense of this new frontier? 

Everything starts by planning and having a strategy. Having a Facebook and Twitter page is not a social marketing strategy. Social marketing strategy should drive overall direction and approach to how social marketing fits into the greater marketing strategy. How does social fits into your CRM, websites, search etc. activities? Especially if we have more than one type of social media platforms. How do we ensure consistent management of these platform? How do we efficiently manage social marketing campaigns, have central view of results, conversations, insights from various social media platforms? How integrated are your campaigns and web properties? Are they able to meet your users/customer's needs and expectation?

There are many tools and players out there that tries to make sense of these problems. Here are some that we have worked with to manage various social channels, from Buddy Media, Wildfire, Tiger Pistol, Hootsuite, to Adobe. The list is endless with new players entering the ring. Most are focused on selective aspect of social marketing and none are emerging as the clear overall leader in this space. Finding a platform that works with China based social platforms is a struggle as well but many vendors have highlighted that they are looking into this deficiency.  

Social listening is also an important part of your social marketing arsenal. Being able to gather and listen in to what your customers are saying about you on social media gives you good insights and allows you to get a pulse on what's happening around your brand, product and offerings. 

Your users/customers expect your web properties to be integrated and social. They want your web properties to be an extension of their social experience;  to know what their friends like on your site, be able to easily share content etc. With the recent Google "Penguin release" (see my opinion here), being able to easily like, share and comment your content would have SEO benefits which you should not ignore. 

Read more here.

http://mashable.com/2012/07/13/marketing-platforms/

Innovative use of shadows to create a time sensitive QR code

We have all seen QR code implementations before. But one based on time of the day and shadows?

This innovative use of QR marketing is developed and use in Seoul for a  retailer. Consumers are rewarded discounts at quieter times of the day, in this case between noon and 1pm.

http://www.springwise.com/retail/seoul-retailer-3d-qr-codes-sun-deliver-discounts-quiet-times/

Where IT is going? Impacts on digital marketing.

CNET.com posted an interesting article recently on Where IT is going in the coming future. They reckon that the new IT buzz will be around Cloud, Mobile and Data.

I kinda agree to the 3 main points. Being seeing it moving towards that in the projects that we are increasingly handling. So what's the impact on digital marketing?

Here’s my take on the 3 main points in relation to Digital Marketing

Mobile

• Mobile devices would be more prevalent in both consumer and businesses.
• Everything we develop will have to consider mobile. Be it, websites, CRM campaigns (mobile optimised emails etc), touch friendly interfaces, display ads etc.
• Mobile Apps will be a big thing. Thin apps that will sit in the phone, use of cloud computing to make complicated processing.
• Mobile devices will capture a magnitude of data. (photos, videos, social media, web browsing, use of apps etc). These data would be stored on the cloud.
• Mobile devices are ubiquitous, they are always on and always by your side. Real time marketing based on proximity, location, time of day etc.
• Well-connected devices. Sharing of information and data between devices.

Cloud

• Due to limited processing power of mobile devices, complicated processing would be done on the cloud to improve performance.
• Moving away from actual physical server hosting. More and more, we are using cloud hosting to allow for flexibility and scalability to adapt to spikes in load due to marketing campaigns.
• Websites and applications are becoming more global and regional in reach. Depending on content delivery networks (CDN) like Akamai and AWS cloudfront to serve content.
• Able to quickly scale up for data storage.

Data

• Analytics would be a big thing for marketing. How to make sense of different sources of data and make recommendations for marketing?
• Change in the way data is stored or structured. E.g. NoSQL, Hadoop.
• Change in the way marketers understand data, increased use of data dashboarding tools.
• Use of cloud to store data that can quickly scale up when required. 

Read more here.

http://news.cnet.com/8301-13556_3-57419230-61/where-it-is-going-cloud-mobile-and-data/