When I came back from Singapore I had the pleasure of finally flying an Airbus A380 - the largest commercial airliner in the world.

I was deeply impressed with the aircraft. It flew gracefully. It was incredibly quiet. The cabin was amazing and spacious.

All these things withstanding, probably because I’m a massive nerd, I was most impressed with the in-flight entertainment system.

I have taken a series of (bad) photos of the system below. Some highlights include:

• A USB port to allow you insert a thumb drive. Most spreadsheet, presentation, or word-processing documents can be opened on the screen and modified using a full QWERTY keypad on the back of the system controller!
• An ethernet port to allow for limited Internet access (when it’s available).
• A video input jack to allow you to play video on the screen from a third party device like an iPod, iPhone, portable DVD player, or video camera.
• Language tutorials. I believe there were 19 languages available. Not a bad thing to learn on your way to Asia!
• Loads of a games with a controller that reminds me of a Nintendo NES controller. They’re some 3d games in there, a bit laggy, but not a bad way to pass the time.

Ultimately both services start to decentralize social networks by virtue of data portability. Basically you can start having a single login and friend’s list that use them across a myriad of sites that integrate their tech.

We started to tinker with Google Friend connect on this site, but held back as we didn’t want to have two commenting systems.  I think it will be better suited to community sites that aren’t blogs.

Google’s system appears to be easier to implement for a typical site user, but Facebook’s has launched with some very interesting uses of their technology. My particular favorite is Loopt. Loopt is one of those mobile social networks that allow you to see where your friends are at in proximity to you. I didn’t dive deep into the service, because I didn’t want to go through the process of adding a whole new series of friends. I can now leverage my Facebook friend’s list to connect through Loopt.

Evan Tana, the Director of Product Management & Marketing of Loopt, commented “Working with Facebook Connect widens the circle of friends Loopt users can interact with, combining the power of Loopt’s social-mapping service with an established network of Facebook friends.” “Loopt users will be able to receive an alert whenever Facebook friends are nearby, discover restaurants and bars recommended by their Facebook friends, and integrate their location into their Facebook feed,” he added.

I strongly suggest you do deeper research on both platforms. There is an opportunity for innovation and success here. I guarantee you it’s what I’ll be doing.

The most popular matrix code is a QR Code, created by Japanese corporation Denso-Wave in 1994. The “QR” is derived from “Quick Response”, as the creator intended the code to allow its contents to be decoded at high speed. QR Codes are common in Japan, where they are currently the most popular type of two dimensional codes.

QR Codes are used in a broad context, including both commercial tracking applications and convenience-oriented applications aimed at mobile phone users (known as mobile tagging). QR Codes storing addresses and URLs may appear in magazines, on signs, buses, business cards or just about any object that users might need information about. Users with a camera phone equipped with the correct reader software can scan the image of the QR Code causing the phone’s browser to launch and redirect to the programmed URL. This act of linking from physical world objects is known as a hardlink or physical world hyperlinks. Users can also generate and print their own QR Code for others to scan and use by visiting one of several free QR Code generating sites.

I always thought that every Nike ID shoe should come with a Matrix Code for anyone to be able to scan it and launch the exact configuration to recreate it.

The latest addition to data mobility is the Audio Barcode: data embedded in sound waves that’s picked up by target devices with a microphone — mobile phones, for example –, analyzed by special software, and then extracted.

Data to be transmitted is superimposed (embedded) by Acoustic OFDM, the technology behind Audio Barcode, in such a way that it is not detected by listeners. With a transmission rate greater than 1kbps, a URL or simple text transmission takes a mere one to two seconds.

This technology has many uses… from being able to append artist urls to every song, dynamically embed DRM information, or even combine this with audio/visual such as movies to allow sending out product information on specific scenes without having to display or affect the video at all… Just think how much information can be embedded everywhere with all these techniques… I already use 2d Barcode applications on my iPhone and I can’t wait to install an Audio Bar reader.

For starters ARM devices will be able to view the same Flash sites that traditional Internet users do as opposed to the Flash Mobile only sites they see now. This is somewhat like what the iPhone browser did for regular website browsing.

Smart marketers will still offer experiences that are designed for a mobile experience (i.e. smaller screens, potentially slower bandwidth) but now they won’t be limited in terms of the complexity or media richness. Flash 10 will allow rich mobile experiences that will easily stream video (HD and regular) and integrate with systems like Flash Media Server 2 for collaborative multi-user experiences.

Kevin Lynch from Adobe shows a demo on a G1 after the jump. Now I just want to see it on a iPhone!

The day started with a keynote from Jonathan Klein, President of CNN/US. John said that CNN embraces innovation, new technologies, new techniques, new trends, and urges all their employees to try new ideas. They have been using user generated content to get faster stories, they have a political blog aggregator that became the largest in the country, they have a program where an expert follows twitter feeds and answers questions and concerns online, in real time, they have a talk show where the host podcasts during commercials, linking the tv air experience with online / web experience. Another twitter fact is that CNN took 4 minutes to cover a recent earthquake in LA, whereas someone tweet it in 30 seconds. They also started providing more data for the next gen during the elections, especially seen during the debates; under the assumption that the younger gen can multitask and consume multiple feeds of information concurrently, they added the analysts’ opinions and scores during debates on side panels, as well as real time undecided voters conversions. Another link between air and web is John King’s touch screen; after the success of the John playing with the screen, they uploaded an interactive version to their site allowing anyone to play with it, just like on tv.

Overall, really interesting to see how traditional channels such as CNN is realizing and acknowledging the need to move towards digital channels, add social elements, and leverage user generated content.

Next, Geoff Ramsey, CEO for eMarketer, took over for 15 minutes to give us his seven strategies for surviving the downturn. In summary, the entire strategy is move media dollars from traditional to digital; it’s cheaper, more measurable, and provides better returns. 70% of marketers said they will cut budget for traditional ads, 30% said they already did … at the same time digital ad spend grew 17% in 2008, and it’s expected to continue to grow with double digits in 2009 … even if it only grows 9 or 10%, it’s better than negative numbers such as traditional media spend.

There were a few boring panels that I won’t mention, so I started talking to exhibitors and companies I found interesting. I will post more details later, but great new products by VeriSign, Akamai, Izea, and IdeaLaunch.

I tried to watch the TV 3.0 panel, but I really couldn’t stand it. What is up with the 3.0 buzzwords? Does anyone even know what 3.0 represents? I bet the panelists can’t even answer what would be the difference between TV 2.0 and 3.0 …. if we can even say 3.0 is here. For our readers, TV 2.0 includes P2PTV, HDTV, IPTV, Streaming Video, and mobile TV.

So what is TV 3.0?

“The first I heard of it (TV 3.0) was when I was invited to this panel”, responded Michael Steib, the director of TV Ads at Google (I appreciate his acknowledgement of the made-up buzz word). In TV 3.0 there is a proliferation of channels, people are watching TV in different places (online, DVR, etc) and at different times. Connecting advertisers and audiences as people start to watch TV in new and different times and places.

Here is the billion dollar question: will TV networks be able to make up the ad revenue lost from the shift away from traditional TV? People will watch 400 billion hours on their TV and watch 10 million hours of online video – online is still a small segment. For networks to stay afloat, they need to either increase the # of ads 4x versus what they are showing now, or increase the effectiveness. The solution? Technology: it can be used in 2 ways to help solve this problem. The first is better targeting, and the second is by using technologies to improve the effectiveness of the interaction or ad that is served (ie. rich media).

Stay tuned for Ad:Tech NY 2008 - Day 2.

OpenSocial didn’t take off nearly as fast as I thought it would. I had always assumed that when MySpace enabled it that adoption would pick-up rapidly. LinkedIn has now finally enabled it and I believe future tech like Google Friend Connect (which also uses OpenSocial) will really push this application platform over the top.

I installed two applications immediately. An application to quickly and easily port this blog to my profile as well an application that scans twitter with references to my company. The two apps are called Wordpress and Company Buzz respectively.

The installation was easy in terms of the number of clicks, but there were some bugs. LinkedIn didn’t acknowledge that the application was complete and the apps were only working intermittently when I viewed my profile. On the basis that I got the email they were launching this at 12.21 AM and blogged about it at 1.35 AM I’m going to cut them some slack. Hopefully it will work a bit better by the time you check it out.

If you haven’t got a LinkedIn profile yet your missing out. Social networking in the business space is equally as interesting as Facebook or MySpace. It’s just harder to pick up a date on LinkedIn…

Social media has played a massive role in recent US politics and its influence will continue to increase over time. Although this trend permeates social networking, blogger outreach programs, and even more traditional banner ads across both of these mediums, the use of Twitter is particularly fascinating. For example, the number one position on Twitterholic.com, which tracks the most popular Twitter profiles, has belonged to Barack Obama for the past month and half.

In terms of demographic, social media is no longer something that is skewed towards the younger demographic who have traditionally had lower voter turn-outs. It now extends to the many layers of the voting demographic and even has an influence on mainstream media, which proves that it is targeting people outside of social media’s traditional reach. Indeed, social media has the capability of seeding public sentiment in real time into web properties that people visit on a daily basis, and these are typically sites that people visit more often than news sites. Personally, I believe there will be a growing and consistent trend between successful politicians and those that focus on strong internet and social media strategies.

The UK’s use of social media sites runs in parallel to the US so unique cultural differences will rarely make a difference. Indeed, it would be foolish of UK politicians not to adopt similar strategies or what’s more, create ambitious strategies that could set the trend for future US campaigns.

Ah, a fresh new Candystand.com smell...

It was announced yesterday that CandyStand.com, Wrigley’s premier gaming site, would be sold to a new third party. Candystand.com has long been hailed as a trend setter in branded entertainment sites boasting well over 5M unique visitors per month with hundred of high quality Flash games.

The new entity, Funktank, is a sister company to famed boutique digital shop WDDG who has been producing great award winning work in the digital space longer then most of us have been thinking about it.  Although the purchase of Candystand is interesting and apparently a sensible business move it raises a bigger question for boutique digital shops that hang in that gray area that is appealing to companies looking to buy them. They’re not big enough to get the multiples they want and so the deals just don’t make sense, but if you’re producing high quality work, and have been giving away your great ideas for years, why not just focus your talent inward and take over a successful web property?

I think this was a bold and brave move for James Baker (CEO of both companies) and the success of this project might very well change the “exit plan” of many small digital shops around the world.

Check it out:
http://www.joshspear.com/item/japanese-cat-cafes/

Technorati Profile

Everyone talk’s about using “key influencers”. We hear these terms used in pitches for new campaigns all the time.

 It’s easy to think of businesses, celebrities, or high profile websites as “key influencers” or places “key influencers” frequent respectively, but today’s new media key influencers are far more powerful then any of their predecessors.

They have a platform – a large platform. They can create content hourly or daily if they like. They’re not like writers who created editorial content for magazines – they’re not beholden to anyone. They blog, vlog, twitter, or live broadcast their thoughts in the form of random thoughts, daily news, or even skits.

 More importantly, due to the strength of their personalities and frequently lack of corporate association, these new media key influencers are able to build long-term trusting relationships with consumers.

We need to leverage these key influencers with product placement or subtle endorsements. Notice I said subtle. These are inexpensive ways to get your brand out there. 

SMOSH is a great example. As of April 2008, they have over 337,000 subscribers on YouTube, making them the most subscribed “producers” on YouTube. Most of their videos have over 2 to 3 million views. Smosh’s most famous video, a tribue to the Pokemon Theme had more then 24,000,000 views on YouTube.

The reality is very few media buying companies are recommending these solutions to their clients. I haven’t decided if I think it’s because it’s their not social media friendly or if they’re just lazy and don’t want to look out of their typical comfort zone. Whatever the reason - there’s an opportunity for marketers here.