Move over “Beatles: Rock Band.” Step aside “Max Payne 3.” Look out “Resident Evil 5.” Twitter and Facebook are coming to Xbox. That’s right, on June 1, the people of Xbox 360 announced they are integrating these leading social networks to Xbox Live, the company’s online multiplayer gaming and digital media delivery service.

When pitted against the likes of a motion controlled system, Twitter and Facebook are fighting an uphill battle for buzz. In fact, from what I can see the news that these social networking giants are coming to Xbox has been met with virtual silence. But if you take a few minutes to glance over the official company statements concerning these integrations you will quickly discover why this move is one of pure genius. In fact, I would go so far as to say that Microsoft might have just have just announced what could be the real deathblow to the competition.

Says Microsoft: “By bringing Twitter, Facebook and Last.fm to Xbox 360, we’re not only extending the walls of your living room beyond your home to your friends all over the world, we’re creating the definitive social network, uniting more than 300 million people to share thoughts on music, play games and tweet.”

By incorporating these social-networking tools into their gaming device, Microsoft is uniting a passionate community that comprises hundreds of millions of people and, in large part, revolves around its brand. Just think about all the possibilities this creates.

First Microsoft’s Xbox team will be able to more efficiently interact with their audience, alerting them to new games and features, unveiling unknown secrets and hints and rolling out the red carpet to upcoming gaming events, all directly to the gamer’s couch. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg.

More interesting is the ability for Xbox gamers to easily and effectively communicate with friends (both gamers and non-gamers), advocating both the Xbox gaming platform and new games via Facebook mini-feeds and Twitter. The new Xbox additions will allow gamers to easily comment on games they’re actively playing and share in-game screen shots with ease.

Now thousands of new messages and game images will enter these services daily and in doing so will forever change the way games are marketed. But how will it impact the in-game advertising market when the likelihood of in-game ads getting more and more media exposure thanks to these shared screenshots? The fact is these ads are going to become a hotter weapon.

Even the most dedicated gamers have interests and passions outside of the games and Microsoft has made strides towards establishing the Xbox as the definitive media hub of your home. That’s where services such as Last.fm come into play. Now gamers can turn their Xbox into a music center that has access to millions of songs that can be streamed through their device, which undoubtedly is connected the best speakers in the house. Another soon-to-be-released feature includes the ability to watch movies as a group via Xbox Live and communicate via microphone and your avatars. Combine this with the recent addition of the Netflix moving streaming service and you have one very powerful device that is finally leveraging the power of a social, tech-savvy community.

Frankly, I’m sick of talking about social media. I’ve had a long-standing view that eventually everything online would have social functionality and that it would become a commodity function of the web. For me, this is a clear indication of how much I may have underestimated how far this could go. As more and more electronic devices become internet enabled and the concept of sharing our lives via the social web becomes more commonplace, how many other devices in the near future will take on similar functionality to what Xbox is pioneering? For example, adding this functionality to a DVR could change the broadcast or movie industry profoundly as it would allow them to use social media far more effectively as a marketing channel.

I was hoping that I wouldn’t be talking about social media in the next couple of years, but as this evolves from device to device maybe this is not the end but just the beginning. Stay tuned.

The Autonomy Interwoven Social Media Analysis solution is a combination of the Autonomy Interwoven web content management system and Autonomy IDOL (Intelligent Data Operating Layer). It is designed to provide organizations with the ability to understand and leverage the conversations happening in social networks to make some money.

The technology uses clustering, pattern matching techniques and probabilistic modeling to understand sentiment, and can present marketers with a richer and more contextual set of data than traditional keyword spotting tools may be able to, according to Autonomy.

Anthony Bettencourt, chief executive at Autonomy Interwoven, argued that marketers have not been able to keep pace with the rapid changes taking place in consumer behavior.

“Social networks, which are by nature dynamic and unstructured forms of information, do not fit neatly into traditional, database-driven analytics systems,” he said.

“Interwoven’s meaning-based marketing approach, which can derive meaning from human-friendly information, and empowers marketers to automatically act on those insights, will transform how organizations engage with customers in the years to come.”

Once marketers have determined the trends on which they can act, they can use Interwoven’s TeamSite and LiveSite web content management products to deliver dynamic, targeted and optimized content to cash in on these trends, the firm said.

The company’s Optimost tool can then be used to run multi-variable testing on any changes to the site, according to Autonomy.

If you hadn’t heard: I lost my laptop and even more tragically my flight log book (seen here) in the back of a London cab about two weeks ago. I’ve only now caught up with the back log and started to re-assemble my life and you will start hearing from me again on a weekly basis.

I stumbled across a couple of brilliant interactive art pieces over the last couple of weeks (via some smart friends of mine – Damion Parsons and Colleen DeCourcy). The first one is not very digital at all – it’s the ultimate “Human Interface” titled Hi. Effectively it’s a guy in a box that looks like a Microsoft surface performing all the computer functions himself. Entertaining and awesome – it’s a must watch and share video.

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From Vimeo:

Concept, design and high-tech by multitouch-barcelona.com
Music: wake up, wake up by lullatone.com
Filmed at hangar.org
hi-res pics at flickr.com/photos/multitouchbarcelona

The interactive installation “I Want You To Want Me”, by Jonathan Harris and Sep Kamvar, commissioned by the Museum of Modern Art, for their “Design and the Elastic Mind” exhibition.

I Want You To Want Me explores the search for love and self in the world of online dating. It chronicles the world’s long-term relationship with romance, across all ages, genders, and sexualities, using real data collected from Internet dating sites every few hours.

The piece is presented on a 56″ high-resolution touch-screen, hanging vertically on the wall, and was installed at MoMA on February 14, 2008, Valentine’s Day.

Which one do you like better?

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The following is an excerpt from a recent piece, titled “A CMO’s Dual Imperatives – Driving Organizational and Technological Change,” on the Propelling Brands blog.  Click here to read the full piece.

No member of the C-suite has a riskier or more-short-lived term than the chief marketing officer (CMO).  The average tenure of a CMO at the ‘100 most advertised’ US brands is 28.4 months, according to recruiting firm Spencer Stuart in a recent Advertising Age column by John Quelch.  In fact, as a marketer, few things are as much of a sure-fire, eventual career killer as being named CMO.

The challenges faced by the CMO are not unique to this position.  In fact, they speak to many of the fundamental strategic problems underlying marketing organizations and marketing science today and that are linked to a permanent shift in power from brand-company to customer and to a proliferation of communication channels and information sources.

For CMOs to succeed they must sit at the top of a newly-agile marketing organization – balancing constantly-changing priorities, being technologically savvy and delivering closed-loop insights into the impact of marketing programs – but too often, such an organization does not exist.  The imperative for the CMO, thus, is to drive change.

Driving effective change and achieving these goals requires a two-pronged attack – addressing both organizational and technological change.

Organizational change

Part one of this change is holistic and gets into issues of how marketing is organized and operates, how it defines its objectives and how it integrates with sales channels and the rest of the enterprise.

A CMO’s checklist for organizational change should address the following:

•    Customers must be moved to the center, not the periphery; brands must be re-invigorated in terms of aligning the company with its customers’ needs:  CMOs must be the voice inside the company that challenges the tradition of product-centric, supply-chain systems and that re-orients the company’s processes and systems around the customer.  CMOs also must re-position and re-invigorate their brands with a sense of customer purpose.

•    Revenue must become part of the marketing mission and the link between marketing and sales; brand must be re-framed as an asset:  CMOs must ensure not only that every marketer in their organization embraces their role in, and understands the risks related to, generating revenue; they must also be compensated to live up to this idea.  Where does brand building fit into this?  CMOs are often charged with being stewards of the corporate brand and/or the total brand portfolio.  But building the brand, per se, will not lead to revenues; instead, it will provide us with a critical asset that we must understand how best to leverage.

•    Best practices must BE practices:  CMOs must not only raise the bar for their organization’s marketing practices and but also make sure that this standard is pervasive.

•    Creative/abstract approaches and an analytical/concrete mindset must be guided to equilibrium:  CMOs must actively cultivate this equilibrium – ensuring their organization is driving fresh, new ideas while maintaining analytical accountability –  through hiring, training and cultural imperatives.

•    Marketing technology and marketing systems must be viewed as a strategic asset, rather than a ‘problem for IT’:  CMOs must be the champion of a technologically-savvy, data-centric marketing culture.

•    Marketing system ‘architecture’ must reinforce marketing sustainability and be designed with a longer-term perspective:  CMOs must focus their companies on investing in and building marketing organizations that do not sacrifice longer-term opportunity for short-term gain and that can scale delivery to customers in a repeatable and value-added way over time.

Technological change

Part two of this change is technology-focused and gets into a critical topic – the need for CMOs to make sure their marketing information systems are up to the task of dynamic, scalable and integrated marketing management.

A CMO’s checklist for driving technological change includes:

•    Breaking ground and leading the charge on enterprises’ build-out of customer-centric information systems:  The CMO must be the chief advocate for not only transforming his/her company into a more customer-centric organization but also for ensuring that enterprise systems mirror this objective, rather than hindering it or sacrificing it to short-term profitability.

•    Focusing the spotlight on strategic vs. tactical marketing technology:  CMOs must question their organizations’ existing marketing systems and push for investments that balance priorities and help achieve what I like to refer to as ‘holistic agility’ – i.e., effective and detail-oriented execution at the periphery that remains constantly guided and bounded by the strategic whole.  CMOs must also make sure their teams to not become bogged down in tactical, communication-channel specific technology or data.

•    Investing in an integrated marketing management platform:  CMOs must work to understand and champion investments in these systems.  Integrated marketing management platforms are critical to the success of their marketing organizations in responding to a dynamic customer environment; they are a key step toward becoming more customer-centric; and they are the critical link to ensuring real-time accountability of marketing.  Plus, “[i]t’s insurance for the CMO,” commented John Rotheray, a mobile software entrepreneur.  I might take it a step further:  An integrated marketing management framework is the strategic infrastructure a CMO requires to succeed.

•    Making sure business intelligence and predictive analytics are pervasive throughout marketing systems:  CMOs must be aware of and push for business intelligence and predictive analytics being a critical element of their marketing technology infrastructure.

•    Pushing for a balanced picture of both online and offline marketing activities:  CMOs must push for marketing technology infrastructure that balances the total picture and integrates both online and offline pictures of customer-brand interaction.

•    Integrating with other enterprise systems:  CMOs must lead the charge on this integration and remind their peers that the type of real-time insight they demand into marketing activities is not possible without total integration.

It is only by addressing the need for both organizational and technological change that CMOs can position themselves and their marketing organizations for success in a newly-challenging marketing environment.

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Adam Needles is an entrepreneurial marketing leader, who is passionate about two areas — brand strategy and technology innovation.  And he both researches and writes regularly on the intersection of the two.  You can read his regular posts on his Propelling Brands blog or via his Twitter stream @abneedles.  He is also the former head of marketing for technology-industry analysis firm The 451 Group (and knows what it means to be challenged as a CMO).

And you thought my giant robot prediction was crazy....

Earlier this month I was able to visit CeBIT, the world’s largest technology show case, in Hannover, Germany. The exhibition space is absolutely enormous totally over 5,000,000 square feet. Imagine the biggest convention center building you’ve ever seen then imagine at least 20 buildings of that size and you’ll have an idea of how big CeBIT is.

I was able to meet some brilliant people from around the world, speak on a panel about social media, and be exposed to some great bleeding edge technology. All in all it was a great couple of days (even though I missed my flight on the way back).

Most buildings were focused on one subject that included green technologies, security, enterprise network technology, mobile, GPS, computers, gaming, or my personal favorite “the future parc”. The future parc was focused on innovative new technologies whether they had been productised or not. You could look at technologies at an early stage with the potential that you might see a new opportunity for it’s use.

I’ve highlighted some of my favorite items below that I saw during the conference. Some are really far out and some are fairly simple – I hope you enjoy the quick summary.

AIPTEK – This German company has produced a very small lightweight project that fits into the palm of your hand. It’s got no where near the kind of power you’d need to do a full blow presentation at good quality, but it would be great for projecting movies from an portable device like an iPod or iPhone onto the wall. Another nifty feature includes an oboard memory card so you can just store movies in the device and avoid the third party portable device all together. It’s still early days, but very cool none the less.

Global Emotion – This wasn’t actually a piece of technology, but it stood out to me for two reasons. One, I have full intentions of living in Asia this year and two I just thought it addressed a very interesting issue for westerners trying to do business in China. iWays is offering a course that allows you to learn to understand the body language and facial expressions of the Chinese people in comparision to some western body language that might cause you to mis-understand a business situation. I could see how this could be invaluable in today’s world.

GestureTek – These guys are doing some amazing interactive displays. They’re doing everything from massive table top displays that allow you to drag content around with your finger and close and expand additional content at will to touchless screens that react just based on the movement of your hands. It’s starting to feel really futuristic.

Another cool product they had on display was called “The Cube”. It was a self contained and portable system for doing projected interactive displays that react to gesture control. Imagine for example projecting a bunch of lilly pads onto the floor that when you moved near them with your feet bounced and rippled in reaction to your motion. This is definitely eye catching stuff. I still think they haven’t unleashed some top level creative talent onto it yet, so they’re still a lot of room to do some amazing things.

Fraunhofer Institute – The Fraunhofer Institute booth took the cake for me for most mind blowing innovations (with actual working prototypes). Some of the highlights included:

• Flat panel TVs that displayed near perfect 3D imagery without the need for 3D glasses.
• 3D digital dashboards for automobiles that also reacted and tracked your eye movement.
• Real-time facial expression analysis that could identify your gender and mood.
• A digital wardrobe where you could change the color and design on your clothes by just standing in front of  a special mirror.
• A bathroom designed to help manage the elderly (for example) in terms of making sure they’ve been doing their bathroom routine and taking the appropriate medications. It then reports back to any caregivers to alert them of abnormalities.
• An image search that allowed you to dynamically search for “simliar images”. The system was smart enough to identify properties like number of people in the image, consistent colors, a positioning of objects in the frame.

I’ve included some of the photos I did manage to take. I should probably also do a quick shout out to the people that invented the massage chair with matching audio and light stimulation. I couldn’t relax as well as I would have liked while testing their product because I kept thinking about how much I wanted to buy one…

Photos after the jump…

Find below a collection of the best tools to analyze, aggregate, and visualize twitter data. Please add a comment if you’d like us to look at additional tools.

Twitterholic.com

Twitterholic not only shows top 100 lists by number of friends, followers and updates, but it also shows detailed information for a Twitter user account. The page http://twitterholic.com/twitter/USERACCOUNT contains a graph showing the trend for the number of followers for the previous 30 days and a table showing for the last 30 days the number of followers, friends, updates and favorites.

Twist

Twist is a tool that allows you to track trends on Twitter, similarly to what Google Trends does for Google searches. It gathers tweets as they are posted, filters redundant ones and compiles the rest into two-hour intervals. I love how my screen shot above shows American Idol gaining as much buzz as Obama today.

Twitter Spectrum

Plot any two opposing terms and see related things people are talking about on Twitter spread across the spectrum between. Again, apparently Microsoft today is tightly coupled with Google, whereas Apple didn’t surprise with been related to the iPhone and App Store…

TweetVolume

TweetVolume is a nifty website that helps you find specific words or phrases and see how many people on Twitter are talking about them. Just type in a word or phrase you want to search for, and TweetVolume will present you with a bar graph depicting the search term and an estimation of the number of times the term was used. Notice how iPhone seems to be more popular than Apple, MacBook, iPod, and iTouch combined…

Twitt(url)y

Twitt(url)y - aggregates URLs linked in Twitter messages and puts them on the home page based on overall popularity, calculated simply by determining the number of times the URL was in a Twitter message.  Twitturly also tracks the number of Tweets with links that a particular Twitter user has posted. This is a nifty feature that can help you see what a particular Twitter user likes and how ofter their Tweets with links get Retweeted by others.  Twitturly also gives you the full Tweet History of a URL including how many and who Tweeted it, plus the total estimated reach, regardless of how many URL shortening services were used to point to it. 

Retweetist

Retweetist distills links, content and users that are being retweeted the most and ranks them according to freshness and frequency. The app also serves as a good guide to see who is creating the most retweeted messages, making it easier to find out which Twitter users are actually worth following

Tweetmeme

Tweetmeme – Tweetmeme looks for new content and tracks who else is talking about it. It ranks the content based upon who and how much a particular item is being discussed. As anyone knows, the number of URLs which spread virally through Twitter each day must run into the millions, so tracking where that viral trail starts and gains momentum is going to be fascinating. It also categorizes the content into blogs / videos / images and audio.

TweetLists

TweetLists – This service simply shows the most popular links over the last 24 hours found on the public timeline at Twitter.com. There are tabs for most popular Tweets of the day and week. There are also lists of the top Twitterati and domains being Tweeted.  A search feature makes it easy to locate specifics.

Additional Twitter Tools and filtering services include (based on Lee Odden’s list):

• Twistori – A sort of emotional Tweet agregator: Love, Hate, Think, Believe, Wish. By Amy Hoy and Thomas Fuchs

• retweetradar – A tag cloud of Tweeted topics is what stands out with this service, showing current tags, today and yesterday for time intervals. Clicking on the tagged keywords initiates a search on Twitter itself.  The “What’s Happening Right Now” section updates in real time.  The top Retweeted links and Twitter users are also displayed along with a trend archive. By Minnesota’s own Ben Hedrington

• Twitturls – Shows popular articles, pictures and videos linked to via Twitter in the past 2 hours, today and also filters out any Tweets that don’t use Twitter vernacular. By Justin Palmer

• Twitlinks – Aggregates the latest links from the worlds top tech twitter users in a news story format.

• Retailer Twitter Aggregator – As the name implies, this is a retailer Twitter aggregator showing an ”at a glance” view of  how brick and mortar retailers are using Twitter to connect with their customers including sales information advice. By Tom Sullivan
• TwitterSphere – a current melange of the most talked about stories from social messaging utility twitter.com

I’ve mentioned over the last year that I’m a fan of Kluster. Kluster is a group decision-making tool with its roots firmly set in social networking. It allows you to set up private or public groups focused around generating ideas in a democratic and collaborative environment enabled through technology.

Read the full article at AdAge.com

The ongoing debate over Flash on the iPhone appears to be over after Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen announced last week at the World Economic Forum that Adobe and Apple are working together in an effort to bring Flash to the iPhone.

While Narayen didn’t answer the question of whether Apple had strengthened its commitment to putting Flash on the iPhone he did point out that the ball was now in Adobe’s court. “We have the developer kit and the onus is now on us,” he said.

During the Bloomberg interview, Narayen said that Adobe plans to have over a million devices shipped by the end of the year that have Flash and he’s not just talking iPhone; the company is working on the Android platform, the Windows mobile and the Symbian platform.

Watch the five minute interview below.

It works by providing the augmented reality software with some form of tracking marker that it knows to overlay 3 dimensional graphics over. The results are astounding – it truly allows consumers to feel as though you have brought a little piece of your imaginary world into their reality.

Right now marketers and technology innovators have done some very interesting examples of augmented reality using symbols printed locally and are then placed in front of your home web camera. Although I think this is fun and definitely buzz worthy I believe the true opportunity is in the not too distant future as more and more mobile phones adopt the technology. Image the potential of being able to re-invent outdoor and print marketing by adding an interactive component to almost any ad by just pointing your mobile device at it.

If you know of any other great examples please forward them to me. I have included a great example of a two player mobile game for Fanta developed by my friends over at the Hyper Factory as well a brilliant Papervision 3D and augmented reality combination.

Visit Fanta.eu to watch a video of the Fanta game in action or actually use it with compatible smart phones.

Otherwise check out the video after the jump.

Papervision – Augmented Reality (extended) from Boffswana on Vimeo.

Apple Introduces Revolutionary New Laptop With No Keyboard