Innovation feeder

I tend to take in information best with my peepers, I’m not great at listening [although I try very hard] and I really like to see things mapped out rather than a huge truckload of words. Which is why I love a good model, a good graph, schematic display - anything which represents information in a stimulating visual way. So here’s another one. This one comes courtesy of Business Week, spotted by one of Max’s colleagues & posted on his blog Experience The Message in the middle of last year. It’s a stormer for presentations & workshop stimulus so eat up friend.

You can check out Max’s original post here

The original Business Week article can be found here

Playyoo a brand new site based out of England has just launched in beta this week. Billed as a ‘YouTube for mobile games’ by Technorati, the site offers users the chance to create, share & download games & game content for their mobile. It allows users to create their own content, interact with others and even get recommendations based on their user preferences.

This is an interesting space, especially beyond just mobile gaming. Mobile social communities and mobile blogging communities are increasing in numbers. According to the Wireless Federation Research there are currently over 45 million members engaged in ‘mobile social communities’ worldwide (including mobile gamers gamers), a number that is expected to reach 175 million in 2012.

These communities also have the potential to generate big revenue. A new study by Jupiter Research states that revenue from user generated content is projected to increase from $572 million this year to $5.7 billion by 2012, about half of which will be coming from  social networking. Moreover, membership of social networking sites is projected to grow from 14 million this year to about 600 million by 2012. Perhaps mobile content management & social software will be the next killer apps.

So what is “moblogging” exactly? Well, mo-blogging is blogging via a mobile phone, or a PDA via a mobile connection with a real IP - GPRS or 3G. It’s friendly cousin “Spot-blogging” is mobile also, just not via a mobile phone. “Spotblogging” refers to blogging via a PC through WiFi. It’s called SpotBlogging because you need to be tied to a hotspot of some sort, whereas real moblogging can be just about anywhere.

Anyhoo, Playyoo is an interesting site - check it out here

bloggermania is here. in fact, you know it’s here because every tom, dick and barry has a blog, according to technorati there’s a new blog being created every second or was that every half second…and then there’s twittermania. for those of you who haven’t succombed to twitter, it combines IM-ing, social networking & mobile technology. twitter members can send short messages to their twitter network about what they’re doing or where they’re at…exciting isn’t it? now you can keep up with what your mates are doing every second of every  day.

whilst twitter seems a little well..time filling & stalker-ish,  think about it in the wider context of communicating online…the average geekhead has videos on youtube, photos on flickr, a blog on blogger, wordpress or typepad, maybe even a moblog, possibly a twitter network, del.ic.ious tags, they’re digg.ing and probably posting palava at myspace. which begs the question….

if a person exists in the world without a digital footprint, do they really exist and how would we know?

When it comes to talking about uploads and downloads, there is a theory cited in many newspapers and sites called “The 1% rule”.

It’s an emerging rule of thumb that suggests that if you get a group of 100 people online then one will create content, 10 will “interact” with it (commenting or offering improvements) and the other 89 will just view it.

It’s a meme that emerges strongly in statistics from YouTube, each day there are 100 million downloads and 65,000 uploads which translates to
1,538 downloads per one upload.That puts the “creator to consumer” ratio at just 0.5%, but it’s early days yet and mobile blogging is no doubt higher.

Check out the full story here

there’s been a lot of chat about ‘lifestreaming’ of late, so what is it? well in its simplest form it’s an aggregated view of all your life activities online. it’s a collection of all the ways you communicate, connect and cache your life online. 

in it’s simplest form it’s a chronological aggregated view of your life activities both online and offline. it is only limited by the content and sources that you use to define it. most people that create them choose a few sources based on sites that track our activities such as del.icio.us (bookmarking), flickr (photos we take) youtube (videos that we make) etc…then you can either find software to host your own, or find sites that provide a platform for you.

these social network aggregators are a relatively new breed of applications which try to consolidate all our various social networking profiles into one, check it out.

source :: lifestream

abrief example of my lifestream can be found at natuba

I’ve just come across the Z-List which was originally started by Mack Collier from A Viral Garden as a way of changing the world order by challenging two concepts — the A-list of bloggers and the Technorati approach to ranking authority.

Essentially you take the list that you find and you add any other blogs that you read & find interesting. The idea being that it’s a way for blogs with less love links to gain more exposure online. To remain on the list you have to have a decent quality blog but it’s basically a user created helping hand for smaller blogs starting out. It’s always good to see a bunch of users helping eachother out & whilst it does have a feel good sort of community aspect to it, it also pointed me in the direction of a bunch of blogs I hadn’t come across before.

So click & enjoy!  Check it out here :: Z-list

There’s also a wiki if you want more…

Image from Chaosscenario

Few would deny that media play a central role in the livs of today’s children and adolescents. Their homes, indeed their bedrooms, are saturated with media. Many young people carry miniaturized, portable media with them wherever they go. They comprise the primary audience for popular music;
they form important niche audiences for TV, movies, video games, and print media (each of these industries produces extensive content targeted primarily at kids); they typically are among the early adopters of personal computers (indeed, of most new media) and are a primary target of much of the content of the
World Wide Web. that connect to the Internet and do most of what any digital screen will do.
Here’s a great report on Generation M:  media habits in the lives of 8 - 18 year olds

For those of you Second Lifers who are waiting for the next big thing, the first 3D virtual platform from Chinese has just entered public beta testing.

HiPiHi works in a similar way to SL, users can create & customise avatars, own virtual land and share or build pre-fab objects in a similar way to the SL prim system.

If truth be told it looks very similar to SL but we’ll have to wait & see how far it takes the metaverse beyond what’s currently on offer.

The bad news is that whilst the the Beijing based company is looking to cooperate with “global leaders in the Internet and communication industry to establish a set of relevant hardware and software standards for the development of the 3D platform”, they still don’t yet support the mac platform.

Nevertheless this is a market where more than 20 million Chinese game regularly, spending almost US$500m. Although the government in Beijing was reported to be introducing controls to deter people from playing longer than three hours, the measures were designed to combat addiction to MMORPG (massive multiplayer online role playing games) such as World of Warcraft and Lineage II.

Given that metaverses are time intensive games and in fact, depend very much on the amount of time spent in-world (especially for those residents operating genuinely viable virtual businesses), it will be interesting to see how HiPiHi tackles the big men up top.

One to watch. Check it out :: HiPiHi

The latest addition to shopping & trading online is Swaptree, a site which lets users trade books, videos, music and games peer to peer.

You simply log on and create a list of things you’re looking to trade and a list of items you’d like to trade for. Swaptree reviews your lists and sets up the trades for you, the idea being that you’re willing to trade anything on your ‘trade’ list for anything on your ‘want’ list.

It doesn’t cost you anything to trade so it looks like their business model depends on advertiser revenue rather than any user generated revenue.

They’re in the midst of beta testing and are set to launch 4th July to the public.

Check it out :: swaptree