ouroboros

Technology - what does it really mean?

What is technology?

Dictionary.com: "Technology is the sum of the ways in which social groups provide themselves with the material objects of their civilization."

Wikipedia: "Technology is a broad concept that deals with a species' usage and knowledge of tools and crafts, and how it affects a species' ability to control and adapt to its environment."

Merriam-Webster, via Wikipedia, "[Technology] is mostly used in three different contexts: when referring to a tool (or machine); a technique; the cultural force; or a combination of the three."

Technology is not 'other' - it is us.  Check it.

Immersive Worlds (Hold onto your hats)

I had the opportunity to catch up with Ken Brady, gadfly and immersive world guru-type fella.  Now for a lot of  folks, conversations about immersive worlds goes 'Second Life' fast.  Between them, Hipihi, and metabirds, you cover a lot of ground.  And miss a lot.

Oh - and you lose everyone.  I mean c'mon.  Walk into a marketing department and say 'Second Life' and you may as well be selling Dutch tulips.  Or plague bandages.  Or dead, really stinky animals.  Or barf.

So for those of you who class immersive worlds somewhere near "Klingons vs. Furries Bowling", Ken had some interesting insights.  And there's even a chance to win a prize somewhere in this entry.  Like at the end.

Back to Ken.

I asked him to share four important things everyone should know, here's the knowledge bombs dropped:

1. Everything you learn now will change in two weeks.  Ken knew thirty new platforms in various stages of development, each with a range of strengths and weaknesses.  The platfrom-specific knowledge from an experience in any would, he suggested, have the shelf life of sushi.

2. Fast retreat = Community Backlash. In other words, don't treat immersive world brand experiences like campaigns with a hard start and finish.  The social contract of entering an immersive world requires a real community engagement (read: committment) to earn the respect of the in-world inhabitants.  Hence the creation of the SLLA - originally formulated to resist marketing incursions (including "shooting" people entering SL American Apparel stores, though of late they've taken a political stance seeking in-world political rights...)

3. Own the IP and/or 3d models built to support your in-world efforts - otherwise you'll need to rebuild them the next time you need them.  Also, the models may (and this is a big 'may') be cross-platform compatible, so while you may need to re-stretch some polygons, don't pay twice for the wireframes/skeletons if you don't need to...

4. Engage communities on their terms, not yours. A brand conversation in Gaia online (e.g., 'The Last Mimzy') versus a Second Life dialoge are different experiences entirely.  Before you can relevantly message or "plus-up" an in-worlder's experience, you gotta know what makes the eco-system tick - what are the goals, rewards and social currencies (explicit and implicit) built into or minted in those locations?  How do you enhance what's going on and provide real value?

As we talked, we also discussed the role of a community manager/virtual brand manager in virtual space, and the outsourcing of marketing functions by real world brands to virtual world teams.  This gets real interesting real fast.  To whit: Brand management as classically understood in the command and control systems of CPGs has to evolve to community management. 

With IP dissemination in virtual space (literally and figuratively) control is effectively gone.   (This is the irony of "UGC" - if your brand  is relevant to people, there is UGC around it.  The choice isn't whether it makes sense, the choice is how to engage)

So you can fight the loss of total brand control in interactive space, or leverage it.

Virtual worlds, dealt with attentively and respectfully, have the potential to become crowdsourced brand forums where you can learn a lot about how your brand could better meet the needs of virtual customers and advocates - and the lessons learned there may well feed real world conversations as well.

Leveraging the power of those spaces means participating relevantly in the communities themselves and being a part of conversations around your brand - aiding and enabling, or correcting as needed. 

How's that sound: "Brand guides, not brand managers."  Nice 2.0, 2.5 and 3.0 ring to it.

Or you can just bowl with Klingons and Furries.  But remember you gotta dress the part.  Who knows - they may even love you for it.   By the way?  disturbing number of SL sex forums with Furries.  One innocuous Google search netted this gem.   Jeepers, people.  I'm not saying, just sayin'.

Thanks to KenekeB for posting up a whole gallery of images from what looked to be a heartwarming communal gathering in ATLANTA.

Special Prize Opportunity:
First five people to post a mailing address in the comments section (if you don't want to go public, email me at renny.gleeson@wk.com) get a real world copy of the "Girls of Second Life" calendar. 

No, I'm not kidding.

Sex-bot's coming. Hey wait a second...

Calling the Porn industry: your future has arrived...PreSurfer digs this one up.  Thanks to the magic of a Head Mounted Display (HMD) and a force-feedback robot, you no longer have to deal with pesky humans.  Cast their avatars over a handy, easy-to-wash green screen mesh and take "interactive" to a new level. Brrrrrrrrr.

Virtual Realities - San Francisco, New York, Dubai-land, Falcon City, Second Life, Cloverfield, oh for gosh's sake

Some I'm going to apologize in advance for bad logic, poor application of social theory, bad understanding of the neurologic basis of memories and the like.  And I welcome any thoughts anyone has on the following.

I was talking with Penny Brough of W+K London about the Golden Gate Bridge.  I'll admit, I was a little jet-lagged, but from what I recall, she was saying more folks know San Francisco through images of the Golden Gate bridge than will ever see the real bridge...so there are probably more virtual Golden Gate bridges traveling the world in folks heads than real memories experienced by folks who've actually seen it.  And the SF of the mind may be as real to the non-visitor as the real one is to folks who've been there.   And sometimes when you finally do see something, the real one isn't as pretty as the cumulative virtual one you remember though you'd never really seen it, anyway.

Maybe, somehow, getting a gray day downer the first time you cross the Golden Gate is like when you meet a movie star like Tom Cruise, and find out he's REALLY SHORT.  Or not.

The power of cumulative virtual memory, not Tom Cruise, may be part of the reason why NYC seems to keep getting blasted to bits in movie after movie - it's a quick cheap "gimmie" for a filmmaker/storyteller to leverage the virtual NYC in viewer's heads, built from postcards, movies, TV shows and commercials - to create an instant pang of connection. 

Below, does Lady Liberty get her head torn off so Cloverfield can tap the collective unconscious?

Side note - Lady Liberty gets the short end of the stick in quite a few movies - Planet of The Apes, The Day After, Escape From New York, etc. - she's even in the movie posters for them all.)

A good storyteller, one who engages and moves an audience, weaves the most effective tale when they leverage their listeners' cultural conventions, ideals, shared images, symbols, archetypes, creation myths, known characters and historical situations to create entry points - think Aesop's fables, Grimm's tales, Disney, Tolkien, The Apostles.  NYC, through the cumulative weight of visual imagery and narrative, has entered the world's global memory bank.  It is a virtually 'shared' city, though few (proportionally to the globe's population) have actually been there.  A terrorist attack there, then, became an assault on a real thing AND on our global collective virtual memory.

We're familiar with taking a real thing (Golden Gate Bridge) and provide virtual copies (postcards) to create a virtual visual memory (of the card initially, but ultimately of the "Bridge").  Now we can personally create a virtual thing (an avatar) and create real copies (paintings, figurines, etc.) - like a 3-D printed 'Spore' figurine, a World of Warcraft figurine, or a portrait of your second life avatar.  In the former, shared virtual memory is gleaned from a representation of the real.  In the latter, real is distilled from virtual.   Is one of those more real, less real, or more virtual?

Something happens, anything, and if the experience makes it out of your short term memory into long term, you are left with an accessible memory.  Is the similarly accessible memory of a virtual experience  (say finally mastering and manning the turret guns in Gears of War - FTW!) somehow less real than the memory of a real experience? 

 

As worlds become truly immersive, the distinction between real and virtual is going to get awful gray, especially since you'll be able to upload your brain to the data cloud by 2050 and get rid of that pesky meat-space interface we call a "body".

Second Life is a real thing, and a virtual place and a collective memory fed by its citizens activities and preserved by Linden Labs infrastructure. It's a place where people can live out their fantasies (mundane and/or bizarre).  Players create real space (and value) in a virtual place, 'real' because it can be perceived by the senses, remembered accurately by the brain, bought and sold, and it adheres to a rule system that preserves and protects the reality it creates.  And players pay for the privilege of creating more value for others with each interaction.  Sweeeeet.

Dubai-Land is a real thing, too.  But it started as a (mind-numbingly expensive) dream, and is being forced, inch-by-terra-formed-inch, onto an incredibly inhospitable landscape.  Watch the video below and be simultaneously blown away and appalled...and not just by the "action-movie-voiceover" narrative with memorable quotes like "think eco-tourism, but BIGGER", or "watch your kids turn into adults INSTANTLY, and live out their DREAM professions", but by how much this promo video reads like the opening sequence for a soon to be released post-apocalyptic film riffing on the follies of man:

 

Falcon City of Wonders, my favorite part of Dubai-Land, is a land mass tastefully formed to resemble a falcon spreading its wings, and features scale reproductions of the Pyramids ("with retail space the Egyptians would never have dreamed possible!"), the Eiffel tower, Big Ben, and the Taj Mahal.  To keep this thing humble, the designers thoughtfully put in a jogging track around the scale Central Park in the form of a section of the Great Wall of China.

Falcon City of Wonders = big.  Tom Cruise = not as big?

Are virtual worlds creating new collective memories?  Yes.  Will Dubai-land create a new collective memory pool (before its overrun by nuclear/plague/ebola/alien infested zombies)?  Yes.  Is Master Chief the new Luke Skywalker?  Yes.  What happens when you can't tell the difference between a virtual world and a real world?  When does the difference not matter anymore?

 

Twombly Tate Tracks

Wandering the Tate, I came across "Tate Tracks", an inspired program where artists find a piece that inspires them, then create a track to accompany the piece.  The music debuts in the gallery for 30 days, then appears on the Tate Tracks site.  From the site:

"Tate Modern invited Union of Knives to walk around the gallery and find a work of art that would inspire them to write a track.

It was Cy Twombly's Quattro Stagioni which blew them away. It's a series of four vast paintings about the cycle of the seasons. They chose it because they 'liked the feeling that it gives of the earth just being one great big creature and the seasons are merely this creature breathing.' The result is their latest track, Four Seasons.

       

        

 

 

Barbie Becomes an Authentication Device for Pre-Teen Friendship

[from Threat Level]

Pre-teens in Mattels' free Barbie Girls virtual world can chat with their friends online using a feature called Secret B Chat, but that relationship first has to be authenticated by way of the Barbie Girl, a $59.95 MP3 player that looks like a cross between a Bratz doll and a Cue Cat, and was recently rated one of the hottest new toys of the 2008 holiday season.

The idea is, Sally brings her Barbie Girl over to her friend Tiffany's house, and sets it in Tiffany's docking station -- which is plugged into a USB port on Tiffany's PC.  Mattel's (Windows only) software apparently reads some sort of globally unique identifier embedded in Sally's Barbie Girl, and authenticates Sally as one of Tiffany's Best Friends.

Now when Sally gets home, the two can talk in Secret B Chat. (If Sally's parents can't afford the gadget, then she has no business calling herself Tiffany's best friend.)

It's sort of like an RSA token, but with cute fashion accessories and snap-on hair styles. THREAT LEVEL foresees a wave of Barbie Girl parties in the future, where tweens all meet and authenticate to each other -- like a PGP key signing party, but with cupcakes.

Friendships authenticated (and validated) via the purchase of a $60 mp3 housed in mind rotting plastic sleeves.  Sweet.  Sure, this has been around for a while - the phenomenon of friend validation through purchase of accessories has existed since the first Tory Burch Lucinda Hobo in pony emerged from the primordial ooze (product as badge, anyone?  cultural signifiers? shirtflags?) - what's interesting here is the layer of tech over it - actual interaction quality changed through the ownership of mutual authentication keys.  Now you can buy your way into the club.  On second thought, there are a few of these as well - T-Mobile faves and in network wireless calling come immediately to mind.

And this gets incrementally more interesting now that RFID chips have survived several rounds of hype to become significantly more viable - freed from the USB tether, the idea of smart products recognizing you and other "owners" could take the idea of "membership has its privileges" in whole new directions.

Human Video Games

Pong:

Space Invaders

Master Chief masters all

The first 24 hours of Halo 3’s release = $170 million in sales...Halo 3 is now the biggest launch in entertainment history - bigger than any Hollywood movie.

Google Earth, now Google Sky. Holy Cow.

Wow.  Honestly, wow. 

Google Earth shows you our world from satellite height down to the cars parked in your driveway.

Google Sky knits together astronomical images into a navigable universe, as seen from Earth.

As a failed astrophysicist, this one blows my mind.  I like features like the 'planet slider', the 'users guide to galaxies', etc.  I just spent way too much time wandering around the universe.  Virtually.   I am drooling.  I am actually drooling.  I also love the awe inspiring banality of the naming scheme.  Google "earth".  Google "sky".  Next up, Google "Air".  You are breathing it. And they want it back.

Claudia Cristovao from W+K Tokyo found this article outlining the features.

Here's a quick video demo from Google about their new application:

download it here.

Nike 'Leave Nothing' campaign, Live in Madden 08

In partnership with Microsoft/Massive and AvenueA-Razorfish, W+K's Nike 'Leave Nothing' football campaign goes XBox Live!

Nokia 070829

Marcelino Alvarez of PDX caught this one on Creativity, entitled "Nokia's latest could be judgment day for Apple"

With so many tech-savvy, sleuthing bloggers on the web nowadays, subversive viral campaigns for NIN’s Year Zero and JJ Abrams’ Cloverfield were quickly unearthed and pieced together. The same seems to apply for Nokia, whose upcoming N Series is at the heart of a mysterious, brain-teasing website simply dubbed “070829.”

According to rumors circulating around the blogosphere and even in Fortune magazine, the viral site, traced back to global interactive design firm Lightmaker--whose offices aren't permitted to discuss the project at this point--is part a new full-scale music service launch from Nokia on August 29th (hence the above URL), which will include an offline London event at the Ministry of Sound nightclub and more importantly, the launch of the new Nokia website.

The destination, which already includes a WAP profile for the N81, will let consumers download songs to their PCs and then transfer them to mobile phones and other portable music players, which is a similar model to iTunes. Also it's expected that Nokia will let users transfer songs to non-Nokia phones using digital-rights-management software.

Gaming to a better world (pt 1)

A point really popped for me from an interview by Henry Jenkins, writer of Convergence Culture and co-founder of the MIT Comparative Media Studies Program, of Eric Zimmerman, CEO of GameLab:

"...there is an emerging form of media literacy that we sometimes call 'Gaming Literacy.' Gaming Literacy has to do with information management, understanding complex systems, social networks, a critical design process, and creativity with digital technology. Increasingly, this new form of literacy will be crucial in the workplace and in our social and civic lives. The process of game design, which combines mathematics and logic, storytelling and aesthetics, writing and communication, systems and analytic thinking, among other elements, is one of the best ways of engaging with this form of literacy."

Gaming may well impact the ways we consumer and process information.  Given the ever expanding reach of so-called "casual gaming", the open sourcing of the Wii (which brought scores of "non-core" gamers into the console gaming mix), and the proliferation of gaming titles distributed via interactive media, this field bears close watch.  Companies all over this space include PlayFirst, Oberon, Wild Tangent, etc.

Boise redux - virtual worlds

Boise's probably a great town, with most anything you could want.  But I may never go.  Like many interactive social networks (new and brand created) with no unique differentiation or compelling reason for me to engage, there's simply no reason for me to participate in what Boise has to offer.  And I've got nothing against Boise.  In fact, if you are from Boise, I love that town, and you.

Nick Wilson, in his 8/13/07 Metaverse article, comments on the trends and the hype around social networks and 3D environments.  Three key takeaways worth mentioning:

"Clueless Corporations"
For wont of a little observation, understanding and immersion within the culture of virtual worlds we see all kinds of mischief befall the unwary.

--> immerse to understand

"First Fever"
Be First.  It doesn't appear to matter what at, [or why,] but dammit, you just gotta be first! "Clueless Twonk Inc Are First Walrus Tickling Company to Enter Second Life"

--> Experiment with objectives

"Selling Picks and Shovels"
In any gold rush, the ones that are really guaranteed to profit are not the gold miners, panning through grit to find nuggets, but the ones selling the picks and shovels. What we havn't seen yet, but must surely come, is the 3D equivalent of the CMS.

--> consider how you can empower your end user with branded tools/apps/functionalities beyond any single destination property
 

The question any company should be asking regarding social networking is: first, why?  then, how will the program I envision create real/perceived value for my audience?   If you can't look at your planned efforts through the [jaded] eyes of the consumer and see real/perceived personal benefit, you are DOA.

3-D Social Networking Panel, 9:06 AM

Little blurry, because I held my phone to my side when I snapped and blogged this.  From left, Sean Ryan (Meez), Tim Stevens (Doppleganger), John Barret (Parks), and Me (ad whore). 

Straight up, it was a panel on 3D avatars/virtual worlds and business models.  Meez lets you create 3D avatars you can display on your webpages, mobile phone, wherever.  Doppleganger builds 3-D environments.  Parks does a lot of work on "the digital home" and immersive worlds.

Second Life (SL) came up.  While SL has taken some knocks, what's most interesting to me about it as a marketer/agency guy is that it has forced the brands that play there to recognize that effective social networking isn't a one-off - it requires sustained presence, commitment of resources, and a strong perceived value for its users.  If you are prepared for those things, you've got a fighting chance.  If not, you'd be better off putting your ad dollars in a bag and burning it, because at least then you could warm your hands.

We had some froth about how exciting virtual worlds/social networks are.  And in actual fact, many brands are actively building their own virtual spaces/social networks. 

WHY?  Why should I give a rat's ass that brand 'x' has created a branded virtual playground for me?  I have a virtual playground - it's called the web.  or my video games. or facebook. or eBay, for gosh sakes.  Unless there is a rock-solid, kick-ass benefit for me investing my time in another virtual world, I WON'T.  And just because its got 'anything anyone would want', that DOESN'T MATTER.  So does San Francisco, and I'm not going to move there.

Remember Walmart's "The Hub"?  That was where young "hubsters" (their term, and pictured below) could 'create their own pages and interact with other cool hubsters'.  This bald-faced attempt to ensnare children in Walmart marketing was DOA: to join, you had to get YOUR PARENTS' PERMISSION.  To post to your page, your post would be sent to your parents.  FOR THEIR APPROVAL.  It was rightly vilified in the press, and resoundingly ignored by kids. SCORE! This of course just after their fake blog (yep - singing their praises) was unmasked, helping spawn the term "Flog" (for Fake bLOG).  SCORE!  Next up for social netowrk digi-blivion is "Yourvoiceyourchoice.com", FinishLine's "social network".  WHY, GOD, WHY?

For sheer hilarity, above is the picture formerly featured on "The Hub" homepage of "Hubsters", a clip art aspirational target demographic dug up by some eager beaver in the marketing group or at their beleaguered agency.  Oh those crazy wired kids who won't slow down - except TO ASK THEIR PARENTS FOR PERMISSION TO POST TO THE HUB, when they can upload nude pics of themselves to Xanga.com

If I strain, I can imagine room at one of the virtual world/social networking spectrum for an immersively branded environment (in the real world, people do fly to Disneyland and visit the Hershey's store in Times Square, NYC).  On the other end of that same spectrum are folks quite happy in the worlds and networks to which they already belong, and who aren't actively searching for an new time suck.  These are the folks you get by developing cool apps for Facebook, or new MySpace backgrounds, etc.

By providing value at all points on the spectrum. 

I'm pretty sure we talked about other brilliant things, but I can't remember most of them.

Full of Hot Ayr?

Could Ayrwulf be a band so notorious on the South Beach scene, they'll be featured in the background of the upcoming Simpsons movie?  You decide...

I love Lumi

Nobody knows about Genki Rockets in detail....

In their own words:

"This is a music group which vocal is 17 years old girl, Lumi, a first baby born in outer space and has never been to the earth.  This group is organized in 30years later the present time.  (She lives in the future world)

Those are the all information on Genki Rockets.
Genki Rockets will work with various kinds of artists and create brand
new music and movies. This should be the latest project nobody ever
launches.  You can't take your eyes off the Genki Rockets from now on!"

Here is Genki Rockets' Heavenly Star video, directed by Tetsuya Mizuguchi:

...and here she was opening up Live Earth's concert in Tokyo. 

Not bad for a holographic projection of a composite girl that doesn't exist.

Future of Media

Gaming your way to great interactive work

Just found out about this presentation that basically says game mechanics are great guiding principles to use in Interactive design.  Since I am a huge gaming geek, this was an enormous relief to me - all those hours with 2-liter bottles of Coke sprawled on the couch = crazy delicious.

This is good stuff.

I've greatly condensed the  eTech notes from Putting the Fun in Functional. Applying Games Mechanics To Functional Software, presented by Amy Jo Kim, Creative Director of Shuffle Brain. (originally from the we make money not art archives):

"...How can we use game mechanics to create compelling services and applications, even if those are not games[?]...by finding inspiration in 5 game mechanics.                   

1. Collecting: amassing and showing your stuff.  Examples include World of Warcraft inventory and MySpace friends.

2. Earning points: keeps interest alive.  On fastr, you can see everyone else’s points, and social points are given by other players.  Ratings on You Tube can be regarded as social points as well.  Once you have points you can get LeaderBoards...e.g., You Tube video rating. MySpace attractiveness ratings. The problem is that LeaderBoards encourage people to game the system. They can be very interesting but you have to be sure that they really reinforce what you want/need to be reinforced.  Once you have points, you can also have levels...e.g., eBay power seller.

3. Feedback: "Bejewelled" shows points very clearly, screen explodes, etc. there are numerous aspects to give a constant feedback => feedbacks in MySpace mobile.  Feedback accelerate mastery...e.g., Karaoke Revolution: How good is your singing? The game teaches you how to sing. If you do it well, your character starts to glow, if you don’t you get booed off the stage.  Feedback makes an experience more fun and compelling. Google Map feels more fun to use because it provides its users with constant feedback. Feedback makes mundane tasks look more fun.

4. Exchanges: structured social interactions, either explicit or implicit (i.e. emergent)
e.g., eBay feedback has evolved into a tit-for-tat social game: give me a feedback, I’ll give you one.  Trading is an explicit social exchange. Example: trading in World of Warcraft; trading in Mogi-Mogi (a GPS-based game in Tokyo to collect virtual objects.)
“Gifting” is an implicit social exchange, you’re not forced to do it but the system makes you do it.
Examples: NetMarble (Korea); HabboHotel (you can buy object with your points and give gifts); Helios that targets the MySpace generation, ability to give ringtones, wallpapers, etc.

5. Customization:  increases investment in the experience. My customized Google page is more personal interesting and fun.  Character customization is especially powerful, for example the customization of female characters in World Of Warcraft.

Click here to see her presentation slides. 

Net: An interesting filter through which to view interactive experiences.

 

         

Grail-based Marketing

Horseman of the Google-pocalypse riding the media landscape this week.

(1) Google/EchoStar

On the face, it’s a deal where Google will auction TV ad inventory from Echostar’s DISH satellite network to sell in Google’s tried and true auction-based model.  While the new deal allows day part targeting, it’s most likely unsold/remnant (=”crap”) inventory.  Spot Runner offers similar auction-based pricing for remnant cable inventory.

 What makes this really interesting is that Google/Echostar will offer second-by-second ad viewing ratings to advertisers who will know exactly how many folks watched and whether they tuned out.  Read that again for emphasis – I’ll wait for you. This, after Nielsen has hemmed and hawed opps for YEARS (with no signs of progress) claiming “challenging hurdles” to deliver advertisement ratings to marketers. And Google/Echostar has got big name advertisers who spend millions in traditional advertising, to participate – Intel is one, and others include marketers laser-focused on return-on-investment (ROI) – eTrade, 1800Flowers.

TV could become as accountable as online.

This announcement puts the current metrics providers and spot industry on notice.

Couple possible scenarios:

• Nielsen realizes they can’t screw around and (over the objections of the entrenched interests it represents and plays with) suddenly unveils an accelerated effort to get advertisement rankings into their own systems, and creates a viable (and more recognized) competitor to Google’s metrics-supported efforts.  This could happen, but the fact that Google wraps in the auction info for true end-to-end analytics will be a tough one to beat without help…
• In the short to long term, assuming Google can quantify and automate branding metrics, not just sales (brrrrrrr), Nielsen gets “extinct”-ed.

Tom Winner (W+K's ass-kicking, name-taking TV guru) says that IF this test works, it will impact the spot market first. But marketers will be watching – and if Google pull this off “…it won’t be remnant space anymore, it’ll be real space, and there will be more than satellite, there will be cable, and more”. Winner pointed out to me that the auction-based broadcast buying model is limited in that it lack the added value and enhanced packages real, live negotiators can secure, but it's a development he's got his eye on.

(2) Google/DoubleClick

DoubleClick is known as an ad serving company.  They are much more than that, but a core service they provide is handling a significant portion of the web’s display and rich media advertising. Thank them for those banners you ignore. This sounds like a “pipes” deal – you know, big players shuffling around ad serving plumbing.  But it’s more than that – much more. Right now, Google has access to some of the biggest advertisers search campaign results data. Through those marketers search advertising programs, Google knows the words important to them, they know the result of those terms and they know the value of those terms in real time. And they retain that data. They also know the value of those terms to those marketers’ competitors. Brrrrrr.

Acquiring DoubleClick would give them credibility in the display and rich media space, access to a lot of tools and capability, a blue chip list of clients and agency partners AND access to a trove of information that could be synched into a seamless picture of online media performance across search and display. 

They’ll have an unprecedented amount of data about consumer and marketer activity.  Including the dollar figures to quantify them.   Mmmmmm.

WHERE DOES THIS LEAD?

Google’s got deep pockets, a share-holder driven need to expand, and a compelling if at times, messianic, vision.  Between their

• local efforts (“Google Base”)
• radio experiments (dMarc)
• newspaper ads (http://blog.searchenginewatch.com/blog/061030-085144)
• magazine efforts (http://news.com.com/Google+takes+ad+sales+to+print/2100-1024_3-5844889.html)     
• digital out of home (http://www.clickz.com/showPage.html?page=3624571)
• EchoStar deal and
• Potential DoubleClick acquisition,     
• add in RFID chips and their vast data warehouses

…Google is positioning themselves to offer marketers a holy grail or a holy terror: Fully optimizable end-to-end marketing (with dynamic, real-time results) across all channels.

More on this to come.

China Virtual - HiPiHi

This entry comes to us wholesale from ReadWriteWeb writer Gang Lu, 4/1/2007

HiPiHi - A Virtual World Born in China

Even though SecondLife has attracted a lot of attention in China and the first millionaire from SecondLife is Chinese, this western virtual world has still not been officially launched in China. But the rapidly growing Chinese Internet apparently could not wait for it. Last week a Chinese virtual world was launched, named HiPiHi. It's a SecondLife-like 3D virtual world and it started a limited beta test last week. We had a very nice talk with HiPiHi’s founders, Hui Xu (CEO) and Xinhua Liu, to find out more about this new Chinese virtual world.

HiPiHi was founded in Beijing in October 2005 as a privately held company funded by GCIG. HiPiHi is the only Chinese virtual world and probably only the second company worldwide after SecondLife to offer a truly collaborative, immersive and open-ended experience for users to create, inhabit and govern a new world of their own design.

HiPiHi Team

HiPiHi is very young, only 1.5 years old, and its private beta test just started a few days ago. People might feel it is just a business strategy to copy SecondLife, just as there are over 200 hundred video-sharing sites declaring themselves as Chinese YouTubes. However, unlike most of these startups, the HiPiHi management team is very experienced in this market.

Hui Xu, the founder and CEO of HiPiHi, was the General Manager of MyWeb China and was nominated as one of the “Top Ten China Internet Heros” in 1999. Hui was also the chairman and CEO of JingQi XiShu Co. Ltd, which became one of the most successful e-commerce site in 2000. Xuewei Rao, the Director & COO of HiPiHi, founded Iscreate Communications Co. Ltd in 2000 and was also the vice-president of the Guangdong High-Tech Chamber of Commerce. Its vice-president, Tracy Ji, was the PR director of ZhaoPin.com - the leading provider of online career and recruitment resource in China. Another founder, Xinhua Liu, was the vice-president of 3721.com (a leading software development company acquired by Yahoo in 2003) and also the co-founder of “EMBA Club International”.

The HiPiHi World

The Chinese Internet is still not mature and web 2.0 is just heating up here. We asked Hui and Xinhua why they started an online virtual reality. Hui Xu said that while most users will treat HiPiHi as another 3D game, he said they are aiming to build a complete 3D visual background which reflects different environments in the real world. It also provides users with a powerful creation engine and tools, which helps users to create their own world step by step. Hui explained that before the full public beta, they are going to invite around 100,000 users to be the original residents of the HiPiHi world.

There are four phases involved in the current private test. Note that these four phases reflect Chinese mythical events, but for better understanding here we are translating it into the corresponding Biblical story of God’s creation of the world in 7 days. They are:

Phase 1 - In the beginning God created heaven and the earth = the tools for rendering the terrain, hills, fields, terraces, water, flora etc are introduced.

Phase 2 - God created Adam and Eve and the human race using the image of Himself = the tools for creating more detailed avatars are introduced.

Phase 3 - God created all earthly things = the tools for creating all sorts of objects are introduced.

Phase 4 - The Mirage = the economic system and social system are established.

Hui commented: “Every phase is given a distinctive theme, in the hope of guiding users in the creation of the virtual world. This arrangement mirrors the real evolution of human society, from barbarians to civilized society. We want to let the users experience the course of civilization, instead of forcing most of our arbitrary creations down their throat from the get-go, which will surely confuse them.”

HiPiHi and SecondLife

HiPiHi has obtained lots of media coverage, most of which inevitably link it to Linden Labs' SecondLife - a few of them even call it a clone of SecondLife. We asked Hui for his thoughts on that:

“When we started discussing the HiPiHi back to 2005, actually we had no idea about SecondLife. SecondLife came to international attention in late 2006, then we studied it and found out we are both working towards a similar direction. It is absolutely a misunderstanding of virtual worlds if people think HiPiHi is a copycat of SecondLife. The virtual world is not just a 3D environment, but a complicated social system including the property policy, financial policy etc. HiPiHi is born in China, [so] we really hope it can embrace our own culture”.

Xinhua also added that “according to the CNNIC’s report (Jan,2007), over 70% of Chinese netizens are under 30 years old, but the average age of SecondLife is reported to be 32. Chinese users have different interests and views on the Internet market. HiPiHi and SecondLife can learn from each other, but neither of us can simply copy the culture from the other”.

The Future of HiPiHi

Discussing the future of HiPiHi, Hui Xu told us: “We have invited many sociologists and economists to sit down with our technicians to discuss the future of HiPiHi. We are working hard to improve our 3D environment, and we do hope we can create a perfect society - a shared and fair world which will finally embrace the various cultures of the real world”.

On the economics, while SecondLife created its Linden Dollar, it may've been the Chinese Internet giant Tencent QQ which first introduced a virtual currency - Q Coin. It has been reported that the China government may restrict the usage of virtual currencies, because of concerns about undermining the nation’s financial system. So we asked Hui Xu if HiPiHi is going to introduce its own currency - and if so how it would work. Hui said that “[certainly] we have considered this, but it is still too early to finalize this topic. We have to take all sorts of factors - inside and outside of HiPiHi - into account and we will introduce it when the virtual world is ready for trading”.

Trojan Halo

Halo created the XBox. Halo 2 reinforced.  Halo 3 is the juggernaut on the way.

Halo 3 trailer:

Microsoft is moving fast to create a cross media channel empire/media property, and Halo is the point of the spear.  They've just announced recently that Halo 2 would be playable via Vista-enabled PC's. 

"The proposed service, Gates said, would connect mobile phones, PCs and Xbox 360s with a universal account that logs gamers' stats, displays friends and sends messages between devices." (from ZDnet)

PC Gamers will be able to go head to head with console players.  Why should we care?  This affords the chance for MSoft to exponentially expand the "XBox Live" universe. For non-gamers, "XBox Live" is the  subscription-based networked XBox gaming community with (according to MSoft) 6MM current members.  Expanding this pool to include hardcore PC gamers affords MSoft to become a virtual standalone media property with a VERY ATTRACTIVE demo. 

And if that's not enough, MSoft just announced acquisition of TellMe, which offers pretty solid voice recognition software and customer support capability. 

So imagine this:  Microsoft gets its cross-platform ad sales act together.  You and your buddies are fragging each other in Halo, trash talking through your headsets, when (not skipping a beat in gameplay) you use TellMe voice recognition to shout out your pizza order, which gets processed through XBox Live/TellMe and Joe blow's pizza.  Hot popping pie in under 30 minutes or your money back, and you don't even have to get up. 

Piping hot pie + hardcore gaming + me not having to get up off my tail?  Priceless.

Wii Space

Nintendo's Wii may represent not just gaming innovation, or the single biggest suck of agency time, but the next generation of social networking.

Mashable quotes from Shigeru Miyamoto's keynote speech at the Game Developer's Conference:

"Although it has given very few details, Nintendo has hinted at its intention to expand the Mii idea into the realm of social networking. Miis are 3D characters created on your Nintendo Wii - they represent you in a number of Wii games. It’s a concept that has proven popular on the web, with sites like Kottke launching Mii contests. In a keynote speech delivered this week at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco, legendary game developer and Nintendo Senior MD Shigeru Miyamoto (Mario, Zelda, Donkey Kong, Nintendogs) said yesterday that Nintendo will not only allow users to share their avatars, but also to vote for them in popularity contests.

The contests will be part of a Mii channel, to be launched later this year. It’s a story that’s leading to some of the usual MySpace hype, with an expert in this article saying “Within a year, the Wii may be the most successful and valuable social-networking community on the Web”. The Wii already has a photo channel that lets users edit and share photos, and an Internet channel based on the Opera browser will launch in the coming months. I think it’s a little early to hype this one up, but it’s certainly a noteworthy trend: consoles are no longer about playing alone, but connecting with others over the Internet. XBox Live, Playstation Home and the Mii concept all point the way."

If you haven't seen the Mii creation process, here's a snap of the interface:

Here's a section from his keynote from  describing the "wife-o-meter":

 

Grab your Wii and get your Mii.  This gonna get HECTIC.

 

Line Rider - internet phenomenon

It's hard to predict what will catch people's imagination, inspire them, and blow up big.  Case in point?  Line Rider, a Flash game created in September, 2006 by Boštjan Čadež, a Slovenian university student.  Devoid of flashy graphics, yet more addictive than crack.

<-- Yep, the Line Rider

"The basic concept is to draw one or more lines with the mouse on which a small man on a sled can ride after the player presses the "Play" button. The game includes simulated physics, which means the track must be sufficiently smooth to prevent the character from falling off the sled. The author has said that he prefers the description "toy" to "game", as there is no goal to accomplish. " - wikipedia entry

To play Line Rider, voted the "Best Webtoy of 2006", click here. When you get to the site, just click the handwritten-looking 'Play' in the center of the page.  When you are done, come back.  We'll be waiting for you.

What does an internet phenomenon look like?

16,000,000 views.

This user-generated movie alone (which you'll really appreciate after you've tried the game yourself!) has generated almost 2.7 million views. 

And it's just ONE of the 18,200 Line Rider videos posted on YouTube.

[Thanks for the tip to Meghan and Marcelino from the PDX!]

Best Indie Games +

When it comes to an immersive digital experience, good games are tough to beat.  The first five games in this post were featured in Wired Magazine's  "Best Indie Games 2007" 

Each selection stretches gameplay in some unconventional ways.  The first four games are downloadable; FLOW (a web based near SPORE clone) is playable online.  Gears of War is XBox 360 only, and EA Sports NBA Street: Homecourt will be playable on most consoles.  If you don't care to download the games, you can play the video clips for a sense of the gameplay.  They rock. 

1. Racing Pitch

"Skinflake Games has produced a game where you drive a car around a track -- and you control the speed of the engine by making revving noises into your computer's microphone. It's a delightful way of breaking outside well-worn control techniques -- buttons, thumbpad, keyboard."

2. And Yet It Moves
"Basically a traditional run-and-jump Mario-like puzzle -- except that you have the power to rotate the entire world around, allowing you to walk on the ceiling or on walls. This allows for fiendishly tricky puzzles, because you'll often have to rotate the world to move loose objects out of the way -- but it's not easy to do so without trapping or killing yourself."

3. Plasma Pong

"Pong gave us the original DNA of video gaming, but very few designers have ever tried to update it in any significant way ... until...Plasma Pong. The goal is the same as in the original, except that the playfield is a sizzling, crackling field of plasma that you can manipulate with your paddle: You can suck the ball back into your paddle, deflect it back at your opponent or release a blast wave...Taylor [the game developer] realized that in reskinning Pong, one could revamp not merely the paddles -- but the negative space in the game."

As one gamer put it so eloquently, "this shit gets hot".

4. Toribash
"Kung-fu fighting titles are considered the epitome of "twitch" gaming [...] Toribash [is] a "turn-based fighting game," in which you carefully plan the movements of each joint on a cube-based fighter's body -- then watch and see what crazy physics emerge. The designer, Hampus Söderström, has transformed fighting into chess: You'll find yourself sitting there, stroking your chin as you examine your freeze-framed figurine, meditating on how much torque to apply to the leg ... the better to kick your opponent's head off. And, in a nice subversion of this meditative pace, when the blows actually land, limbs fly off and blood geysers in all directions."

5. Flow
"You start off as a little microorganism, eating smaller lifeforms to grow in size and diving deeper into the primordial ooze when you want to hunt more difficult prey. But if you get overwhelmed, you can back up to an easier level. The upshot is a game that is oddly soothing to play -- not just because of the self-regulating gameplay (designed after Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi's concept of "flow," naturally), but due to a gorgeously trippy soundtrack."   hmmmmmmmm - sound familiar?

6. Gears of War

OK, it's not PC-based.  But mother of god, what a game.

You can't talk about immersive gamig without giving this one a pop!  GEARS OF WAR!!  Here's a fan remixed trailer set to the soothing strains of Metallica.  Check out the imagery.  If this one doesn't make you want to buy a 360, you've flatlined.

and last but not least,

7. NBA Street:Homecourt , representing.  We worked with Rooster Teeth (mentioned in an earlier Machinima post) on the TV stuff.  Check out the clip below.

China's Internet Addiction Solution

This via Shanghaiist

An old military base in the Daxing suburb of Beijing has been repurposed for battle against internet addiction among China's 12 to 24-year-olds. According to a new report, 14 percent of Chinese teens are vulnerable to internet addiction, and the Communist Youth League says that internet addiction is "a grave social problem" that threatens the nation. Additionally, the Chinese media has recently drawn attention to social problems related to internet addiction including a murder over the theft of virtual property and a string of suicides....[Full Text]