ouroboros

OMG - Nokia buys Symbian, MSoft screwed? Google kneecapped?

This is going to take a lot to process.  And there's a lot to be worked out (what does "royalty-free to members of the alliance" mean in practice?  Will this be Open like Linux, or 'Open' like...brrrr...AT&T/Verizon Wireless?). 

But OMG, IN YOUR FACE, iPhone (6MM handset sold US, 10MM projected by years end) and Google Android Handsets (None sold, nor to be sold soon):  Nokia (1 Billion handsets in market) just got all 'Open-Source' Symbian on you.

"On Tuesday, companies including Nokia, Motorola, NTT DoCoMo, LG Electronics, Samsung, Sony Ericsson, AT&T, Texas Instruments, STMicroelectronics and Vodafone announced that they will work together to make the Symbian OS open source. They will offer it under a royalty-free license to members of a new nonprofit group called the Symbian Foundation.

Symbian is used in about 60 percent of the world's smartphones [~200MM handsets], which means that open-source software will soon drive the majority of those devices. The proprietary model behind mobile operating systems from Microsoft, Research In Motion and Apple, then, will for the first time be in the minority."

- Nancy Gohring, IDG News Services, Symbian Shifts Mobile World to Open Source, for PC World

Golly. 

200MM handsets in market using Symbian.  Sure there will be legacy issues with handsets running older Symbian software, but c'mon.  Microsoft's like "yeah, no worries.  We don't see much of a change in the short term based on this announcement".  That's like the Titanic's captain saying "well, in the light of news about an iceberg dead ahead, we see no need to alter our current course".  Dude, did you read the FREE part?  The market leader against whom MSoft is struggling for dominance in the mobile OS market [Symbian] just made their product free.  Microsoft CHARGES people to use their mobile OS.

"It's unclear whether device manufacturers will want to continue paying high fees for Windows Mobile license when [Nokia] the market leader suddenly cut costs to zero." - J. Nicholas Hoover, Symbian's Open Source Gambit Ups Stakes in Mobile OS War, for Information Week

Really?  Unclear whether people will want to pay for something they can have for free?

Nokia just made a BOLD MOVE. 

Some say they've grabbed their future, others that they've just opened up mobility.  Good piece over at ZDNet byEd Burnette discusses Symbian deal winners and Losers.

Your Collective Brand

Melissa Sconyers, W+K interactive scout, shared with us Noah Brier's (a Naked-ite) newest creation, Brand Tags.

"Brands exist in people's heads" goes his premise - and here everyone's brand-related tags are collated and rendered as a swarm, creating a graphic illustration of the brand as socially-constructed collective perception, with each perception proportionally scaled by it's importance to the group.  [Interestingly, as participation with the site has increased, Brier's noted more "noise" being introduced - profanity, brand bashing, etc.]

How does it work?  Brier's site shows you a logo, and you free-associate a word (that becomes a tag) into the handy blank field.  Then the next logo appears.  It's shockingly simple, and irritatingly addictive.  So people come to you to tell you about your brand.  Contrast this with Summize, the Twitter search tool that searches public twits/tweets for brand mentions and aggregates them, or their "sentiment"

He's cobbled together a single player Google Image Labeler, only now instead of help Google tag every image using your free labor, you can help Brands get a gut check.  And make Naked look brilliant.  Sweeet.

What I really liked was the gaming aspect of the site - Brier lets you try to guess the brand based on the swarm and see the tags posted by referral URL (so you can ferret out any domain-based swarm biases :-)

Melissa conjectures that the site coding may reveal potential Brier-based brand bias in the order in which brands were entered - Nike is #1 (ID=1), Google is #2 (ID=2), etc. - but his numbering scheme skips from #9 (H&M) and doesn't pick up again until #25 (Yahoo!).  Perhaps this has something to do with their client list?   Or maybe he's leaving room to put them in later?

Check these swarms for W+K partners:

ABC
Brand Jordan
Coca-Cola
Converse
ESPN
Nike
Nokia
Target
EA Sports
Honda
Google
Starbucks
Heineken

If Brand Tags sits at one end of the spectrum of collective brands (where people are required to go to a destination to create and experience collective perceptions), Summize sits at the other.

Summize positions itself as a provider of "conversational search", and it searchs public twitter streams for keywords.  Enter a brand, get a slew of brand-relevant tweets.  In aggregate, it's a pretty interesting snapshot of what people are saying, right now, about your brand.  You can even sift for sentiment.

Nifty.

Askablogr

OK - just got a ping from Chris Devore to try out there new 'Askablogr' widget.  Since he's really smart, I'm humoring him.  If you go over to the right hand column and scroll down, you could be dangerously close to asking me a direct question via this here blog. Go ahead.  Give it a shot.  I haven't gotten so big I've forgotten where I came from.

Facebook legal issues?

Facebook's new ads will allow Netflix to serve an ad with your image to a friend to market a movie title you have seen/reviewed/commented on. 

But we in advertising have to pay for use of people's likenesses when we use them to market product.

Henry Blodgett [on the 'Silicon Valley Insider'] notes hat the NYT's Saul Hansell, dug up a law professor's blog post arguing that
 

"Facebook's "social ads" violate some ancient New York State statute prohibiting the use of names or likenesses in advertising without first getting written permission.  Facebook immediately responds by saying the professor is interpreting the law "too broadly" and that online opt-in is now the same as a written signature."

WIll Facebook cut you a check if you sell something for their partners?

Fraudvertising - Phishing 2.0

Give a man a fish, he'll eat it for lunch, but teach a man to phish and he'll eat yours.

This email one arrived in my mailbox today from "Paypal", subject line "Urgent Message".

       

Your Debit Card must receive a refund worth 288.40$ USD from Oregon Community Credit Union.After the last annual calculations of your account activity we have determined that you are eligible to receive a tax refund of $288.44 credit. Please submit the tax refund request and allow us 6-9 days in order to process it. To get your Tax Refund Money please click the link below:

https://www.oregoncommunitycu.org/login.cgi?section=signin&refund

 Regards, Oregon Community Credit Union Customer Service

 Copyright © 2007 - Oregon Community Credit Union - All rights reserved.  

This smelled bad, but rather than just delete it, I figured I'd do a little digging.  And with a logo like that?  Got to be fake.

But it's not.  There is an OCCU.  The first giveaway for me was the copy, which felt like a digital ransom note.   The website address looks pretty innocuous, but it's bullshit.  But good bullshit - the customer service # was actually correct, and for the heck of it, I tried the rep.  She was a good sport about it and shared with me that OCCU had been hit with a raft of these things in the past week.  4-5 Phishing attacks had been shut down or cut off YESTERDAY alone.  They don't the source, but it's been getting pretty hectic.

Add to this a new form of spam - bogus MP3-vertising.

How does it work?  You get a blank email with an MP3 file  attached - something like "mychemicalromance.mp3" or "justintimberlake.mp3".  They look like mobile ringtones, but if you launch it you get an audio file with a come-on to purchase crap stocks.  Imagine opening up "bartsimpson.mp3" on the crowded cubicle floor and hearing a digital sideshow barker shouting about improving your sex life and you can see where this might go.

With fraudvertising becomes more efficient (better designed, co-opting realworld logos/brands/customer service and technologies), muddy water gets murkier, and the need to deliver real value as a brand, not just ads, becomes even more critical.   

Now politics are personal

The Washington Post featured an article last Friday entitled: "Coming Soon: Personalized Campaign Ads", by Samantha Gross.  She projects personalized political ads available via major MSO's (specifically, Comcast) within the next two years:

"Imagine: You turn on the TV and see a campaign ad. Your neighbor down the hall, watching the same channel at the same moment, sees a different ad selected for her in part because she's Hispanic, single, owns a dog and drinks Bud Light...In short, voters' race, income, marital status and favorite brands could soon determine exactly what they learn about political candidates while watching cable TV.

...[T]he technology could...allow candidates to make...subtle adjustments to their mannerisms, speech patterns and appearance. In theory, a voter originally from the South could hear a candidate speak with a hint of a drawl. A dog owner could be shown a glimpse of the candidate's family with their pet.

Such manipulations are hardly new in politics, but the ability to bring such intensive targeting to television could give the candidates added leverage - and raise new questions about their authenticity."

Wow - inauthentic statements made by candidates?  That would be a first. 

Addressable advertising already exists online, via registration info, IP addresses and 'behavioral targeting'.  The migration of these capabilities into broadcast opportunities is a logical evolution.  And interestingly, the very technology that enables this targeting and manipulation may help us spot the more egregious pandering more easily:

"The degree to which candidates can vary their messages is likely to be limited by an increasingly watchful blogosphere, says Tobe Berkovitz, an advertising professor who teaches political campaigning at Boston University.  "That's the thing about this modern, interactive, blogged, YouTubed environment," he says. "You can't send messages that conflict."

Finally, a definitive answer

Who can argue with an objective source?

RateMyLife.net - Find out if you suck at life

Discuss: LiveLeak

LiveLeak.com is a site where video footage various folks don't want you to see is aggregated in one sprawling, challenging, terrifying place.  Between the CNN/YouTube presidential debate buzz and sites like LiveLeak we can see leading indicators into the potential role interactive media and digital video can play in shaping the nature of discourse in modern societies.  Imagine - a participatory democracy.  Oh right we have one.  Oh right, no we don't.

I found LiveLeak again through stories about "Juba the Sniper".  "Juba" is either a person or persons who create video footage (or "snuff propaganda") of American troops in Iraq being slain by sniper fire.   Disturbing stuff.  American troops were apparently posting there own "nyaah-nyaah you missed me" videos on YouTube...but with the US govt shutting down access to YouTube for troops stuck over there, LiveLeak has become a jarring outlet for their voices.

Web Art

Interesting bit today in the UK's Guardian - *unique* Brit artists (and UK "national treasures") Gilbert and George have created a unique piece of art available for download exclusively online until 11.35pm, 10th May 2007, London time.

Click here to learn more or download your copy!

This is an interesting use of the web as a free, time-limited distribution vehicle -. of course,  expect those freeloading webbies to download and post the artwork for others well after the Guardian's planned expiration date.  Still, interesting.  And it'll look funky on the vacuous, soul-sucking walls of your standard cubicle...