Adam Nicholas Burke

So Ketchup King Heinz has thrown up a Pop-Up Fan-Store in Facebook selling personalised cans of Heinz soup to UK Heinz fans.

The pop-up store allows Heinz fans (and-only fans) to send personalised ‘get-well’ cans of Heinz soup to friends suffering from post-summer distress disorder – i.e. Autumn colds and chills, for a £1.99 ($3.00) PayPal payment via an store app on the brand’s Facebook page.

The customised cans feature a personal get-well message on the label, via a custom store app on the Heinz fan-page from London-based social media agency We Are Social.

What we really like about this Heinz pop-up fan-store is that it taps into Facebook strengths – gifting – an eminently social activity, and personalisation (although not, in this case, via the social graph).  Personalised gifts in Facebook make real sense.  Kudos Heinz.

Expect other food and beverage brands – champagne, chocolates, wine and soda come to mind – to follow.

Heinz is emerging as something of a poster-child for f-commerce in FMCG/CPG – earlier in the year it opened a pop-up fan-store in Facebook to support the launch of a new line of ketchup by offering fans exclusive fan-first access to the product before it became available in-store (also by We Are Social). And last month, Heinz ran a social couponing campaign, where the value of the coupon doubled when shared.

Providing a rationale for the Facebook activity, Matthew Cullum, Heinz Soup marketing controller, said, “Because Facebook is a place people choose to engage with our brand, we want to be there…  Our use of these channels doesn’t replace TV, but it is a great compliment to it because it allows the consumer to spread the word and they engage more than they would with traditional channels such as TV or Radio.”

Are you juicing your social media presence for all it's worth? Sure, social media engagement can be a great way to connect and interact with fans, prospects, and customers alike. But are you aware of its potential as a lead generation tool?

The next time you tweet a link, post a message on Facebook or LinkedIn, or upload a video to your YouTube channel, consider the following 10 tactics to make sure you're squeezing out as much lead gen juice as possible from your social media strategy.

10 Ways to Squeeze More Lead Gen Juice From Social Media

1. Promote your social presence via email, your website, and your blog. In order to generate leads from social media, you first need followers and fans who actually care about your updates. Don't forget about easy ways to promote your presence in social media and attract new followers. Add social media follow buttons to various pages of your website, your blog, your personal email signatures, and your email marketing messages so people know where else to find you.

2. Make sure every blog post you share includes a CTA. In general, it's a best practice to include a call-to-action on every blog post you publish in general. While blog articles don't directly generate leads, they're a great way to direct visitors to landing pages where they can convert into leads. Make sure every blog post you share in social media includes a CTA to support lead generation.

3. Share more landing pages in social media. Blog posts shouldn't be the only type of content you share in social media. Pump up your social media lead generation efforts by sharing more landing pages for downloadable content like ebooks and webinars. This will cut out the lead gen middle man (i.e. blog posts) and enable visitors to convert in fewer clicks, which will increase your chances of generating leads.

4. Include social sharing buttons throughout all content and landing pages. Easily expand the potential reach of your content by adding social media sharing buttons for sites like Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn to every piece of content you produce as well as every landing page you create. Include these buttons on every blog post you publish and on every single page of the ebooks you launch. By making it virtually effortless for people to share your content with their connections, you will attract new eyes to your content, expand your reach beyond your direct network, and ultimately, generate more leads!

5. Create custom landing pages on Facebook. Create a custom Facebook page tab, and use it to promote your best lead generating content. Or take it one step further with HubSpot's Welcome Application for Facebook, which enables you to create a custom tab with a form to generate leads directly within Facebook!

6. Participate in LinkedIn Answers. Regularly monitoring questions pertaining to your industry and expertise in LinkedIn Answers will enable you to identify opportunities to share your thought leadership. In your responses, be sure to include a link to a piece of content that provides more detailed information to support lead generation.

7. Launch a contest that includes a lead gen element. Launching a contest in social media is a great way to attract new fans and followers, and, when done correctly, help you generate leads. Consider making lead generation the way someone must enter your contest. Something as simple as "Download our new ebook, and you'll be entered to win a new [insert enticing prize here]!"

8. Include CTAs in videos you upload to YouTube. Just as every blog post you publish should include a call-to-action, so should every video you produce. Including the URL of a landing page with a simple CTA at the end of the video will suffice. This way, if someone embedded your video on their website or blog and others viewed it outside the context of YouTube, your CTA would remain intact. Furthermore, you should also include links to landing pages in your video's description when you upload it to your YouTube channel.

9. Use your social media bios wisely. Use opportunities in your social media account bios to link to your content. Many social media sites enable users to include a link or two in their forward-facing bio or profile; use it wisely.

10. Increase your social reach. It's an easy concept to understand -- the more fans and followers you have, the more chances you'll have to generate leads. Spend some time working to increase your social media reach and increase your fans and followers, and those lovely leads will follow.

How else can you squeeze more lead generation juice out of your social media presence?

Image Credit: Keith Williamson

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In 20 years our technology will reach a level of personalization that will enhance every moment of our lives. We’ll be more physically comfortable with the furniture we sit on and the products we hold; only the most relevant and personalized information from friends and family will reach us; and our movement in the digital world will be near telepathic.

I foresee several of today’s technologies as relevant to this particular vision of the future. They will evolve to not only be more powerful, but also more integrated with one other.

1. Smartphones

Smartphones, like today’s iPhone, are as much a computer as they are a communication device. Besides having a great multi-touch interface and fast CPU, they contain sensors like cameras, gyros, accelerometers, GPS and compasses. They allow us to calculate and communicate anytime, anywhere.

In the future, they’ll evolve into personal mobile computers (PMC). Assuming that Moore’s law holds true, mobile CPUs with near super-computing speeds will be entirely possible. The number, accuracy and performance of sensors will grow, the combination of which will give the user a very powerful sense of her surroundings.

Your PMC will move to your wrist and take the place of your watch. (Microsoft had this vision with SPOT, but the technology came too early and was too limited.) The device’s display will not need to be your primary user interface (UI), so the PMC can be a small, diverse fashion statement like today’s watches. The primary UI will become personal peripherals, like information glasses and headsets. You’ll be able to interact naturally in a visual and audible way.

Your PMC and personal peripherals will become your interface to every other computer, device and machine you interact with. The only UI you will ever need to know is that of your PMC.

Not only will your personal peripherals allow you to explicitly interact with the digital (and physical) worlds, but they’ll also provide subtle cues to your subconscious. While looking through your information glasses, a restaurant might emit a subtle, warm blue tint because it was reviewed positively by patrons. It will feel like a good place to eat. Are your spidey senses tingling?

2. 3G and 4G Wireless Broadband

“How many bars do I have?” We’re frequently checking smartphone signal strength when wirelessly browsing the Internet and retrieving our email. Today’s 3G and 4G networks provide acceptable but intermittent connections and okay speed. This must change.

The deployment of today’s cell towers is a slow, deliberate and costly affair. In the future, deployment will be faster and more organic. Wireless providers will likely credit homeowners’ monthly bills for having devices like AT&T’s 3G MicroCell at home. With enough of these devices in place, even remote neighborhoods and towns will enjoy solid wireless access to the cloud.

So in the future, personal mobile computers (PMCs) won’t even have signal strength indicators; wireless access to the cloud will be pervasive and ultra-fast at all times.

3. Cloud Computing

There is certainly a lot of hype around cloud computing, but few technology providers have done a good job explaining or providing services that are relevant to the average person.

The two most notable exceptions are Google and Apple. Google Docs is arguably the first cloud-based app that gained mainstream traction. Apple’s iCloud looks like it has the potential to cross the chasm and move the early majority into the cloud.

With tomorrow’s cloud computing, all of our personal information and the applications will be available to us at any time. Whether you’re editing a text document while riding a train, or adjusting a sales proposal at a client’s office, you’ll never be without the information needed to complete a task.

4. Eye-Tracking / Voice Commands

Today’s eye-tracking technology from companies like Tobii is used heavily in usability research. Where are people looking on a webpage, and how do their eyes move around it? Voice recognition products like Dragon from Nuance are used extensively when transcribing voice to text.

In the future, this technology will be combined with augmented reality (AR) to create a near-invisible and natural user interface for your PMC. We’ll call these information glasses. The object you’re viewing and the words you speak will be transmitted to your PMC, which will interpret your intent, find and compute and then transmit the results back to you visually and/or verbally. Look at a restaurant and say, “Do they have good salads there?” A moment later, you will hear the highest-rated salads, communicated via your information glasses either by visual display or audible voice, depending on what you are doing at that moment, like driving.

5. Augmented Reality

Today’s augmented reality (AR) will add floating text, symbols and 3D virtual images to a camera’s video feed to make it more informative or entertaining. Numerous iPhone apps like Layar provide local information. Tissot watches and Olympus cameras have webpages that let you experience virtual products. And Lego has a great point of sale display that lets kids virtually play with the toy inside the box they’re holding. You can even use AR glasses to experience this technology in a slightly more immersive, first-person point of view.

In the future, AR glasses will project images onto the lenses using components that are barely noticeable. Your PMC will display information on your glasses much like a heads-up display (HUD), for instance, with symbols projected along the periphery. Look at a symbol and say something, and your PMC will act on the broadcasted message. Your PMC will also do a great job of minimizing the information displayed, limiting it to just what you need to know now.

6. Social Networking

Social networking as it exists today on Facebook and Twitter requires users to do extra work to extract value. We must diligently manage our community of friends and followers, and weed through all the tweets and posts for those that pique our interest. In the future, the management of our network will be dynamic and automated; the system will make and break connections to ensure maximum value. As updates are posted, for example, only those relevant to you at the present moment will make it through the filter to your PMC.

Social networking may also become more integrated with other components of our digital lives, like our calendars, address books and GPS. When going to a scheduled meeting with someone, you may be presented with recent and relevant posts that person made on Facebook to help prepare for small talk.

Image courtesy of Flickr, escapedtowisconsin

7. CAD, 3D Printing & Custom Products

Computer-aided design (CAD) products are popular among engineers, designers and students for creating 3D product designs. But the software is often too advanced for the average consumer to design his or her own products.

In the future, however, CAD will allow the average consumer to design his own custom products that are both manufacturable and affordable. Consumers will be able to use simple software to combine predefined, configured product features. They’ll be able to personalize further by adding their own color palate, pictures, shapes and even personalized sizing.

3D Printing (3DP), like that from Dimension, is another amazing technology that will take a 3D CAD model and “print” layers of material, one on top of the previous, to produce a real physical model. It can create almost any shape, even those that can’t be made by traditional manufacturing. The downside today is that the process is slow, costly, and often doesn’t produce parts strong enough for real world use. The technology in this industry is always advancing, and in the future, it will be able to produce robust parts quickly and cheaply.

3D Printing in an industrial setting is often referred to as “additive manufacturing.” As products are ordered online, versatile manufacturing stations controlled by robots will quickly and affordably crank out custom-manufactured products. The robots will be controlled by process software that will be integrated with future CAD.

Online custom products are slowly gaining popularity. You can go to NIKEiD and design your own customized Nike shoes. The downside is that they are pricey and will take several weeks to get to you. Other websites such as ShapeWays and Ponoko are useful for many DIYers. The mass market appeal of sites like these will grow in the future (when combined with the simpler CAD described above) with fast, flexible and inexpensive manufacturing.

8. Autonomous Cars

Today’s cars are packed with a variety of driver assistance aids. You can get most any car today with GPS, but luxury car makers such as Audi, BMW, Mercedes and Volvo provide a whole lot more. Options now include active cruise control, lane departure warning/intervention, traffic info and blind spot warning. These cars can even brake on their own to avoid hitting an obstacle or pedestrian in front of the vehicle.

A few years ago, DARPA ran its Grand Challenge, in which teams competed to race fully autonomous cars that drove themselves. They were tested in off-road, highway and urban settings. Some of these competitors later went to work for Google’s autonomous vehicle efforts.

In the future, we will have autonomous cars, where driver control will be optional. Even though the thought might seem scary, the cars will be safer than any car you’d pilot yourself. They will constantly evaluate their current environment with multiple sensors -- and they’ll never get distracted by text messages.

Will they be complex to operate? Not at all. Your PMC will act as a user interface to any device, including your autonomous car. It will know your schedule and address book, so when you get into your car one hour before an appointment, the car’s GPS will instantly display the destination address and arrival time. All you have to do is say, “Let’s go!”

Image courtesy of iStockphoto, tlnors

More About: future, Gadgets, technology

On September 4, 1998, Larry Page and Sergey Brin filed for incorporation as Google Inc. — they had received a $100,000 check from an investor made out to Google, Inc., and needed to incorporate that name so they could legally deposit the check.

Prior to the launch, Page and Brin met at Stanford in 1995, and soon decided to launch a search service called BackRub in January 1996. They soon reevaluated the name (and the creepy logo) in favor of Google, a play on the mathematical figure, “googol,” which represents the number 1 followed by 100 zeroes. The name embodied their mission to create an infinite amount of web resources. And that they did.

Since then, Google has become a household name to billions of people worldwide. You’ll overhear senior citizens command their grandchildren to “google” the price of foot cream. You’ll witness toddlers punching the screen of the latest Android phone. And chances are, you’ve navigated the circles of Google+ (if not, let’s get you an invite already).

We’d like to guide you on a trip down Google lane, presenting the key products and acquisitions that were born in the first Google garage office, and innovated in the Googleplex. In the comments below, please share how Google has had an impact on your life, and join us in wishing Google a happy birthday!

1996-1997: BackRub

Google was first launched under the BackRub nomer. Soon after, founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin registered the Google.com domain name in September 1997. The two arrived at the name as a play on the mathematical figure, "googol," which represents the number 1 followed by 100 zeroes. The name embodied their mission to create an infinite amount of web resources.

1998: Google's First Homepage

The original Google homepage prototype debuted in November 1998. Earlier that year Google received a $100,000 check made out to as-yet-unestablished Google Inc. from first investor Andy Bechtolsheim.

In September 1998, the two founders set up shop in Susan Wojcicki‘s garage in Menlo Park, CA, deposited their check and hired their first employee, Craig Silverstein.

1999: The Uncle Sam Homepage

Apart from adding Uncle Sam to its homepage, in 1999 Google outgrew its next office and moved to its first Mountain View, California location. The team announced $25 million in equity funding from Sequoia Capital and Kleiner Perkins in its first press release.

2000: Google Becomes Yahoo's Default Search Provider

Apart from its partnership with Yahoo, in 2000 Google announced that its index reached the 1 billion-URL mark, making it the largest search engine in the world. Google also launched AdWord, a self-service ad program that allowed people to purchase keyword advertising that would appear alongside search results.

2001: Google Image Search

Image search launched in July 2001 with an index of 250 million images. That same year Google acquired Deja Usenet and archived its index into categories that ultimately made up Google Groups.

2002: Google Search Appliance

Early in 2002 Google marketed its first hardware, the Google Search Appliance, a device that plugged into a computer and provided advanced search capabilities for internal documents. In May Google announced Labs, a resource for people interested in trying out beta programs emerging from Google's R&D team. Later Google launched its News tool that provided links from 4,000 sources.

2003: AdSense

Google announced the world's largest content-targeted ad program, later dubbed AdSense after Google acquired Applied Semantics. Earlier in the year Google acquired Pyra Labs, the creator of Blogger.

2004: Gmail

Google launched Gmail on April Fool's Day 2004, but the beta version required an invitation to join. In January Orkut launched as Google's foray into social networking. In August, Google's initial public offering contained 19,605,052 shares of Class A common stock at $85 per share.

2005: Google Maps

Google Maps launched in February 2005, to go live on the first iPhone in 2007. Additionally, code.google.com went live to provide resources for developers, and included all of Google's APIs. The company also acquired Urchin, whose content optimization service helped create Google Analytics, launched later that year. In June Google released Google Earth, a satellite-powered mapping service. In October Reader was unveiled to help organize and consolidate content into a single feed.

2006: YouTube

In a $1.65 billion stock transaction, Google acquired YouTube in October 2006. Google also unveiled Trends, a tool that allows a user to evaluate popular searches over a specific timeframe. Earlier that year Google released Gchat, a Gmail-based instant message service derived from Google Talk. Google Checkout emerged later as a way to pay for online purchases.

2007: Android

In November 2007 Google announced its first mobile venture, Android, which the company called "the first open platform for mobile devices."

2008: Google Chrome

In September 2008 Google introduced Chrome, its open source browser. The surprise was spoiled when the comic book that was meant to help debut Chrome leaked a day ahead of schedule. Later that month T-mobile announced the G1, Google's first Android-powered mobile device. That year Google also added Google Suggest capabilities and site search.

2009: Google Wave

To much anticipation, Google announced its venture into real-time communication via the Wave platform. Little more than a year later, however, Wave was no more. That same year Google launched Mac-based photo application Picasa.

2010: Google Apps Marketplace

In 2010 Google launched its Apps Marketplace, an app store that allows third-party developers to sell their creations. That same year Google unveiled Google Buzz, its latest attempt at social sharing that originated in Gmail. The company also released Google TV after teaming up with Intel, Sony and Logitech.

2011: Google+

Google's most talked-about and participatory social platform thus far, Google+ launched in June 2011 with invite-only access. The tech giant also announced its most expensive acquisition to-date when it bought Motorola Mobility for $12.5 billion.

More About: Google, media, Tech

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Aliens, robots, utter dystopia, outer space and Tom Cruise; that’s the stuff futuristic films are made of (with the directorial power of James Cameron or Steven Spielberg). In this thought-provoking graphic below, designer Michael Hobson of Tremulant Design lays out the predictions of futuristic films on a timeline.

Perhaps unsurprising, movies made before the Internet’s adoption are strikingly far off in their predictions in comparison to movies made after. The movies I think are spot on if not slightly overshooting are: Minority Report, Wall-E, Robocop 3, 12 Monkeys, Vanilla Sky and iRobot. Escape from L.A.? Not so much.

If nothing else, it’s a list of movies to add to your Netflix queue. For example, how have I not seen Equilibrium? A movie where yoga and gunplay are combined? Crazy!

(Click image to enlarge)

Visual News

You know that thing you do when you forward on a tweet to your followers? Well, the word that describes it, ‘retweet’, is now officially in the Concise Oxford English Dictionary (COD), reports the Daily Mirror.

The act of sharing tweets of those you follow on Twitter with your own followers is now common practice. And as with the emergence of any new mediums, a whole new parlance has emerged to describe such activities – in this instance ‘retweet’ came to the fore. But how did the concept of retweeting emerge?

Twitter was founded in 2006, but it wasn’t until 2008 that retweeting began to popularize. No official mechanism was in place at that time – users would simply repost a message by one user and prepend it with “RT @username”. It wasn’t until August 2009 that Twitter began to integrate official retweet functionality into the platform.

Retweet buttons were added to all Twitter posts (next to ‘reply’) and, by August 2010, an official “Tweet button” was launched for use on external websites. That’s about as potted a history as you get, but it helps to show that a word can go from nothing to the Oxford English Dictionary in two years.

It also emerged that other tech-related words included in the COD are sexting (flirting by text message), and cyberbullying which refers to any bullying that takes place in a digital environment.

Meanwhile, in other completely non-tech related news, it transpires that mankini also made it into the dictionary, as did jeggings.Daily Mirror

You might want to spruce up that Facebook profile pic, because artist Adam Ellis could interpret it for you using his incisive caricature style of drawing.

He calls the series of drawings you’ll see in the gallery below “Never Be My Friend,” but we’re certain he means that in the nicest possible way:

Facebook Caricatures

Images courtesy Adam Ellis/Books of Adam

Facebook Caricatures

Images courtesy Adam Ellis/Books of Adam

Facebook Caricatures

Images courtesy Adam Ellis/Books of Adam

Facebook Caricatures

Images courtesy Adam Ellis/Books of Adam

Facebook Caricatures

Images courtesy Adam Ellis/Books of Adam

Facebook Caricatures

Images courtesy Adam Ellis/Books of Adam

Facebook Caricatures

Images courtesy Adam Ellis/Books of Adam

Facebook Caricatures

Images courtesy Adam Ellis/Books of Adam

Facebook Caricatures

Images courtesy Adam Ellis/Books of Adam

Facebook Caricatures

Images courtesy Adam Ellis/Books of Adam

Facebook Caricatures

Images courtesy Adam Ellis/Books of Adam

Facebook Caricatures

Images courtesy Adam Ellis/Books of Adam

Facebook Caricatures

Images courtesy Adam Ellis/Books of Adam

Facebook Caricatures

Images courtesy Adam Ellis/Books of Adam

Facebook Caricatures

Images courtesy Adam Ellis/Books of Adam

Images courtesy Adam Ellis/Books of Adam, via TechEBlog and AcidCow

More About: Adam Ellis, Caricatures, facebook, profile pic, trending

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One of the biggest pushbacks I hear from people when I talk about how wonderful I think Google+ will be for business professionals is that they’re tired. They’re tired of joining a new social network. They’re tired of going through the dance of re-adding their friends and connections on yet another platform. They’re tired of having to think up even more content for yet another platform, after having finally committed to Facebook or Twitter or wherever else.

Social Media Fatigue

For a lot of people, the fatigue comes from that sense that they’re doing all the work, but not seeing the results. For another group, it’s that feeling that we’ve all done this before, so why do it again? For others, it’s just that we’re getting to the point where we feel maybe that we’ve shared all we can think of sharing, and we’re tired of rehashing the same old things over and over again.

Are any of these you?

Wake Up

Writing about social media can be boring. Writing about how to empower people, however, is pretty much always interesting. Telling people the same old thing on Google+ that you’d have shared on Twitter or Facebook or LinkedIn is about as boring as it sounds. Maybe try doing something new with the platform. On an absolutely random post about eating the Swedish meatballs at IKEA, I got a comment back from writer and all around interesting thinker, Jeff Jarvis, about how he not only likes the Swedish meatballs, but he admits to liking Taco Bell. For whatever reason, I came away from the experience thinking, “Huh, I wouldn’t normally get into these conversations, inane as they are, on the other social networks. I wonder why I’ve given myself permission to do so here.”

Wake up. We can all find new ways to talk about social media by NOT TALKING ABOUT SOCIAL MEDIA. (Queue the Fight Club comments.) The thing is this: we’re using these tools to enable new connections. We’re using them to make different kinds of business happen. We’re using these tools to help causes that matter, and so much more.

It’s Your Choice

Look at your last 20 posts on any social network, and/or your blog. What are you talking about? Do you find yourself interesting? What else could you talk about instead? What would really change the nature of the conversation? How could you move from “talking about what everyone else is talking about” into talking about what’s next, what’s new, what’s personal, what’s helpful?

Make Your Own Media

These tools let you tell the stories you want to tell. They let you make something meaningful to you, to your business, to your pursuits. Nothing dictates how you use the tools to be your own media platform except your imagination and your ability to create. With that in mind, think up a few ways you might want to put these tools to use to tell the stories you want to tell.

• If you’re a real estate professional, why not bring the neighborhoods you’re selling to life in stories and videos.
• If you’re a freelance photographer, share the stories behind the photos.
• If you’re a corporate blogger, tell us the passionate stories behind the big official posts.
• If you’re writing just for your own passion, show us what you’re passionate about.
• If you’re someone selling something, tell us the stories around that product or service.

The opportunity is for us to make something interesting and worthwhile, to be helpful, to empower others, to encourage and inspire others. If we’re fatigued, let’s all wake up.

I’ll do it too, okay?

Can you remember what life was like before the Internet? Queuing in banks during lunch hour, buying music in record shops and writing letters with a pen and paper. It’s almost laughable now.

But as useful as the Internet is, there’s still plenty happening online that falls short of game-changing, and not much closer towards useful.

We’re not talking about well-meaning Web apps that set out to change the world but fail, and we’re not talking about badly-designed websites either. We’re talking about websites that have no ultimate goal: websites that make you go…’huh’?

1. Llama Font: Say it in llama

“Why would anyone want to write something in llamas? Because llamas make everything better.”

A simple, elegant website created by Avery Oldfield, an art director, and Jack Inscoe, a creative technologist. Llama Font does one thing: it transforms your text into a llama-style font. You can enter any message you like into the input box, and it translates your text in real-time into characters that resemble, well, llamas.

“It’s especially helpful in taking the edge off bad news”, claims Llama Font’s tongue-in-cheek what? section. I’m not in love with you anymore, or I’m sorry we amputated the wrong leg are two examples of such messages. “Helvetica is cold. Say it in llama.”

2. Do nothing for 2 Minutes: Relax, and listen to the waves

We covered this back in January, but it’s worth another mention. Do Nothing for 2 Minutes is a website that challenges you to do literally nothing for 2 minutes. If you touch the mouse, or press a key, then you fail and the counter goes back to the start. If you can sit on your hands for 120 seconds, well done.

Okay, this isn’t entirely pointless. It’s designed to encourage all you Internet addicts out there to sit back, relax and do nothing whilst staring at a beautiful sunset set against a soundscape of crashing waves.

Do Nothing for 2 Minutes was the brainchild of Alex Tew, the very same creator behind another pretty pointless Internet endeavor 6 years back – The Million Dollar Homepage. You can read all about that here.

3. Tetris 1D: It’s like Tetris meets patience

Tetris 1D is about as pointless as a website gets. It’s a Flash game involving your beloved Tetris, re-imagined as a one-dimensional game. You can’t turn the blocks, and even if you could, it wouldn’t do much good. You can make the blocks fall faster by pressing the downward arrow key, though:

To get on the leaderboard, you simply leave your browser open as long as you can, wait for the inevitable and then click ‘enter highscore’ when you’ve had enough. That’s if you don’t switch off and head somewhere a little more useful and do nothing for 2 minutes instead.

4. Shady URL: Discourage people from clicking on your links

URL shorteners are incredibly useful tools. For starters, they help you squeeze every millimeter of space from your tweets, and they can be used to help monitor the click-through rates of links that you circulate.

The downside to shortened URLs, however, is that you can’t easily see where the link is taking you – it could be to a 100% bona fide website, or it could be somewhere a little more sinister. There are ways ’round that, of course, and the overall pros of URL shorteners outweigh any downsides.

Shady URL, on the other hand, has no discernible use:

When you enter the URL, and you click submit, you’re then presented with a randomly generated, shady-looking link containing words that probably wouldn’t prompt you to click on it.

You can even tick the ‘shorten’ box and receive a shorter, but ‘somewhat less shady-looking’ link.

5. The Drama Button: Making mountains out of molehills

Some people need a bit of drama in their lives. Ensure you always have this website loaded, and the next time you’re in the office and someone’s creating a big hoo-hah about nothing, you can activate The Drama Button. Also available in various different guises in dedicated mobile app format, The Drama Button makes a dramatic ‘duh, duh, duuuhh’, when pressed:

6. Dice simulator: Life’s a gamble

“Dice are thought to be the oldest gambling device invented by man and have been around since before 2000 BC. There are many different types of dice, but the traditional dotted cube is easily the most common with each side having a pattern of dots ranging from 1 to 6.”

With the advent of the Internet era, it seems that dice no longer have to be physical objects. Dice Simulator lets you choose from between 1 and 6 dice, and it uses pseudo-random numbers to mimic the rolling of the dice. There aren’t too many practical use-cases for this website, but it works:

7. Selleck Waterfall Sandwich: Erm, yeah…

The Internet is awash with websites dedicated to everything from cats that look like Hitler to beard contests, and you probably thought you’d seen it all. Until now, that is. Believe it or not, there is an entire website specializing in photographs containing former Magnum PI actor Tom Selleck, waterfalls and sandwiches.

Aptly titled Selleck Waterfall Sandwich, this Tumblr blog has countless Photoshop mock-ups of these three aforementioned entities, and this ranks pretty highly on the ‘huh?’ front:

8. Freckle Count: A crowdsourced freckle-counting project

“This project has shown me parts of myself I’ve never seen before, nor did I ever want to see. I’ve certainly not felt so awkward, exposed or pale in my entire life. I suppose that’s the price you pay to count your freckles.”

Where to start? This isn’t actually a gimmick or a link-baiting website, Freckle Count is a genuine endeavor to have one man’s freckles counted by the global online populace. Every inch of Ryan’s body was photographed close-up, and visitors to the site click on a section of skin when they spot a freckle…and so on. The Freckle counter is currently at just over 29,000. Here’s a video of what was involved pre-project:

9. Pretty Loaded: Watch a website ‘load’…over and over and over

Nobody likes watching websites load do they? Thankfully, with broadband on tap these days, most websites load pretty quickly. But if you do have a penchant for watching animated ‘Loading’ graphics, Pretty Loaded is the site for you. It is actually mildly entertaining, seeing how imaginative people have been with some of the submissions on show here, and you can download these as screensavers too.

10. The Revolving Internet: Turn, turn, turn…

Oh boy, someone has actually developed a revolving version of the Internet. The Revolving Internet launches with Google swiveling in a clockwise manner. You can still enter text in the search box:

Whilst the site is revolving, The Windmills of your Mind plays in the background on loop. And when you arrive at your destination website…it continues to revolve too:

A completely pointless website, you’ll no doubt agree.

Over to you

Okay, these are just some of the random/pointless/’huh?’ websites out there. For every Amazon and YouTube, it seems there’s at least 10 Freckle Counts and Llama Fonts, so feel free to post your own suggestions in the comments below.

For years now, Netflix has been among the Web's most loved companies, scoring tops (or, this past year, second) in customer satisfaction for online retail.

Netflix deserves this respect because it delivers a complex service that, 99 times out of 100, just works. DVDs arrive remarkably quickly. Streaming is synchronized across your many devices. And, prices match or beat competitive options.

So it was surprising that such a firestorm sprang up when Netflix announced its pricing changes for DVD+streaming. On the face of it, Netflix's move was totally reasonable — initially, streaming was a throw-in to the DVD service, and, as it evolved to be the dominant reason to join, it needed to separate as its own line of business.

It's not surprising that a company whose raison d'etre was the abolition of video rental late fees would incur such customer wrath when introducing a (higher) fee structure. Still, it's clear Netflix handled this roll-out quite poorly. The company nailed the functional aspects of its service, but doesn't understand that the service is also a relationship between it and its customers.

Netflix's announcement shows a distinct lack of empathy. The argument made perfect sense to those who worked there — it was a rational explanation of the realities of their evolving business. But the company didn't see how customers would view this new pricing as a betrayal.

Perhaps Netflix assumed its customers thought like the company. A while ago, Netflix CEO Reed Hasting posted an immensely popular presentation on its corporate culture. It's a remarkable document, demonstrating among other things, a rational focus on results.

The only response from Netflix I've seen is in David Pogue's piece on his conversation with Netflix spokesman, Steve Swasey. And that job title about says it all. Companies who understand the emotional character of customer experience do not use corporate spokespeople. Apple had a similar blow up around what became known as Antenna-gate. Though it took them a little while to do so, when they responded, it was complete, thoughtful, generous, and final. Steve Jobs became the point person. Where is Reed Hastings in all this?

While there are no viable competitors to Netflix' offering currently, that won't always be the case. And the arrogance and tone-deafness demonstrated in handling this situation will give customers a reason to jump ship once another offering proves satisfactory (most likely from Amazon, who scored highest in online retailer customer satisfaction and has a burgeoning streaming media offering). Services businesses need to realize that their success is ultimately predicated on the trust built over time in their relationships with customers, and that such trust is affected not just by rational considerations, but emotional ones as well.

After less than 24 hours of being live, the Google+ iPhone app has hit the number one free spot in the Apple app store, beating out “Draw ‘n’ Go: Awesomeness!” for the top slot.

This is quite impressive considering that the app, which started out buggy and continued to be buggy after the “fastest update to an iPhone app” Erick has ever seen, is currently only pertinent to at the most an estimated 18 million people in the field test AND that Google has its own mobile operating system to focus on, Android.

What makes this milestone important is the fact that Google+ competitor Facebook currently has the top downloaded free iOS app of all time  — So Google+ is in good company. Of course Google does have a lot of marketing leverage for whatever it needs to push, namely its highly trafficked homepage.

You could put anything on there (Paul Carr’s book for example) and it would do well. But, at an average of three stars currently in its pretty substandard version, I’m pretty excited to see what the app will rate/rank when it actually works.

If I were Facebook my ears would be perking up right about now. Just sayin.’

At the beginning of the month I was asked to speak at a panel that discussed Social media, Social Networks and “What’s Coming Up Next”. In research for this discussion, I came up with a few insights on what I foresee coming up next in the world of social media.

Here are my top 10 insights:

1) The physical and digital worlds will be more highly connected than ever before – already today we are able to run in the park and track our progress online while sharing it with our friends or track our weight loss, or even our ovulation (well, some of us, that is) with iPhone apps that connect to our Facebook and twitter profiles and enable us to keep track of our progress as well as share the data with our friends. Robert Scoble had a brilliant presentation on this topic at the last TNW Conference in Amsterdam. You can see it here.

2) Facebook, Twitter and other major social networks will become increasingly what Fred Wilson coins “Social Dashboards”. In essence, Facebook and Twitter are social channels on which other companies can grow and develop their own technologies and businesses. Both Facebook and Twitter have created economies far larger than many nations. Take for example, companies like Stocktwits, Tweetdeck and Zynga, (amongst others) that have gained huge profits “piggybacking” on these two platforms.

3) Until now, brands have been very concerned with bringing as many people as possible to their pages. Consumer brands can now finally reap the fruits and build social commerce stores where Facebook users (all 700 Million of them) can purchase products on their favorite social network without needing to go to any destination site. Facebook will become one of the major channels of future online shopping.

4) Companies like Google, Facebook and Amazon are currently collecting information about each any every one of us: Our likes and dislikes, our interests and disdains. Soon in an age of Web 3.0, an age of Semantic Web, we will no longer need to search for information on the Web as information will find us based on all this data which companies are collecting. The right information will be served to the right people at the right time, saving us all a lot of time, effort and energy.

5) Mobile technology will become more dominant and NFC technology will be developed further enabling it to offer us special promotions, coupons and tips based on our geographical location and the interest graph we discussed in insight #3.

6) Human Relationships will no longer be as physically dependent and we will befriend and hang out with people from all over the world and all walks of life, all ethnicities and all beliefs, creating a worldwide melting pot.

7) We will no longer be passive media consumers. Media will interact with us in dynamic ways on all platforms. Just like gamers playing WOW today, we will all become a part of a virtual world unknown to us yet where we will all be avatars in the game of life.

8 ) As the Web is overloaded with more information, the content that we are exposed to will become more and more customized to our needs as companies will large sums of money to companies like Facebook and Google, making sure that the information we are exposed to is highly targeted to our interests. Rather than experiencing information overload, we will actually experience the opposite effect.

9) Companies will understand better how to measure the ROI of social media and realize that social media is not about the number of people brands have in their communities but rather the amount of engagement that they see on their page and the overall online sentiment they faced this month as opposed to the last. See Gary Vaynerchuk’s response to how companies should measure the ROI of social media in the video link above.

10) Services will become increasingly crowdsourced. Whether it be the way that we get from point A to point B (Waze), the way that we find answers to our questions (Quora), the manner in which we test our Websites (uTest), the way that we get things done (Fiverr) or the way that we share information (Wikipedia).
All of these insights are of course complete speculations based on my years of experience in the world of social media and following of trends occurring all over the digital space. Do you agree with these speculations? Is anything missing? What do you think is coming up next in social media?

What if your Twitter followers literally followed you everywhere you went?  What if people walked around with signs announcing their relationship status and sexual orientation, poked people on the street, or stuck post-its that said ‘Like’ on all the things they liked in real life?  A new viral video, ‘Can I be your friend?’ explores these questions in order to promote a brand new opera about our online lives.
continued…

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Human technology is an incredible phenomenon. It’s something that grows exponentially: for every advance we make, our next advances are more varied and easier to attain.

Our inventions are all around us, every day, making every part of life easier. Some people say that’s a terrible thing. I’m a futurist — I think it’s incredible.

But hey, if you want to go back to shoveling your own waste into the ground, be my guest.

Here’s a concept that’s even more fascinating than human technology: human technology. That is, putting the technology into humans.

Transhumanism, as it’s known, is the process of augmenting ourselves with advanced technology; the point where the technology isn’t merely an extension of ourselves — like your smartphone probably is — but a part of ourselves.

In shorthand, futurists refer to transhumanism as H+, or humanity plus. In just two characters they make the claim that technology can make us better than we are.

We’re a flawed species. I’m sure there are many things that can make us better than we are, like meditation for those inclined. But this concept of transhumanism — and the technologies that put it into practice, both conceptually and in practice right now — is the method of species improvement that fascinates and captures the imagination beyond any other.

The Fathers of Transhumanism

Transhumanism, for a topic so firmly rooted in the most modern, cutting-edge technologies of our day, has surprisingly old roots. Philosophers say that the human impulses that drive this desire to become something more were first recorded in the Epic of Gilgamesh, one of the earliest known recorded works of literature, which features a quest for immortality.

From the Bible’s Tree of Life to Stargate’s Ascension, the whole span of human literature is full of examples of our desire to become something more advanced than we are.

In the 19th century, Russian philosopher Fyodorov wrote about the potential of science to one day enable us to become immortal or raise each other from the dead, setting off a wave of discussion that was just as hopeful as fiction and legend but, for the first time, was speculatively serious (let’s discount the alchemists of various times and civilizations, whose theories were generally supported by supernatural assumptions).

In 1923, geneticist J.B.S. Haldane wrote that every advance in genetics and technology, when applied to humanity, would be called indecent, unnatural and blasphemous. So far, he’s been right. More time is spent discussing the ethics of human augmentation than on creating such technologies.

To be clear, I think it’s important that the ethics of augmentation are discussed. Just not the way the religious right hijacks the discussion and puts a blanket on rational debate.

It was Julian Huxley — brother of the famous science fiction writer Aldous — who first used the term transhuman, defining it as “man remaining man, but transcending himself, by realizing new possibilities of and for his human nature.” It was not until the next decade that the new definition (transhumanism as a transition to posthumanism, which we’ll look at momentarily) would enter the discourse in academic circles.

In later years, transhumanism is brought into the discourse of artificial intelligence and the Singularity by important figures in those fields, Marvin Minsky and Ray Kurzweil prime among them. Kurzweil, who outside of his synthesizers is most famous for his thoughts on the Singularity, holds to the view that transhumanism is an important stepping stone toward human immortality.

The Transhuman & The Posthuman

The ideas of transhumanism and posthumanism are closely linked. The transhuman is to the posthuman as the homo heidelbergensis is to the homo sapiens, one might say.

The posthuman is the destination: the human that transcends humanity through undefined means — technologically, spiritually, genetically. The posthuman has much in common with the Übermensch, a philosophical concept coined by Nietzsche that would come to be interpreted in many ways: racially by the Nazis, eugenically in a great deal of literature — The Wrath of Khan must be one of the seminal works in any rigorously academic posthumanist literature list — and through technology.

On the other hand, the transhuman is the journey. The term applies to people who are adopting the technologies and ideologies that lead to posthumanity — thus making them transitional: in between where we will be and where the rest of us are now.

What’s hard to determine is where transhuman becomes posthuman. Is it when mind uploading becomes a reality and we no longer need the human body? But certainly that in itself is not a final destination. Technological advancement is potentially limitless, and we’ll always find ways to apply that to our posthuman selves: bigger, better, faster memory! Better processing and indexing of input! Better hardware to allow ourselves to interface with the world!

Some may even argue that as soon as we augment ourselves in any way, we become posthuman. By this definition, everyone with a cochlear implant is posthuman. This approach has no place for transhumanism in the ideological landscape.

Like the grass that’s greener, I think it’s likely that transhumanism will always be a valid concept, even when one could argue that the posthuman has arrived. The destination is a concept rather than something we can quantify and achieve.

Everyday Transhumans

It’s easy to condemn transhumanistic endeavors when detractors are quick to flood the discussion with images of Star Trek’s Borg and Shelley’s Frankenstein.

But there are people who are living as transhumans today, and their quality of life (and in some cases, their life, period) can be attributed to their transhuman features.

When you take a step back and look at the good these technologies do for people — people you may well know — that harsh glare fades away pretty quickly. For most people, the families of the deaf who can now hear thanks to the cochlear implant or those with heart conditions who are alive because of their pacemaker, that these devices even exist is reason for gratitude and optimism.

The cochlear implant is an incredible invention. Granted, it’s a poor substitute for real hearing, and you can hear for yourself what speech and music sound like through one of these devices. But it’s incredible because it’s an invention that, in lieu of an ear, plugs right into the nervous system to send the electrical impulses of sound to our brain. Even if it does so badly right now, it’s a leap ahead of the regular hearing aid.

The expensive implants are purchased by those who are completely deaf or reasonably close. If they want to hear, they have no other option but to enter this static-filled world. What’s amazing is that they are often able to hear and hold conversations without assistance after some adaptation time.

Imagine what such devices will look like decades down the line. In Star Trek: The Next Generation, Geordi La Forge is a blind engineer who uses a “visor” to see. This visor doesn’t just compensate for a lack of human sight, as the cochlear does for hearing. It allows him to see spectrums of light well beyond regular human perception. When will we have cochlear devices that extend the range and spectrum of human hearing beyond what is naturally possible with even the best ears?

I wouldn’t be surprised to see that before I die.

We’ve seen a wave of transhuman development in recent years. Australian researchers this year created a technology that allows the disabled to dictate to a computer. In 2004, a quadriplegic man received a brain implant that allowed him to check email and play games using his thoughts. The more recent development in Australia means people like him could soon be writing responses to those emails as well.

After forty years of academic excitement and debate around the concept of transhumanism, we’re no longer waiting for it. We’re seeing it happen.

Haldane’s Law

There’s no such thing as Haldane’s Law. I’m making it up for convenience. Remember his assertion that every technology that’s developed to augment humans beyond their natural capabilities would be met with disgust, claims that scientists are playing God, and comparisons to Frankenstein?

There are many examples of this in history. One of those is IVF. The first IVF baby was born in 1978 and the public reaction was one of condemnation for the scientists, the parents and the child itself. Those scientists had to stop their work after the second delivery because of that reaction, but today over 100,000 IVF babies are born each year.

Today, we see IVF as a normal approach to solving fertility problems. The only people left opposing it would fit in Fred Phelps’ dining room.

One of IVF’s long-time detractors, Leon Kass, once said regarding cloning that those who tolerate it have “forgotten how to shudder and always rationalize away the abominable.”

This is a common argument by the group of people that Haldane’s Law refers to. What it does is take the responsibility of rationalism off of those who oppose things simply because they make them recoil.

But how do you define the abominable rationally? Historically, abominations are defined only by what we are not yet familiar with. In the past society has called homosexuals abominable. For the most part, at least in the Western world, we’re beyond that phase of societal retardation now, but as a species we’re certainly not past the instinct to recoil at the unknown.

It’s that instinct, as unevolved as it is, that people like Kass hope will prevail.

To me, they might as well say: “this isn’t rational, and we can’t defend it. We’re just disgusted.”

We continuously see this cycle in motion. People are frightened by new discoveries or just the plain old unusual, cause a public kerfuffle, and hold up social advance or technological adoption for a time — a time in which the lives of people who need such social or technological advance could have benefited.

But just for a time. As the years roll by, more and more people are willing to take risks as the public discourse and debate slowly adjusts their expectations, making people feel more at ease and familiar with such things. The early adopters — for instance, the first IVF customers — decide to go ahead at the expense of condescending looks from their friends and neighbours, until it becomes normal.

The Future of Transhumanism

As interesting as it is to consider that we’ve already taken the first steps into the realm of transhumanism, the real wonder — at least for futurists — is in what could be possible.

The cochlear implant is an amazing thing, but it’s got nothing on the speculation and predictions for the future.

According to futurist George Dvorsky, experts believe that genetic diseases can be eliminated by 2030. But that’s not all our rapid advances in genetics can help us achieve. Our intelligence and memory, our health and strength, can all be improved in the next few decades — though the costs associated with having yourself modified will likely remain sky-high for decades.

In that vein, imagine a world where you can have your metabolism adjusted to suit your line of work, instead of doing crazy things to manipulate your body’s metabolic regulation.

In science fiction, we’ve seen plenty of examples of sensory enhancement. As is often the case, futurists are following sci-fi’s lead and working to bring those things to life. We may see implants that return vision to the blind, La Forge style. There are predictions of high resolution implants that will allow humans to see things at great distances in great detail.

Forgoing the idea of implants, there’s the possibility of changing sensory organs themselves — for instance, adapting the human eye to take on some of the characteristics of the eagle eye, allowing us improved vision without the need for electronic devices in our skull.

As an extension of our eyes rather than an improvement, heads-up displays are a real possibility, and they’ll allow us to perform computing tasks in our head, with our eyes as the monitor. There are two methods that scientists speculate such technology would employ: retinal display, where the light is projected directly onto the retina, and synaptic interface, which doesn’t use light to create an image but rather transmits visual information directly to the brain.

This will no doubt inspire many run-of-the-mill applications such as checking your email in your head and quickly looking up words in the dictionary during a conversation so you don’t look like an idiot. But, as an atypical geek, I’m excited about the implications for gaming: synaptic interfacing would enable receipt of stimuli for other senses as well, meaning we could play completely life-like, realistic games in our head. It’s the Holodeck, without the need for a physical space.

Interestingly, the synaptic interface method has the reverse application of capturing visual data, using your eyes as a video camera. The synaptic interface method hasn’t been tested on humans, but there has been some success in capturing video signals from the optical nerves of horseshoe crabs, and even in sending video signals back into the crabs’ brains.

A combination of synaptic interfacing and networking would make telepathic communication one of the more basic applications of this technology. Chances are, once the synaptic interface problem is solved, telepathy will be one of the first ways for (rich) consumers make use of it.

Humans are vain, and of course cosmetic applications haven’t been ignored. Anti-aging technology could combat free radicals and oxidation through chemical/hormonal control or nanotechnology. We could control the pigments of our hair follicles, the hormones that control male baldness, and even generate tattoos that can be painlessly created, modified, animated, and easily removed.

We could disconnect our emotions when there’s a need for rationality — such as when that car salesman is sucking you in on an unnecessary upgrade — or select our instinctual motivators, switching off our desires for food, entertainment and sex when we need to focus on work we’re not motivated to complete. Or, instead of switching them off, we could re-align them so that the work feeds into and satisfies those motivators.

While you’re up there screwing around with things in your head, why not adjust your pain threshold so you can take a beating without breaking a sweat well past the point CIA trained operatives would have broken?

Here’s the kicker: the things I’ve just mentioned? They’re the small biscuits, the inventions that’ll come and go in the near future before our real breakthroughs, as far as futurist scientists are concerned.

Blood too inefficient? Replace it with vasculoid! Traumatic injury? Switch on accelerated cell regrowth! Worried about your weakest failure point, the heart, even with genetic improvements to its reliability and longevity? Get a redundancy heart system.

What if you get crushed by a train? That heart system would’ve been a waste of money — it’s not going to help you in that scenario. So how about we forget about iCloud and backup our DNA and our brain contents, ready to be restored in a new body at the drop of a.. well, train?

We can adapt our bodies to deal with extreme environments that we’re usually unable to explore without restrictive suits or remotely through robots — for instance by using the anti-freeze proteins found in the Arctic Flounder in our own bodies. It’s a technique that has already shown success in preserving citrus plants through harsh winters.

There’s a lot of talk about being unable to ever leave our own solar system because, even with the technology to create a ship that’ll get us that far, last that long, and not run out of fuel, we’ll die because even nearby trips take tens or hundreds of thousands of years. Cryostasis is a sci-fi favorite solution for this, and nanites may help to make it work. It could be augmented with the development of a natural ability to hibernate, for shorter trips within the solar system for instance.

Transhumanism is About the Dream

Some people would read that last section and feel repulsed. Many others would feel excited. Transhumanism, for the latter group of people, isn’t so much about the technology itself as it is about the dream of becoming better: of going beyond the capabilities that we were born with.

It’s no surprise, then, that transhumanism is a popular philosophy among wealthy entrepreneurs like Raymond Kurzweil. That same idea of going beyond what’s considered possible has applied in their personal and business lives, too.

Transhumanism is a heady subject. The possibilities get the mind spinning. The ethical implications result in debates that roll on for decades. It’s something that academics dedicate huge chunks of their lives to studying and considering.

For me, I’d rather leave the ethical debates to someone else and look at the sheer possibilities. I just hope that I live long enough to see some of the more radical applications of transhuman technology become a reality.

If you haven’t stumbled upon Intel’s Museum of Me yet, you really need to give it a go. A showcase of everything that’s brilliant and creepy about the social Web, it hooks into your Facebook account to build a museum… of you.

Within seconds of authorising your account, you’ll be taken on a video tour of the museum, which has rooms dedicated to your life, your friends, places you’ve been, things you’ve liked and even a huge screen displaying words from your status updates.

It’s incredibly impressive, although it’s fair to say that if it were real it would be an incredibly boring exhibit for anyone but yourself. Yet according to the video the public are happily touring your life – instant ego boost!

Here’s a video of the generic experience – now go try it with your life pasted on. I guarantee it will leave you feeling… strange.

You haven’t? Well, we have a handy chart for you on that subject, anyhow. So get your iPad and your paintbrush stylus, and get ready to follow along.

On the canvases of Bob Ross, Facebook is a mega mountain with 600 million happy little users, and Google Buzz is a desert with “swirly tumbleweeds.” We’ve also got Ross’s take on Path, Color, Digg, Reddit and a slew of other social web apps.

This infographic comes to us from Flowtown, a social marketing startup, and the designers at Column Five Media.

Click image to see full-size version.

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Social media-savvy people are more likely to be helpful to others offline too, new research has found.

A study of 24,000 consumers across the 16 largest countries found that those who are most connected, living on the cutting edge of social media tend to be more ‘prosocial’ than average, being more likely to do volunteer work, offer their seats in crowded places, lend possessions to others and give directions.

The research was compiled by Let’s Heal, an Amsterdam-based independent non-profit organization which aims to help brands become more prosocial – brands that help others by doing good.

“It’’s no secret that I’’m especially interested in ‘Meaningful Prosocial Brands’ in particular, because rather than just helping others, they facilitate their consumers to help others and in doing this, they can mobilize a  large force for good,” says Let’s Heal founder Mark Woerde. “‘Meaningful Prosocial Brands’ go beyond ‘social responsibility’.  These brands use their marketing power and engage target groups to the max and facilitate  them to help other people by tackling small or big societal issues.”

Woerde gives nappy (diaper) brand Pampers as an example of a prosocial brand, noting how it has committed to ridding the world of tetanus by the year 2013, making the issue key to its brand. For each Pampers pack purchased, one child gets vaccinated.

It appears that these prosocial brands particularly appeal to social media-savvy folk. The study found that 72% of the social media savyy prefer to buy prosocial brands, compared to 61% of people less engaged in social media. Similarly, the savvy folk tend to prefer working for a prosocial company (81%) more than most (61%).

While most prosocial brands are likely to be ‘doing good’ in order to maintain a positive image in the eyes of the public, it seems that doing good correlates closely with use of social media. In short, this study seems to indicate that either social media makes us nicer… or nicer people use social media more

You can draw your own conclusions by downloading the full study from LetsHeal.org.Image source

Reading the news in recent weeks, it’s becoming increasingly clear that there are the early signs of a new war brewing in the mobile computing space. And it’s a war that promises to be the most fascinating one yet. It doesn’t involve Microsoft or Nokia or RIM or HP or Palm. It doesn’t even include Apple. It’s all about Android.

Whereas right now, it’s all Google/Android vs. Apple/iOS, what happens when it becomes Google/Android vs. Amazon/Android? It’s going to happen. It’s just a matter of “when”.

First, a bit of backstory. Last August, The New York Times reported that Amazon was looking into creating hardware beyond its Kindle e-reader. A month later, we received a tip which proved to be a confirmation that Amazon was gearing up to launch their own Android app store. Alongside that tip, we received one from the same tipster stating that Amazon was also working on an Android-based tablet. This past March, we saw the Amazon Appstore launch, but Android hardware from Amazon was not yet anywhere to be seen. Still, as we wrote at the time, it seemed inevitable.

Fast forward to last week. In an interview with Consumer Reports, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos said two words when asked about a new Amazon tablet that set the Internet on fire: “stay tuned.” The following day, the site Android and Me published another tip coming from “an industry insider with direct knowledge” who says that Amazon is not only gearing up to launch one Android device, but an “entire family” of them. And those devices would come in time for this holiday season.

And that brings us to today. BGR is now running the rumor that Amazon is prepping a dual-core “Coyote” and a quad-core ” Hollywood” tablet for release this year. Android isn’t mentioned, but well, yeah. If there’s truth to these claims, that’s how they’ll work.

And that brings us to our war.

Imagine a 2011 holiday shopping season where Android-crazed consumers hungry for the latest tablets have to pick a side. Do they go with the Google-backed variety (perhaps a Nexus model tablet)? Or do they go with the Amazon-backed variety?

Even if it doesn’t happen this year, extend the same question into next year. Again, this seems inevitable at this point. There’s a reason why Amazon not only built their own Android-based app store, but is working on deals left and right to get exclusives on apps and pricing. Just today, it was revealed that PopCap would give the Amazon Appstore the exclusive rights for Chuzzle and the all-important Plants vs. Zombies for a set timeframe. This means they’ll have the games and Google’s own Android Market will not (at first). That’s huge. And you can expect more of those types of deals.

Still think Amazon won’t be making Android devices?

They have to. The experience of installing their Appstore on current Android devices, quite frankly, sucks. They need to get devices in consumers hands that has their store pre-installed. They may be able to work out deals with some carriers to do that. But remember that Google also has deals with the same carriers. You don’t think Google would figure out some way to block (or heavily discourage) such maneuvers? Amazon needs to make their own devices with a customized version of Android that is centered around their software/experience. And they will.

And what does Google do if it’s significantly better than the experience they offer with Android? Do they stick to the “open” nonsense? Or do they start locking stuff down (even more) when they realize that Amazon is commandeering their own platform? What if Amazon strikes a deal with Microsoft to put Bing on their Amazon tablets? What if the ads are handled by someone else whose name doesn’t end in “oogle”? It could be bad news for the search giant.

Google has succeeded in building a massive platform that doesn’t fully rely on them. That’s awesome on paper. But it can work both ways. If others start to realize that they don’t need Google, what does Google do? Just sit there and take it?

The answer, of course, is “no”. They’ll fight back. Maybe they’ll use carrots. Or maybe they’ll resort to sticks.

All I know is that I’ll be watching. With popcorn.

[image: Lucasfilm]