South By Super Sad True Love Story By Southwest

In Gary Shteyngart’s novel Super Sad True Love Story (Random House, 2010), the schlubby protagonist clings to his old-world ways, doing his best to resist the overabundance of technology and information that barrages him in a not-too-distant-future version of New York City. He is starkly contrasted by his love interest, a younger woman who has grown up with these perpetual streams of stimulus and embraces them without question. The book tells a cautionary tale of personal connections and human relationships gone awry, replaced almost entirely by digital communication and instant, unlimited access to data. While I’m tempted to shrug off this dystopian future, a startling amount of this tech exists already and is gaining popularity. In this way, Shteyngart’s novel feels uncomfortably akin to nonfiction.

Highlight & Glancee were recently deemed the kings of South By Southwest (SXSW 2012), while peripheral nods were given to their competitors like Banjo & Sonar. These apps show you information about those around you. More specifically, they display location-based Facebook interests and Facebook friends-of-friends of people who are physically near you, in the same bar or on the same street. The impetus to browse search results, judge potential connections and act upon them is up to each individual user, but these apps provide opportunity. For more information, Robert Scoble gives a stellar rundown on The Next Web.

Info and images, social networks and video chat, newsfeeds and live-streaming, and above all the shopping, Shopping, SHOPPING – all of this is beamed to äppärät users in real-time, a userbase that includes basically everyone on Earth, minus the destitute and the elderly. While specifics are never given, the äppärät is described as a futuristic iPhone where a haze of holograms replaces the touchscreen and display real-time information on and around the user. The latest äppärät is a small pebble-like device worn like a trendy necklace, a cell phone immune to the battery woes of today. Nothing in the book is so futuristic that I can’t imagine it becoming commonplace in the next year or two.

With these new apps, the data used for comparing and ranking your nearby peers is pretty mundane: movies and bands you like, your favorite cuisine, perhaps the schools you attended. These are things that any Facebook friend could learn about you, but when this info is automatically sent to strangers in text-message-like pings, it changes from passive to active data. You are broadcasting information about yourself to anyone who has downloaded a free app – I can wait while you go update your Facebook “likes.”

The data being sent around by apps like Highlight is rather innocuous – it’s strictly qualitative stuff. But Super Sad True Love Story takes data-sharing to the extreme, where anyone with an äppärät can see quantitative data like your credit rating, your cholesterol level and even your annual salary. In this novel, not only is privacy dead, it’s been long-forgotten.

Before apps like Highlight can gain widespread adoption, they’ll need a filter system (such as a minimum number of friends in common) to weed out the surge of false-positives. For instance, you’d be more inclined to chat up someone with 6 common Facebook friends than someone with only one third-degree connection. Similarly, you might not shy away from approaching a stranger if you had a very specific interest in common; millions of people like Radiohead, but as a New York City resident, I’d happily chat with another fan of Portland, Oregon’s DJ Copy.

In the not-too-distant-future, speaking to another person… out loud… face to face will be so uncommon that it gives rise to the term “verbal-ing.” In the novel, everyone is surrounded by three-dimensional clouds of information, images, advertisements and videos. Even today, it’s too easy to get sucked in by the distractions of a smartphone and miss the real world around you. But apps like Highlight are not as ominous as they may initially sound.  By encouraging people to socialize and meet new friends, these apps turn a few common interests into the potential for a friendship, as it was in the pre-smartphone era.

For more info, check out a video interview with Shteyngart on the äppärät via TechCrunch.

Clap Twice for Pizza: Gesture Recognition Makes this Dream a Reality

It’s no secret that, when it comes to home entertainment, we’re in the midst of a distribution revolution. Content once tied to broadcast airwaves is now being ravenously consumed on the internet via computers, video game consoles and set top devices.

TriplePoint has the privilege of working with some of these new media startups. PlayOn (which recently made the jump to iPhone; CNET link) streams Hulu and other web video onto PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360, without the need for a costly Hulu+ account. For those without a video game console, Softkinetic is providing a Microsoft Kinect-like experience to a massive install base via their set top box gesture recognition system.

With two cameras and a powerful microphone, Kinect knows who’s in front of the TV. For games like Dance Central, the technology will track all the poppin’ and lockin’ you can throw at it. But as an entertainment hub, a Kinect-enabled Xbox 360 will change the way that marketers convey their messages. Advertising is the backbone of media, providing the funding for programming and keeping content free for the viewer.

Softkinetic and Microsoft face a major challenge with these user-recognizing innovations. The product must find the right combination of allure, cost and ease-of-use, or at least hit two sides of this triangle. Kinect is rumored to cost $150, putting it well above the $99 impulse-buy sweet spot and closer to the price of a new game console. Softkinetic, on the other hand, will have less features but will also enjoy wider adoption, since the system will piggyback onto cable boxes and not require additional equipment.

As these devices become a fixture of the entertainment centers in dens and rec rooms around the world, ultra-targeted advertising will be commonplace. In order to frame this in a positive light, marketers will highlight the family-friendly aspects of these targeted ad systems.  For instance, “No R-rated movie previews if children are detected,” or, similarly “no beer commercials until the registered account holder turns 21.”  Of course, there are many aspects of these targeted ads that appeal to advertisers, too.  For instance, gender-specific commercials can now be tied to the actual gender of the viewers, rather than the network making educated guesses about the viewing audience based on the channel, program and time of day

Interactive ads are not far behind. Many of today’s preroll web video ads ask if you’d prefer to interrupt your show with 3 traditional thirty-second commercials, or watch a 90 second long-form ad before the show begins.  By giving the viewer a choice, marketers engage the audience and have a better change of holding their attention.

With mics and 3D cameras in place, these ads will evolve into mini-games – how many on-screen Pepsi bubbles can you “pop” by waving your hands, before the time runs out? Sponsored gameshow-style quizzes are also possible, since the systems can detect multiple voices in the room. First one to finish this jingle gets 10 points on their gamerscore!  “Plop plop, fizz fizz…”

Social media integration is already built into modern game consoles.  In the future, before the new Top Chef episode streams, you’ll be prompted to invite other online friends who ‘like’ that show on Facebook to join you and watch together, virtually.

During the show, ads will feature music by artists from your Last.fm account that you’ve “favorited.” Local advertisements will pinpoint your self-identified exact location and give you offers that are relevant to your tastes.  For instance, the Italian restaurant below your apartment is offering double-pepperoni for the price of cheese, and they’ll be open for another 45 minutes.  Since your credit card is on file with your Xbox Live or PSN account, you can literally say the word and have hot pizza at your door before Padma calls the chef’testants to the judge’s table. Are you watching solo, or did you invite the whole gang over? Accordingly, you’ll get promotions ranging from personal-pan pizza to the ultra-jumbo feast.

There’s a great deal riding on the success of these gesture- and user- recognition systems.  Their main strength is in eliminating the “input middleman,” giving users greater control over their own entertainment. They also give marketers new ways to reach consumers. While this new technology is exciting on many levels, it will also present unseen obstacles and take years before adoption is truly mainstream. Only time will tell if the universal remote can survive this Minority Report future.

Frisky Mongoose: Why Do We Play Social Games?

I think it’s a bit harsh to say that social gamers are “weird”, as Newsweek recently put it… But you have to dig a little deeper than face(book) value to understand the attraction of playing casual games with actual friends on the (social) web.

In the end, it all boils down to the fact that people like playing games with their friends, and the Facebook platform allows new audiences to enjoy a “gaming community” atmosphere in a familiar setting (Facebook) with people they know, and games they can learn to play easily and that don’t require a large time investment to enjoy (social gamers are busy)!

It’s more fun to beat your friends than strangers, and social games can even lead to better connections with Facebook friends you don’t know very well, or otherwise wouldn’t have a chance/reason to interact with on a regular basis.

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Social Plays in Networked Gaming

Yesterday, I had the pleasure of presenting at the monthly Social Media Expedition Memphis breakfast meetup. It was a great chance to take a look at “social gaming” from a different perspective, as many attendees knew little about the video games industry, but they were all social media enthusiasts.

The result? An exploration of the connection between video games, technology and social media, and what it all means for marketers. For brevity, I’ll just say that the relationship between gaming and social media is, by all means, symbiotic. For a more thorough explanation, check out the full presentation on SlideShare below.

In such an emerging space, one can never have all the right answers. Let me know what you think – insight, opinions, questions… All feedback is more than welcome!

Social Plays In Networked Gaming by Kate Hancock

View more presentations from triplepoint.

The Social Web: Redefining the Online Landscape

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More and more parts of our lives are becoming tangled in the Social Web – Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, LinkedIn and Digg are buzzwords everywhere you turn, and everyone *could be* paying attention to your social doings these days… But are they? In any case the fact is, social media is creating a new organizational framework for the internet, the way we interact with others, and the way we manage and conduct our daily lives, online and off.

The social networking industry is worth billions and over 35% of US Web users 18+ actively use social networking sites, up from just 8% in 2005. That’s in addition to a whopping 65% of 12-17-year-old Americans who are currently on social networks, said the Pew Internet & American Life Project survey in January 2009. With SO many different networks, the virtual world (Wide Web) is quickly becoming as socially diversified and segmented as the real world. Cliques and niche groups now have the resources to form their own SNs and cut out a large chunk of the “noise”. There are sites for professional networks, social groups, charities, churches, schools, universities, doctors and pharmacists, parents, micro-bloggers, video-sharers – a site for them all…

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But wouldn’t life be easier if all of those various personal and professional contacts could all just be on one social networking site, or in one place, one destination? Instead of keeping up with five or ten different sets of contact info, profiles, links, status updates, applications, comments, jokes and photos… I mean, we’re already struggling to keep up with five thousand different people here – give us a break!

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Defining the Social Media Landscape, Literally

What would any good definition be without a dictionary? Here are the “real” definitions of our social media landscape, archaic or fleeting though they may be…

Social– adj. “relating to society; organization of the way people live and work together in groups; seeking or enjoying the companionship of others; pertaining to the life, welfare, and relations of human beings in a community; relating to the public as an aggregate body; consisting in union or mutual intercourse”

Media– noun “the means of communication that reach or influence people widely; something intermediate; surrounding conditions or influences; an intervening agency or means by which something is conveyed or accomplished; channels of general communication, information, or entertainment in society, such as newspapers, radio, or television”

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Social Media– According to our old friend Wikipedia, and who better? Besides, perhaps Wordia the “next-gen social dictionary”… I digress, Wiki says social media is “primarily Internet- and mobile-based tools for sharing and discussing information among human beings; most often refers to activities that integrate technology, telecommunications and social interaction, and the construction of words, pictures, videos and audio; AKA: user-generated content (UGC).”

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Defining the Social Media Landscape, Comparatively Speaking

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Vivity Scenes allows users to create a 3-D virtual scene “experience” to embed on any blog, brand or site. Vivaty created services for  Facebook and AIM in May 2008.

To sum up in response to my original question – are social networks (SNs) and virtual worlds (VWs) merging into one medium? In my opinion, not only are they converging, rather social networks are, at the core, just more user-friendly versions of virtual worlds.

The only real differences are user interface (UI), visual presentation, text opposed to graphics/pizzazz, and most of all, the idea of escape from- versus extension of- real life. In other words, either it’s an “escape” – as in an MMOG, where players create an avatar and explore a fictional world and/or storyline, or it’s an “extension” of the real world – as in a social network.

The 2008 VW Report shows that adult and teen VW development numbers are on a steady decline, while kids VWs are more rampant than ever. I firmly believe this is because adults today aren’t generally interested in treading the confusing and often complicated waters of a VW user interface. Our lives are increasingly busy as it is, and most adults don’t have time to build and maintain a “second life”, or for that matter even bother trying to figure out the technology. But we sure as hell have time, and eagerly welcome a SN where we can easily keep up with friends, family, professional colleagues and a million and one other things in-between. I think it’s safe to say that an “extension” must be more important than an “escape” to adults and teens in today’s society…

Continue reading Defining the Social Media Landscape, Comparatively Speaking