Interactive TV, linking consumers to advertisers

Last night Ron Swift asked us how we could track actual advertisements with consumer consumption. Did the consumer get lured into the store by walking by it? Or did they see something online and come in to try it on and then purchase? E-mail and online coupons allow the store to link their online marketing to actual sales. Yet, television advertising is still a mystery. Who knows how many sales can be associated with those ads?

Over the next year, TV watchers in the NY area will have a new way of interacting with some of their commercials. Optimum Select is launching a new advertising service that will give TV viewers the power to snag coupons, have free samples delivered or learn more about products in commercials by clicking their remote.

Of course we know that this also means that those advertisers will be learning a lot more about you as well. That coupon will be printed or placed on your iPhone and link your purchase online or in the store to your TV watching habits. As with so many things today – fascinating, cool, and creepy all at the same time….

All of this is looking to a future in which every TV show can be a virtual store in which we can laugh at Tina Fey’s joke and then use our remotes to buy her shoes (or her typewriter). I know that product placement is already everywhere…but it will be interesting to see how this will change TV even more.

the Hulu Chain

After playing with Hulu, pondering Hulu, and then reading an assortment of articles about Hulu, I am swimming in Hulu tidbits that seem to all link together…

• Hulu is free and consequently spreading like wildfire (ok – it might be that Alec Baldwin commercial too)
• Right now Hulu is losing money…about 9 million in the last year
• Speaking of…how do they make money?  With advertising just like major network TV
• Through the thumbs up thumbs down option, advertisers are getting feedback from users on the ads created for Hulu
• Watchers, in turn, are getting ads tailored to their interests (although not necessarily products that match up – I like ads for things I have no interest in buying)
• Why are NBC, CBS, etc providing their shows to Hulu?  What are they getting?  Well, I read that Hulu shares about 70% of their income with their content partners. 
• Broadband networks are now reacting to the impact of streaming video with download-oriented protocols. 
• Google now appears to be looking into figuring out how to adapt to all of our crazy streaming by working with service providers to cache some of its content for more rapid delivery.
• Hulu made me buy  a new TV - Well, ok it might have been the combo of my converter box having its final hurrah, my disinterest in another monthly financial commitment of cable when I get 20 some channels for free, and, now, the availability of Hulu.  Yesterday, I bought a TV that I can connect to my computer. 

So, what is on the horizon?

• Well, there are likely to significantly fewer dorm rooms with actual TVs
• With such a large following all ready, it is likely that Hulu will be able to make money through tweaks to their advertising and circulation strategies. 
• Rumor has it that Hulu has already hinted at the possibility of making itself a charged site
• Small independent shows without the backing of network or cable television have more of a chance to get on a site like Hulu and gain an audience
• TV shows will compete more on the merits of the individual show than based on the timeslot that it is given.  For instance, while a show might not be able to stand up against a timeslot that has it paired against The Office, it may be in the top 10 shows available via video stream
• Network and cable television will need to adapt to a revenue stream that is split between traditional advertising and advertising through sources such as Hulu and any other stream that is on the horizon

Twitter Aps

It isn’t super original, but I am going to cover the top 5 most popular Twitter applications. I figure you gotta know the basics first, right?

• Twitpic lets you share photos on Twitter. You can post from your phone, the Twitter site, or their API
• Tweetdeck apparently keeps you in contact across Twitter, Facebook, MySpace and “more” all at once. From one page, you can update your social networking sites, send your Twitter Pictures, manage multiple Twitter accounts, and organize groups.
• With a similar concept to the Tweetdeck, Disgby allows you to see e-mail, IM and social networking.
• Twitterfeed links your blog to Twitter. It automatically turns your blog entry into a tweet.
• Twitterholic is a Twitter ranking site in which the most popular Twitter-ers are tracked and ranked.

So, most of these, Twitterdeck, Digsby and Twitterfeed are essentially about multitasking. This makes sense to me. I don’t have time to social network…not even one network….much less use the wealth of tools that I am learning are out there. Having to repost to all of the various networks, blog and then follow it up with a tweet…well, I’d think it would get old.

I have a couple of reasons that I might be looking into (getting over myself and) using these sorts of tools more and more. For one, my husband is an artist. He is a woodworker making mostly furniture and the occasional boat and then other commissions that take him into other mediums than wood. I have started to blog a bit for my husband’s business as we don’t always have nice professional photos to update the website with. We do simple posts that are time consuming enough for me. But I can imagine if we expand his online presence that I will want to consolidate. We are also about to start a small company with our friends (a green coffee roasting business – organic, fair trade, bird friendly, etc). The first draft of the business plan is just about done…so we will see how useful all of this is for us when we get online stage of our business development.

Oh – and a note on the Twitpic….that actually sounds a little addicting and I don’t have time to expound on the uses..but I could see potential. While on the other end of the spectrum, Twitterholic (much like that Google Trend gadget) just seems like a dangerous waste of my time.

Interesting Annoying Legitimate?

So I have broken down the twitter uses that I have found into those that are interesting, those that annoy me and those that might actually have a valid purpose.
Interesting
Twitter as a tool for social change is intriguing.  A (student) journalist was in Egypt and had the idea to report on a protest of the government.  He was promptly arrested at which point he quickly Twittered “ARRESTED” which spread across many countries to the people had the power and the interest in getting him out of jail.  It was quite effective.  Of course, then there are the more publicized exploits of the citizen journalists in repressive China and the role of Twitter as a link to the outside world in Iranian protests.
Annoying
Making new friends – seriously?
Notify customers – Businesses aren’t going to send you a twitter once a month….it is going to be much more often…much more often.  I can’t think of any product I care enough about to interrupt my life full of actual people that I care about and care about me. 
Read News – I find the idea of synopsizing stories into 140 characters insulting.  That is not a legitimate story in which you come away understanding both sides.  It is a tool for spreading only the portions of news you want people to know.  I think that is dangerous.   So I guess this is a headline that links to a story?    Not interested.  I have plenty of sources for that in every format I could want.
Legitimate?
There are all sorts of things here that maybe sorta might be legitimate: find prospects, take notes, set up meetings, etc.  But I have yet to figure out why Twitter is key in any of these things.

But frankly, I might not be the target market.  I have tried to give it a chance.  I mean if Dan Schorr can adapt…I should be able to.  But, I can’t think of anything that I want to know about right away.  My life is so busy and over scheduled that frivolous interruptions annoy me.  If I am interrupted, it had better be by the sweet sounds of my husband, my mom or dad or one of my friends….again those actual human beings that are a part of my life and want to have real interactions with me as an individual and not as part of some silly mass communication tool.

Meet Twitter

The help section starts with a How To video.  I was first introduced to How To videos through the apple iPhone app they have.  One of the features on the particular app is Shake it Baby.  Upon shaking the iPhone, the app shows you a video at random.  The first thing I learned was How to Look Hot Coming Out of the Ocean.  Then came the more applicable, Changing a Light Switch.  It is a very entertaining and informative 107 seconds. 

The How To Video provides the Twitter basics without any pesky reading.  Sadly, here you must read…but don’t worry they are all in Twitter format.

• Twitter is a way to broadcast your thoughts to an audience in 140 characters or less.
• Generally Twitter is used to ask the question “What are you doing?”
• Once you have set up your Twitter account, simply enter your note, and hit update to publicize your thoughts.
• To limit your Twitter to an individual, type @username and the message.
• Follow others by using the Find People and Search to find individuals, organizations, or topics that suit your fancy.
• Like so many other applications today, you can import your contacts to efficiently annoy your friends.
• Updating your account information will help your stalkers find you.
• On the flipside, you can block non-followers from reading your thoughts.
• Because Twitter is a cute, catchy craze, naturally you can set a background to, again, suit that fancy.

open to your comments on open source

Open Source is a term that is tossed around a lot in our classes. While I grasp the general idea, there are things that don’t add up for me. So, off I went into the World Wide Web to find some answers.

I welcome anyone to correct me if I am headed in the wrong direction with this….people refer to software as being open source and/or free. Well, free means that it is like Adobe Reader, I can go out download it and start using it whenever. If it is open source, once I have it, I can take a look at the code that makes it work and play with it. I am not sure exactly how that works. Maybe you make a copy so that you don’t screw up the program that you possibly just paid for….and then you futz with the copy?

The idea is that then someone else can come along and build on your ideas. They might just clean up a problem that the software is having. They might take what you have done and alter it for a whole different purpose and then start selling it. OSI believes that development will happen better, faster and cheaper if we share our ideas instead of hiding them. Everyone need not start from scratch. Instead, let us build upon each other’s accomplishments.

I like this. Reading the intro on the Open Source Initiative home page makes you feel all warm and fuzzy. They use words like promise, trust and cooperation. But as I start pondering this again, I am still having problems summing it up. The Open Source Definition is a list of 10 different criteria for licensing of open-source software. The first of which is (directly from the opensource.org site):

1. Free Redistribution


The license shall not restrict any party from selling or giving away the software as a component of an aggregate software distribution containing programs from several different sources. The license shall not require a royalty or other fee for such sale.

The idea that you can take something that someone else has built and add significant things to it, target another industry, repackage it and sell it makes sense. Maybe my software that handles insurance information for large construction projects could have the front end changed and apply to tracking of certifications for aircraft parts. I never would have seen that and I would be glad to have it out in the world making one part of building planes cheaper and better…maybe it’ll make my airline ticket cheaper one day. Yet, what if I take someone else’s software and update one small thing and then put a new name on it and sell it? It is 95% somebody else’s product with my little addition. I could just put half the cost that they put into development into marketing and steal all of their profits, right? Where did that warm and fuzzy feeling go?

I have gotten long winded again…which often means that I am headed in the wrong direction. So, if anyone wants to push me in the right direction, I’d welcome the shove.

Opera Web Browser

Opera is a web browser that currently takes up only about 2% of the browser market share.  Of course, there are more than a billion people are connected to the World Wide Web….so I really shouldn’t say only.  Their two percent touches a lot more people than anything that I work on during my day.  Unfortunately for Opera, the most recent statistics that I found had them headed in the wrong direction.   According to Market Share, IE has actually dropped more than 6.5% of their market share in the past year.  While Firefox, Safari and Chrome have all snagged some of that up, Opera has seen a bit of decline losing 0.1% of their share in the same time period.

It does appear that they have some handy features.   Although, I must admit, I am not a person who typically utilizes all of my browsers tools.  In fact, my company just updated my IE browser and I recently started using Google Chrome on occasion, and I think I am going to go nuts.  Every time I go to find something, one of my favorites, something I looked up five minutes ago, or even a simple search, I fumble through each of them and it takes twice as long as it used to.  Maybe it is just that I updated too many things at once – new phone (without all my contacts!), new apps galore, two new browsers, even my kitchen cabinet contents that have been rearranged…..so I am surrounded by things that are familiar and completely out of my normal order.  With change overload, I am not learning any one of them….I am just further confusing them.

But I digress…

Opera has some features that peak my interest.  As I frequently find myself cursed with a slow internet connection, I am intrigued by the Turbo feature they are touting in which their compression somehow boosts your speed during slow connections.  They also have an alternative to the tabs at the top of the browser for different pages that bares resemblance to the way you can flip through albums on your iPod.  Finally, I find their mouse gesture interpretation completely entertaining.  You can right click and slide your mouse slightly to the left and you can go back a page or right click and move down and to the left to minimize the window.  There are an assortment of subtle moves that can completely change what is happening on your screen and now doubt completely confuse anyone looking over your shoulder. 

I can’t help but wonder what great features my current browsers have that I know nothing about.   If I triple click my mouse, will it make me a sandwich?  Or possibly fill up my gas tank?  That would definitely be worth the time of reading the tutorial.

How in the Wiki world?

The basic how to on Wikipedia -
Edit buttons reside at the top of the page and at the top of each section. Upon entering the edit page, you are informed of two things: the impending availability of your IP address should you not log in and the availability of a practice area called the sandbox.

IP address: So my first question is why do I care if my IP address is out there? Well, after a little reading, I have found that it is because this number allows your computer to be identified and recognized. It is a little like being tagged (like the cows that Dr. Watson keeps talking about). Once you’ve been tagged all sorts of things can be tracked about you. Of course, once that information exists there is someone out there who wants to take it and use it to their advantage and possibly to your disadvantage.
I didn’t know all of this until now. Now I do. Now I have a Wikipedia login.

Sandbox: This is a handy little tool that allows you to get your sea legs in the world of Wiki publishing prior to making your edits available to the world. I played with it a bit just to make sure that I new how to add in a link and could see that my formatting worked correctly. I also got a quick lesson in what happens if someone else is editing the page at the same time I am. Which is this: instead of immediately posting, Wiki provides you with the just updated version and your version and allows you to mesh the two. It also recommends that you don’t be that jerk who completely overlooks the changes that someone else just made to override with your own updates.

With my new IP awareness and sandbox skills, I decided to change the Floyd County, Virginia entry. My home county has only one stoplight. It is full of country farmers with a thirty year influx of artists. While the two cultures clash a bit, they provide our community with a rich well of art and music all in a peaceful mountain setting. I merely added a line and link about a yearly music festival held in the county.

An RSS feed, you say?

So, when I went to do my homework this week, my first question was:  What is an RSS feed?  Well, it stands for Really Simple Syndication or Rich Site Summary.  Don’t worry, that doesn’t explain anything for me either.  So really, what is it?  It is the link to another site that pulls in and displays information that is updated frequently.  It is what allows you to look to the right at my list of fellow classmates and see what their most recent post is entitled.    If you have a Google account and have spent time compiling an incredibly distracting, time sucking iGoogle page, then it would be what populates the page.  It is that assortment of your favorite news feeds and the latest recipe from AllRecipes.com.  It is a lot of the stuff available from your Add Stuff button.

A Prairie Home Distraction

On a side note, while typing up my this blog post, I took a look at my iGoogle page only to see that Google Hot Trends was saying that Garrison Keillor is currently the second most Googled topic right now.  For those of you who know who Mr. Keillor is….well, he is no Anna Kournikova or Kanye West.   He doesn’t say things like “George Bush hates black people” that shoot a person to the top of a Google list.  So, I had to know.  I was sucked into the vortex of news stories….and for those interested:  Garrison had a minor stroke.  He is in the hospital but is expected to be out Friday.

Lazy banking...made lazier

I deposit my checks from my house. I simply hook my laptop up to the scanner and scan the front and the back of the check and voila. Yet, I have become so spoiled by the ease of depositing checks at my house that I have actually had the audacity to think that it is a hassle. Even crazier, I just learned that this annoyance has already been addressed. My bank, USAA, has actually made an application in which I can deposit a check by taking a picture of the front and back of the check with my iPhone. The online demo actually goes through the whole process in one minute and forty five seconds. It shows a thirteen year old girl depositing her birthday check from grandma while sitting in a café. I can do anything a thirteen year old girl can do. I used to be one.

USAA recognizes their customers' tendency to be fast adapters to technology.  Their website points out that their adoption rate for mobile apps is 14% which is 3 times as high as other big banks.  Within three days of the launch of this application on August 11th (my birthday by the way....yes, I turned 30 at our MIT orientation) $1.5 million dollars in checks had been deposited via iPhone.