Did you know? (Version 4.0)

By Oscar in Business, Film/TV/Music/IT 1 Comment Tags: , , , , ,

The Economist recently released another of their famous “Did You Know? videos. Fantastic and very interesting data as always. Some personal favorites:

  • Over 1,000,000 books are published each year. A Google book search scanner can digitize 1,000 pages every hour
  • There are 240,000,000 TVs in the U.S., 2,000,000 are in bathrooms (?!)
  • More video was uploaded to YouTube in the last 2 months than if ABC/NBC/HBO had been airing new content 24/7/365 since 1948
  • 95% of all songs downloaded last year weren’t paid for
  • Wikipedia launched in 2001. It now feature over 13 million articles in 200 languages
  • The average American teen send 2,272 text messages … each month
  • 90% of the 200 billion emails sent every day is spam
  • The computer in your cell phone today is a million times cheaper, and a thousand times more powerful, and about a hundred thousand times smaller than the one computer in MIT 45 years ago

Mashable and Silicon Valley Insider on the same topic.

It’s Not What You Say That Matters, It’s what you do

By Oscar in Business 1 Comment Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Here’s an excellent deck from Paul Isakson who works as the Head of Strategy at Space150.

As I’m sure you have been reading and hearing, there is more and more chatter about looking at people’s behaviors within social media, not just the tools and technology. That’s the main point of this presentation — focusing on behaviors and what people are doing.


(View more documents from Paul Isakson)

What to take away from this about the Future of Marketing:

  • The future of marketing is collaborative
  • The future of marketing is generous
  • The future of marketing is experimental
  • The future of marketing is helpful
  • The future of marketing is playful
  • The future of marketing is personal
  • The future of marketing is honest
  • The future of marketing is participatory
  • .. The product is the marketing
  • .. Listen, listen; Listen for rich insights related to your brand about what people really want and need

Thanks Paul.

***

This is great, and what it’s all about, sharing and caring. I went through Paul’s deck yesterday around noon and scheduled this post for today (at the time of your reading). However, yesterday evening Johan Ronnestam posted this tweet which is very much connected to the topic. The deck he has created and refers to in the tweet is the one found here. With the risk of running amok on the embedding, I’ll try to contain myself from embedding Ronnestam’s as well. But please – go through it carefully if you’re a marketing man.

For the sake of it, what to take away from this about the Future of Brand Communication:

  • Everything your brand does will become transparent
  • The future belong to ‘nerds’
  • Learn to speak ‘link’
  • Everything circles around conversation
  • Media space is not for sale. You have to create it for yourselves
  • Move yourself into the ‘betasociety’
  • Marketing departments of the future seed tools, not campaigns
  • Sharing is caring!
  • Passion and innovation beats everything
  • Bulls eye! (It’s not about reaching 1,000,000 to sell 100, it’s about reaching 10 people that reach 100 people that reach a 1000 that …)

Thanks to both of you for sharing!

Spotify Mobile and Spotify Premium

By Oscar in Business, Film/TV/Music/IT No Comments Tags: , , , , ,

Playlists in Spotify MobileSpotify Mobile has been out for roughly two weeks now, it’s still in the top ten of the most downloaded free apps in the Swedish app store – currently at number four to be precise. The app has been rated as many times as 1806 at the time of this writing. Quite remarkable.

Spotify Mobile really hit the media (and social sphere) when the story was published. I don’t think there’s a single medium where the story haven’t been posted/dugg/liked/whatever. It spread like a bushfire in a summer breeze throughout Twitter and Digg – they really got everyone excited. Including me.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not trying to build up some “but”-action here; I love Spotify, and I love the app. I have to say though, that what’s really interesting in all of this is to monitor search patterns on both mobile and premium. Premium being Spotify’s (paid) member service which offers no ads, higher sound quality, unlimited travel access, and exclusive access to pre-releases. So why is this interesting? For one, Premium is of course required in order for you to use Spotify Mobile. The second reason is a killer; search volume index for Spotify Premium is actually greater than the volume for Spotify Mobile:

Spotify Premium vs. Spotify Mobile

Not only was it greater during the actual release (when the bushfire spread); it spiked higher, it lasted longer, and it has maintained on a higher level. Of course, as the disclaimer indicates “several approximations are used when computing these results”. Still a good indication of what’s happening.

Is Spotify finally making (decent) money?

(Spotify Mobile picture from Press/Images on Spotify.com)

Some updates to the blog

By Oscar in Misc, Shared Items 3 Comments Tags: , , , , , , , ,

It’s been a while since WordPress 2.8 aka. “Baker” was released. Even though I think “Coltrane” was a more fundamental change to the usability and backend of WordPress, Baker proved to be the perfect excuse to complete some other improvements that have been on my to-do list for ages.

To start things up I’ve implemented disqus for handling comments. It’s an excellent framework that allows users to login using e.g. their Twitter or Facebook identities. As you might recall, I did some ‘ugly hacks’ to enable a Facebook Connect and Twitter Connect earlier. Disqus also has a neat feature called social media reactions which monitors conversions around your posts, so no need to use the backtype plugin or similar to bring the conversation back. I’d also like to reserve some extra kudos to the DISQUS-team, especially Giannii – they’re absolutely fantastic at getting back to you if you have a problem and seem to monitor conversations regarding disqus in every space.

I’ve also finally got around to writing somewhat decent about me and follow me pages as well as mashed up my social presence to a lifestream page by using the excellent wp-lifestream plugin. Following a tip from Andreas Karman (Swedish post), I cleaned up the archives a bit using smart archives reloaded.

And as a bonus to all iPhone users, you now have an iPhone optimized site if you visit this blog in Safari on your iPhone, compliments to wptouch. Rumours also has it that the feed wasn’t working earlier, that’s now solved.

Puh. Maybe it’s finally time to create some content? It’s just that WordPress is to fun to mess around with.

Personas art installation

By Oscar in Film/TV/Music/IT, Misc No Comments Tags: , , , , , ,

“Personas is a component of the Metropath(ologies) exhibit, currently on display until Sept 09 at the MIT Museum by the Sociable Media Group from the MIT Media Lab (Please contact us if you want to show it next!). It uses sophisticated natural language processing and the Internet to create a data portrait of one’s aggregated online identity. In short, Personas shows you how the Internet sees you.”

Very interesting, would you agree with your Personas?

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