Here's a video walkthrough from Peter Birch, Google Earth's project manager.
Click here to download the app for your iPhone from the iTunes App Store.
The next two weeks are flush with events in NYC, orbiting around the sun of Advertising Week.
I'll be flush with events too, so here's a heads-up on how you can catch me...
Monday, September 15th
Social Ad Summit
Tribeca Rooftop, NYC
11:15am - 12:00pm
Branded Experiences on Social Networks
Large brands spend billions of dollars every year on advertising. Hear from a few of those large brands about how much they are allocating to social networks. Find out what has worked and what hasn’t as well as the hurdles for brands getting on social networks.
Thursday, September 18th
OMMA Global
Marriott Marquis, NYC
4:45pm - 5:30pm
Getting Social Sites to do your Work for You
Are you looking to precisely target based on demographics or activity? Targeted ad networks are showing promise for delivering more precise demographic segments for marketers than the big global networks. Could the same be true for vertical social networks? Social shopping, reviews, and more targeted groups can provide better engagement for those people you want to reach.
Moderator:
Brant Barton, Founder, Bazaarvoice
Speakers:
Adam Cahill, SVP, General Manager of Carat
Michael Carrier, CEO, StyleHive
John Riordan, Director-National Sales, Yelp.com
Ian Schafer, CEO, Deep Focus
Thursday, September 22nd
MIXX 2.8
Crowne Plaza Hotel, NYC
4:45pm - 5:30pm
The Self-Service Revolution
It sounds too good to be true: A completely automated process for setting up and executing highly-targeted ad campaigns. But how do we separate the hype from the reality? In this interactive session, you'll hear from marketers and platform-providers working together to define the automated future.
Moderator:
Michael Wolf, Partner, Farrallon Point, Inc.
Panelists:
Dan Ballister, Chief Operating Officer, TRAFFIQ
Aaron Finn, President & CEO, AdReady
Ian Schafer, CEO, Deep Focus
Jay Sears, EVP, Strategic Products & Business Development, ContextWeb
Tuesday, September 23rd
Advertising Week
Paley Center (formerly the Museum of TV and Radio), NYC
12:00pm - 1:00pm
Social Media: Giving Voice to Social Causes
The explosion of social media has created countless new ways for advertisers to engage consumers. It’s also created countless ways to promote social causes and increase civic engagement. Whether it’s social networks like MySpace and FaceBook or bloggers, widgets, twitter, or friend feed, these powerful tools can and are being used for the greater good. This panel brings together the best of the best to discuss where social networking meet social change.
Panel:
Moderator: Bob Greenberg, Vice President, Corporate Brand Marketing
Panasonic Corporation of North America
Douglas Atkin, Chief Community Officer, Meetup
Chris Colborn, Chief Experience Officer, R/GA
Lexi Reese, Head of Media Platforms, Google
Ian Schafer, Founder & CEO, Deep Focus
Want to keep up with all of my speaking engagements? Well why didn't you just say so?
Just keep an eye on my Google Calendar. I'll keep you up to date.
(Note: Skip to June. That's where they begin...)
I was engulfed in work tonight, and realized that I missed a night I've been waiting for for a while -- the 2008 NBA Draft Lottery. As a Knicks fan, it's all I had to look forward to this season.
11:43pm: Where did I go first? ESPN.com. And no list of the lottery results on the homepage. Ah, but there was a small link to the story about the draft. But no list of the results. Argh!
Google Search on 'nba draft lottery results'? Turned up nothing. Nothing!
So then I go to NBA.com.
A link to a video recapping the top three picks. But I WANT A LIST! It was only until I got down to near the bottom of the site (which I only realized existed by doing a Firefox 'find text' function) that there was a link to the results.
11:51pm: Going back to those Google results made me realize that I missed the fact that Yahoo's coverage of the results were, in fact, indexed -- but it was the very last result on the first page of results.
This was way too hard to find. So maybe I can help everyone by just posting the list here. Maybe I'll linkbait have better luck getting indexed by Google than NBA.com did:
Results of the 2008 NBA Draft Lottery
SECAUCUS, NJ, May 20 – Following are the results from the 2008 NBA Draft Lottery, which was conducted Tuesday at NBA TV’s studio in Secaucus, New Jersey. The Chicago Bulls, who had a 1.7 percent chance of obtaining the first selection, will have the first overall pick in the 2008 NBA Draft, which will be held in New York City at The WaMu Theater at Madison Square Garden on Thursday, June 26, 2008.
1. Chicago
2. Miami
3. Minnesota
4. Seattle
5. Memphis
6. New York
7. LA Clippers
8. Milwaukee
9. Charlotte
10. New Jersey
11. Indiana
12. Sacramento
13. Portland
14. Golden State
Following is the order for the remainder of the 2008 NBA Draft:
15. Atlanta (To Phoenix)
16. Philadelphia
17. Toronto
18. Washington
19. Cleveland
20. Denver
21. Dallas (To New Jersey)
22. Orlando
23. Utah
24. Phoenix (To Seattle)
25. Houston
26. San Antonio
27. New Orleans
28. LA Lakers (To Memphis)
29. Detroit
30. Boston
2008 Second Round Draft Choice Order:
31. Miami (To Minnesota via Boston)
32. Seattle
33. Memphis (To Portland)
34. Minnesota*
35. LA Clippers
36. New York (To Portland)
37. Milwaukee
38. Charlotte
39. Chicago
40. New Jersey
41. Indiana
42. Atlanta (To Sacramento)
43. Sacramento
44. Philadelphia (To Utah)
45. Toronto (To San Antonio)
46. Portland (To Seattle via Boston)
47. Washington
48. Cleveland (To Phoenix)
49. Golden State
50. Denver (To Seattle)
51. Dallas
52. Orlando (To Miami)
53. Utah
54. Houston
55. Phoenix (To Portland via Indiana)
56. New Orleans (To Seattle via Houston)
57. San Antonio
58. LA Lakers
59. Detroit
60. Boston
* Pick may be conveyed to Detroit.
Oxford University Professor Jonathan Zittrain in his new book, The Future of the Internet--And How to Stop It, according to NetworkWorld, states that:
...today’s Internet appliances such as the iPhone and Xbox hamper innovation. That’s because these locked-down devices prohibit the kind of tinkering by end users that made PCs and the Internet such a force of economic, political and artistic change.Zittrain argues that if the cybersecurity situation doesn’t improve, we will migrate to a different kind of Internet. The new Internet will have as its endpoints tethered appliances such as iPhones, which are controlled by their manufacturers, instead of open, changeable PCs attached to an open network that can foster the next round of disruptive innovation.
A bold statement. And he's got a point.
Now these devices are innovations unto themselves, and some even are positioned as development platforms. Take the iPhone, for example. Apple just released the latest version of their Software Development Kit (SDK) and developers everywhere are coding away, looking to build the next great iPhone application.
But in classic Apple style (i.e. heavy DRM within iTunes), Apple remains the gatekeeper. Applications can only be distributed via their App Store, and will only be distributed if approved by Apple. Apple will explain that this is for security and quality-assurance reasons, but it still puts them in control of what's available, with the ability to shut an app off if they so desire. So yes, you can be as creative as you want on their platform, but it's up to Apple if anyone is going to see it at all, or in perpetuity.
There's a similar situation going on with Google's new App Engine (the preview version was launched on 4/8, then taken down on 4/9). Google's vision is that instead of freely building apps with their API, you can develop applications using their APIs and host them on their servers, free of charge. Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud and Salesforce's Appexchange are also providing similar opportunities for developers. Sounds great, right? But there's a catch, as ArsTechnica reports.
Perhaps the most blatant downside is being locked into Google's platform. Existing projects will have to be ported or written from scratch, and those that rely on traditional relational databases will probably have difficulty making the transition. Even more difficult would be transitioning your application to your own servers if you choose to leave Google's tender embrace. Once you've created an established application on top of Google's authentication service and stored all your data within the company's datastore, removing all this code and data and moving it to another location would appear to a be fairly onerous task.
Once again, applications -- and even more importantly, data -- are locked into someone else's platform. And this is precisely what Jonathan Zittrain is talking about.
This is a disturbing trend and runs afoul of what led to the creativity that yielded many of the most popular websites of the last few years. Imagine if Warhol was free to create any art he wanted, but someone else owned the canvases and could destroy or bury them at any point if his art offended someone? That's what's going on here.
It doesn't seem that this is a trend that will let up anytime soon as companies like Apple, Google, and Amazon have way too much to gain by housing and hosting application engines. Doesn't feel like 'do no evil' anymore does it? And a little more 'PC' than 'Mac', if you ask me.
Food for thought...
The onset of digital media has enabled communication, information, and news to flow quicker than ever before. The sheer velocity of information has had devastating effects on the newspaper industry (at least the printed elements) and consumers have changed their behavior to adapt.
No longer do we have to wait until the 11pm local newscast to find out what happened in our city. We don't even have to respect the anchorperson's request to stay tuned until after the commercial break to hear about a news story. We can just go to any number of websites to get that news before that brief break is over.
When an online news source breaks some piece of information (with our without fact-checking), blogs swoop in to comment, and news aggregator (i.e. Digg) users vote stories up, and they become 'the news'. And the more news becomes endorsed by the people reading it, the more 'true' it feels. Fact-checked or not.
I recently saw a panel at SXSW on the online behavior of teens and tweens, and when a few of the teenaged panelists mentioned that they got their news from Digg, it made me shudder. As great of a tool as Digg is for finding interesting pieces of online content, it's not a news source. Just an 'interesting content' recommendation engine.
But even journalists and professional bloggers use recommendation engines. They're out there; techmeme is an example. And sometimes those recommendation engines are other journalists and bloggers. In this new era of online journalism, these recommendations have become known as 'memes'. Wikipedia defines a 'meme' as consisting of any unit of cultural information, such as a practice or idea, that gets transmitted verbally or by repeated action from one mind to another. Examples include thoughts, ideas, theories, practices, habits, songs, dances and moods and terms such as race, culture, and ethnicity. Memes propagate themselves and can move through a "culture" in a manner similar to the behavior of a virus.
While memes often reflect important topics, they also have the potential to create stagnant monologues that doesn't necessarily get us anywhere -- eventually just turning what should be solution-deriving conversations, into noise. That's when memes make the leap from becoming units of cultural information and legitimate conversation to being momentum-generated waves of propaganda. Or, as I will business cliche-ify, memeoganda.
What used to be called 'trend pieces' are now being ripped from the headlines of blogs and even other publications. The biggest culprits tend to be traditional (especially print) media, and overzealous bloggers (in fact, I randomly stumbled upon this post by Mark Evans on the topic of blog topics via Techmeme) looking to capitalize on popular conversations/memes.
When journalists in traditional publications stop having original things to say, or just have the same ruminations on existing problems without offering up solutions, we get classic memeoganda. Lately, I've seen examples of memoganda regarding the ad industry ranging from the 'death of ad networks' to 'facebook's demise' to 'google click volume' to 'the death of the music industry' to even the state of the economy/recession.
These trend pieces get written so quickly and so close to each other, that while they may raise awareness of important topics, they water down the depth of the coverage, and result in a stream of 'also-ran' stories.
I started writing this blog post last night, and right on cue, this morning Techcrunch tells us about a new startup called Publish2 that will make memoganda even easier by providing journalists and newsrooms with their own Digg-like resource for finding out what's hot.
You know, maybe it's just me, but I yearn for the days when journalists broke hot stories rather than write about stories that are already hot. Memeoganda is sucking the life out of investigative journalism and seems to be more about finding new and exciting ways to conjure up ad inventory than to publish content with depth and meaning. And while stories that yield more ad inventory (read: linkbaiting) can be good bottom-line revenue band-aid, they are not the solution to mainstream journalism's woes.
The long-term answer is to strive to be the best at what you do. Break the news that matters. Investigate the broken news deeper. Don't fall prey to the easiness of spreading memeoganda.
According to Download Squad, today, Yahoo!, Microsoft, and Google announced the formation of the OpenSocial Foundation.
The Foundation is a 'non-profit' entity aimed at ensuring '...open and transparent governance of the OpenSocial specifications and intellectual property.'
Is it me, or does it seem weird that you can set up a non-profit entity that is designed to support the initiatives of a very 'for profit' company like Google? It seems that the efforts are noble enough, but still, these are Google standards, no matter how many third-parties are involved.
Do we have a choice but to choose between Google's and Facebook's standards? Time will tell.
Visit Download Squad for the nice little recap.
With Google's acquisition of DoubleClick now official, Saul Hansell discusses the potential for DoubleClick's Dart for Advertisers (DFA) product to move to a free model, due to it's acquisition by Google.
I say, bring it on.
This would be a shrewd move by Google towards getting the world migrated over to its ad serving platform.
While I'm not holding my breath for my ad serving bills to stop rolling in any time soon, my hope is that at the very least, the industry will be able to get a free, basic DFA, then maybe add-ons for additional services. That will force moves by companies like Atlas and 24/7 to reassess their models, and hopefully bring down costs across the industry.
The major ad serving companies are now all owned by major corporations (DoubleClick:Google; Atlas:Microsoft, 24/7:WPP). Ad serving is starting to appear more and more like it's a value-add every day. Lets just hope the technology doesn't stop improving for the sake of making it free, or even just less expensive. Without improved ad serving, we don't get improved metrics.
Bring on the free. But don't stop improvin'.
MIT's Technology Review just published it's list of 10 Emerging Technologies for 2008. The one piece that resonated with me is Sandy Pentland's exploration into Reality Mining especially in relation to social networking, new media and interactive.
Reality mining "is all about paying attention to patterns in life and using that information to help [with] things like setting privacy patterns, sharing things with people, notifying people–basically, to help you live your life."
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