New interface for Android! Coming soon - Summer 2012

This might just cause me to try out an android phone!
Unfortunately, it is only going to be available in Japan for now. Hopefully, it will not take long before it reaches the shores of Singapore. We're so hungry for new gadgets here, it's almost an obsession.


Sharp AQUOS Android Smartphone - Feel UX from frog on Vimeo.
Sharp Corporation collaborated with frog's team of designers and technologists to create “Feel UX”, a new Android smartphone experience that is easy to use, highly personalized, and visually stunning.

“Feel UX” for Sharp’s AQUOS smartphones will be available in Japan during the summer of 2012 and include the following features:

-Personalized and innovative lock-screen experience, allowing users to browse photos and widgets without unlocking the devices
-Real-time weather display motion experience and animation
-Desirable, gender-neutral palette and visuals
-Streamlined, curated home space to smoothly manage applications, widgets, and shortcuts

Dropbox to do away with public folders, makes sharing more private.

Dropbox to do away with public folders, makes sharing more private.

being a heavy user of dropbox, i'm not too concerned about this going away. most of my use of dropbox doesn't need the public folder anyway. i love dropbox, it is my 'second home online'.
i love that the user experience is so intuitive, and it does all i expect of a cloud service. if i could suggest one feature, it would be to create simple a text file within dropbox to store notes as well.
that way, i can completely do away with using the 'notes' application on my iphone.

Sharing has been not so smooth though. it is a pain sharing files through the "get a link" feature. supposed to make sharing easier by creating a simple link that should enable people to view your file, i have tried this several times with several people without success. they just couldn't open the file through the link. wish that dropbox would take note of this and rectify the problem. though i haven't checked with others if they encountered the same problem as I have.

Obviously the decision to do away with public folders has got to do with the concerns of how people share the files within public folders. guess dropbox is trying to prevent a situation of copyright infringement, and is taking a more cautious approach. the service now has 50 million registered users, according to this techcrunch article.

random

Kinda bored with the blogger template and user experience...tempted to jump ship. hmmm.

My notes during Social Media Week

Some hits and misses, but this summarizes what I felt was useful during the two sessions I attended on Wednesday -
1. Social Media + Search
2. UX in the new social era

Effective Use of QR Codes

http://vimeo.com/34140861

Very interesting use of QR Codes...this is truly amazing and I wish I thought of this!

Anyone noticed this!

There's voice activated Search in Youtube! Cool... :) though not sure it will be very useful! let me try it out when I get home so no one will think I'm crazy geek talking to my laptop.

Google moves into Travel

http://www.google.com/flights/

If you are flying interstate US, you can now use the Google flights tool to get you better search results.
Aww... why is it not available in Singapore yet!

SEO/SEM for Luxury Brands - What differences in strategy or approach?

Placeholder to remind myself to explore this question.

Did You Know: Kaypoh Singaporeans are Top Facebook Users in the World, Spend Most Yime on the Site, Nov 2011

Did You Know: Kaypoh Singaporeans are Top Facebook Users in the World, Spend Most Time on the Site, Nov 2011

BY LYDIA NG

Did you know? Singaporeans spend an average of 39 minutes tailing their friends, posting updates, viewing pictures on Facebook everyday. In fact, we are the nation that spends the most time on FB! This may also be due to a high smartphone penetration rate (>60%) in Singapore and the rise of mobile data usage.

What that means:

Basically, Singaporeans are super kaypoh 'lah'. How does spending so much time on Facebook benefit us besides forming virtual friendships and having gossip fodder on what your friends (and fake friends) are doing?

An interesting phenomenon -- we develop ‘facebook envy’. 

Facebook envy: Getting jealous of your friends’ wall posts and pictures as they showcase their near perfect lives of endless vacations, acquisitions, and high status, but still viewing picture after picture of their sun-filled holidays, perfect lives, being addicted to trailing them still, being subscribed to their stories, all the while muttering under your breath.

Marketers, it seems, are not taking enough advantage of this. Almost none of Facebook’s downstreams are to retail sites, according to an Experian study. Meaning most users who are on Facebook do not visit the company’s website after Facebook. This is unlike New Zealand, where 9% of site traffic comes from Social Networks.

Perhaps the incentive given by brands is not enough to entice users to visit the website. Or it could show a reluctance of users to be persuaded to navigate away from their favourite pastime – Facebook stalking.

Either way, this demonstrates that social marketing by brands in Singapore is nowhere near maturity, and there is much room to grow for brands to develop their social strategy.

In Memory of Steve Jobs, a True Inspiration

Hi friends, for the next 3 days (7,8,9th Oct) let's change our Profile Picture to this one (see mine) in memory of Steve Jobs, who has been a huge inspiration to us all. even if you don't like apple products, you got to admire the man who turned apple around to become more than just a computing company. he showed us how to live a true and inspirational life.
(source photo is kindly 'stolen' from coolhunter and then edited slightly. :P)

Steve Jobs RIP iRespect You

the future belongs to the geeks

we live in a world of constant improvement and imagination. and that is what makes me still believe in humanity - our quest to make things better. yesterday in a conference, exciting new technologies were shared with us via BBC Click. the future holds augmented reality, pc-less, smartphone-less devices and technologies that makes life so different, the future you won't recognize the present you. Imagine a deviceless world, where all you have is computed by a microchip in a contact lens that beams up information on physical buildings and objects to give you detail on it -- something like walking around with a view only terminator can enjoy. all this is not some science fiction fantasy -- research is underway now on these technologies. the future where the lines between what's human and what's robotic cross may well be possible.
yet a part of me fears what would happen when such things become real -- in a world where looking at a bee brings up its exact species name, how many exist in the world, what is its known behavior and lifecycle, along with other stats and data -- will we become even colder in treating each other, and will our child-like sense of wonder be lost and replaced with an adult-like 'i've seen it all' view of the world?

in some sense, if you talk to our children, this is already happening.

Now You Can Block Any Site You Dislike From Google's Search Results

There is some debate whether this will affect your search rankings, if say, your competitor hired an army of people to block your site from their Search Results.  I think this is Google's way to provide a more personalized Search experience, but I don't think Google will take this seriously and include this in their SEO ranking algorithm.

New: Google Lets You Block Any Site From Search Results

Mar 10, 2011 at 2:16pm ET by Barry Schwartz

• inShare272

Google announced you can now hide or block certain sites from showing up in the Google search results.

When you do a search in Google, the search results will show a new link near the “Cache” link when you click a result and then return to Google. The link that Google adds to the search results reads “Block all example.com results.” Clicking on that will allow you to block the site from showing up in the Google results.

If you are not logged in, Google will immediately block the result and confirm they did so. But if you want the site to remain blocked on future searches, you have to login and confirm the block request.

At the bottom of the search results it will show you that there are blocked sites. It will let you show the blocked results or manage your blocked sites.

Here is the confirmation page:

Here is the manage block page:

You can access this page under your “Search Settings.”

Google said:

We’re adding this feature because we believe giving you control over the results you find will provide an even more personalized and enjoyable experience on Google. In addition, while we’re not currently using the domains people block as a signal in ranking, we’ll look at the data and see whether it would be useful as we continue to evaluate and improve our search results in the future. The new feature is rolling out today and tomorrow on Google.com in English for people using Chrome 9+, IE8+ and Firefox 3.5+, and we’ll be expanding to new regions, languages and browsers soon. We hope you find it useful, and we’ll be listening closely to your suggestions.

Periodic Table of SEO Ranking Factors. I like this

Alternatives to Google Keyword Tool

today i was introduced to touchgraph, which can be a pretty useful tool to grab some ideas for campaign setups apart from using Google Keyword Tools. http://www.touchgraph.com/seo
Key in what you are searching for, and the tool generates search words relevant to it. These can be considered as topics for your campaign.

tone-sensitive facebook sharing

facebook 'recommend' button

I was reading an article on news.com.au on the state of the asylum seekers when the boat crashed onto Christmas Island. it was a piece of horrible news, and i saw that the familiar facebook 'like' button had been replaced with a 'recommend' button. this is of course much more appropriate given the nature of the news article.
i think more news sites should use the 'recommend' button instead of the 'like' button.
how many times have we read horrible news and wanted to share it on facebook, but it seems so inappropriate to 'like' an article of such nature? for instance recently a gang murder was carried out in the heartlands of Singapore. the last I read, 3000 people 'liked' the article.

Interestingly, this only affects Facebook, because it doesn't shy away from using emotive language.
Twitter for example, favours a more objective 'retweet' button.
But here you can see the power of Facebook compared to other social networks -  and that i think captures the essence of facebook and endears it to us all - a way to be human, online.

Search is not dead.... Enter YouTube Topics Beta!

a post ago i said that Google was 'holding the fort' in search.
Well, looks like the giant is not a big elephant. it certainly has not lost it's edge, backed by smart engineers who are given time to explore their own side projects, the latest one is not mind-blowing, but is a natural progression towards the more social aspect of search that has been the trend nowadays.
first we had bing integrate its results into facebook. we had msn and facebook link up. we have yahoo social ads. we have twitter search, of course.
and now, we have Youtube Topics.

An introduction to YouTube Topics
Youtube Topics is something like organic search for video.
when you enter a keyword search, popular topics are displayed just below.
These topics are based on frequently used descriptors that youtube users 'tag' their video with when they upload.

Youtube statement:

Q: How are topics generated?
We use many different sources including frequently used uploader keywords, common search queries, playlist names, and even sources outside of YouTube such as Wikipedia articles.

Q: Will I see topics on all searches?
You might not see topics on some searches. Our goal is to show topics when they are useful and we will continue working on finding useful topics for more of your searches.

Q: How do I leave the experiment? 

From the search page, click on the "Turn off" link next to “YouTube Topics experiment”.


This can give you quite interesting data, on what topics are the most popularly associated with a certain keyword.
A sample search for 'ibanez', for example, yields an interesting find -- that the artists steve vai, paul gilbert, joe satrani, john petrucci are most associated with ibanez.

Then, I searched for 'les paul'. this time, artists zakk wylde, slash, chet atkins are popularly linked with 'les paul'.

This can give valuable data mining insights on who have the top of mind share for a product category.

try it yourself!

the new search leaders

this is a short post, as a reminder to self to expand on this topic later.
it used to be that Yahoo and Google were the dominant players in search industry. not anymore. while Google is still holding the fort, trying to reinvent itself, Yahoo is now at the bottom, from what began as a slow slide to a current and realistic 'i'm in the junk pile' market position, really.
Reason i say this is, search technology for Yahoo is so far down in the dumps that it is a pain to use. Bing used to be the number one leader in horrible search technology (those days it was still called MSN SearchCenter), but now, Yahoo beats it by a mile. Bing, on the other hand, is making good for lost time and is continuously improving its technology with a whole office full of geeks at the ready, as can be proved by smarter integration with Facebook, social search, Bing maps...
Yahoo, on the other hand, continues to emphasize the 'human touch' (read: pen and paper, abacus, calligraphy, typewriter) and as a result, fails to recapture lost market share, year upon year. I'd say, if Yahoo and MSN Search could be listed on the stock exchange, put your stocks in MSN, and sell away all those Yahoo stocks you may have! :s

Do you know how to Analyze Competition in Google Adwords?

everyone should know this...but it's a good reminder. and the graphics are cute!!

Bing and Facebook integrate Socially for a win-win deal

Bing increasingly eyeing the Social space by integrating its results with Facebook. Increased connected-ness allows you to sync status updates you share on MSN messenger with Facebook, and vis versa. You can also now see all your facebook friends in Messenger as well, which gives you the convenience of chatting with your contacts in one window only. Of course, what this means for MSN is only good news -- by showing facebook's millions of users on Messenger, it essentially broaden's their reach and impressions, meaning more ad inventory to sell, meaning more big bucks...which is good news for the Ad Sales team. It is also a win-win for Facebook -- as this allows Facebook to grow its advertising platform, which has long been a headache for the management -- as anti-privacy cries ring loud in the facebook community and users do not want to see their favourite social network plastered full of ads. Essentially, this is an advertising breakthrough for Facebook, and you can expect to see much more ads on the platform in the future. 

What's the Hoohah on Binghoo

Yahoo Panama is transitioning out and searches are going to be powered by Bing.
This roll out starts as early as 15Oct for US advertisers. For the rest of the world, it is not announced yet when the transition will take place and we are waiting for timelines.

Impact on your campaigns
I'll spread this out in a later more detailed post but for now, it's important to note that the transition means come 15Oct, ALL search advertisers RE-ENTER the auction and your history will not be maintained. The impact will not be as great compared to if Google and Bing were to merge, for example. This is because Google uses a more robust quality score factor and historical data to determine Ad rank, while Yahoo's algo is not that dependent on history. Am awaiting news from Yahoo on my questions. Till then, fingers crossed..