Word on the high tech highway is that we have a Google Phone to look forward to and some even say its an iPhone killer!! According to Simeon Simeonov ’s blog ‘High Contrast‘ the most interesting part about it is the go-to-market strategy behind it, which someone will have to explain to me because I do not really get that part yet.

“Apparently, Google is planning to build distribution relationships with multiple carriers by allowing them to minimize subscription and marketing costs. In other words, Google will market the phone online and carriers will fulfill. How fast can you say dumb pipe? Then, again, carriers are not good at marketing to consumers so what choice do they have?”
What we are pretty sure of is that the phone will be GSM leaving about 40 million US Verizon mobile users out of the game. One of the real questions is whcih browser the phone named ‘Switch’ (for now) will be using.
There is apparantly some speculation as to who the photo’s were released (leaked) to, according to Simeon Simeonov ’s blog ‘High Contrast‘ they were leaked to Engadget although this story originates from his blog. The pictures are warned to have been photoshopped.

“According to Engagets tipster, it’s a button-less touchscreen device as is the rage these days only this time with GPS built-in for pinpoint navigation around Google Maps. What’s pictured in that all too familiar blur (Photoshopped?) is the phone’s contact program said to be an extended version of Gtalk combining Gmail, text and instant messaging. The device doesn’t have any on-board storage and all applications are served up over the network with new apps “attached” to your account via a web interface”
These are all still rumours so we are going to wait on Google for their confirmation.

Nokia announces platforms to connect advertisers and media publishers with mobile
Tuesday, March 6, 2007 Nokia Ad Service and Nokia Advertising Gateway enable delivery of the right ad to the right mobile consumer.

The Nokia Advertising Gateway not the Ad Service really caught my imagination. This may be the best way to allow advertisers and news media broadcasters to target specific localized audiences. It really spells a second chance for the local media and newspapers to jump into the playing field and make up for lost opportunities.

I will leave you with the full press release from Nokia.

Espoo, Finland; New York, USA — Nokia today announced two mobile advertising services. Nokia Ad Service, is a fully managed service for advertisers to conduct targeted advertising on mobile services and applications. Nokia Ad Service consists of a group of mobile publishers forming a mobile ad network and a platform to deploy, manage and optimize mobile advertising campaigns. Nokia also introduced Nokia Advertising Gateway, a private label service for third party Publishers and Advertising Aggregators that want to extend to relevant mobile advertising. Nokia Advertising Gateway operates as an intelligent switch, selecting between text, visual, audio and video ads - depending on the user’s context – and feeding the ad to the device.

Nokia Ad Service
“As advertisers struggle to reach personalized targeting with traditional media such as print and TV, mobile advertising is becoming an increasingly attractive channel for brands,” said Tom Henriksson, Director of Nokia Ad Service at Nokia Emerging Business Unit. “We have completed a number of pilot campaigns with advertisers and mobile publishers for testing the Nokia ad serving technology and consumer experience. The feedback has been very positive from all parties.”

Nokia Ad Service fulfills different types of advertising needs such as advertisers deploying global mobile campaigns, agencies offering mobile advertising to complement traditional media initiatives, and publishers seeking new business models and a larger consumer audience. Nokia Ad Service serves mobile operators as a solution provider bringing the mobile advertising model to operator services, driving new and sustainable revenue streams. Nokia Ad Service simplifies the mobile advertising process by supporting & managing the full campaign lifecycle for advertisers including planning, deploying, optimizing, and reporting. Typical mediums of experience for mobile advertisements are in the form of interactive content like banner ads in browsing services, ads in applications, and videos.

Nokia Ad Service will begin its operations in Europe with a kick-off at ad:tech, an interactive marketing event in Paris, France on March 6th-7th, 2007 and globally in the second half of 2007.

Nokia Advertising Gateway
“With Nokia Advertising Gateway we are partnering with newspaper publishers, other traditional media companies, aggregators, platform companies, operators and internet companies to help them serve their current advertisers by offering easy access to a mobile audience” says Matthew Snyder, Head of Business Development, Nokia Multimedia, Advertising Business Program. “We have an aggregator interface for plugging partners’ platforms into the gateway – Nokia being in the role of platform service provider. Think of the gateway as a one-stop delivery point with intelligence”.

Nokia Advertising Gateway enables delivery of targeted ads to mobile devices. Ads will be closely tied and optimised to specific multimedia applications, such as reading digital newspaper content, watching TV, listening to music or looking at directions on maps. Nokia offers access to the platform for third parties and enables their ad sales teams to sell for the mobile channel. Nokia Advertising Gateway supports so called CPA (cost per action) model and it provides usage data from mobile devices for enabling targeted ad selection and delivery to users’ devices. A key part of the platform will be the easy-to-use reporting and analytics tools for Publishers to manage their advertisers ROI (Return on investment).

Nokia Advertising Gateway will run several pilots during the coming months and will become commercially available in the second half of 2007, starting with support for converged mobile devices based on the S60 software platform.

Alright, recently I have not been as honest and as forthcoming as I should have been about this. However the only reason I am doing this is because I thought it would be nice to keep this Canadian gem to myself, just for a while before it hit the internet high street. Did I really say Canadian??! Yes, it’s time to take your ear muffs off. This may be a serious future contender for the Google space, they are so tiny compared to Google at the moment with under 1,9 million users a pittance to Google however they have grown at a phenomenal rate of 127% since July 2006.I know you may rely on people like me to tell you something as important as this, but I was just in compliance with the unwritten code of universal bloggers. “You shall not spill anything against Google untill we have made all enough AdSense revenue to give up the day job”.

However it is official according to the Wall Street Journal ‘Stumble Upon’ delivers better search results then Google. “Next time you want to wander the Web, forget about Googling it. Stumble it.”

First of all it is important to know that Stumble Upon is a Search Engine (duh), second of all its a plug-in for Firefox users and IE, thirdly it is community based (that’s the 2007 buzz word). If the technology of this fine machine gets you fired up you may view it here.

” StumbleUpon helps you discover and share great websites. As you click Stumble!, we deliver high-quality pages matched to your personal preferences. These pages have been explicitly recommended by your friends or one of 1,959,891 other websurfers with interests similar to you. Rating these sites you like () automatically shares them with like-minded people – and helps you discover great sites your friends recommend.”

The major difference between Google and Stumble Upon is that the latter relies on intuitive search whilst Google still tends to clog up the drains with a lot of nonsense sites. The fact is that the whole need for SEO (search engine optimization) has now been disrupted and the people at Razorfish may need to re-think their 5 year plans. I mean lets face the facts here, what kind of a market is lead by the economics of search?
My rationalization on this subject is that placement of a website or brand at the top of the search engines listings was rarely about firms which provide a good quality service or product, its about who hired the best SEO people to get their website listed. This staus quo is outdated by Generation C and Twinsumers whose purchasing decisions are increasingly being determined by word of mouth, peer-to-peer, price-comparisons, opinions, reviews, ratings and recommendations. The relevancy of my search results on Google is worsened each day that SEO firms get better at understanding Google.

Advertising on StumbleUpon
When paying for ads on StumbleUpon you’re not buying ad-space as you would in other campaigns - what you’re paying for is an increased weighting within their engine - so an increased percentage of users will be directed to a page you specify (again based around their loose tagging system). So you could set up a campaign directing users to a page about Vista and tag it as “operating system” and “windows” and get semi-targetted traffic. The quality of traffic from social bookmarking sites is debatable but you are going to get targetted visitors… You can take a look at how this works here.

The only critique I would make on Stumble Upon is that they may need to add a time limit on sessions as it is the singular most addictive experience I have had since smoking. Please give it a try but be forewarned:-)

http://www.stumbleupon.com

Last week we were all over Yahoo Tubes, I wonder if this one is going to hit the Technorati charts any time soon? xFruits deserves some credit right now, I doubt they even have a marketing budget or PR guys like Yahoo does. I  also understand that they are based in one of the most unlikely corners of the globe in respect to high tech internet applications i.e. Corsica.
I do however deserve a wallop for spending more than two hours figuring out how difficult Yahoo Tubes is too use whilst I could have been creating the same and better mash ups right here in under 2 minutes. It basically does the sames as Tubes except you can create RSS mash ups for web, mobile, email, sms etc.
this is a typical Web 2.0 service. In other words you do not need any specific learning to deal with it.

xFruits claims are pretty interesting, however I think some points may have been most in translation from uhh…the language they speak on Corsica, Italian…French…Corsican??:
“It is a free online service offering to every user the possibility of:
- Enriching your home
- Enlarging your blog’s functionalities
- Creating, generally, your information system from the RSS feed ”

XFruits makes possible the Mashup RSS creation in a very simple way thanks to the Composer.

You can assemble the bricks together so as to build your own feed-based service.
“xFruiter” service’s users are referenced.

XFruits is already available in English, French and Spanish version, a Japanese version will be available soon. This service is still in Beta. Check it out on http://www.xfruits.com

Many would say that advertising is the most cynic and hypocrite
businesses that exist on this planet (consider the oil business too There is everything in it, except for authenticity.

So many efforts, minds, money and manipulations are being configured
just so you’ll buy that fucking Gillette and believe it makes you better.

Unilever is a mega global corporate.
Dove is one of their many brands, so is Axe.
Dove encouraging women to take pleasure in their individual beauty,
Axe portrays women as a ditsy, sex crazed collective.
Two worldviews, Same company (and V.P of marketing)

But!
When copywriters get their 15 sec without the client being an asshole,
you get some of the best short films.

Enjoy.

Classics.
(Apple 1984 & Honda)

Nonsense.

Thinking about death?

Here’s a comfort if you actually do think about death- Here

CREDIT:
Thanx to InblaTi (Fogel Levin) that sent me some of these.