Finally Adobe seems to be getting on to showcasing some good Flex examples.
Subscribe to an RSS feed of the showcase list to get the latest addtions added automatically.
Any ideas on how to rate these?
Monthly Archive for September, 2007
“ArmchairGM is a community for passionate sports fans. Read, write, and talk about sports. Meet other fans of your favorite teams. Rate players, teams, and sporting events. Earn points and receive gifts.”
ArmchairGM is a company that has been bought by Wikia, a for profit wiki site created by the founder of Wikipedia. It combines the best parts of open source wiki software with social networking features such as adding friends, building a profile, creating groups and meeting people. It also offers users the ability to add ‘foes’ in addition to friends, since so much sport centres on rivalries.
This is something that sports brands should pay attention to and start to take part in. These are the fans, the die hards.
Here’s a screen grab of Didier Drogba’s page:
There’s some serious potential for sports brands and manufacturers to begin cross selling their own promotions, features and competitions on sites like these which will be seen by advocates (and rivals) of that athlete, team or sport.
I can see huge potential here…
MyStrands made its name by offering audio recommendations based on what you listen to.
It’s now launched a music video service which pulls in the majority of it’s content from YouTube, but significantly seems to be doing so in a more robust fashion than any of its competitiors such as iLike, and MOG. One of the other interesting competitior in the form of Vidora.tv. Now they’ve got a really bad design, but a very good Flex widget and a bunch of interesting things going on - well worth a look.
Techcrunch has an article on it.
MyStrands has always been a very interesting company for me, and that’s illustrated by their labs page.
I was very impressed with mystrands.tv:
Richard MAcmanus, over at Read/WriteWeb has an excellent article outlining 10 future web trends to look out for over the next 10 years.
1. Semantic Web
2. Artificial Intelligence
3. Virtual web
4. Mobile
5. Attention economy
6. Web sites as web services
7. Online Video/ Internet TV
8. Rich Internet Apps
9. International web
10. Personalisation
General Motors Europe has launched an innovative “social media newsroom.” Each press release on its new Web site has “links for easy sharing and tagging with popular social media sites such as Technorati, Digg, del.icio.us and Facebook, and each includes a comments area to encourage commentary and opinion from readers.”
The comprehensive Web site includes photography for reuse online that can be downloaded from Flickr — and a link to GM Europe’s video collection on YouTube.
The social media landscape is littered with companies like Walmart whose attempt at social media marketing has gone up in flames.
I have to compliment GM on this approach. By beginning with existing assets (press releases, pictures and videos of their cars) they can test the social media water. The tactics they are using have little chance of blowing up in their face, so the organization will be able to gain confidence in this new marketing approach. As Julie Hamp, GM Europe’s vice president of communications puts it:
“Everyone is learning about the value of the social media environments which allow open dialogue, sharing select information with other users and posting photos or information to share with friends of select users. Today, there is much more of an opportunity to create a dialogue with the consumer, and we are providing our news in a form that makes it easy to republish, comment on and pass along.”
One of the great things about the Web is the ability to link to a Web page, or a part of a Web page, from anywhere. Asterpix, wants to bring that same ease of use to the world of video. The company’s technology -– which it calls hypervideo — gives authors the ability to link directly to objects displayed inside video clips.
Hotspots can be placed on points of interest throughout the entire video clip and tracked. The hotspots are designated with blinking circles; click on them in the video to access the author’s notes, tags and target links. (Here’s a version of the ‘Battle at Kruger’ YouTube video - which has had over 16millions views - but with added links through to the relevant Wikipedia pages)
Crucially, the service doesn’t require you to download separate software on to your desktop. Instead, you simply sign up and embed the videos as you would from any video source such as YouTube, MetaCafe, or Blip. Asterpix adds a separate invisible layer on top of the video that contains all the metadata (aka relevant linking information). Then just go ahead and drop it in your blog or on your MySpace page.
Asterpix’s technology could have big implications for online video-related advertising as it would allow advertisers to embed hotspots around products of high commercial value. For instance, Le Bron James videos could link his shoes to NikeTown stores, or Tiger Woods’ clips could help push golf clubs or even apparel.
All very cool and more impressive than anything I’ve seen so far.
Liz Gannes over at NewTeeVee has written about this. Why’s this important?
Joost currently has over 238 channels and 10,298 programs - I don’t know how many hours that is, but they’re all fed into the Joost platform via Video Feed in the form of (RSS). OnTheToob enables you to own customized channels, interactive tags, and RSS feeds of the latest Joost content.
You can even enable programs you’ve selected to have their own ‘digg it’ button. Owning this is a smart move by Joost because there’s power in them there feeds…
