Via Mashable
Archive for the 'R&D' Category
Page 5 of 6
“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
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.
As mentioned by Janko Roettgers over at NewTeeVee, Joost has opened up its API for developers to write their own widgets.
Shel Isreal emailed Facebook’s corporate communications group to get some accurate numbers. Here’s what he uncovered:
- Over 150,000 registrants daily. That’s 1 million a week since January.
- 36 million users today. Of course that number will be off a million one week from today.
- Half user are outside college. That number was zero in Sept. 2006.
- 0ver 40 billion page views in May 2007
- Average visitor stays 20 minutes
- Most growth is among people over age 25.
- 47,000+ Facebook groups.
- #1 photo sharing app on the web. 2.7 billion photos on site.
- More than 2000 applications. The Top 10 are: Top Friends, Video, Graffiti, MyQuestions, iLike, FreeGifts, X Me, Superpoke!, Fortune Cookie & Horoscopes. The smallest of these has over 4.5 million users.
More on this over on Jeremiah’s site. He’s just joined Forrester research as a Senior Analyst covering social media.
An interesting article over at NewTeeVee.com.
Grassroots buzz and genuinely interesting sports are perfect for internet consumption. Think about televised Ultimate Frisbee tournaments or Roller Hockey…These are the types of programmes that have niche audiences and offer the ability to be experimented with.
I see huge potential in this space…
