The DLD 2012 conference in Munich was a great place to mingle and network with social media super stars and online entrepreneurs.  At the conference I had the opportunity to speak with Casey Fenton, CEO and Co-founder of CouchSurfing, who sat with me and discussed his company’s completely unique business model.

The idea of CouchSurfing was fueled by Casey’s own experiences while traveling the world.  Casey found  that by networking with people all over the world, he could rely on their hospitality and vice versa.

CouchSurfing is a community, and as such it focuses on spirit of trust and hospitality.  Members of the CouchSurfing network offer their homes to fellow travelers in order to help facilitate a truly genuine experience, from the perspective of a local.

Casey shares some of the crazy experiences he has had over the years using CouchSurfing.  From the Galapagos to Scandinavia, his stories are pretty amazing!

We have decided to take action, and to that end we are responding to SOPA and PIPA with a proposed legislative initiative of our own: the Stop Online Boredom Act (SOBA). This is a new law that calls for harsh punishment for those responsible for mindless, boring content that is posted to the Internet.

After all, if SOPA passes, everyone will be so terrified of the consequences that the Internet will be stripped of anything meaningful, interesting, or remotely provocative.

You can explore our press release about the initiative here: https://www.blonde20.com/soba/

The main thrust of the proposed law calls to protect Internet users from the theft of their Interest Property (IP). The legislation would lay out the following guidelines for IP theft.

• If the content causes drowsiness, sleepiness, or slight disinterest – this is IP theft. It is not the result of all-night, energy-drink fueled sessions of Call of Duty.
• If the content causes the user to say “Why the fuck would you post this?” – this is IP theft. It is not the result of the user being a superficial, elitist hipster.
• If the content makes the user nostalgic for the good old days of broadcast television – this is NOT IP theft. This is impossible, and most likely a drug induced hallucination.

We are also proposing an appropriate punishment for offenders guilty of IP theft: Blondification. You can see an example of Blondification here, this time using SOPA and PIPA authors Lamar Smith and Patrick Leahy.

Please join our fight against online boredom by adding a ‘Support SOBA‘ badge to your profile picture.

Remember: Stop SOPA! Support SOBA!

I started out gaming at the early age of 5, but soon enough most of my friends gamed in one form or another, it’s the most regular thing in the world, right? A kid playing around with videogames, back then it felt like the most natural thing in the world, but even then I felt like something was amiss.  I was always more dedicated, more emotional and more addicted (some would say) to gaming.

My gaming addiction became clear around 11^th grade.  It was obvious that gaming was not a phase or a toy for me.   Gaming was a major part of my life, it was what I had been doing for as long as I can remember and it was probably the thing I was most attached to. Soon enough I was the weird guy playing videogames, of course the videogames sub-culture exists, but to the rest of the world you’re a grown man playing with toys.  None of them understood the magic of gaming.  They thought it was silly, stupid and annoying. You could take away school, friends, house, clothes or whatever else and I probably wouldn’t mind nearly as much as if you took my XBOX.  It was at this time I started feeling society slowly but surely pushing me aside, and me pushing myself further away from it.

Until now.

Well, not right now, but in the last couple of years (specifically with the release of angry birds) suddenly… everyone games.  Granted, they don’t pull all night COD sessions, but they’re gaming, and they’re addicted; wherever they go, whatever they do, they’re mobile casual gaming console (or ‘phone’ as some of you sometimes call it) is with them.

In the time that I have been working in social media, I have seen how social media has been used to help launch a company, promote a product or even to help organize a protest. Last week I saw how social media directly impacted an event in my life by making the world that much smaller.

This past Wednesday, I was lucky enough to marry the most incredible woman in the world, okay so you might think that I am a little biased but the facts are the facts! So a little background is that I come from Johannesburg, South Africa and she is from London in the UK so we have family and friends spread all over the world. Unfortunately a lot of those family and friends were not able to travel to Israel for the wedding due to factors such as ill health and the high cost of travelling. One such guest who was missing from the wedding was my now wife’s grandmother who could not travel from London due to ill health. The thought of her missing out on arguably her favorite granddaughter’s wedding was a particularly sad one. Enter the wonderful world of social media!

As we stood under our wedding canopy, a friend of mine held up my cell phone which was connected to Skype and was beaming a live video stream of our wedding across the planet to an old aged home in London. From where I was standing, I could see the video feed originating from London and saw the tears on our grandmothers face as her granddaughter walked down the aisle. So while she was not there in person, she was certainly there in technology!

At the same time, various guests at the wedding were posting to Facebook, Twitter and Foursquare about their attendance at the wedding with several real time photo’s being post to the various platforms during the course of the ceremony. Throughout the day our friends had been posting to our Facebook walls with various messages of congratulations. Within hours of the wedding being over, many photo’s had been uploaded to Facebook for all our friends and family all around the world to see.

When planning the wedding, we decided to add an extra element of fun by hiring a photobooth for the evening. People who used the booth received a copy of their picture as well as a copy to put in a special album for us. The pictures were also uploaded to Facebook the very next day although it was clear to us that not everyone knew this when posing for their pictures!

A few days on from the wedding when I finally had the chance to change my relationship status from being engaged to being married, I was not prepared for the outpouring of love from family and friends all over the worlds. That simple relationship change elicited dozens of comments and more likes than I have ever received.

This is the true worth of social media. Despite having family and friends spread across the globe we really felt like they were there with us on our special day.

Kevin is a Content and Community Manager at Blonde 2.0

This post was originally posted on socialmedia.biz on December 28th.

You and your friends from all over the world walk into a bar on New Year’s Eve. The music is great, the bartender is friendly, and you and all your friends are dressed up in your favorite outfits. Your friend from London decides to pick a different song from the jukebox, your friend from Brazil decides to listen to the band instead, while the buddy you just met from Istanbul decides to play a cool YouTube video on the wall of the bar. You head out to the dance floor, whip out some amazing dance moves that are straight-out of a movie, and then the cute guy or girl you’ve been checking out comes over and buys you a drink. Before long you’re chatting it up like you’ve known each other forever, so you decide to have a video chat to get to know each other better.

The best part of all of this is that you never have to leave your living room.

The great virtual night out I just described is possible with .Friends (Dot Friends), a brand new app on Facebook that launched last week. The whole point of the app is to have fun, party with your friends and to meet new ones as well. You go into a virtual world, pick a hot spot from the world-map, and then live it up while chatting with your friends and meeting new ones.

I’m a heavy Facebook user so I know what an amazing platform it is for connecting with people. But Facebook is missing the unique element of personal interaction that is so important. That’s where .Friends comes in. It lets you create a virtual “you” and provides a bunch of cool places where you can party and hang out. .Friends provides a new way and a new venue to interact with people and lets you get together with people from all over the world and hang-out as if you were all in the same spot.

This should sound familiar to tech watchers since a similar app has been making waves recently and raised a “bit” of money as well. But where I think .Friends really shines is in its stunning visuals which make the app a lot more fun to use. Not only that, but you have a ton of options in terms of how you can look in the .Friends world. There’s a huge selection of hair styles, clothes and accessories to create a perfect look. After all, how can you meet people in a virtual world if the virtual ‘you’ doesn’t represent who you are and your own individual style?

It’s easy to get started with the app. You can either follow the tutorial when you enter the app or just click on the .Friends logo on the top left. This will open a pull down menu that will enable you to navigate through the world, see the different venues around the globe, change your clothes and more. When you’re in a location and you see someone interesting, you can click on them and then you’ll get a menu of options such as writing them a private chat or buying them a drink. Be careful though, people notice when you buy the cheapest drink on the menu. .Friends also lets you start-up a video chat with someone right from the app making it a convenient and fun way to meet people face-to-face.

While all of this already makes .Friends addictively fun, I think one of the coolest features is still to come. The team at .Friends is putting the finishing touches on a feature that lets you build your own location in the .Friends world. So if you’ve always dreamed of opening up your own bar or club and turning into a world-leading entertainer, you can do it all on .Friends.

Facebook and other social networks are transforming the way we communicate and stay in touch with our friends, making it easier than ever to maintain relationships that span the globe. .Friends – and other social tools that duplicate real-world scenarios – are going to extend the range of interactions we have on the web, add new depth to our online experiences, and strengthen our relationships with friends on social networks.

I am not ashamed to say that I am, and always have been fascinated by time travel. Be it Doc Brown’s Delorean or the Doctor’s TARDIS, anything to do with time travel has me jumping up and down for more. You can imagine my joy when Facebook rolled out the Timeline option. One of the great things about working in a new media firm is that we found out about the Facebook Timeline a few months ago and I have been delving into it for quite some time now.

It is no secret that we all live on Facebook nowadays. We have all seen and heard the statistics: if Facebook was a country, it would be the second biggest on the planet; the average users spends at least eleven hours a month on Facebook; one in every 8 minutes is spent on Facebook; the list goes on. You could even go far as saying that we have a life on Facebook and a life off of it. Which one is real is another story altogether.

You can imagine my delight in being able to “go back in time” and see exactly what had been posted on my wall on the very first day that I signed up for Facebook – which was 29 November 2006 as my timeline proudly informed me! I had once before tried to see what was on my page all the way back in November 2006 but my browser crashed somewhere around December 2007.Now with the help of Timeline, I can see exactly what was posted to my wall at any given time by any one of my friends.

In a previous post I wrote how blogs have become modern day diaries but with the roll out of the Facebook Timeline, I think it is more accurate to say that this is a modern day diary. With the very cool and easy to use timeline on the side of the page, I can pick any year and month that I want and I will see all the activity on my page from that specific period. This comes in handy when you want to see who wished you happy birthday 5 years ago!

Another great feature is the improved profile picture. With the new set up, people have a lot more room for creativity. I had a Myspace page long before a Facebook profile, but the one thing that convinced me to make the change on 29 November 2006 was that there was no pressure to have the best designed profile page on Facebook – unlike Myspace, which was all about having the flashiest and most colorful page. While Facebook has made many changes to its look, the basic premise has been the same. Although everyones profile is individual, they are all still similar. You can change your profile picture, and make it as crazy as you want, but at the end of the day your page will still contain the same information as everyone else – a picture, a Facebook wall, etc. So you still get to be creative, but only within the exact limits that Facebook allows.

Even before I started working at a social media company, I spent countless hours on Facebook building up a friend database and interacting with those friends. Until recently, what happened in the past stayed in the past, but now with Timeline all that ‘hard work’ is not in vain!

Kevin is a Content and Community Manager at Blonde 2.0

The NYC based company is funded by investment firm Rhodium and specializes in providing directions for commuters in over 100 cities, offering valuable information for locating and providing directions to subway stations, bus stops and specific destinations.  In addition, HopStop even offers estimates on the total miles an individual travels, the amount of calories burned and carbon emissions saved by taking a particular route. Thanks to HopStop, getting from A to B has never been more efficient in the concrete jungles of the United States.

This week, I bought myself a birthday present, it was a genuine mint condition Gameboy color full with a night light, a Pokémon blue cartridge, and a cable to connect up to four (!) Gameboys at once, the guy who sold it to me stated that there is no need for a cable, since the Gameboy came with an Infra-Red interface to connect to other Gameboys. Later that day, I got home, turned on steam, and played a round of Magicka with my friends online. Wow.

This got me thinking about the evolution of social gaming, and how it’s changed the world of gaming, how gamers view gaming and the technology around it.

The very first social game is one of the first games in the history of gaming- Pong. You could play Pong vs. the machine but it was much more satisfying kicking your friends’ ass with a small paddle, pong was created to play in twos, that’s why almost every Pong system came with at least 2 controllers.

After that, social games took a pretty big hit, the dominating game genres were platformers and adventure games (with some early First Person Shooters appearing, none of them vs. human players), mostly games built to play alone, this is when culturally, the socially awkward, shut in gamer image started to emerge, because no one enjoys sitting around watching you play Mario (as it took me about three first dates to figure out).

With the arrival of Gameboys, available to connect to each other, a brand new way of thinking about sharing a gaming experience with someone else was born, 2 consoles connected to each other, when each player played on his own console. This wouldn’t be properly implemented until the arrival of the internet, so the most common use for connecting 2 Gameboys together was swapping Pokémon, that’s how I got my Mewtwo.

Now, as I mentioned earlier, many FPSs existed at this point, they were fun and pretty popular, but there was one FPS, that came out in the mid-90s on the N64, to which you can attribute the current day success of MW3 and Battlexfield 3, Goldeneye.

Goldeneye, apart from being a mediocre James Bond movie starring Pierce Brosnen, is an FPS game with the best multiplayer system of its time, the screen was split up to 4 different boxes, and players would deathmatch with each other for hours, finding the joy in killing intelligent human beings rather than scripted AIs, the FPS multiplayer movement was born.

Now, after that many came and went that let a group of friends hangout and kill each other virtually, but with the budding internet, a new type of gaming was born.

It began with LAN parties. Internet connections were too slow, so people would bring their machines to someone’s house (proper desktops mind you screens and all, this is a pre-gaming laptop world), hooked all of them on a local area connection, and played each other (each on his own computer), the most common game played-half life, and even more popular than that was its mod called counter strike, still one of the most played FPSs out there, almost fifteen years after its release.

Slowly internet connections grew more common and faster, PC gaming was now one with online multiplayer, some games (most famous of which is World of Warcraft) don’t even have a single player mode, it’s all in the web, it’s all social. Now, it was the consoles turn. The first console to be connected to the internet was the Sega Dreamcast, which suffered from a major case of “no one is online with me so it’s just like playing alone” ness, and didn’t have much going for it besides being able to connect to the internet, so no one bought it. What we needed was a good console from a major company that would have a great online experience, enter Microsoft.

Now, you can dis on Microsoft all you want (you probably do) but you can’t claim they don’t create revolutionary products. One of which was the Xbox (which then spawned the three way console wars between Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo), the Xbox was an awesome console, with great graphical power behind it, the awesome marketing and distribution power of the Microsoft Empire and a phone outlet on the back.

Xbox live, which still being used today as a social gaming, media and entertainment hub was a revolution in a server, players could now play the latest and greatest console games (the main one, Microsoft’s exclusive title Halo) with friends, and yell swear words and recial slurs at them while doing it, Gamer heaven.

Nowadays no console or PC game is not complete without online features, and if your not into online gaming, the Facebook and online social games are now the most common games out there.

And all I wanted was to get a Mewtow.

Shahar Goldfinger is the Creative Catalyst at Blonde 2.0

North Korea’s leader Kim Jong-il loves a spectacle. His personal creation, the Arirang Festival, is the world’s largest public performance, involving some 100,000 performers to an attending audience of usually 1% of that amount. The Arirang Festival takes place every year for two months to celebrate Kim il-Sung’s birthday (Jong-il’s father) in Pyongyang’s national stadium. The performance itself is utterly mind-blowing in scope and design.

The Dear Leader of Marketing?

Make no mistake, marketers can learn from the Dear Leader about building a spectacle. The Jong-il directed festival / advertising campaign easily encourages word-of-mouth buzz and online viral sharing from its viewers. Western visitors are well known to walk away from the Arirang performance absolutely astounded and willing to share footage of the performance on YouTube. Ironically, both of which are actions occurring by people not at all motivated to actually becoming proud citizens of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.

Could it be that size does matter in promoting an ideology in the exact same way as the promotion of a product? I think the answer is yes because the world loves a spectacle.

Marketers are taking note. The idea of using a spectacle as a medium for advertising and the engine for generating quality word of mouth is quickly becoming commonplace for companies that can afford to undertake a massive public marketing endeavor. Companies already realize that they existentially have to publically astound in a big way in order to move their product and stay cool to a generation of tech-savvy 18-34 year olds.

On November 28th, Nokia teamed with internationally famous DJ deadmau5, to create a public event to promote their new Nokia Lumia 800 cellphone. Starting with a public concert of booming beats from deadmau5, Nokia completely hijacked the face of the 118m Millbank Tower in central London with a 4D lightshow fed from 16 projectors from over 300 meters away onto the 800 windows of the tower. As you can see here, the event was simply outstanding and technologically impressive. For their effort, Nokia garnered great press coverage, more than a million views on YouTube and most importantly, the phone has sold out across London as seen here. By creating a public spectacle, Nokia is cool again, literally 118m of skyscraper cool.

Equally impressive, in Quito, Ecuador Coca-Cola recently installed a 16m tall 3D screen that digitally pours and brands a constant waterfall of color torrents. Located in the Quito’s biggest mall, the Casada installation is being considered the largest public interactive screen ever built. Launched on November 17 after eight months of preparation and construction, the Coca-Cola waterfall provides a one-of-a-kind colorful experience for the ever-growing crowds gathering around the screen daily to manipulate and control the waterfall on the digital screen with their hand motions. Coca-Cola’s branded exhibit provides an outstanding auditory and visual experience, thus raising the bar on how companies are encouraging consumers to actually interact with the product, while simultaneously motivating future sales.

Both Nokia’s and Coca-Cola’s public installations mark strong examples of an important growing technological and marketing trend. First, people love to be astounded and top companies absolutely know it. Second, we are entering into an advertising era where the world’s top companies are pushing to create public spectacles in order to prove that they are the best creatively rather than just saying creatively that their product is the best.

What was once a simple formula – create a product, back-up a loaded Brinks truck full of cash to a creative ad agency, create an ad and then strategically place the ad, is now seeming slightly outdated for the world’s most foremost creative marketers. Ingenious marketers must now consider making their advertising magical, interactive and larger than life by broadcasting their creative greatness onto giant screens in city centers to promote future sales. Screens projecting images of 3D and 4D pixilation create dominant scenes for attracting the public’s attention both online through sharing on YouTube and offline by seeing the spectacle with our own eyes. In the end, these product spectacles that are occurring across the world are not only proving to be incredibly viral, but also creative enough to motivate the future opening of wallets in a big way.

Brian is a Content and Community Manager at Blonde 2.0