Refresh Creative Media

The Social Network Trailer Parodies

Craig — Mon, 16 Aug 2010 19:26:27 +0000

The Social Network is the film to be released later this year on the beginnings and rise to popularity of Facebook and it’s founder Mark Zuckerberg. The trailer for The Social Network has spawned several hilarious parodies for the other major social networks including YouTube and Twitter.

Here is the original trailor for The Social Network upon which the parodies were based:

And then, the parody for YouTube:

And Twitter:

Tech4Africa – Sheraan Amod

Graham — Sat, 14 Aug 2010 08:40:55 +0000

Sheraan Amod is a 24 year old web-developer from Cape Town, who has launched an international software brand called Personera. Personera allows you to created a printed calendar with the birthdays of your FaceBook friends printed onto it.

Sheraan talked about how they developed their idea into a working model in Cape Town, and how they have been selling the concept to companies in the US. Just goes to that South African startups can be widely successful.

Tech4Africa – Clay Shirky

Graham — Sat, 14 Aug 2010 08:36:59 +0000

Clay Shirky is an engaging speaker on Social Media. He has written a couple of books including: Here comes everybody; Cognitive Surplus (launched in July 2010).

Clay talked about how the old world model of pushing content out a single source requires management, but how co-ordination of social engagement requires culture.

An example was given of a nursery school in Israel where the late parents picking up their children were fined, and graphed against a control group. The fined parents actually start arriving later. After the fine system is dropped, the previously fined parents continue to arrive late. From this we learn that you have to realize when you are engaging a financial consideration, and when you are engaging a cultural consideration.

To illustrate the future power of Social Media, Clay compared the number of hours it took to create Wikipedia (estimated 100million hours) with the number of hours North Americans watch TV. He reckons that North Americans watch an equivalent amount of Wikipedia content generation time on TV in one weekend on just adverts. Now if you move just a few people over to creating content – imagine the consequences!

Clay also talked about how small good organizations have the potential to become big good organizations. The example of Linux and Wikipedia were given with the original calls to action from their founders.

When asked what technologies we should watch out for, Clay mentioned GitHub.

Tech4Africa – Dustin Diaz

Graham — Sat, 14 Aug 2010 08:29:50 +0000

Dustin Diaz spoke at the Tech4Africa conference. He is a pretty funny guy and gave an entertaining insight into his work at Twitter. Dustin has worked at Yahoo, Google (on Gmail) and now Twitter where he is the lead javascript architect.

Dustin talked about the trinity of font-end development: HTML; CSS; JS
and how HTML5 is a confusing term to describe a new package of the trinity.

Dustin also reckons thats JQuery is like cocaine. One line and you are hooked

An interesting coding practice that he took part in at Twitter was paired coding. This is where 2 developers sit at the same computer, each with their own keyboard and mouse and develop the same code together. He says it can be very tiring.

I asked Dustin: “You’ve been building cutting edge tools for the internet such as Gmail and Twitter. What do expect from the internet of the future.”. “Really?” he replied, “The future of the internet?”. Dustin reckons the internet will become more real-time, with simpler scaled down interfaces.

@Anywhere is a twitter API that Dustin has developed. It allows you to add twitter tools to your website. Here are some code examples that he put up.

Tech4Africa Conference Day 2.1

Graham — Sat, 14 Aug 2010 07:24:01 +0000

Marcel Klaasen from FNB small business talked about entrepreneurship in South Africa. His advice was:

1. “Smurf it up”. The internet allows all kinds of specialised interest groups – so you can create an audience and then monetise it.

2. Don’t forget Business Fundamentals. Input ->Process->Output

3. Be patient

4. Take a leap of faith. According to Adrian Gore from Discovery Health, starting a business can be like jumping out of an aeroplane with a box of silkworms instead of a parachute and hoping that those silk-worms are over-achievers.

There was also a panel discussion on Social Media in South Africa with Walter Pike, Mike Stopforth, Andy Hadfield and Alaister Fairweather. The panel talked about the need to genuine and be prepared to lose control. The summary included:
- Listen first
- Don’t have shit products
- Content; Collaboration; Community

Tech4Africa Conference – Day 1.2

Graham — Fri, 13 Aug 2010 06:08:22 +0000

Leila Janah gave a keynote address on her project called SamaSource. This project is all about outsourcing small computer tasks to Africa for small amounts of remuneration. Leila talked about how the Industrial Revolution created the concept of the assembly line. Low-cost computers can now become part of the virtual assembly line, with tasks being outsourced all over the world.

SamaSource is non-profit, and the main objective is to give employment to people in the developing world. SamaSource currently have 800 workers who login at various SamaSource accredited partners and complete tasks such as address verification. The management team sits in San Francisco and provides all the client liaison and quality assurance.

Eric Hersman talked about his project Ushahidi, which provides Crowdsource Crisis Information. This application was developed in Africa by African developers. It has been used extensively in Crisis situations to help Aid Organisations determine where to send help. Check out the Haiti map.

Tech4Africa Conference – Day 1.1

Graham — Thu, 12 Aug 2010 14:26:48 +0000

I am at the Tech4Africa Conference in Johannesburg for 2 days listening to some web gurus talking about web technology. My overall impression has been – WOW! What a clever bunch of people are developing the internet and it’s tools for us.

Steve Song from the Shuttleworth Foundation talked about the work he has been doing for an organization called Villageteleco.org. They have developed a piece of hardware called Mesh Potatoe which connects a regular analogue telephone to digital wireless network. It has great potential for low cost voice communication in rural communities.

Steve quoted Clay Shirky saying: “To enable innovation…lower the cost of failure.” In the African context the cost of access makes web innovation and failure expensive.Stat (no source): 50% of disposable income is spent on mobile communication in Africa.

To cope in an unpredictable environment, you need to enable ideas that can evolve and let the successful ones survive, according to Steve.

Joe Stump from SimpleGeo was the lead architect of Digg. He spoke about the moving from the Small-time to the Big-time and what you should understand about developers. This includes:

- Understanding that you will have protest from you developers,

-And stubbornness,

-With whiners

-Good developers are lazy by nature – hire the lazy ones.

-Developers are also eccentric.

-Jedis (or genius developers) are rare.

-Split developers up into teams with team-captains (who aren’t managers).

-Ensure regular communication. SimpleGeo has daily standups where people talk about their work. Across offices they have 2 big screens with iChat running that allows them to wave and beckon a developer in another office.

-Ensure Standards and Conventions are applied

-Make sure you have Code Repositories

-Promote ownership of pieces of the development. Moving developers around too much doesn’t work.

-Create frameworks

-Ensure there is testing, documentation and peer reviews.

There was also a panel discussion with Andy Budd (Clear Left), Dustin Diaz (Twitter), Joe Stump (SimpleGeo), John Resig (Mozilla Foundation) and Jonathan Snook (Yahoo). Discussion included the how developers will probably have to support old browsers like IE6 for ages as many of the bugs will be passed onwards to future versions of Internet Explorer.

8bit art

Graham — Wed, 04 Aug 2010 06:31:35 +0000

There have been times at Refresh when we have wanted to have a sale on blue pixels, because we had over stocked. It turns out that not having enough stock of pixels can mean quite amazing design.

Pixel Couch by Christian Zuzunaga

Turns out this style is also known as 8bit. I found this out when I saw a group on Flickr called 8bit where this pic was posted:

Pixel Street Art

Now you can even buy 8bit products:

Pixel coaster

Pixel Jewelry

Pixel Watch

Web 2.0: Crowd-sourcing and User-generated content

Craig — Thu, 15 Jul 2010 21:22:41 +0000

Firstly the difference between crowd-sourcing and user-generated content:

The term “crowd-sourcing” was originally coined by Wired Magazine in 2006, by Jeff Howe and Mark Robinson, and involves opening up tasks usually performed by company employees to a open or restricted community. User-generated content on the other hand is always publicly available, and this content forms the basis for Web 2.0,. It can also be referred to as “Conversational Media” because of the two-way dialogue involved between posts and comments.

Crowd-sourcing in marketing functions

Traditionally market and product research have been conducted in closed groups, but the large pool of individuals available through crowd-sourcing has opened up the industry to a wider community of diverse backgrounds and talents. Marketing and advertising agencies have successfully used crowd-sourcing for a variety of tasks including product research and development, promotion and advertising, and market research. Crowd-sourcing provides companies with access to a large number of ideas from individuals with outlooks perhaps more varied to those within a single company or group, as well as giving access to a huge pool of individuals with diverse expertise.

Amazon’s Mechanical Turk is one those sites which offer a number of Human Intelligence Tasks (HITs) that can be completed by individuals who are then paid for their efforts by the firm that created the task. The fees paid can range from 1 US cent for simple data entry, up to a maximum of around 11 US dollars, for more complex tasks such as copywriting or website usability testing.

Sites like Mechanical Turk often offer companies access to these skills at lower rates than their salaried employees, but this does raise the question of whether these lower-paid workers are being exploited by larger companies and the effect this has on their existing employees. There is also the issue, particularly in market research activities, as to whether the individual could be biased towards the company doing the paying, and because of this it’s recommended that very specific guidelines are set when gathering the information.

Many online advertising campaigns have also embraced the idea of crowd-sourcing, utilising the power of the masses to come up with innovative concepts. Idea Bounty is a website used whereby agencies can post briefs, and the best ideas will take home the bounty. The benefit for the agency is that they only pay for what they want, and the creatives are not restrained by any long term commitment.

User-generated content and Web 2.0

Web 2.0 refers to the recent internet, and to use the well-known phrase: “where users no longer just browse the web, but are the web”. Time Magazine paid tribute to Web 2.0 by making their person of the year in 2006, “You”, meaning all people generating content on the web. Websites like YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter, owe the majority of their success to a user-centric design, which facilitates a more interactive and social way of absorbing and creating of media. Brands who want to communicate effectively in this environment must provide content that is useful, entertaining, and above all places user-experience first.

Facebook is the currently the second largest site on the net after Google, and with 400 million users, most of whom have shared very specific demographic information, it is a extremely powerful site for marketers. Facebook allows marketers to interact with consumers where they are most comfortable, in a community of their friends, where peer to peer recommendations are king.

There are many great examples of company Facebook fan pages that have had great success. Pringles have realised their target market enjoys videos with humorous content, and also engage with their users by creating status updates that prompt user discussion while maintaining an informal and casual tone. Redbull have the edge over the rest with their access to some unbelievable extreme sports video content on their Facebook fan page, and also offer Twitter feeds from their various sponsored athletes.

According to Callan Green who works in public relations and social media at Bailey Gardiner, the key pointers to a successful Facebook presence are: “know your audience, provide quality, regular content, encourage discussion and engagement, and do not take yourself too seriously.”

Twitter allows companies to actively engage with customers with the use of short status messages, and also gain market intelligence with their real-time search facility. According to Twitter the microblogging service also “shrinks the emotional distance between company and your customers” and builds these relationships through direct contact, and feedback. Old Spice recently combined Twitter and YouTube in an highly successful and innovative social media campaign, where the hunky guy from the Old Spice Ads, (who has become the new Chuck Norris) read out Twitter statuses tagged with @oldspice, dressed in only a towel. Twitter was crucial to the viral nature of the campaign, while YouTube provided the video platform.

Video is an entertaining medium that will keeps a user more engaged than reading reams of text-only content. Users are searching for video that provides instruction, value, and entertainment, and YouTube has an audience viewing over 2 million videos per day. The University of Phoenix Online is the leader in it’s field by providing compelling online testimonials to convert users into enrolled students. Home Depot is another brand effectively using a sponsored YouTube channel and this has helped establish themselves as a trusted expert in the field of home maintenance. The world’s largest video community also offers advertising opportunities such as inVideo Ads or YouTube video ads, that can be targeted to very specific user demographics.

Blogging allows companies to open dialogue and built trust within their customer base. Company blogging is the medium through which companies can communicate directly with customers, listen to what they are saying and analyse current trends. There is, however, a barrier to entry for large corporates, as with all social media, mostly due to insufficient information and fears of the risks involved. Many companies and eMarketing agencies build a network of respected bloggers in various industries, who are then paid to blog about the companies products and services.
This kind of marketing is effective as it is consumer to consumer dialogue, which is quite often regarded as being more trustworthy than standard marketing messages. Blogging networks such as PayPerPost.com build a network of diverse bloggers who companies can approach to blog on various topics for an agreed fee.

The benefits
As the web opens up to more social, collaborative media creation, the content is becoming more edgy and less restricted by corporate guidelines. Although the new methods for using this new landscape may step on the toes of the more traditional marketers, those that understand benefits of user-generated content and crowd-sourcing, will have more tools at their disposal and this may lead to a greater understanding of their customers, while at the same time offer consumers an pro-active outlet to demand better products and services.

References:
Crowd-Generated Content (CGC): What Is It? – http://allthingsv.com/tag/crowdsourcing/
Wikipedia – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crowdsourcing
Wikipedia – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_generated_content
Click Advisor – www.clickadvisor.com/…/Whitla_Crowdsourcing_Application_in_marketing.pdf
Pay per Post – www.payperpost.com
YouTube Brands: 5 Outstanding Leaders in YouTube Marketing – http://mashable.com/2009/06/01/youtube-brands/
Killer Facebook fan pages – http://mashable.com/2009/06/16/killer-facebook-fan-pages/
Youtube Fact Sheet – http://www.youtube.com/t/fact_sheet
Twitter – http://business.twitter.com/twitter101

5 Popular Open-Source eCommerce Platforms

Craig — Mon, 05 Jul 2010 14:13:34 +0000

We recently wrote an article for Memeburn.com on this topic, please view the article here.