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5 Ways Gaming May Transform The Future Of Healthcare & Wellness

Rohit — Thu, 11 Jun 2009 10:30:54 PDT

Since the Nintendo Wii came out several years ago, the term "gaming" has begun to take on a different meaning. What was once used as a misunderstood term to describe teenagers wasting hours afterschool playing online games requiring huge and powerful computers with tattoo art on the sides has broadened. Now gaming describes everything from the massively addictive multiplayer games, to a new form of journalism, to the 45 year old woman playing a "microgame" on her mobile phone while waiting for the bus. Recent stats from the E3 conference offers research that may be surprising to some, including one data point that 25% of all gamers are over the age of 50.

Yet, despite the broadening perception of what gaming means - one area that is most interesting for marketers is also an area that is often ignored ... the market for "serious games." Serious games could be a variety of things, from educational games to help teach a new skill, to healthcare oriented games designed to aide therapy or test new prosthetic devices. Today is also the opening day of an innovative conference called Games For Health put on by the Serious Games Initiative and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. In its fifth year, the event is featuring lots of interesting discussions in over 70 sessions. The event will showcase what I believe may be the 5 core ways that gaming could transform almost every aspect of healthcare and wellness as we see it today. In no particular order, these are:

1. ExerGaming - The Wii has done more for this category of gaming than any other, but this is simply the idea that gaming can be a powerful motivator in helping people to get more fit or incorporate more exercise into their schedule. The WiiFit has been a big hit in enabling this activity among Americans. The conference will also feature a case study from the US Army on their own exergaming effort called Army Fit.

2. AdverGaming - On the marketing side, advergaming has been around for some time now ... but it starting to make some waves when it comes to healthcare marketing. At least one prominent healthcare blogger believes it may be the future of healthcare marketing, and there are several examples such as Pepcid's current Nighttime Word Burn game on WebMD or a highly addictive game for Miraplex, a treatment for Restless Leg Syndrome that was released several years ago but is no longer online. (Disc. - Boehringer Ingelheim is a client of Ogilvy PR) Today Humana also announced a well concieved effort called Humana Games for Health which is seeking new game concepts to motivate people to be more active and healthy and is running a paid contest for ideas from today through September. Humana's effort is an interesting crossover that could move into one of the other categories such at TheraGaming relatively easily as well.

3. TherapyGaming - A natural fit for gaming has been in the area of visual therapy and improving cognitive abilities, as well as real physical therapy. There are several sites such as SharpBrains and Lumosity that offer gaming as a way to improve your intelligence and potentially treat learning disorders as well. To some degree, this is also the type of gaming that has been around for many years before the Internet, with flash cards and other forms of real life games that provide therapy to help patients heal or improve ability. Ben's Game is a video game designed to help kids fight cancer and the Wii is finding another use here as a tool to help physical therapy which the USAToday dubbed "Wiihabilitation."

4. CauseGaming - Sitting at the intersection of healthcare, behaviour change and cause marketing is an unique effort from The Partnership For An HIV-Free Generation and Warner Brothers called Pamoja Mtaani. The game is an interactive effort designed to educate children in Africa of the dangers of HIV in an engaging way. Another brilliant example I first heard about several months ago is Akoha, described as "the world's first social reality game." There will likely be many more examples in coming months of games that take a cause related approach to inspiring behaviour change in a health context.

5. SimulationGaming - There are several interesting examples of what you might consider a crossover between simulated training exercises and gaming. Though it may be a stretch, I'm including these in this list because it's a potentially big area where gaming can have an impact in methods and knowledge building when it comes to dealing with certain situations. The conference will be featuring an interesting case study of Burn Center, a "medically-accurate simulation of mass-scale casualty burn treatment." Another older example is the now defunct SIMHealth: National Healthcare Simulation.

Collecta Turns Internet’s Ocean of Data into a River of Real Time Information

brian — Fri, 10 Jul 2009 15:33:53 PDT

I’m blogging from the Real-Time Stream event in Redwood City, California organized by TechCrunch. I will share more of my thoughts and observations in a series of posts at a later time – there’s just so much too process in “real time.” Let’s just say that the future of search, streams and the concept of the “Now Web” is blindingly bright.

One of the presenting companies here is Collecta, a new take on Web search, social aggregation, and real-time aggregation..

Collecta recently launched a new platform in public beta that fundamentally changes the way people find and access information on the web.It is especially interesting for any brand manager attempting to harness and organize conversations across the social Web.

What we’re learning through Twitter Search, is that people want access to the immediacy of conversations tied to keywords, regardless of the authority, Page Rank, and SEO.

This is the dawn of real-time search…

It’s the difference between finding the right content on the Web and finding the right content, right now across the Web and Social Media.

As Collecta CEO, Gerry Campbell puts it, “I want to know what are people saying about my topic, right now. The minute you put rankings and filters on search, it stops representing real-time.”

Last year I introduced the Conversation Prism with Jesse Thomas to map the social landscape as a way of discovering REAL insight into the conversations transpiring across social networks, where and when they occurred.

Initially, I expected brand managers and marketers to use the search boxes within relevant networks to search for past and current conversations. The dream was, of course, to have a search window into the social web and the social graph, in real-time. Collecta, among other specialized tools such as One Riot, Topsy, and PeopleBrowsr are peeling back the layers of society, focusing the our attention to enhance and amplify listening, and plugging us directly into the conversations that shape impressions and perceptions.

While searching the Conversation Prism is real-time is not yet fully realized, it is imminent.

Essentially, Collecta enables Internet search to finally keep pace with the real-time information streams on blogs, microblogs such as Twitter and FriendFeed, traditional news sites, Web sites, and social networks such as Flickr, YouTube, and Digg. It then centralizes the search results in easy to read, continually updating streams.

While not every search requires the immediacy of real-time, Collecta’s technology can dramatically transform the end user experience in countless applications, such as watching a live stream of comments on a sporting event or television show, following breaking news or a natural disaster, or keeping a close eye on brand or product comments.

I asked Gerry about the inspiration behind Collecta and his response paints a picture representing a true shift in technology and behavior, “The evolution of media needs to catch up to the pace of how people are consuming data now. We need to rethink search from the user perspective, not trying stuff results into existing paradigms and products. We have to start from scratch.”

He continued, “Every minute, stories are told on the Web. Yet in traditional search, most are usually ranked out of the results and therefore, people don’t get a chance to see them. With Collecta, you can see these stories break and unfold.”

Unlike other aggregator or search tools that are simply a mashup of information built on top Twitter Search, Collecta has built an entire ecosystem and infrastructure based on the open messaging standard XMPP. Over the past decade, the Collecta team has placed an early stake in the future of XMPP. And the recent launch of Google Wave ups the ante on XMPP’s position in the real time web.

Collecta is a river, while traditional search architectures are oceans.

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Responsabilização

Amílcar Tavares — Thu, 09 Jul 2009 02:00:46 PDT

O quê que o mal-amado Bill Gates, o bad boy Bob Geldof e o Arcebispo Desmond Tutu têm em comum?

Sentido de responsabilidade.

Há quase dez anos, líderes africanos e os seus parceiros na comunidade internacional fizeram um pacto para melhorar as vidas de centenas de milhões de pessoas. Como parte da sua campanha para alcançar os Objectivos de Desenvolvimento do Milénio, os países ocidentais assumiram o compromisso com os seus cidadãos de que iriam trabalhar para vencer a pobreza extrema a promover a boa governação.

Contudo, o G8 emitiu apenas um terço da ajuda adicional que prometeram à África até 2010 quando falta dois terços do prazo. A ONE tem projecções mostrando que, até ao final de 2009 vão ser entregues cerca de metade da promessa, com a Itália e a França responsáveis por 80 por cento desse défice. Isso deixa apenas um ano para o G8 fazer o resto.

Portanto, a chave é a Responsabilização.

E foi isso que levou Bill Gates, Bob Geldof e o Arcebispo Desmond Tutu à reunião com a organização criada por Bono e pressionar a cimeira do G8 que começou na quarta-feira em L’Aquila, exortando o Governo italiano a, imediatamente, reverter o corte de €411 milhões na ajuda, proporcionar um extra de € 350 milhões para a agricultura e que pague as suas quotas de 2009 para o Fundo Global de Luta contra a SIDA, Tuberculose e Malária.

O mundo torna-se um pouco mais confortável e habitável quando nos apercebemos que há pessoas que acreditam que a luta contra a pobreza não é uma questão de caridade, mas de justiça e igualdade. E que lutam com unhas e dentes por esse ideal.

Créditos da foto: Tim Anderson para a ONE.

Getting the Mosterous from Posterous

(author unknown) — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 03:04:00 PDT

Posterous has a number of little features that I absolutely love. What's great is that they primarily benefit those of you who consume and engage with my content. (For more, see the photos I attached to the end of this post.)

First, on every post you can see how many page views it received. I like how transparent this is. It's something I wish every content site had. Take a look at the upper right part of this page to get a flavor.

Second, with each post I can control where it syndicates. Currently I post to Posterous and Facebook. Then I let Friendfeed scoop up the RSS and push it into Twitter. This reduces duplicates.

You can also view/leave comments directly off the home page. I like that you can push these comments into Facebook (via Facebook Connect) and/or Twitter, depending on how you log in. (See the gallery below for an image.)

Posterous is also a mini social network. You can track who follows me and who I follow by visiting my profile page.

They also have extensive tag support, which I am making heavy use of. Here's my Twitter tag page. It would be great to see feeds for these pages so I can give the folks who want just my essays an option to subscribe to the "essays" tag.

Search: wow, Posterous gets it. Not only can you search my site using by relevance and recency, but also "interestingness." Try this search out for size.

Finally, they keep quietly adding features. If I add a direct MP3 URL to my emails, it encodes it into a player that you can run right off the site. Like this, the latest episode of For Immediate Release ...

To play mp3s in your browser, you will need to have Javascript turned on and have Flash Player 9 or better installed.

I like companies that pump out tons of incremental innovations. The two that come to mind right now are Friendfeed (as Jeremiah observes) and Posterous.

For more, see the photos gallery below.

See and download the full gallery on posterous

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O Jeff Goldblum não morreu.

(author unknown) — Fri, 03 Jul 2009 04:10:00 PDT

The Colbert Report

Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c

Jeff Goldblum Will Be Missed

www.colbertnation.com

Colbert Report Full Episodes

Political Humor

Jeff Goldblum

Comic for July 2, 2009

(author unknown) — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 00:00:00 PDT

Comic for July 3, 2009

(author unknown) — Fri, 03 Jul 2009 00:00:00 PDT

Speed versus substance

Richard Bailey — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 01:50:37 PDT

Here's a confession: I've done no more than dip my toe into Twitter. I know it's where the conversation is, I know it's the latest toy loved by celebrities and social media mavens. I know it's where news breaks and gets discussed. I know it's a great example of the mobile internet.

I also recognise (and this is best of all) that it's easier to get into than blogging, so a new generation has skipped blogging and become enthused by real-time conversations on Twitter. (Consider the irony: blogging, like email, is considered 'too slow' by Generation Y whose members grew up on instant messaging and mobile phone text messages.)

But even so. I'm not fashion-conscious and I'm keen to keep the noise down and cut through the clutter. Besides, I don't currently have any clients so the need to be actively engaged is lessened. If anything, I've moved more of my reading in the direction of good old-fashioned books in the past year. There's a tension here and I'm pulling against the trend.

But there's something else, a concern about the trade off between speed and substance. Stuart Bruce points to a post by Robert Scoble (in turn quoting Forrest Research analyst Jeremiah Owyang):

"The other night Jeremiah Owyang told me that thought leaders should avoid spending a lot of time in Twitter or FriendFeed because that time will be mostly wasted. If you want to reach normal people, he argued, they know how to use Google. And if you want to get into Google the best device — by far — is a blog."

So it's OK for me to come out as a Twitter refusenik. See how I'm ahead of the curve?

PR apela para ética e transparência nos negócios

Cláudia Vau — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 12:54:52 PDT

O Presidente da República proferiu hoje declarações de excepção acerca de um negócio privado. A compra de 30% da Media Capital pela Portugal Telecom levou Cavaco Silva a apelar para "transparência e ética nos negócios". O Presidente reconhece as "dúvidas fortes" que se instalaram na sociedade portuguesa em torno deste negócio e considera "importante que os responsáveis da empresa de telecomunicações expliquem aos portugueses o que está a acontecer entre a PT e a TVI."

Ontem o Jornal de Negócios deu conta de um comunicado dirigido pela PT à CMVM, na terça-feira, dia 23, confirmando a existência de contactos com o Grupo Prisa. Este comunicado refere que nesse contactos se “abordaram diversos cenários de investimento, incluindo a possível aquisição de uma participação no capital social da Media Capital e formas de relacionamento entre esta empresa e a PT”.
O Governo detem uma golden share da PT, mas quando interpelado pela comunicação social acerca da notícia deste negócio, o Primeiro Ministro, José Sócrates, afirmou desconhecê-lo. O presidente do conselho de administração da PT, Henrique Granadeiro, não tardou a dizer que não tinha informado o accionista Estado, nem recebido instruções suas, acerca da possível compra da Media Capital.
O debate em torno deste negócio foi aceso na Assembleia da República e para Manuela Ferreira Leite "é uma questão altamente preocupante". Será "gravíssimo para a democracia e para a comunicação social" se o director-geral da TVI for substituido. A intenção de afastar o "incómodo" José Eduardo Moniz foi desmentida, mas a preocupação em torno do negócio é sublinhada pelas declarações do Presidente da República, nas comemorações dos 900 anos do nascimento de D. Afonso Henriques, esta manhã em Guimarães.
No que se refere aos números do negócio da Media Capital, o Diário Económico noticia hoje que 30% da Media Capital corresponderiam a 84,4 milhões, se fossem comprados em bolsa. Isto, depois do BPI ter avaliado a participação em menos de 100 milhões de euros e de a Espírito Santo Research ter apontado um valor de 137 milhões, de acordo com o Jornal de Negócios.
Apesar do valor avançado, analistas da Espírito Santo Research consideram que “a PT não irá ser capaz de controlar a Media Capital”, sublinhando que a operadora “não tem quaisquer outros activos relacionados com a produção de conteúdos que lhe permitam retirar sinergias”. Com compra de parte da TVI, líder de audiências, a PT pretenderá reforçar a presença neste segmento, tendo em vista o seu crescimento no mercado doméstico.
Num mundo ideal, os objectivos económicos de uma empresa, mesmo que participada pelo Estado, não se confundem com intenções políticas. No mundo em que vivemos, a ética e a transparência são os critérios de destrinça. Seremos capazes de peceber as fronteiras neste caso?

Senbazuru

ana — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 03:00:56 PDT

Thousand Origami Cranes (千羽鶴 Senbazuru or Zenbazuru?) is a group of one thousand origami paper cranes held together by strings.
An ancient Japanese legend promises that anyone who folds a thousand origami cranes will be granted a wish by a crane, such as long life or recovery from illness or injury. The crane in Japan is one of the mystical or holy beasts (others include the dragon and tortoise), and is said to live for a thousand years. In Asia, it is commonly said that folding 1000 paper origami cranes makes a person’s wish come true. This makes them popular gifts for special friends and family.

(from wikipedia)

seen a bit everywhere, in the streets of porto.

Obama should look to Portugal on how to fix schools

Don Tapscott — Wed, 24 Jun 2009 11:30:49 PDT

President Obama already knows that the nation’s schools are failing a large number of young Americans. One-third of all students drop out before finishing high school. It’s a terrible record, and it’s even worse in inner city public schools, where only half of African-Americans and Hispanics graduate from school. This is not a legacy that would make anyone proud: More young Americans on a proportionate basis drop out of school today than at any other time in our history.

This problem is undoubtedly complicated, but one of the reasons why many American youth are unmotivated and not learning well is that they’re bored in school. They’re grown up in a fast paced, challenging digital world, with the Internet, mobile devices, video games and other gadgets. They watch less television than their parents did and TV is typically a background activity. They are a generation doesn’t like to be broadcast to and they love to interact, multi-task and collaborate. Yet, when they get into the classroom, they’re faced with stale textbooks and lectures from teachers who are still using a nineteenth century innovation, chalk and blackboard.

American classrooms need to enter the 21st century. Thousands of teachers agree. Earlier this year, several important educational groups urged the president and Congress to spend nearly $10 billion to improve technology in the classroom, and ensure teachers know how to use computers most effectively.To show the way, I suggest the president take a look at a modest country across the Atlantic that’s turning into the world leader in rethinking education for the 21st century.

That country is Portugal. Its economy in early 2005 was sagging, and it was running out of the usual economic fixes. It also scored some of the lowest educational achievement results in western Europe.

So President Prime-Minister Jose Socrates took a courageous step. He decided to invest heavily in a “technological shock” to jolt his country into the 21st century. This meant, among other things, that he’d make sure everyone in the workforce could handle a computer and use the Internet effectively.

This could transform Portuguese society by giving people immediate access to world. It would open up huge opportunities that could make Portugal a richer and more competitive place. But it wouldn’t happen unless people had a computer in their hands.

In 2005, only 31% of the Portuguese households had access to the Internet. To improve this penetration, the logical place to start was in school, where there was only one computer for five kids. The aim was to have one computer for every two students by 2010.

So Portugal launched the biggest program in the world to equip every child in the country with a laptop and access to the web and the world of collaborative learning. To pay for it, Portugal tapped into both government funds and money from mobile operators who were granted 3G licenses. That subsidized the sale of one million ultra-cheap laptops to teachers, school children, and adult learners.

Here’s how it works: If you’re a teacher or a student, you can buy a laptop for 150 euros (U.S. $207). You also get a discounted rate for broadband Internet access, wired or wireless. Low income students get an even bigger discount, and connected laptops are free or virtually free for the poorest kids. For the youngest students in Grades 1 to 4, the laptop/Internet access deal is even cheaper — 50 euros for those who can pay; free for those who can’t.

That’s only the start: Portugal has invested 400 million euros to makes sure each classroom has access to the Internet. Just about every classroom in the public system now has an interactive smart board, instead of the old fashioned blackboard.

This means that nearly nine out of 10 students in Grades 1 to 4 have a laptop on their desk. The impact on the classroom is tremendous, as I saw this spring when I toured a classroom of seven-year-olds in a public school in Lisbon. It was the most exciting, noisy, collaborative classroom I have seen in the world.

The teacher directed the kids to an astronomy blog with a beautiful color image of a rotating solar system on the screen. “Now,” said the teacher, “Who knows what the equinox is?”

Nobody knew.

“Alright, why don’t you find out?”

The chattering began, as the children clustered together to figure out what an equinox was. Then one group lept up and waved their hands. They found it! They then proceeded to explain the idea to their classmates.

This, I thought, was the exact opposite of everything that is wrong with the classroom system in the United States.

The children in this Portuguese classroom were loving learning about astronomy. They were collaborating. They were working at their own pace. They barely noticed the technology, the much-vaunted laptop. It was like air to them. But it changed the relationship they had with their teacher. Instead of fidgeting in their chairs while the teacher lectures and scrawls some notes on the blackboard, they were the explorers, the discoverers, and the teacher was their helpful guide.

Yet too often, in the U.S. school system, teachers still rely on an Industrial Model of education. They deliver a lecture, the same one to all students. It’s a one-way lecture. The teacher is the expert; the students are expected to absorb what the teacher says and repeat. And students are supposed to learn alone.

Teachers often feel that this is the only way to teach a large classroom of kids, and yet the classroom in Portugal shows that giving kids laptops can free the teacher to introduce a new way of learning that’s more natural for kids who have grown up digital at home.

First, it allows teachers to step off the stage and start listening and conversing instead of just lecturing. Second, the teacher can encourage students to discover for themselves, and learn a process of discovery and critical thinking instead of just memorizing the teacher’s information. Third, the teacher can encourage students to collaborate among themselves and with others outside the school. Finally, the teacher can tailor the style of education to their students’ individual learning styles.

It’s not easy to change the model of teaching. In fact, this is the hard part. It’s far easier to spend money, as Portugal did, to put Internet into the classroom and equip the kids with laptops. ( By now, half of high school students now have them, as do four in 10 middle school students.)

Yet Portugal has been careful to invest in teacher training to capitalize on the possibilities of the laptops in schools. They’re also thinking of creating a new online platform to allow teachers to work together to create new lessons and course materials that take advantage of the interactive technology. Through this collaboration, the Portuguese school system will create exciting new online materials to educate children. Lots of ideas are already making their way into Portuguese classrooms, says Mario Franco, chair of the Foundation for Mobile Communication, which is managing the e-school program. There are 50 different educational programs and games inside the laptops the youngest children use. The laptops are even equipped with a control to encourage kids to finish their homework and score high marks. If they do, they get more time to play.

It’s too early to assess the impact on learning in Portuguese schools. Studies of the impact of computers in schools elsewhere have been inconclusive, or mixed. One key problem is that simply providing computers in schools is not enough. Teachers facing a classroom of kids with laptops need to learn that they are no longer the expert in their domain; the Internet is.

Yet Portugal is on a campaign to reinvent learning for the 21st century. The technology is only one part of that campaign. The real work is creating a new model of learning.

I believe this could help the U.S. revive students’ interest in school and perhaps keep them in school long enough to graduate, and even go to college. It would be a substantial investment. It’s estimated that the total cost of giving a computer to each student, including connection to networks, training, and maintenance, is over $1,000 per year.

Yet after seeing the promise of the exciting classrooms in Portugal, I’m convinced it is worth it. Your child should be so fortunate.

Gosto mais desta versão do que da do Justino e do 50 Cêntimos

XaninhA — Sun, 21 Jun 2009 08:38:56 PDT

Obvious: A revolução do Irã não será televisionada

(author unknown) — Sun, 21 Jun 2009 06:25:35 PDT

O filme “A revolução não será televisionada” é considerado por muitos uma das melhores obras já feitas sobre a ascensão do regime chavista na Venezuela, se não por sua imparcialidade, sem dúvidas pela contundente forma como o documentário fala do outro lado da chegada de Hugo Chaves ao poder, sobre processos que nem a própria população venezuelana conseguiu acompanhar, muito menos o restante do mundo.

Golpes de estado que acontecem da noite para o dia, ajuda humanitária impedida de chegar ao destino, torturas e execuções, contestadores desaparecidos entre outras tantas obscuridades políticas multiplicaram-se extraordinariamente durante o século XX; governos da Argentina à China, passando por Cuba, Libéria e Myamar, valeram-se constantemente da facilidade de controle dos meios de comunicação como rádios, jornais e televisão para preservarem seus governos de intervenções externas e suprimir descontentamentos internos.

A fragilidade do que hoje chamamos meios de comunicação tradicionais reside nas mesmas bases que os fizeram canais confiáveis de informação. A centralização de notícias e opiniões nas mãos de profissionais sempre nos garantiu, ou nos fez pensar em garantias de que as informações recebidas eram fruto de um trabalho de coleta, seleção e reportagem, feito por pessoas cujo único comprometimento era com a verdade.

Continuamos relativamente seguros da integridade e confiabilidade da imprensa, mas hoje nossa postura se mostra bem mais consciente das distorções que uma notícia pode sofrer até chegar ao papel e das grandes manobras políticas que podem se esconder entre nas omissões e anúncios excessivos.

Esta semana, suspeitas de fraude nas eleições levaram milhares de jovens iranianos para às ruas em protesto contra a reeleição de Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, quem governa o país desde 2005 sob o apoio do sistema islâmico que governa o país desde 1979. Se até a última segunda-feira o Irã podia ser considerado aos olhos do mundo um país a caminho da democracia, a denúncia, seguida da violenta reação contra os manifestantes, nos desengana. Ou as violências.

Diplomatas vêm sendo advertidos sobre não abrirem muito a boca em seus países, correspondentes internacionais trabalham sob constante vigilância, os Basij, a milícia islãmica, distribuem fogo aberto entre as pessoas e levam embora os hospitalizados, levam para ninguém sabe direito aonde. Estimam-se mais de 100 feridos em meio à impossibilidade de serem contabilizados. Enquanto esse artigo era fechado, uma jovem fora baleada, a décima pessoa morta nos conflitos; acabo de assistir aos últimos segundos de vida dela no You Tube.

Os primeiros rumores sobre o que acontecia no Irã não estavam em nenhum canal de TV, nem nas rádios. Horas depois, 1 milhão de pessoas estavam nas ruas exigindo a recontagem dos votos impulsionados pelas declarações de Mir Houssen Mousavi sobre a suposta fraude na eleição. Enquanto a imprensa tradicional se decidia entre transmitir ou não as notícias na segunda-feira, por falta de material ou por negligência mesmo, o Twitter exibia atualizações sobre o assunto em uma média indeterminada de mensagens por minuto.

No momento, o Twitter é o principal canal de comunicação e divulgação (em diversos idiomas) dos acontecimentos. Hashtags (palavras antecedidas por “#” usadas para etiquetar os assuntos e facilitar sua busca) foram rapidamente definidas e organizadas para convergir notícias e avisos sobre o assunto (a principal delas é #iranelection, que funciona também no You Tube, Flickr e Facebook) e, embora o acesso à internet tenha sido cortado pelo governo, proxies burlam os filtros de segurança. A própria imprensa presente no conflito tem se valido dessas ferramentas quando possível, já que foram proibidos de fazer reportagens no local.

Todos estão apreensivos sobre os rumos desses conflitos, o maior desde a revolução iraniana de 79 que levou Ayatollah Khomeini ao poder. Eles já tem sido chamado de nova revolução, a verdade é que já extrapolou mesmo a revolta contra a eleição; tem dado vazão a diversos outros descontentamentos da população como os direitos da mulher e os abusos do governo teocrático, ou seja, nada sinaliza para pacificações, nem mesmo o anúncio da recontagem aleatória de 10% dos votos.

O furor do povo iraniano, o modo como nos fazem perceber que lutam por algo que não é o desejo somente daquela nação. Temos sido convidados ao engajamento. Cyberwar e cyberativismo podem soar como coisas bem tolas, até desrespeitosas, mas significam que, não importa a distância ou se estamos usando véus ou cruzes ou nada, liberdade é uma palavra que todos compreendemos mesmo sem saber exatamente o que é. Isso move as republicações, traduções e re-twitts, isso me move a escrever esse artigo e partilhar uma opinião de que só as múltiplas vozes podem dizer a verdade.

Artigos relacionados:

- Twitter e imprensa
- persépolis, uma animação demasiado bela para ser verdade...
- Twitter mania, um raio-x da blogosfera
- Ponte Khaju

Why metrics-driven startups overlook brand value

Andrew Chen — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 09:34:49 PDT

The perils of ignoring brand value
The nature of internet marketing makes it easy to have a highly accountable, metrics-driven view – but companies that are highly metrics driven easily overlook hard-to-measure issues like brand and user experience. The reason is that when all product decision-making is run through metrics-driven reports, soft things like “Brand” show up as costs, but never as benefits.

This leads to systematic erosion in many “soft” but important factors, like customer experience, brand value, and “love.” And ultimately you need all of these things to create a massive, enduring consumer brand – it’s not enough to optimize funnels.

Let’s discuss why:

Two worlds: Direct marketing and brand marketing
In the advertising industry, there’s been a long, historic distinction between brands and direct response – and this distinction echoes its way into the online startup building world as well.

In the brand world, you have companies like Coca Cola, Apple, and others who pour millions of dollars into high-reach vehicles like TV which lack any real accountability. Thus the saying:

Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half
– John Wanamaker, US department store merchant (1838 – 1922)

To many people, the brand advertising world is irrational and fashion-driven, because of the complex interactions between agencies, their partners, and the publishers that rely on them. Just watch Mad Men.

On the other hand, you have direct marketers who thrive on accountability. They buy into marketing channels like direct mail, coupons, infomercials, and most recently online remnant ads, because they can purchase cheaply and use sophisticated statistical techniques to optimize their media buys.

Startup engineers tend towards metrics-driven
So what side do startups tend to side on? It obviously depends, but because of the highly accountable and measurable nature of online, it’s much easier to become metrics focused. Similarly, startups are mostly poor Thus, expensive brand efforts are mostly out of reach. (Probably for the better!)

Also, with the possible exception of GoDaddy, I don’t know a single startup that made it or not based on their brand advertising strategy. The typical path is focused on products and technology, and large organic growth which builds large consumer audiences.

And obviously, readers of this blog will tend to be much more metrics driven compared to the average entrepreneur!

You optimize what you measure
The first issue that causes metrics-driven startups to ignore brand value has to do with the fact that it’s very hard to measure brand, and you tend to optimize what you can measure. As soon as you throw some numbers on a big report, there’s an inherent human desire to make the numbers go up!

This is why one of the fundamental tenants of metrics-driven startups is to build lots of highly accessible reports that everyone in the organization can look at. Even if it’s easy enough to pull something out via a SQL query, it’s another thing for everyone to be able to hit a URL and load it instantly, no matter who they are on the team.

Measuring brand value is hard!
But measuring brand value, or user experience, or community “feel” or other soft things like that is very hard. I think they’re hard because while it’s clearly important, at the same time:

The quantitative effects accumulate over large periods of time
These might be “source” variables that drive lots of behavior, but it’s hard to measure past surveys and explicit information collection
Some of the most important datapoints may be qualitative, not quantitative
Changing these soft things may require big efforts above and beyond small A/B-testable changes

The companies out in the marketplace that try to measure brand value mostly just use surveys to detect changes. Or, many companies simply resort to a pretty ineffectual number like “reach,” which refers to the number of people who saw the campaign. This can sort of work, but self-reporting also sucks, and the quantitative data you get out may not be as useful as the qualitative data.

In my previous online ad career, I was shocked to hear that the standard way to measure a brand advertising campaign online was to fork $50k over to Dynamic Logic, whose job was to run a dinky little survey and tell you if your campaign worked. $50k to run a survey!

Reports show the cost of branding, but not the benefits
As a result of brand advertising being hard to measure, you get two systematic, interrelated issues:

Product changes that result in brand value are overlooked, whereas the costs of delivering that value is not
Features that negatively impact brand value but show short-term quantitative value are accepted

Here are two examples – let’s say that you think your site’s interface looks like crap, and you want to improve it to make it higher class and more trustworthy. But your metrics czar says, let’s make a really small improvement and see if it affects anything before we revamp the whole site. That sounds reasonable, but then you find out that in fact, making a visually compelling site just doesn’t drive better metrics, and in fact, it’s expensive and maybe lowers certain metrics. What do you do? (This is case #1)

Another example is that you make it really hard to unsubscribe from your mailing list. Maybe you don’t have a link, or you have to login first, or whatever. Making this change clearly affects your ability to retain users, but you get a small percentage of complaints, but the overall quantitative metrics look good. Should you keep this hard-to-unsubscribe mailing list issue? (This is case #2)

Ultimately, it should be clear that both cases are not clear cut issues at all. I could find reasons to go either way, but when you’re trading off a qualitative metric versus a quantitative thing, the numbers-driven approach tends to win. But this may not be the right thing. Similarly, sometimes the numbers may justify the decision, and the brand costs are actually quite low.

How do you make these decisions then? I’ll just wave my hands and say, “Entrepreneurial judgement”

Who’s the brand advocate?
One of the big, important roles that you need on every team as a result is someone who can advocate for the soft things. Who’s your brand advocate? Or customer experience advocate? Having someone on your team who can make logical arguments to balance out the quantitative stuff is hugely key, otherwise you’ll inevitably go down a path of brand-eroding quantitatively driven decisions.

Similarly, if you find that you’re never making decisions that go against the numbers, then frankly, you’re probably doing something wrong. If the data drives all the decision-making, then a lot of “soft” data is getting ignored.

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A Minha Alegre Casinha: Tricklestar - Elimina os Gastos em Standby

(author unknown) — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 04:02:00 PDT

Como todos devem saber, muitas vezes gastamos uma pequena fortuna na conta da electricidade graças ao consumo dos aparelhos que se deixam em standby. Embora as pessoas assumam que esse consumo é insignificante e bastante reduzido, nalguns casos isso não é verdade... e watt a watt... acaba por representar um consumo considerável.

Ora... porque é que as pessoas não ligam/desligam estes aparelhos totalmente, ou usando uma tomada com interruptor? Por comodidade. É muito mais cómodo pegar num comando remoto e ligar os aparelhos sem terem que se levantar do sofá, certo?

Daí que um sistema como este Tricklestar se torne bastante interessante, pois permite reduzir significativamente esse consumo fantasma... sem afectar a vossa comodidade.

Como é que ele faz isto? De forma bastante engenhosa.
Este pequeno aparelho liga-se a uma qualquer tomada e disponibiliza duas novas tomadas:

Uma que se deve ligar a um aparelho "mestre" que servirá de controlo
Outra ao qual se deverão ligar todos os aparelhos "escravos" que serão ligados/desligados automaticamente sem gastarem energia em standby.

O aparelho master - por exemplo, uma TV - continuará a receber electricidade tal como se tivesse ligado a uma tomada eléctrica normal. No entanto, o Tricklestar analisa continuamente a quantidade de energia gasta: se a TV estiver desligada, o Tricklestar desliga completamente a electricidade na segunda tomada, cortando a energia aos demais aparelhos associados à TV: DVDs, consolas, amplificadores, set-top boxes, etc.

Quando ligam a TV com o tele-comando, como fazem habitualmente, o Tricklestar detecta o aumento do consumo, e liga automaticamente todos os outros aparelhos, ficando disponíveis para utilização imediata sem terem que se levantar da cadeira.

Um sistema simples e prático de usar. :)

This can’t be true – $9.95

admin — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 12:35:09 PDT

It’s so hot that the price of ForkLift melted down from ~~$44.95~~ to $9.95. Grab a license before it cools down.

Why you should make it easy for users to quit your product

Andrew Chen — Mon, 15 Jun 2009 08:30:16 PDT

Don’t worry, I’m not a hippie
From the title of this blog post, you might think that I’m going to make a touchy-feely argument about why you should respect the right of your users to do all the terrible things that every entrepreneur fears:

delete their accounts
unsubscribe from email lists
cancel their subscriptions
uninstall their apps

… but you’d be wrong.

In fact, I’m going to argue that for every early product out in the market, making it really easy to quit is completely aligned with self-interested thinking. I’ll make the assumption that all the entrepreneurs reading this post are greedy, self-interested individuals, and target the appeal straight into your dark hearts

My central argument is that if you believe that every startup is an iterative learning process that converges towards product/market fit, then you need extremely high-fidelity signals to tell you if you’re going in the right direction. That means that along with trying to charge people money from early on, which is the highest form of “I love this!” you should give people valves to tell you “I hate this!” so that you can learn more faster.

Let’s drive into this further…

Product/market fit
There’s a notion of product/market fit that Marc Andreessen references in his blog, and he calls it the “only thing that matters” and says that every startup should do everything they can to get to this point. Let’s see what he writes:

The only thing that matters is getting to product/market fit.
Product/market fit means being in a good market with a product that can satisfy that market.

… and Marc continues:

Lots of startups fail before product/market fit ever happens.

My contention, in fact, is that they fail because they never get to product/market fit.

Carried a step further, I believe that the life of any startup can be divided into two parts: before product/market fit (call this “BPMF”) and after product/market fit(”APMF”).

When you are BPMF, focus obsessively on getting to product/market fit.

Do whatever is required to get to product/market fit. Including changing out people, rewriting your product, moving into a different market, telling customers no when you don’t want to, telling customers yes when you don’t want to, raising that fourth round of highly dilutive venture capital — whatever is required.

When you get right down to it, you can ignore almost everything else.

If you believe what he says, that gives you a pretty firm set of marching orders. And for early products on the market, getting to to this point in which your product is good enough and the market is compelling enough is a tough slog. So the question is, how do you navigate your way to product/market fit?

At the heart of every startup is a learning loop
For the idea that every startup is inherently a learning machine, we can turn to two of my favorite startup people, Steve Blank and Eric Ries. Eric has blogged in a lot of detail about how he believes that inside of every startup is an OODA loop that involves trying stuff out, learning, and trying more stuff again. And of course a lot of these ideas are built off of Steve Blank’s Customer Development framework that I’d encourage my readers to look into as well.

In this light, to combine the two ideas: Every startup is a series of iterative experiments that gets you from zero to product/market fit, and if you can do it before running out of money, then you might get rich

And the decision-making process in this approach is totally different. In most product strategy conversations I’ve been involved in, the most heated debates center around whether a particular product will work, and all the pros and cons of the situation. Contrast this to a learning-centric approach, which emphasizes whether or not experimenting with an idea will yield insights, and how much it’ll cost to learn these insights.

In other words, you’re much more likely to try things that will fail, if those failures teach you something important about the market.

Of course, all of the decisions that power these iterations rely data – and the better the data, the better your decisions will be, naturally. So where do you get the data to tell you if customers are happy or not about your product?

Explicit signals beat implicit signals almost every time
One of the key lessons I took away from my time from the behavioral targeting ad industry is that explicit data is much, much better than implicit data, when it comes to predicting user behavior.

That is, you’d prefer explicit “intent” data like:

made a purchase
used a student loan calculator
searched for “palo alto bmw dealership”
filled out a form

versus the less valuable implicit “interest” data like:

have similar demographics to other people who buy
visit the same publications as similar customers
having a pattern of reading finance articles

So if you are looking to collect data to drive decisions, then the best kind comes from the explicit data of having users specifically take action, whether it’s positive or negative. Purchase intent data, as illustrated above, is positive – and quitting intent gives you the negative half. In fact, if you only look at the positive feedback, you might be ignoring 50% of your data.

As a result, you want lots of explicit data points in the axis of “I love it!” to “I hate it!” which includes people giving you money (maybe donations being the ultimate form of love) to allowing them to easily quit. Make it easy for your users to quit, unsubscribe, or otherwise cancel – it gives you the strong signal when you’re doing wrong! And make sure to track it and include it in all of your quantitative experiments as well.

Better data = better learnings = Better product
So to summarize my key arguments here:

Give users lots of explicit ways to show appreciation and hatred
These datapoints will help you iterate your product
Better product iterations will let you reach product/market fit faster
Reaching product/market fit will lead to more money faster

You can only learn so much from reacting to positive data, and trapping your users in unwanted subscriptions won’t get you to product/market fit any faster.

And finally, don’t do it because it’s annoying
‘nuf said.

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Facebook Vanity URL’s Hysteria

Odrakir — Sun, 14 Jun 2009 06:10:09 PDT

Much has been said since Facebook allowed the new “vanity URL’s” (or user url’s like I rather call it, since vanity urls is purely an american expression adopted from the vanity plates they have in their cars).

Most of the posts about this are from users bitching about the way Facebook roll out this feature, allowing the users to choose any alias to be used in http://www.facebook.com/whateveryouchoose regardless of their username, unlike Twitter that has http://www.twitter.com/username. Others rant about the fact that Facebook should have provided something like http://user.facebook.com, forgeting that Facebook has milions of users and something like that would have a termendous weight in their DNSs…

But, as always, there’s something good to learn. One of the posts I read about this subject (no link, sorry, can’t find it) mentioned a cool way to give your Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, [insert your favorite social network here] URL’s to other people, that is, if you have your own domain.

In my case, my domain is odrakir.com, so I created some subdomains redirecting to the social networks I use the most:

This way, I can give an url that’s easy to memorize and always mentions my “brand name”, cool enough to use on a visit card

Search Engine Visibility and PR - An Edelman Digital White Paper

Steve Rubel — Wed, 10 Jun 2009 03:58:23 PDT

Regular readers here know that in addition to focusing on emerging technologies, I also have long taken an interest in how search engines are evolving. Fundamentally, I believe that Google is media and also every brand's home page. Therefore, search engine visibility (and all of the reputational concerns that go with it) are front and center an opportunity for the public relations industry to shine.

With this in mind, my colleagues and I have co-authored a 13-page position paper on Search Engine Visibility. We released it to our clients last month but now we are making it available to the public today at the Edelman New Media Academic Summit in Washington. You can download it here (PDF). It's also embedded below. This is the second in a series - the first is here.

In the paper we posit that today there are two primary search visibility tactics: Paid Search (more widely known as search engine marketing - SEM) and Optimized Search (e.g. SEO). Both of these are generally not managed by public relations professionals.

Now, however, there are two new disciplines emerging. And both sit squarely in the public relations professional's domain...

Reputational Search - The premise and promise of Reputational Search is that any company, NGO or brand can apply a search mindset to tried-and-true PR tactics and, in the process, influence the search results around certain keywords.

Social Search - With Google and competitors increasingly prioritizing social content from Flickr, blogs, Twitter and others in result pages, it is imperative that brands build out "embassies" in all relevant networks – places where employees work to serve the interests of the community, as well as their company.

If you read the paper you will see that we are convinced that search engines for the foreseeable future will have a critical impact on how brands are perceived - far more so than any single social network site, which tend to come and go. As always, we're interested in your views. Please share them below or on Twitter or Friendfeed.

snik

noreply@blogger.com (PedroF) — Fri, 12 Jun 2009 05:04:00 PDT

Seen On The Streets Of Bristol