Through the looking Glass

The future is here. Google recently released their latest ad for the next big thing, Google Glass, and the digital world is heading for yet another huge change in the next few years.

According to Isabell Olsson, an engineer on the Google Glass Project, the company created the glasses for people to interact with the virtual world without distracting them from the physical world. She said that they had had two broad goals in mind: communications through images and quick access to information.

(Source: firstpost.com)

The new smart glasses will operate on the Android operating system and have a camera, a microphone and a small screen top right that will give you Terminator-type vision – but in a friendlier way.

Streets ahead of today’s smart phones, tablets, and modern computing devices, these new smart glasses will apparently provide a vast amount of benefits for individuals, businesses, cities, healthcare, and the environment. They’ll change the behaviour and lives of early adoptors and the next generation.

The camera will enable you to capture fleeting moments and allow others to see the world through your eyes. You’ll have the ability to get directions as you go, see texts and video chat, identify products and shop online, augment reality to make playing video games more realistic and interact with billboards and places of interest through the glasses.

Even everyday actions will become easier, like watching a cooking demo as you cook or preventing embarrassing moments – as a helpful pop-up identifies and reminds you of someone’s name. Businesses will benefit too – sales will grow as people interact with as their company, product or service through the glasses.

The possibilities seem endless.

People are already developing some cool/scary apps for Google Glass – including one that allows you to identify your friends in a crowd, and another that allows you to dictate an email .

This is stirring up privacy panic in some quarters as some people believe that Google Glass will have more sinister consequences.

Privacy concerns

A website called Stop the Cyborgs has sprung up with its stated mission to “stop a future in which privacy is impossible and corporate control total.”

They ask whether you would ever have considered wearing a hidden spy camera or recording conversations a few years ago? Will everyone will be doing it soon and finding you odd for objecting?

They’re concerned that there’s no way to know if you are being recorded by someone wearing Google Glasses or a similar device. Very different to a smart phone where users visibly hold the camera up to take a photo or record a video.

They also raise issues about what will happen to your video and audio files. Will they be collected and processed in the cloud to display contextual information using image, object, face, voice identification and speech recognition? Will information about you just sit in a database or might it be delivered to the people you’re interacting with?

They believe there will be serious consequences for human society as the distinction between the ‘digital world’ and the ‘real world’ becomes blurred. People will make decisions and interact with other humans in the real world in a way which increasingly depends on information that Google Glass tells them.

See the full article: http://stopthecyborgs.org/about/

A vision of the future

Interestingly, Charlie Brooker’s satirical mini-series, “Black Mirror”, which ran on Channel 4 last year, taps into collective unease about our modern world and where it may be going. It’s about the path the media is taking us down. To quote Charlie Brooker  “It’s about the world we live in now, and a warning of the world we will be living in 10 minutes from now”.

The name ‘Black Mirror’ comes from idea of a blank TV screen or computer monitor reflecting the world back to us.

In this dark drama, in the near future, everyone has access to a memory implant that records everything they do, see and hear – with disturbing consequences.

Sound familiar?

Check out Black Mirror – The Entire History of You Trailer here

Or view the whole episode here

http://goo.gl/dF5o6

The long-heralded mobile web is  finally coming of age.  No longer relegated to a second screen experience, mobile devices are commonly the first option for consumers around the world.  In Ireland, Smartphone penetration is currently approaching 50% of the population and consumers are becoming increasingly reliant on their phones, with 61% accessing the Internet every day and most never leaving home without it.  If your website still isn’t optimised to provide a mobile experience, you’re missing out on the huge opportunity that this presents.  In fact, according to a recent study by Google, 67% of users said that a mobile friendly site makes them more likely to buy a product or use a service, with 52% declaring that a bad mobile experience made them less likely to engage with a company.

Whether your website is focussed on marketing, e-commerce or customer service it’s vital that there is a consistently good experience across all devices from desktop to tablets to the myriad of Smartphone screen sizes available.  Our solution, for many clients, had been to take a mobile-first approach to producing a responsive design (using HTML5) that gives a fluid experience on any device a consumer is using.  These days if a site’s not built for mobile, with a responsive web design,  it will leave users feeling frustrated and they can transfer this negative emotion to your brand, leaving your site to find your competitors who have taken a mobile-first approach.

Click image to find out more about ICAN Web

Image: Chausinho

Digital advertising in Ireland is on the up, hooray!  Open the champagne.  But wait a minute. Let’s not congratulate ourselves too much. Ireland is still lagging significantly behind other European markets in terms of advertiser investment in online.

The latest IAB / PwC Study predicts that digital won’t become the lead medium in Ireland in terms of advertising investment until 2016.  If correct, this is a very poor projection indeed.  Digital overtook TV as the biggest medium in the UK in 2010 which puts Ireland at least 6 years behind our nearest neighbour.

The assertion from some quarters that this is because Ireland is a less mature market than the UK simply isn’t true.  To a large degree it is the advertising market (clients and their agencies) that have failed to evolve properly, not Irish consumers.

The reality is that Irish consumers have always kept pace with changes in technology so much so that the recent Mediascope Study (again from IAB Ireland) revealed that they demonstrate online usage levels well above the European average.

They jumped enthusiastically on the ‘wave of technology’ that arrived on our shores a number of years ago and it’s the savviest advertisers and agencies that followed them that are now reaping the real benefits of this ‘brave new world.’  A world, by the way, which is now very much the norm for most of us.

Advertisers and agencies that were too slow to or didn’t even bother to wax down their surf boards are now paddling frantically to catch-up.  And even today, some still continue to downplay the very obvious fact that the tide has truly turned and allocate minimal spends to their digital activity.

It is this disconnect between how advertisers and their agencies plan campaigns and how actual consumers behave that is, in my view, the greatest challenge the industry in Ireland faces.

All agencies, regardless of their alignment or specialty have a responsibility to ensure that the out-dated, linear approach to media and creative planning which has always put offline executions first and treated digital as something to be ‘bolted on’ on ‘looked at later’ is let go of once and for all.

Solutions to briefs should be borne out of an objective approach to actually answering the brief – not the crude media and creative budget carve up that defined the Celtic Tiger hey day, when spend targets sometimes seemed more important than delivering results for the client.

And you’d think that in the cold light of the recession that particular party would be well and truly over.  Take quick glance, however, at Nielsen Adspend data and you’ll notice that some of the biggest brands in the market and still making shocking over investments in some media and a worrying under investment in other, much more important areas.

But don’t get me wrong, there are some excellent examples of truly objective and joined-up thinking happening in many areas.  What I’m simply trying to say is that these should be the norm, not something we’re still aspiring to.

Let’s stop paying lip service to what is now so fundamental to the future of our sector and double our commitment to genuine integration and development of our talent to deal with the new reality.There’s a lot riding on it – our industries reputation, employment and jobs, a return to growth and the long term sustainability of indigenous industry – both our own and our client’s

So, digital will obviously continue to grow and play a bigger role, but only if the advertising sector in Ireland makes a genuine effort to grow-up with it.

Do you store your personal files in the cloud? I do but I’m a bit iffy about the whole thing.

It’s just so freakin handy though!

I save a document in my Dropbox folder on my work PC, I can then work on the same file on my iPhone during my commute, then finish my work on my Mac at home. All without worrying about using a USB drive, copying/moving files or backing anything up.

There are a number of different services offering cloud syncing for your files, all with varying benefits.

Apple’s iCloud is too tightly connected to their iOS apps, so there’s no real storage to just save your random files.

Drobbox seems to be the most popular, being the first to market and the simplest to use. However they only offer a measly 2GB on their free plan.

There’s Microsoft’s SkyDrive, which offers 7GB of space for free, however being a Microsoft product, the usability is muck.

And then there’s Sugar Sync which seems to be a clear winner with 5GB free, a great user experience and cross platform/device support.

Until now…

So…the big news this week is that the almighty Google have launched their cloud storage service Google Drive, aiming to give the rest of the competition a huge clobber up side the head.

They’re offering 5GB free(with the option to upgrade to 25GB for just $2.50 a month), cross platform support(iOS support to follow in the next few weeks) and integration with all the Google apps you know and love(Gmail, Docs, Picassa etc).

So whatsa the problem you ask?

Well it’s Google, and they love a bit of the oul behavioral targeting.

The small print when signing up states:
“you give Google (and those we work with) a worldwide license to use, host, store, reproduce, modify, create derivative works (such as those resulting from translations, adaptations or other changes we make so that your content works better with our Services), communicate, publish, publicly perform, publicly display and distribute such content. The rights you grant in this license are for the limited purpose of operating, promoting, and improving our Services, and to develop new ones.”

So does this means Google are actively looking at the content of my files in order to target ads? I ain’t cool with that.

The other big beef I have with cloud storage is that there is no real protection from data deletion or loss.

MegaUpload for example was recently raided and shut down by the US Gov’t. Their users were basically told “sorry, we had to delete the lot”! Looking at the terms & conditions for most cloud services, none of them will guarantee the safety of the data uploaded to their servers.

Call me paranoid and backwards, but for me(for now), I will be sticking with Dropbox for working projects and also backing up my files to a hard-disk in the safety of my non-fireproofed home.

There has been a lot of talk about Pinterest recently.
The new social network delight adored by a primarily female audience. Read more

Happy Friday.

Have you noticed how digital technology is increasingly becoming apart of our everyday experience. Yes indeed, the digital world definitely no longer remains on our desktop. Check out some of the latest examples of digital installations, augmented reality and mobile creative below. Enjoy a digital weekend!

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When I started using Social Media, back in I can’t even remember when, it didn’t really bother me that everyone I knew saw everything I did and I saw everything they did. It was fun! The ability to be able to speak to everyone and catch up with old friends was exciting. Yet, over the past few months, for some reason I want to be able to control who sees what, and I don’t think I’m alone.

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Apple have always had the view that despite calling software the “soul” of their company, in order to make great software you must also make your own hardware. Well it looks like Google are now taking a leaf out of Apple’s book in their acquisition of Motorola’s mobile phone division.

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Social TV seems like a bit of an oxymoron doesn’t it? What could possibly be social about plonking yourself down on the couch and watching the tube? Well these days a lot of us are watching TV while simultaneously talking about it online.

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This Monday, July 11 sees the roll out of a huge upgrade to the Eshots editor including more flexible repeaters, a new WYSIWYG editor, a new template language plus a whole lot more. Click the video below for a sneak peek. Please get in touch with us if you have any queries on Eshots.