DIGITAL MARKETING CANADA

In cahoots with two other brilliant digital media minds; Steven L. Taylor and Hessie Jones, we have been producing a weeklyish podcast on all things digital marketing. Check out the show and what we consider the real top digital marketing news items of the week.

Marketing Geeks Podcast Episode #25

“3 Dreams of Black” is an interactive film by Chris Milk and Google Creative Labs that showcases the creative potential of WebGL. The video is a companion piece to ROME, a collaborative project between hip hop producer Danger Mouse and Italian composer Daniele Luppi that is an homage to the Spaghetti Western featuring collaborations with Jack White and Norah Jones.

The video showcases the power of WebGL and creates a whole new understanding of what’s possible with this technology. WebGL is a context of the HTML5 canvas element that enables hardware-accelerated 3D graphics in the web browser without a plug-in…meaning…

This technology opens up a huge new landscape for those looking to create a new, different and highly immersive experience within the browser without making the user deal with new software, plugins or additional technologies.

For more samples and a deeper dive into what OPEN GL

I called this late last year and I’ll reaffirm my position again – the days of our beloved national technology darling, RIM are probably coming to an end. This week RIM gave warning of weaker than expected earning for Q2 (WSJ), which was no surprise given the poor out-of-the-gate performance of their new PlayBook product. But it is also much more than that.

RIM’s cascade into irrelevance started long before the Playbook as it failed to recognize the evolution of social communication and how quickly it was spreading…because it’s social communication. People are moving from communications tools to communications ecosystems while RIM insists on continuing to be a “product” company.

Facebook is no longer a website, it’s a communication ecosystem, so is Apple, as is Google and possibly in the distance Microsoft. Although people interface with these emerging ecosystems through “products” the products themselves are of little use without the ecosystem that now powers them. Facebook would be no use without my friends network, my iPhone would be just another phone without the App store and my Google TV would be just more IPTV without the growing app developer network.

Can RIM’s momentum sustain it? Not likely? Last week Nokia laid off more than 4000 staff as a final blow to the Symbian Phone operating system, which at one point was the most distributed piece of software on Earth. Symbian feel off of it’s cliff in less than 2 years because it did one thing, make phone calls, leaving what’s left of Nokia, a one time innovation flagship, to become Microsofts new mobile services sweat shop.

RIM’s footprint in the corporate domain may sustain it for a while, but more and more organizations are switching to a BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) policy. As businesses realize one of the best ways to maximize employee’s time is to extend more than just email to their mobile devices, the RIM devices’ lack of flexibility and usability make it less than interesting to the IT leaders that were once their strongest champions

Like many of it’s predecessors, I don’t expect RIM to drift into oblivion, but much like Nokia, Palm and a number of lesser known giants of the second golden age of Telcom, I expect in less than 2 years that RIM will be stripped of it’s patents, talent and juiciest technologies and shelved as a novelty, brand maybe to be revived as a nostalgia device 20 years from now like a Commodore 64.

How NOT to win an election.

First, let everyone know that once elected you will eliminate open and independent press coverage on Parliament hill by shutting down the Official Press Gallery and replacing it with a government managed Private Press room where they will provide all footage and restrict access to only reporters they let in.

THEN….

You announce that if re-elected you will pass a massive “crime and justice” bill within 100 days, which has never been debated, had hearings or public consultation that includes massive, extrajudicial bulk surveillance over Canadians’ use of the Internet and forces Canadian ISP’s to change the physical structures of their operations to enable real time digital surveillance. What’s next? Federal licencing for .CA’s?

In all fairness, law enforcement does need better judicial tools to keep up with the awful things happing in some corners of the internet…but they must be JUDICIAL tools…once you take these tools out from court supervision…there is no oversight as to how they can and will be used and against whom. But history has clearly shown that when a government, any government gains unrestricted tools of this kind…abuse inevitably follows.

Here is a Snippet from Micheal Geist describing the meat of the policy

More important than process is the substance of the proposals that have the potential to fundamentally reshape the Internet in Canada. The bills contain a three-pronged approach focused on information disclosure, mandated surveillance technologies, and new police powers.
The first prong mandates the disclosure of Internet provider customer information without court oversight.

The second prong requires Internet providers to dramatically re-work their networks to allow for real-time surveillance. The bill sets out detailed capability requirements that will eventually apply to all Canadian Internet providers. These include the power to intercept communications, to isolate the communications to a particular individual, and to engage in multiple simultaneous interceptions.

Having obtained customer information without court oversight and mandated Internet surveillance capabilities, the third prong creates a several new police powers designed to obtain access to the surveillance data.

Too often when we try to explain or illustrate the dynamics of social media we tend to fall back on simple diagrams of social graphs and basic social networks. This TED video explains just how complex social interaction is and why building a social strategy that actually influences peoples perceptions and actions takes an incredible amount of data, understanding and creativity.

Google announced this week that it planning to spend as much as $100 million to commission low-cost content designed exclusively for the Web. Targeting 20 “premium” channels, Google plans to commission as much as 5-10 hours a week of original content starting later this year.

Read More WSJ

KLM Turned a minor Tweeted request from a Dutch DJ into an opportunity to break the world record for the worlds highest altitude dance party to promote the launch of their new Amsterdam to Miami route.

It all started when KLM announced that they would be opening a non-stop route from Amsterdam to Miami on March 27, 2011, Dutch DJ Seid van Riel and Producer Wilco Jung tweeted KLM asking them to move their inaugural flight up a week so that they could attend a huge music festival in Miami. KLM tweeted back a challenge: If Seid and Wilco could get enough people to fill the plane then KLM would reschedule the flight. They filled it within a couple of hours and the rest is history.

More…socialtimes.com

Minecraft is a game that’s hard to explain…there’s no real objective, and all you really do is build stuff and then live in it. Compared to it’s hyper realistic, 1000 frame per second, visually turbo charged gaming console peers, it is the Duplo Blocs of gaming…but it has found an audience and crushed it.

With more than 1,837,252 units of the game sold, it cleared 800,000 copies at 9.95 euro and then so far 1 million more at 14.95 euro. PayPal takes a cut, there are taxes, and such, but considering it takes less power to run than a small online magazine…not bad for a one man operation.

Go see for yourself www.minecraft.net/

YouTube Live officially launches

With increased pressure from upstarts such as uStream and Justin.tv, Youtube officially launched it’s own live streaming service. Combined with it’s unmatched infrastructure, massive traffic taps and gigantic ad engine…I wouldn’t want to be a uStream investor.

This now provides an interesting opportunity for companies and organizations that want to distribute internal events to a wide audience in real time.

Check it out at www.youtube.com/live/

Interesting Article at VentureBeat

In a report due out Thursday titled, “Will Facebook Ever Drive eCommerce?” Forrester interviewed nearly two dozen technology vendors, retailers and marketers and found that they received little benefits from Facebook and other social networks.

The study found that the average Facebook metrics are a 1% click-through rate and a 2% conversion rate. E-mail marketing, by comparison, has an 11% click-through rate and a 4% average conversion rate.

ARTICLE…http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2011/04/07/facebook-wont-become-e-commerce-force-analyst-says/