Recently Google introduced the Google Elections Video Search gadget which was used for people to keep up to date on the US election. Taking videos from YouTube’s Politicians channels it automatically transcribes speech to text and indexed the content. Using the gadget users could search for spoken content allowing them to jump to the most relevant point in the video relating to their search.
Now Google has launched Google Audio Indexing in Google Labs. The site which offers features such as a “search within video”, has been dubbed Google Gaudi.
With internet video set to account for half of all consumer Internet traffic by 2012 according to research by Cisco, allowing users to search video content in this manner will be another plus for Google’s search engine. We guess now we’ll all need to be a bit more careful about what we say on camera!
The Irish Times recently reported on a survey carried out by the employment law consultancy Peninsula Ireland, has revealed some interesting stats on why your social network profile may be getting hits. The survey showed that 83% of employers have monitored staff Facebook statuses to check whether they were truly ill. Furthermore 67 per cent of bosses have disciplined staff for false sickness having discovered them leaving photos or comments indicating they were perfectly healthy. The survey included 1039 employees and 647 employers.
Alan Price, head of Peninsula Ireland said, “Irish employers are now using social networking sites as a tool to combat false sickness, and as the survey shows, it is proving a rather effective tactic. Employees should realise that there is a chance they are being monitored in this way and that their bosses will no longer tolerate their false absences.”
He also advised staff that employers are also monitoring social networking websites during the recruitment process in order to find out more about potential recruits.
Animito: The End of Slideshows
If you don’t have the video skills to blend the the ‘next big’ mash-up, and your not the techiest of your friends, fear not. Animito is the genius site that lets you add images and music to produce kick-ass video.
Unplug Your Friends
Is there such a thing as too much digital? We think not, but everyone knows someone who’s perhaps a little too connected. You let this great site help you unplug them – set them free!
ffffound: Image Bookmarking
Simple. Clever. Effective. It pretty much does exactly what you’d think, but it does it really nicely. Have a sniff around and you may find yourself lost in ffffound.
VW Tiguan
We don’t speak the language but it’s not that necessary to realise this is a slick motor site with really well thought out web2.0 elements. Take it for a test drive.
The Powerade “Never Give Up” campaign, which ran throughout Ireland, has been nominated for an Interactive Marketing and Advertising Awards 2008. These UK based awards showcase and celebrate the digital campaigns short listed as the most effective and interactive campaigns of the year. This is the second time Cybercom has been nominated in these UK based awards. In 2007, Jurys Inns was nominated for the best Search Marketing campaign.
It is our intention to benchmark as many Cybercom designed and developed digital campaigns as possible in the UK, European and Global arenas in the future. Only by doing so can we be reassured that we are delivering “best in market” campaigns to all of our clients target consumers living in the new digital world. The independant and fully audited nature of the major Global awards is something which we welcome the opportunity to be judged against.
The IMA awards ceremony will take place on 30th October in the Royal Lancaster Hotel, London.
Coming to the attention of the online community less than 3 weeks ago, this recently unearthed video by the Christian band Sonseed is racking up the views. With just under 740,000 views on Youtube, we’re backing this to break the one million mark by Monday!
Unless you’re lucky enough to work in the city and can pop out shopping for lunch, work generally restricts you to the pandemonium of the weekend. For many, it may be that the only window shopping you do is when you’re out for the night and walk by a shop. So how can retailers combat this?
The folks over at Ralph Lauren have taken the issue seriously and come up with a strong two-fold strategy to capture even the late night window shopper. Ralph Lauren are now giving shoppers the ability to buy any item they see, immediately. This is thanks to RL’s new interactive window display in their New York store. All you need to do is download a QR code to your phone from the RL website and then you can use it to scan any of the QR codes on the RL store touchscreen. Essentially your phone is transformed into a barcode-type reader and you will be redirected to the item on their website where you can buy it immediately.
To further enhance the scope of this new feature, QR codes are to be implemented in all RL print ads as well. This ad was spotted in the latest issue of Esquire:
The 2008 GAA Championship came to a conclusion yesterday with Tyrone triumphing over Kerry in a closely contested encounter. This video of Tyrone manager Mickey Harte talking to the Powerade ‘Never Give Up’ team, Munterconnaught, earlier this year might give a few clues to what drove his players to victory!
Old Spice: School of TV Medicine
A great viral element to an overall fantastic campaign – “The place where real people go to become fake doctors”. Old Spice are giving you the opportunity to become a fake doctor and write fake prescriptions for those in need. Who could resist?
Audi A5
Beautiful animation and music. Trust us, it’s worth the two click splash page.
U-Le-Chang
This illustrated canvas stretches from one corner of the mind to the farthest regions of our imagination.
Carphone Warehouse X-Factor Challenge
Sing on your mobile or via PC, draw your own animated performance and cross your fingers because it may feature as a TV ad during the X-Factor break!
This is an old business adage that could be making a comeback. While business networking has always been important, the demise of lunches and the demands on time means that networking opportunities are less prevalent. However, Linkedin.com could become an important link in the networking chain.
With 24m members globally, 6m in Europe and a claimed 100,000 in Ireland – it’s clear that Linkedin.com is becoming more popular. A comScore analysis for August suggests there’s 24,000 active users of linkedin in Ireland. An interesting development is the launch of an advertising platform on their network.
There’s two options – a display option for larger advertisers (£5,000 plus) and the DIY option to accommodate smaller budgets. CPMs are higher than most social network sites but considerably lower than business sites, suggesting it could be a very cost effective add-on to for B2B campaigns.
Mobile search use is more widespread and frequent in the US and Western Europe. 20.8 million US and 4.5 million European mobile phone subscribers used search in June — up 68 percent and 38 percent respectively from June 2007 (according to the latest comscore report). The UK had the highest penetration of mobile subscribers using search (9.5 percent), followed closely by the US (9.2 percent).
The number of people accessing mobile search at least once a week grew 50 percent in Europe, with France and Spain leading at a rate of 69 percent and 63 percent respectively. Meanwhile, the number of US users accessing mobile search has more than doubled as a result of expanded 3G penetration and smartphone adoption, as well as the proliferation of flat-rate data plans. With T- Mobile’s ‘android phone’, powered by Google’s Android OS (launching next month), the future of mobile is strong.
Google is the preferred brand for browser-based searches with a 60 percent share of mobile searchers in all countries measured by comScore. Yahoo! ranks second in Germany, Italy, UK and the US. In the US, Yahoo!’s mobile search penetration is 34.6 percent, more than double its share in most other countries.
