If you have an interest is cutting edge digital trends, and constantly search for the newest and most innovative developments then Mike Walsh is probably someone firmly on your radar. Mike is the CEO of Tomorrow and a world leading authority on the digital future. Mike is also author of the new book, Futuretainment. Most importantly for us, however, Mike is a dynamic keynote speaker whose presentations are described as powerful catalysts for leadership transformation, strategic planning and brand inspiration.
We won’t spoil tomorrow’s talk but needless to say, Mike is the man who will tell you what the next big thing is in digital before you’ve ever heard of it.
Nokia, a pioneer in mobile telecommunications and the world’s leading maker of mobile devices, announced this week that it has acquired Dopplr, a privately-held mobile service provider for international travellers.
Dopplr is the latest addition to Nokia’s small start-up acquisitions (Plum, Cellity and Bit-Side this year) with the Dopplr team bringing to Nokia’s Services unit unique know-how in creating internet-based communities and showing their journeys, experiences and tastes collectively on the web.
Dopplr members share personal and business travel plans privately with their networks, and highlight interesting places to stay, eat and explore in cities around the world. Dopplr presents this collective intelligence – the travel patterns and preferences of the world’s most frequent travellers – as a Social Atlas.
What does it mean for the end user? Nothing bad, claims Dopplr. The service will not change, Dopplr will remain integrated with services such as Flickr and Twitter.
What does it mean for mobile telcos? As the web goes mobile, the nimble, fast-moving start-up companies in the web services and community sphere, will become more interesting to the bigger telcos looking to deliver their customers innovative, community services they desire. Watch out for more acquisitions in this space – and the large scale roll-out of some great new services.
For the vast majority of us, this just isn’t something that we consider. How could the Internet “slow down”? Well, it’s actually fairly simple. Imagine a garden hose bringing water out of your house to your garden. As your garden grows, you start to add more offshoots to your main hose to supply water to new beds. Eventually you have so many feeds coming off your hose that there simply isn’t enough pressure to keep the supply at an optimum level. The same thing is essentially happening to the Internet.
As more and more users come online, the speeds that you are able to achieve start to drop. Eventually so many people will be using the Internet that speeds will be reduced to those that we used to experience with ‘dial-up’.
So what can we do about it?
It may surprise you to learn that the answer has been provided by an Irish company, Intune Networks. In fact, Intune Networks could very soon be the driving force for the future of the internet globally. This little-known Irish start-up, formed in 1999 by a group of ex-UCD photonics researchers, has developed the technology to enable a single strand of fibre-optic cable to carry 80 times more data then was previously possible.
This new “Exemplar Network”, which will be tested in Ireland, could catapult Ireland to the cutting edge of telecoms before anyone else, anywhere in the world.
“The Exemplar Network is going to be an infrastructure test bed funded by the Government and will allow Ireland to have early access to technology that could be used to rollout a next-generation fibre network across Ireland and facilitating any kind of broadband access,” Fritzley explains.
It’s the start of a big week here in Cybercom. We’re just four days away from our 10 Year Birthday Conference and all the final little pieces are coming together. So for all of us here it’s going to be super busy. So let’s take five minutes for a breather and remind ourselves of one of Thursday’s most anticipated guests…
On Tuesday we decided to run a competition to give away two pairs of tickets to the Cybercom 10 Year half day conference and Blogger’s Breakfast. The Blogger’s Breakfast iwill be held in Odessa next Thursday, 1st October 2009, from 9amm to 11am, with the conference, entitled ‘2010 : A Defining Moment of Change for Marketing?’ on that afternoon from 2pm to 6pm in The Sugar Club.
We are extremely happy to announce that the two winners, who each receive a pair of tickets, are David Maybury and Sean Fee. Congratulations lads, your names were first out of the hat. We hope you enjoy the day!
Big & Small www.bbc.co.uk/cbeebies/bigandsmall/fun/
A very cute, real-time rendered, 3D world to give young kids a way to interact with their favourite Cbeebies characters.
Die Fail Whale www.diefailwhale.com/
When all the world is talking about Twitter, sometimes it’s best to take a step back and just have a bit of fun with it
Imagining Mozambique www.imaginingmozambique.com/
Stunningly present website, full of thought provoking content. This is exactly how it should be done!
Airness: Attraction Day www.airness-attractionday.com/
Beautiful full video and animated graphics are brought together here to provide an unique interactive experience.
As Ireland’s leading Digital Agency we’re celebrating this milestone with a special conference for our friends and clients, who have helped get us to this fine old age in Internet years…
This half day conference, entitled ’2010 : A Defining Moment of Change for Marketing?’ will be held in The Sugar Club on Thursday 1st October 2009, from 2pm to 6pm. To really capture where digital is, and where it is going, we have brought together a panel of International speakers including:
Although the invitations have already gone out, and the tables are pretty full, we did hold back two pairs of tickets that we’d like to give our readers a chance to win. As well as getting access to the half day conference, we’d also like to invite these lucky four readers to a Blogger’s Breakfast that is being held in The Odessa Club that morning. This is a great opportunity to meet Matt Harding and Mike Walsh face-to-face, and ask them your own questions on Social Media, Viral Marketing or Future Digital Trends.
So how do you get a pair of tickets? Simple, just leave a comment below and we will choose two winners (each receiving a pair of tickets) randomly, to be announced on Friday morning.
For those that haven’t had the pleasure, here are a few words from our good friend Barack Obama…
A copy of the full conference invitation can be viewed here.
Mobile marketing capabilities completely depend on your phone type. To date, the number of smart phones in the marketplace has been dwarfed by the massive market share of less sophisticated “feature phones” or 2.5G phones. However, the enhanced user experience driven by the iPhone has seen demand for smart phones rocket in the last six months.
Just last week, Google estimated that 1.2 billion mobile phones will be shipped globally in 2010 compared to 200 million laptops. 20% of these phones will have full browser capabilities; highlighting that more people will have access to the web via their phone then through their laptop by this time next year.
The subject of the Zeitgeist is really and truly mobile. Across the digitalsphere, conversation is growing over geo-localisation, social media and augmented reality, both as stand-alone features and as powerful assets when combined. Location is of most interest to marketers as it adds dimensionality to the consumer experience – search answers the “what”, social networks the “who” and now location serves up the “where”.
As we merge location and the web, we are seeing a whole array of new services, applications and browsers appearing. Some of the most exciting include:
Around Me: An iPhone app that uses geolocation to tell you what’s close by — banks, coffee shops, theaters, restaurants — and maps the route from you to them. It also taps into Wikipedia to find info about what’s around you.
Gomobo: A service that ties into restaurant ordering systems to let users place orders online and via text message.
SnapTell: Visual product search. Snap a photo of an object, send the picture to SnapTell and get back product information and offers. Owned by Amazon.
Layar Reality Browser: An augmented-reality platform. People look at their surroundings through their phone’s video camera and see links, photos or text projected over specific locations. Others can build applications on it.
The next 6-12 months will see even more development in the mobile web space, as marketers look to satisfy the needs of all phone users in new and innovating ways.
Belgacom – The Profiler www.theprofiler.be/
Combining Facebook, Youtube and Flickr this website lets you discover more of your interests and the interests of your friends.
Incredibox www.incredibox.fr/
Discover the musical universe of “The Incredible Polo”, with this great application that handles a range of human beatbox sounds created by the artist.
The Puma Index www.puma.com/
Puma have found a clever way to target the financial sector and promote their new seasons range of clothing via a branded entertainment iPhone application. Linking up with the performance of various localised Stock markets, the app features models who either loose or gain items of clothing depending on whether the stock market rises or falls!
Cybercom’s Managing Director, Jonathan Forrest, spoke to the Irish Marketing Journal this month about the Government’s recent digital infrastructure announcement, the effect and change it will have on the Irish Marketing Industry, and the state of the Irish Digital Landscape.
