A new article posted by New Scientist magazine reports that electrodes placed on a person’s arm was able to transmit data (10MB/s I might add) to a second electrode 30 cm away. And how is this possible, you might ask, through low-frequency electromagnetic waves. And if this wasn’t cool enough, it’s also energy saving, well compared to a Bluetooth link. Presently, researchers are only able to do this on the skin but as we all know, if there’s money to be made it won’t be long before we can embed such electrodes in our skin.

So until then Charles will have to walk around the office asking for that 3G card!

Check out the article at http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn18648-human-arm-transmits-broadband.html

Augmented reality (AR) is a term for a live direct or indirect view of a physical real-world environment whose elements are augmented by virtual computer-generated imagery

So as you may or may not know, many companies have been experiencing with this, using it as marketing tool, running campaigns around it basically trying to bring their products to life.

OK, so how it works is that you download a small program (or get it with your product) and install it to your computer, baring in mind that you have to have a web cam, in order for it to work. Then what they do is ask you to print out a logo, picture or whatever it is they have chosen, so that the web cam recognizes the design. Then it tells you to place the piece of paper in front of the web cam so that the image that has be printed is facing the web cam and is visible on your computer screen. Then what happens is magic!

Here are some videos to see it working in action…

Here we see the Adidas campaign they have run, check it out, pretty cool.

Next we have the BMWs augmented campaign featuring their new Z4, very cool I must say.

Now lastly what I would like to show you, is what LEGO did with it, they set up kiosks inside their shops and customers, while using the augmented technology were able to take their LEGO box of choice and hold it in front of the kiosk and see exactly what the final build of that product looked like.

Check it out….

So is this going to be the way forward when we shop, is our reality going to eventually be entwined into the digital world. Are we heading towards the matrix? It seems very much so!

smartphones

As our world progresses into the future we keep on finding our self with more information coming ever so closer to our fingertips.

The world of the cellphones is very much upon us, with more and more people becoming connected to one another just by the touch of a button. Gone are those days of written messages by candlelight with the recently found feather in the garden to create that somewhat perfect looking letter that took about a minute to create. Not only was that a mission, but also the wait of the letter being delivered by horse or runner, with that unknown feeling of whether it would ever reach its destination. Yet all worth it, upon receiving the reply letter a mere five days later. Wow the excitement of instant messaging in the past.

But now as we have progressed from letters to telephones to intercontinental conversations, we see our world becoming smaller and smaller by the day. With phone calls and messaging be made from all corners of the world, made exciting by the fact that it can be done anywhere, in the car, in the elevator and even in some circumstances the lavatory.

From the realization of the fast movement of technology on the go, we have seen the invention of the new age phone dubbed the smartphone. It can do everything I mean everything, except for washing dishes but it will show you how to do that even more efficiently.

Apple has brought out the iPhone, RIM has brought out the BlackBerry, Google has even hopped on the gravy train with its phone being called the Nexus One. All theses phones have somewhat of a similar platform, Nokia calls theirs Ovi, Google calls theirs Android, even Windows got in there with Windows Mobile. These are just some of them out there but the common thing among all of them is the fact that you can create you very own applications.  And best thing yet, is that anyone in the world can download it and use it, and the second best thing is, you can make money from it!

We have seen this happen, the iPhone App Store has over one hundred thousand apps with up to three billion downloads to date, that’s massive. And now they have just brought out their iPad, which will increase their dominance in the app world. Watch this space is all I can tell you.

Basically where I’m getting at, is that there is money to be made, a lot of it. How you may ask, well I’m sure many people are asking that. For us as the individual/consumer the easiest way is to start developing apps and getting them into the market place and marketing the hell out of it. You may not make a lot in the beginning but if it picks up you’ll smiling from ear to ear. The key though is to get your app across all platforms, so you have more penetration and awareness. The one barrier to this is knowing how to develop these things, you need to know your stuff, especially if you developing across platforms.  There are plenty of tutorials out there, so get googling and start developing cause we still in the sweet spot of the “application boom” and you don’t want to fall behind, it just may mean a bit more hard work, which as we all know always pays off.

We are surrounded by this amazing thing called design all the time, it’s everywhere and anywhere!

For my ilearn I decided to focus on an area in this crazy but wonderfully awesome world of Design!

Typography, the art of arranging type, type design and modifying type glyphs, is often considered as a major part of promotional material and marketing. If you use typography properly, you cannot meaningfully convey the message, but also strengthen the brand of your company.

Typography has always been very inspiring and nowadays many artists experiment with type treatments to achieve inspiring, unusual and beautiful results.

I feel that a design is not quite complete without the use of type; it brings life to a design!

Please click on the Link below and you will see a few examples of what I mean

http://www.noupe.com/inspiration/gorgeous-typography-examples-in-advertising-design.html

Will all news content always be free?

So as the online world becomes bigger and greater, with more and more information being consumed all day, what will we see happening to these content providers?

In the dawn of the Internet age, we have seen people adding websites about their companies, their lives, their stories, all types on interesting articles have been uploaded onto the World Wide Web. Some companies seeing it as a necessity for them to be online, but with this has come many barriers and problems to existing business models. One big example of this is the music industry, with album sales plummeting due to the fact people getting their music free on the Internet.

“Why pay when it is free”

We have now also started to see this with news publishers. Most newspapers have an online portal for readers to consume as much news as possible for free. Now from this they have started noticing a decline in newspaper sales. Which many have them have seen it as a concern due to the lost revenue but to counteract this they began with online advertising. Which is a good source for income but the main question was…was it enough.

So now we have started to see a trend in paid for content, which the top news people like to see where it should be going and not allowing people to read the news for free, because it could be very lucrative for them. Recently the Newspaper Association of America requested information from Google to see how they can successfully monetize their content but by also not shooting themselves in the foot.

So Google is now starting to develop a mechanism that will be attached to its existing Google checkout system, which will allow users to seamlessly pay for content on a subscription type basis. All though Google claims that most of the revenue will come from advertising, but this will give publishes an additional source of revenue.

So the question at the end of the day is, will we the readers be happy with this decision, will we fork out the money to read the content and do the newspapers really care what the readers think or are they just seeing dollar signs in the eyes.  And another thing, will there be pirated news sites starting to pop up on the web.

So we might start seeing a similar trend in the news industry as we saw in the music on. Because the main question for the consumer will be, why pay when we can get it for free.

How do we turn advertising from a monologue into a dialogue by using new ways of engaging with digital media?

There are a mix of technologies available today begging to be assembled more creatively.  It’s not about blue sky possibilities but an opportunity to put existing applications together in a unique and creative way which really gives it legs.

We’d still be using all the creative skills we’re good at, skills which are familiar to our clients (and our partners who have already made tentative steps in this direction over a year ago) but it would involve more effective commercial use of digital media – our key strength.

No, we kid. We know people who still read books. Okay, we still read books. In spite of the Internet taking over the world, even those of us obsessed with finding the next killer start-up, website, web tool or can’t-live-without app have to step away from the glare of our computer screens every now and again.

The problem is, being able to Google absolutely anything and everything, down to our own mothers’ names, means that we, okay I, have lost the ability to remember anything. Which means that when people, especially cute people (read ‘guys who I’m trying to impress with my immense intellect and quirky reading tastes’), ask me the above questions I’m often struck dumb. I know I’ve read a lot of books. (Really, I have.) I know I enjoyed a lot of them. I just don’t know any of their names. I can remember what they were about, I can even remember some of the character names, but mostly, for the life of me, I just can’t remember the title or author.

Thank goodness I remember Google, at least. And by ‘Google’ I mean the Internet at large. Because thanks to a bunch of literary genius websites I can now sound as intelligent as I know I am. Somewhere inside me. Deep inside.

First port of call when trying to remember the name of a book or author would have to be Google. Naturally. Google Book Search, specifically their Advanced Search Page allows you to type in a character name, a line of dialogue or any other obscure memory of the book you’re searching for and comes up with surprisingly accurate results.

A couple of other websites good at (book)worming titles and authors out of thin air are:

BookFinder: you can search over 150 million new, old, rare and out of print books by typing in keywords.

Askville: a search service from Amazon where one can ask and get answers in discussion boards centred specifically around books. Just type in your memory of the book and no doubt someone, someone with a better memory than you, will come back with a title and/or author.

Yahoo Answers, is said to be growing by 11 million new answers per month – that’s a lot of answers, works similarly, as do Answerbag and Answers.

Once you’ve found out the names and authors of books you once loved, you can then go to WhatShouldIReadNext? for recommendations on similar books. Enter a book you like and the site will analyse a database of real readers’ favourite books to suggest what you could read next.

Or you can just use all these sites to pretend you’re well read. Not that that’s something I’d do myself, of course.

According to Mxit founder and CEO Herman Heunis, the tie up will make it easier for Mxit users to buy the social networking service’s money credits, called Moola, by using the bank’s MiMoney payment solution.

“A large segment of our user base is entry-level and unbanked,” comments Heunis. “They do not have bank accounts, but they do have mobile phones, and with MiMoney they can purchase goods and services with their mobile phones without using hard cash. Mxit will start hosting various shop fronts on the Mxit platform, which will enable users to purchase items such as airtime, music and Mxit Moola.

“If you look at the prediction for Internet access via the mobile phone for Africa and the Middle East, some analysts expect an increase of 400%-plus within five years,” he says.

Mxit plans to expand the offering into 26 countries, many of these on the African continent. “The expansion into Africa is intended to grow the user base on the continent substantially. We invite mobile operators in the various African countries to collaborate with it in creating new revenue streams for all parties.”

How it works

When a MiMoney voucher is purchased through a self-banking channel, consumers will be asked to provide their cellphone numbers in the beneficiary reference field. Once that transaction has been completed, an 18-digit voucher number is delivered to the specified cellphone number.

When a MiMoney voucher is bought from a “real world” sales agent (Ster-Kinekor was the first sales agent to sell vouchers), the 18-digit number has to be SMSed to the number provided on the sales slip, which will activate the voucher. This can then be used at any online retailer/service (like Mxit) that indicates acceptance of this payment method.

The MiMoney client saves on transaction fees as the merchant carries this cost. The MiMoney vouchers are available in any denomination for amounts of up to R1 000 and the monthly limit is R10 000.

It is expected that the system will go live in April.

Click here to read the original story from ITWeb

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• More than half the world has a mobile phone (timesonline.typepad.com)

Excerpt:

Of all the mistakes covered in this series, not using segmentation has the biggest negative impact on ROI. Jupiter Research suggests that targeted email campaigns generate an ROI of five times that of broadcast emails. Furthermore, emails based on Web-site click-stream behaviour deliver an ROI roughly nine times greater than a batch-and-blast approach.

According to MarketingSherpa, segmented email campaigns draw a 20 percent higher open rate than broadcast campaigns in the first 30 days, with click rates that exceed broadcast by a 2-1 ratio. This click-rate improvement increases in the all-important fourth business quarter, during which segmented campaigns in the last 90 days of the year draw click rates that are five times higher than those on unsegmented campaigns, according to MarketingSherpa.

Today’s email recipients want to see personalized messages that reflect their own interests, preferences, expectations and relationship with you, including a history of purchases or other transactions. Failing to segment gives your competitors that do segment a clear competitive advantage.

Leveraging User Data to Create Segments

All or most of your subscriber data can be used to create segments.

Some of it is explicit data, such as demographic information or interests subscribers supplied to you on preference pages, customer-support contacts, surveys, etc.:

• Gender, age, marital status
• Industry, job title, company size
• Location
• Content preferences—e.g., biking versus running
• Frequency preference
• Format preference (including a mobile version if you offer it)
• Acquisition source

In addition to the explicit data, you have implicit information gathered from subscribers’ email, Web-site and purchase behaviour. Examples of behaviour that can be used for segmentation include:

• Length of time on your list
• Email open and click activity versus inactivity
• Email click activity (e.g., specific types of links that imply interests)
• Purchase history
• Web-site activity
• Lifetime customer value
• Offline activity

Even if you don’t gather detailed data, you can create segments using key indicators such as list age and message interaction.

Segmentation can also help you battle list churn by keeping subscribers more engaged. If you keep sending the same basic “buy this widget” message week after week, you will gradually turn off many of your subscribers who fail to engage with the continuous stream of irrelevant messages.

View the full post here

“The development of this Money Transfer service is a joint venture between Standard Bank and MTN Banking, offering a safe and secure way for customers to send money home. The service will allow money to be sent directly to the recipient, removing the hassle and cost of locating a traditional ‘cash-out’ location such as a bank’s branch,” says Tim Lowry, MD of MTN SA.

“Convenience for our customers has been the motivating factor in developing this service, and we have identified the stores most frequented by our customers, for the implementation of this service. This has enabled MTN to provide the service in areas typically under-serviced by the banks.”

The person sending the money goes to a participating outlet with the cash and receives a code from the money transfer agent. He then sends the code via sms or a phone call to the recipient of this cash. The recipient then goes to his or her nearest participating outlet and produces the code in order to receive the allocated amount of money. This transaction is as simple as 1, 2, 3.

Carefully selected outlets such as the Kosi Bay Supatrade Spar, Langa Spar in Flagstaff, the Spargs outlets in Umtata, Ncogbo, Mount Frere and Idutywa, and Multisave Baragwaneth are included in this pilot. There are currently 14 outlets linked to the service, which is not restrictive to MTN customers.

MTN already has a significant non-urban footprint and its popular Community Payphone network could also provide a base from which to further enhance the reach for the Money Transfer customers.

“As with the success of the Community Payphone network, we see the Money Transfer service as possibly providing increased employment opportunities whilst ensuring that even the most rural community is able to gain access to basic financial services.

“Following technical testing of the base system for the past year, this pilot project is intended to assess the demand for such a service prior to a possible wider rollout in 2009. MTN is also actively seeking partners in the targeted distribution areas to come on board and assist in the rollout of this project, to ensure a broader accessibility to the service,” concludes Lowry.

Related articles

• A Fun Webisode from a Bank (daveduarte.co.za)
• Mobile money – coming soon? (bbc.co.uk)