Category Archives: innovation

By-product Innovation

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I just love it when I see entrepreneurs use some by-product of what they have to create something new and innovative.   For instance take this entrepreneur:  Philip Tellis.  He’s thought of a great use for the 404 page.  For those of you who don’t know, a 404 page is the page you receive when you try to hit a page on the server that doesn’t exist.  Typically it’s just a standard page that says something like ‘Sorry, your page can’t be found’.

Philip has a great idea of using the 404 page for something great, such as showing pictures of missing kids.  I think it’s such an innovative and great use of something so simple that we typically just don’t really give much thought to.  I hope an open source project such as the Apache Foundation (or MS) would be willing to implement it in their next release.

Blog posting here: http://tech.bluesmoon.info/2010/02/missing-kids-on-your-404-page.html

twitter – the new chat system

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So i’ve been thinking about twitter recently and have pretty much come to the conclusion that twitter is/will be the new form of chat going forward.  In it’s current incarnation, i think mostly because of celebrities, it’s become generally a one way ‘status update’ system.  While it can still be used this way, many users are using it as way to have conversations with new people (@signsomeone), and have conversation around general topics (#hash).

If you think about it, it’s pretty much similar to the way chat used to be: IRC (internet relay chat, go look it up).  On IRC you could congregate around a specific topic (#hash) and talk to random people.  The benefit of twitter compared to IRC is that the topic chats have no formal rooms and everything is public.  Information around topics are also available to more people because of its public nature and are archived which oddly, allows for asynchronous communication, or better,  real-time (synchronous) communication.

I’ve found that the brands who use it best are the ones who use it as a form of this one-to-one real-time communication.  They are able to see what people are saying about them, since there are no “formal rooms” and are able to address them directly.  This provides a valuable source of what people are saying about them, and allows them to join in on the conversation about themselves.

Oddly, most brands however just use twitter as a form of one-way communication, broadcasting out “updates” to their ‘users’, which I believe is just a lack of understanding on their part of the medium.  Think about it this way… If I don’t care to visit your site, or follow your RSS feed, why would I care to follow your twitter feed?  It really makes no sense.

Going forward what I believe we’ll really start to see is more focus on grouping people together, which they’ve started with the #hash feature and the new lists feature.  I also believe the hashing and the lists can be a potential revenue model, similar to what youtube has done with their brand pages.    I may throw up a demo site to feature this thought in the future.  I’ve been already thinking of possible funny branding opportunities around #hash marks.

Anyway, anyone have any thoughts about this?

You is the closer!

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So I worked on a quick one pager site (http://www.isthecloser.com) with a co-worker (Jason) from Tribal that merged two wav files to create a funny short wav clip.  Check it out.

To build the site, I used two technologies:

1) Flite – an open source text-to-speech system developed by CMU.  It was a low quality wav, but did the job well.  I also used Espeak, but the code looked like it required the server to a sound card installed, which mine does not.  So I switched over to flite instead.

2)  SOX – an open source sound exchange application.  I originally used the default one that came with CentOS 5, but it lacked the feature of sequencing the sounds together instead of merging them on top of each other.  So I uninstalled the default rpm and downloaded the code base and recompiled the latest version.

The code wasn’t too complicated, it was just figuring out how to get all the stuff to work together.  First get flite to spit out a wav:

/usr/local/bin/flite -t “‘ . $name . ‘” -o /tmp/closertemp/’ . $rand . ‘.wav’

the -t option is to use the text that’s passed in instead of a file

then I push it to sox:

/usr/local/bin/sox –combine concatenate /tmp/closertemp/’ . $rand . ‘.wav /tmp/TheCloser_1.wav /tmp/’ . $rand . ‘.wav’

the rand # is to make sure i always produce a unique file name for every request.

Future of interactive ads – layered interaction

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So the prototype experience got me thinking about the future of interactive ads.  I believe that the new model, because of Facebook Connect (and Google Connect),  will start to create a layered interaction model.  What this means is now you’ll not only get your standard ad, you’ll get another ‘state’ where you can have a deeper interaction that is personalized.

I imagine something simple where you’ll see the a typical flash ad.  Once the first run finishes, you’ll be able to login to facebook connect, and the ad would download some information about you, and create a customized experience just for you, something similar to the prototype experience.  Imagine an an orbitz gum commercial appear, after the ad, it asks if you’d like to login to facebook, where you can rate the clean smiles of your friends.

This will also help you start to identify the consumers of your product who really are the techno-mavens that will really spread your message online.  You can begin to track the effectiveness of your ads, not only by CPM’s anymore, but by virality as well.