Interacty

AlertThingy v3

I recently installed AlertThingy and was test driving it as a Twitter client. The interface is very sleek and I like the easy to use sign up section where it allows you to setup the various social networks and be configured to work with them.

Like a lot of other tools, AlertThingy allows you to access your “feed” from various social network and through its interface also allows you to update your status. I use Flock on a daily basis for Twitter and Facebook and find its integration with the various social networks, including Flickr and Gmail, very useful.

Taking my workflow into account, I probably find having a separate installed application, rather than an online application, a little less useful. i.e. You can have the same access everywhere you go.

I’m not sure how long AlertThingy will stay in my Applications folder, but I’m glad that I gave it a spin and I do hope it becomes a success.

Staction is a collaboration tool that I am wowed by. I have not utilize the application as yet, but I had envisioned an application similar in nature to how Staction is today.

It is a microblogging tool, but goes beyond Twitter by integrating various commands into the interface - add a file, add a todo, log time spent, etc … The interface is very simple and clean and it wouldn’t be hard for anyone to pick it up.

However, as with any new tool, adoption is based on how existing users adapt their workflow to the application. 

For me, I like the way the application logs all the little updates that occur along the way for any given project. From an operational view, this is great to track the progress of any project. From an aerial, management level, the application serves its purpose of allowing management to be on top of everyones work and project status. Its’ a Work In Progress update tool for companies.

Do check it out and let me know what you think. For now, I’ll be convincing my partner to try out the tool.

For 4 years now, I have been tracking my expenses, including my daily expenditure and bank balances, using the plain old excel sheet. I had recently been experimenting with a couple of online tools which allows users to track their expenses, manage their finances and some of these sites go an extra mile by connecting users together to share tips and tricks on how to manage their finances.

ClearCheckBook.com had recently relaunched their website with a brand new look. I am still getting used to the new layout and widget style applications. The functions remains very simple and intuitive. What I like about ClearCheckBook is how it mimics my real life expenditure. It allows me to setup accounts, such as cash accounts, bank accounts, and make “withdrawal” (Expenses), “deposits” (Savings/salary) and “transfers”. It does not require you to specify a bank account which it then links directly to. Should you choose to setup a fictitious account with fictitious amounts of money, you are free to do so. Other sites, such as Mint.com, Wesabe.com, requires you to link to banks (largely US based banks) before you can setup “bank” accounts.

Do check out these sites and let me know which works for you or if there are any others which does.

I hope everyone has had a good 1st week at work/school/play. The festive season had gone by really quickly. There was feast on good food, catching up with good friends and much more.

I like to welcome everyone back to Interacty. I hope to continue giving good insights on the interactive world through this blog and love to hear any comments you have.

http://bit.ly/jJxb

The article provides a great overview of the immense growth of mobile in SEA. In fact, I like to point out that Asia, as an entire region, I believe has had the greatest acceptance of mobile internet in the world.

In addition to the mentioned points, a key factor that promotes and drives mobile internet usage could be the cost of having a fixed line broadband.

In Singapore where I live, the cost of having a broadband connection on a fixed line at home is almost comparable to having a mobile broadband connection. In fact, with the appropriate promotional prices applied, I am paying less for a mobile broadband connection. Adding cost of electricity, the router and the modem, the cost of maintaining a mobile broadband becomes more appealing. Moreover, mobile broadband allows for greater mobility where users can access the internet on demand, whenever and where ever they want to.

This is a great article on Fortune on Apple’s iPhone and their excellent App Store environment. http://bit.ly/OgfQ

Unfortunately, the article points to a more dismay situation whereby the App Store is stifling innovation because of the “ring tone” effect of applications being sold at $0.99. Popular Apps in the store are usually either FREE or $0.99. These Apps take up a huge percentage of the Apps in the store and usually the initial few pages of the store would display these wildly popular FREE or $0.99 Apps.

Personally, I use the iPhone 3G and I have numerous Apps on the iPhone. However, I have to admit that I have NOT made a single purchase on the App Store. All the Apps I am using now are FREE. It’s amazing how many wonderful Apps are in the App Store that simply do not cost a cent.

The author argues that with so many apps available to the users for FREE or for a low cost of $0.99, more expensive Apps are perceived by users as being EXORBITANT. In any other situation, however, these more expensive Apps would be well worth its price. i.e. Omnifocus, Things, etc.

I agree with the author to a certain extent, but I also like to point out that there are many open source movements on the internet which has produced excellent and innovative products. i.e. Mozilla Firefox (FREE), Filezilla (FREE), Linux (FREE), GIMP (FREE), etc. These are great products that are as good as the commercial versions. Understandably, these products would have other sources of revenues, such as tie-up with Search Engines, donations, advertisements, etc.

Great innovation should not be impeded by the lack of money or funding. I might be wrong, but money usually chases after great ideas.

Twitter is a classic example of being a great idea. It still does not have a viable revenue model, but VCs that had invested in the company are confident that with such an innovative idea, the money would follow.

On the 2nd day of ad:tech Shanghai, Harry Hui, Chief Marketing Officer, Pepsico International, made a keynote speech and delivered extremely valuable insights into the behaviour of Post 80s and 90s Chinese consumers.

There are ~470 million users to day from the post 80s generation. This is large number of consumers that forms the target audience of most consumer brands. For this generation, the gang of 4 is a thing of the past. Within each family nucleus, both parents are working and a child is, more often than not, brought up by their grandparents.

In this close knit family, where 3 generations live under a same roof, there is a strong conflict of values for the child. On one hand, there was a confucian teaching of respect for elders and on the other, there is the child’s ego. The strong desire to stand out and demonstrate success on their own.

The one child policy, which had been very successful in curbing population explosion, had resulted in the loneliest generation of all time. One child per family, has also resulted in a very skewed population where there are 30% more males than females. Being the lone child of a family, the child feels immense pressure from their parents and grandparents to achieve success in all things they do. They, indeed, are under great amounts of pressure professionally, spiritually and emotionally.

A positive result of the policy would be the creation of a strong family nucleus. Without any siblings, the child only has their family and/or friends they cherish. To them the community around them becomes extremely important and the increasingly identify themselves with the people within their community.

This generation is also the most connected generation of all time. Everyone of them has a mobile phone and can be seen chatting and texting on the phone, while they wait, etc … To them, “Technology is comfort food”. A study showed that 85% of them felt that their mobile phone was more important then their boy/girlfriends. They have a strong and obsessive need to be communicating at all times. Perhaps, it is for this reason that internet word of mouth or social influence can achieve such massive scales and impact in China.

Understanding this generation is key to success in marketing in China. It is about how a brand can engage them, evangelize them, and through doing all those, entertain them such that their attention is kept on a brand.

This post is about online campaign reports and data, specifically to address the issue that there is too much data that brand advertisers are becoming drowned by it and its relevance and usefulness not being noticed.

Throughout ad:tech Shanghai, there was a strong sentiment that online reporting metrics have not reached equivalent status as the offline metric for TV or print (i.e. GRP, Reach, etc). As such, it becomes difficult for traditional advertisers to evaluate the value that online media campaigns can bring to the brand.

There are 2 perspective on the current situation:

1. Too little metrics of equivalent offline standards
2. Too much information available

A key usage of the internet today is online videos. 

Youtube is the number 2 search engine in the world following behind from it’s parent company, Google. An interesting article on ReadWriteWeb asked the big question: Is YouTube the Next Google? The interesting and yet terrifying thing to note is that the current generation of kids growing up will be growing up being totally immersed in technology. YouTube is increasingly becoming their channel to learn about all things. The article explains that anything that can be described in a video is already on YouTube. Kids looking to find out about various subject matters are increasingly turning to YouTube to get their does of “encyclopedic” explanation. Watching a video is so much easier to do compared to reading about the matter.

At ad:tech Shanghai, Victor Koo, CEO and Co-founder of Youku.com, shared very good insights on the current state of online video sites. Youku is China’s number 1 video sharing site.

Victor is confident that online videos is comparable to the traditional TV media, if not even better. Online video sites started out mostly with User Generated Content (UGC) but have gradually shifted in direction to include professional content. This shift is not only happening in China with Youku and Tudou, but also happening in the US with the launch of Hulu and YouTube’s recent launch of the Star Trek series.

UGC is great for users to express themselves. It allows anyone to be creative and to create a video to share with their friends. However, users want more than UGC. If professional content from the traditional media of TV can be syndicated online, users would be willing to spend more time with these online video sharing sites. Victor mentioned that for the recently concluded Beijing Olympics, the number o fusers who watched the show live online surpassed that of those who watched it on TV. Many factors contribute to this, and the main reason is that most Chinese might not be able to get in front of a TV, but were able to be in front of a computer.

Victor goes on to say that he hopes UGC in the future would shift towards more time sensitive information, creating a whole new area of Citizen Journalism. He explained how during the recent Si Chuan earthquake, a video posted by one of the user had helped in the rescue of many lives.

Finally, there was much talks of how to monetize all these online assets and users engagement time. Unfortunately, the current situation is still very sad. Victor mentions that marketers have been trying very hard to monetize online videos, but have so far only succeeded in “turning analog dollars into digital pennies”.

This space is still very new and there is much room for growth. Increasingly, more users will be going online to watch traditional programming, so marketers should take this opportunity now to experiment with these new platform to ensure that they do not miss the bout when video takes off in a huge way very soon.