Why Facebook Will Do Search And Why Google Needs Social

Mark Zuckerberg posted a picture of himself in front of his computer, and an eagle-eyed blogger noticed that his version of Facebook sports a larger-than-usual search box. An unintended leak or not, Facebook competing in search is only a matter of time just as, in retrospect, it was inevitable that Google would integrate social elements deeper into its main product.

This is why.

Future: The Pirate Bay Loads Up on Physical Goods

Not science fiction anymore, this: "Once chairs and other things become content, the prospect of rampant chair piracy turns from unimaginable into very real."  The Pirate Bay is opening a new category for the new kind of piratable stuff: "We believe that the next step in copying will be made from digital form into physical form. It will be physical objects. Or as we decided to call them: Physibles. Data objects that are able (and feasible) to become physical. We believe that things like three dimensional printers, scanners and such are just the first step. We believe that in the nearby future you will print your spare sparts for your vehicles. You will download your sneakers within 20 years."

In the world where all merchandise is either basic materials or data about how to arrange them, what is the role of brands?

"The Future of Advertising" Speech by P&G's Ed Artzt, 1994

On May 12, 1994, the CEO of Procter & Gamble Edwin Artzt delivered a speech at the annual 4As conference on the future of advertising. It has since become a classic,  often referenced but rarely read in full.  The speech, written months before the first banner ad received its first impression, was prescient in many regards and inspiring throughout:

"We run the risk of simply adapting to these changing technologies, but if we don't influence them -- and if we don't harness them -- loyalty to our brands could suffer in the long term."

"The most important change, by far, is that people will become more program-driven and less channel-driven." 

"[Remote controls will] soon be replaced by program navigational services that will fundamentally change the dynamics of TV viewing."  

"In virtually all of the media tests that have been launched around the country, consumers respond very positively to time-shifting." 

"History says that the advertising industry adapts brilliantly to new technology. But we can't sit there. We have to act."

"So we've got to get involved in programming to make certain that advertisers have access to the mass audience and to the best properties." 

The speech was made a year and a half before Nicholas Negroponte's seminal Being Digital.  The full text of the speech, via AdAge archives and an abandoned MediaCzar blog,  follows.

Ten Years Of "This Will Be The Year Of"

"2000 will be the year of free Internet" (IDC)

"2001 will be the year of the Internet appliance." (Chicago Tribune).

"2002 will be the year of the clones." (New Scientist)

"2003 will be the year of the blog" (Instapundit)

"2004 will be the year of the analysis engine." (ieee.org)

"2005 is year of local mobile search" (O'Reilly)

"2006: the year of vidcasting and advercasting" (Steve Rubel)

"2007 will be the year of the widget" (Newsweek, original)

"2008 will be the year of web TV." (Techradar)

"2009 will be the year of the uber blog" (Inquisitr)

"2010 will be the year TV and the web really converge." (Guardian)

Bonus track:
"2001 will be the year that website operators come to their collective senses and start charging customers for service." (Jakob Nielsen)

Things That Should Have Happened by 2011, Edison's Version

As a follow up to an earlier post about old predictions for 2011, here's what Edison thought back in 1911 would happen "a hundred years hence":

"Books of the coming century will all be printed leaves of nickel, so light to hold that the reader can enjoy a small library in a single volume. A book two inches thick will contain forty thousand pages, the equivalent of a hundred volumes; six inches in aggregate thickness, it would suffice for all the contents of the Encyclopedia Britannica. And each volume would weigh less than a pound."

Sounds like Kindle.

-- Paleofuture

Will Agencies Become Publishers?

A few years ago, when I was doing presentations about web 2.0, I had a deck about the democratization of media. It was the usual stuff I like to call "media Marxism" (aka social media):  how the means of media production were now in the hands of the proletariat, how content capitalism was giving way to the new order, and a lot of other things I and many other people were discovering at the time.

In that deck, there was this bullet point about how the ones who were going to benefit (that is, profit) the most from this revolution were not "the people" but marketers and their agencies who already had access to talent and would now be able to manufacture and distribute content and aggregate their own audiences at costs comparable to renting them from traditional media.

Over the past week, I've come across a couple of articles that illustrate this evolution as well as the inevitable tension between agencies and publishers:

HuffPo ran a piece by CEO of Story, a digital content shop, who thinks publishers will win: "The extinction-level event for traditional ad agencies is the ad world's rapid uptake of the idea that original content is the new path to engaging consumers. In a world where brands need to create and own original, engaging content, it is publishers -- the people who actually understand and manage content creation -- who are best positioned to profit from selling content-creating services to their advertising clients."  That's in addition to publishers doing the creative work on ads that run on their properties.

NYTimes, in a weekend piece " Publishing, Without Publishers", makes the opposite bet: "Luxury brands have always advertised in the likes of Vogue, Esquire and Architectural Digest and tried to impress their editors enough to get mentioned in the editorial pages, as well. But now companies like Richemont are reaching out directly to consumers — and cutting out the middlemen."  Just last week, P&G launched its Man of The House site (they are even selling ads on it).

In the HuffPo piece, Story's CEO argues that agencies lack the key set of storytelling skills required to create great content: "The traditional ad agencies are going to lose because creating great, engaging content is emerging as the key skill in marketing. And they don't have it." This strikes me as somewhat self-serving (his company says it creates engaging content for hire) as well as inaccurate: one thing good agencies know how to do well (if not always sell to the client) is interesting stories (Coke's Happiness Factory) and enduring characters (Coke's Polar Bears).  What agencies have little experience with is everything else that goes into producing a publication that lasts longer than a typical campaign span, from staffing and planning to subscription management and content optimization. But if there's money in it, they will learn or buy their way in.

Things That Should Have Happened By 2011

When I started to look at predictions for a living back in 2006, I remember how 2011 was this big banner year against which most forecasts were made. I guess partly it was because 2011 was at the end of a five-year horizon, and partly because it was conveniently removed into the next decade. Whatever the reason, I've been patiently waiting for this year to arrive to check back on some of the more feisty predictions made in the outset of the 2.0 boom. And now this time has come.

Some of the stuff below has worked out remarkably -- surprisingly -- well, such as the prediction from Hitachi about commercial availability of mind-machine interfaces (check!). Other stuff -- not so much:  podcast audience was expected to skyrocket  from 11.3% in 2006 to 51.1% in 2010 (eMarketer #084888), but it didn't, lingering instead at 12% by December 2010 (eMarketer #123668).

Above is Gartner's Hype Cycle chart for 2006; you will love how tablet PCs sit at the bottom of the trough of disillusionment. Below are a few predictions made in 2006 or in early 2007.  

"Hitachi: Commercial Mind-Machine Interface by 2011" (Wired, November 2006)

"In 2011 you'll never have to clean your house again. Nanotechnology could soon allow you to sanitize your bathroom with a flip of a light switch." (PopSci, June 2006)

"446m Mobile Phone TV Users By 2011" (IMS Research in Digital LifeStyles, August 2006)

"Segments such as video game advertising, set to become a market worth close to $3 billion by 2011, will result in the further maturing of this industry." (ABI Research in Gamasutra, February 2006)

"By the end of 2011, 80 percent of active Internet users (and Fortune 500 enterprises) will have a “second life,” but not necessarily in Second Life." (Gartner in AdLab, April 2007)

"Online advertising will grow to represent 9 percent of overall advertising spending by 2011, and search will continue to be the driver of growth." (Jupiter in ClickZ, July 2006). Fact check: online advertising's share of total advertising spending was 15.3% in 2010 and is expected to grow to 20.5% this year (eMarketer, January 2011)

"Broadcast and cable TV will pick up $5 billion in revenue from new ad platforms by 2011. That’s the good news. The bad news is TV will lose $12 billion in traditional revenue over the same period, thanks to ad-skipping and other disruptive technologies." (Jupiter in Lost Remote, September 2006)

"By 2011, TV programming delivered over consumer broadband connections will be a "viable alternative to cable." (Forrester in eCommerce Times, January 2007)

"Already worth $1.4 billion this year, mobile porn will be worth nearly three times that much by 2011, or $3.3 billion." (Juniper in Pocket Lint, November 2006). Also, "most people who watch mobile porn are "lads down the pub" wanting to impress their friends, rather than hard core porn watchers."

"Shipments of the tiny [tablet] PCs could rise to 7.8 million units by 2011." (In-Stat in CNet, May 2006)

"When Chairman Bill Gates first outlined the notion of an ultramobile PC at a hardware conference last year, he talked about a device that would weigh less than 500 grams, have all-day battery life and could cost less than US$800, possibly as little as US$500." (CNet on Microsoft's Origami project, March 2006). See the Origami Project page on Microsoft's website (with devices scheduled to ship in 2008).

"By 2011, 28 million cars in the U.S. will be iPod-ready, up from just under one million in 2005." (Telematics in Motortrend, May 2006)

"Podcasting to Generate $400 Mil. in Ads by 2011." (eMarketer in MediaWeek, February 2007)

"Over the next five years video game advertising will grow at a compound annual growth rate of nearly 23%, reaching nearly $2 billion by 2011." (eMarketer in Gamasutra, April 2007). eMarketer's recent forecast for the year: $1.1B

Pocket Bargain Finder from 1999

In 1999, a team of researchers at Accenture described what you now know as a barcode-scanning app on your phone; they called it Pocket Bargain Finder. Pocket Bargain Finder "combines the global scope of Internet shopping agents, the ease-of-input of a barcode scanner, and the portability of a PDA. The result is a convergence of electronic and physical commerce that we call augmented commerce."  In their research paper (pdf), the authors have described the potentially disruptive effects such technology would have on traditional retailers: "With consumers able to find the best price regardless of where they shop, the physical retailer is left at a distinct disadvantage."  (Related from AdLab a few years ago: The Future of Retail: Instant Price Check.)

This is apropos of the Price Check for iPhone, a new app that Amazon launched today that lets you scan barcodes, snap pictures or say the product name into it and it will show you product prices, reviews and ratings along with a big Buy On Amazon button.

15 Stories From Fast Company About The Future of Advertising

FastCompany yesterday made a splash with its The Future of Advertising piece. It's not the first time the magazine offers predictions about the ad industry. I've looked through the first 100 issues published between 1995-2005, and found at least 15 stories describing how broken the ad biz is and offering some version of its future; that's at least one story published every year. 

Rethinking Big on Madison Avenue, October 31, 1995 (FastCompany's first issue)
If you look at the level of organizational change in ad agencies compared with the rest of corporate America, it's like one is standing still and the other is running at 100 miles per hour. Agencies have not changed in 50 years.

The Ad Agency to End All Ad Agencies, December 31, 1996
The truth about companies has more energy than any fabricated advertising slogans. Every company has its own truths. It's even more true on the Net, a modern version of the old marketplace. There will still be people bullshitting on it, but the people who are putting honest communication across will succeed.

Branding Is Dead! Long Live Sustainable Identity! March 31, 1998. (That was the issue that introduced Zaltman's metaphor elicitation method and Godin's permission marketing)
The Internet has introduced a whole new group of players into the "influencer" chain that PR people must connect to, and the opinions of these Web pundits present a new challenge for PR to grapple with.

Do You Buy the New Marketing? August 31, 1999
It's new! It's radical! It's digital! And it's designed for you. That's the pitch from a hot new crop of books on marketing. Together, they amount to a cutting-edge curriculum for connecting with customers.

This Virtual Agency Has Big Ideas, October 31 1999 (Basically, an early crowdsourcing model by Host Universal)
As the bathwater cooled, Smith returned to an idea that he'd been mulling over for weeks: Why not build a virtual agency -- a flexible organization that would be dedicated to generating strategic and creative solutions for clients? Instead of running a shop full of employees, why not contract work out to small, ad hoc teams that would offer the best available talent for any given project? Each team would work directly for a client. Its only product would be its ideas.

Change Agency, April 30, 2000
How does a fabulously successful, old-line ad agency reinvent itself for the Digital Age?  Those are the kinds of questions that occupy the staffers at Y&R 2.1, a fledgling agency-within-an-agency at Young & Rubicam. The 30-person shop was established last December with the goal of creating a bug-free version of a traditional agency.

Attention, Please, May 31, 2000
If Billboards are the ultimate symbol of old-economy advertising, then E*billboards are the next frontier of new-economy advertising.

Will Online Ads Ever Click?  February 28, 2001
The problem with Internet advertising isn't that there's too much of it (or, these days, less and less of it), or even that most banner ads make 30-second TV spots look like Oscar material. No, the problem is that Internet advertising just isn't smart enough.

Don't Shout, Listen, July 31, 2001
At Procter & Gamble, branding is almost everything. And in the age of the Web, almost everything is up for grabs. Here's how P&G has turned the Internet into a device for listening to customers -- and for experimenting with its brands.

Advertising, Under Review, March 31, 2002
Never mind the blank TV -- someone unplugged the entire ad business! When it comes to spending -- whether the medium is television, print, or the Internet -- the boom times are over. Clients wonder if agencies understand their problems, and consumers wonder why they should pay attention to what Madison Avenue produces.

More Than a Game, April 30, 2002
How many 2002 Super Bowl spots made you sit up and take notice? When was the last time you saw a banner ad that really clicked with you? Madison Avenue is in a creative slump. That's why marketers are testing alternatives to the 30-second spot and the pop-up ad. Their latest experiment: the "advergame."

Memo to Brands: Surrender, May 31, 2002
Don't kill your television. Just paralyze it. Choke off its influence, smother its authority, and reclaim control over your evenings, Saturday mornings, and bathroom breaks. That is the directive from TiVo central, where technology is rendering the 30-second television ad impotent. Empowered viewers armed with digital video recorders are zapping through Academy Award speeches, opening credits, and thousands of TV commercials -- giggling all the way. And that is only the beginning of the end.

Buzz Without Bucks, August 1, 2003
Smart companies are discovering that you don't need big budgets to deliver a big message. By cleverly cultivating buzz, small businesses with tiny budgets can level the playing field with established giants.

It's a Blog World After All, April 1, 2004
Despite those worries, no new medium can go for long without being turned into a marketing channel. Got a message to get out or a product to promote? The blog world is populated by folks who thrive on racing to be first to post news and getting others to link to, or "blogroll," them. They're naturally the opinionated, hyperconnected influencers marketers crave.

Commercial Success, January 1, 2005:
"The creative departments at ad agencies still see TV as the sexy medium," says Montague, who's now chief creative officer of J. Walter Thompson, "but their days are numbered. These people will either get religion or get left behind."  That might sound a bit hyperbolic, but consider this: In the late 1950s and early 1960s, even after broadcast TV had come to more than half of U.S. households, the reputable creative directors refused to make TV commercials, which weren't very good yet and still weren't admired or respected as an art form. Eventually, they got religion -- or got left behind.

Your Blog Here!  April 1, 2005
Yay! FastCompany names AdLab one of its favorite ad blogs because of its ad-futuristic bent.

Is Mad. Ave. Ready to Go Naked? October 1, 2005
After years of mass denial--of declining advertising effectiveness, of disruptive technologies such as the Internet and TiVo changing long-entrenched consumer behavior--the ad industry is finally beginning to acknowledge its baldness.

Vending Machines With Face Recognition and Opinions

The Japanese should connect these vending machines that suggest a drink based on customers' gender to the billboards with face recognition they've been installing in train stations earlier this year -- unless that's what they are already doing. From Reuters: "The machines, developed by JR East Water Business Co, a subsidiary of railway firm JR East Co, use large touch-panel screens with sensors that allow the machine to determine the characteristics of an approaching customer."

The embedded digital signage bases its drink recommendations on temperature and time in addition to the customer's gender. The machines are made by Acure that has more information about them on its site.

Here's the press release in Japanese (pdf).

Mad Men Against The Machine

Last month, I was on a panel at a FutureM "Flying Cars Are Here" event. I talked about robots, which in retrospect turned out to be surprisingly timely: that same week, AdWeek ran "Machine-Built Brands" and AdAge wrote about "Glitch in the Coming Advertising Singularity". The accompanying slides are on Slideshare and are also embedded at the end.  Below is what I talked about.

Hi. I run the R&D practice here at Hill Holliday. It’s a really great gig because I get to read science fiction and think about robots.

I can easily name two reasons to turn to science fiction for insights.

One is that some of the kids who read science fiction grow up and go on to making things they’ve been dreaming about.

The other reason is that science fiction, just like advertising, reflects the collective dreams and fears of a particular era.

We fantasize about giant machines laying destruction on entire cities, or brains of metal that farm humans for energy, or a disembodied artificial intelligence that provokes a nuclear holocaust.

On the other hand, you have Rosie the Maid from The Jetsons, a show that launched right in the middle of the Mad Men era, the golden age of American advertising.  And if there is one thing that Rosie can tell us about our collective dreams it’s that we really would love a chance to slack on our chores.

A New York Times spread from the early 1980s sums up the duties the humans have been eager to relinquish: "In the distant future robots may scrub toilets, wash the dishes, and mow the lawn. Made to order robots can already be adapted to serve drinks at cocktail parties or vacuum on their own."

Ever since the Mechanical Willie, a robot that Westinghouse unveiled in 1934 and that crooned in a “mellow baritone and manipulated a vacuum cleaner with almost human skill” – ever since then, the civilization has been trying really hard to stick the broom into some else’s mechanical hands.

The broom, of course, is both very literal and very symbolic, a metaphor for all the things humans have long sought to outsource.

A 1978 book called Exploring the World of Robots introduced the world to the "Maid Without Tears", but also mused about the bigger picture of the future where humans are being cared for by a nurturing robotic brain:

"The robot brain will suggest meals for the day. It will order our shopping, finding out from other robots in the local shows where the best buys are."

We wanted a machine that would not only wash our socks and do our dishes but that would also know us so intimately that it would relieve us from deciding which socks to purchase and what food to eat in the first place and let us, humans, concentrate on nobler pursuits.

If we look at our technology dreams that do come true, we’ll see that while they retain the core functionality, their physical appearance is often different from the way we’ve imagined it, dictated by what is commercially practical at the moment. We wanted a life potion and got pills and vaccines. We wanted a magic carpet and got the 31 inches of seat pitch on the economy class. We wanted a “Maid Without Tears” and got a Roomba.

We wanted a machine that would take care of our daily odds and ends, a brain that would help us navigate the abundances of capitalism. We got what we wanted.

Only instead of a white shiny plastic humanoid rolling around a house we got server farms.

We got hundreds of thousands of computers sitting in fortresses of reinforced concrete. They hum quietly and analyze every single choice we make so that they suggest something we are likely to enjoy even more.

What started with “if you like this book, you will love that one” a decade ago now spans a wide range of human choices, from running a family budget (oh, it looks like you are spending too much on food) to finding a life partner (“how about Jelly Penguins who lives 4.35 miles from you?”).

The machines gently guide you towards new restaurants, recipes, exercise routines, business associates, friends, dates, movies, music, potato chips, mutual funds and underwear.

There are many different companies carving out their own niches in the business of making recommendations.

One company, Hunch, has an ambition to help us make all of those decisions at one place.

And then there’s Google that, in Time’s words, is “a massive recommendation engine advising us on what we should read and watch and ultimately know”.

We, the ad people, used to be the ultimate recommendation engine, the ones who told others what to crave, what to buy, who to look up to, what to aspire to.

We told others how to think: Think Small. Think Different. Think Outside the Bun.

We were the ones who defined tastes and influenced choices.

And now all these recommendation services create an extra layer around customers, a cocoon that is becoming increasingly harder to get through.

This year, we as an industry will spend more than two billion dollars on “search engine optimization”, which is to say that we are paying a lot of money to convince the machines that what we have to say is what people actually need to hear.

Two billion dollars is the kind of money that can buy some 800 Super Bowl spots; that’s every single spot in every Super Bowl for the next decade.

And we’d better get used to it. The machines aren’t going away.

Over the course of several recent interviews [1,2,3],  Google’s Eric Schmidt outlined the company’s vision for what he called a Serendipity Engine.

Search occurring in the background.

The machine learning from not only your active interaction with it, but also, passively, from your behavior, from the comfort of your pocket as you go about your day.

A brain that suggests what you should do next, what you care about.

Imagine a future, Schmidt says, in which you don’t forget, because the computer remembers.

Imagine this future, and then brace for it.

Billboards With Face Recognition Collect Demographic Data in Japan

One of the popular stories last week was this AFP piece about a group of Japanese train stations testing a new set of billboards with face recognition technology.  The billboards were inevitably, and sometimes breathlessly,  compared to the personalized signage in Minority Report.

The project is a lot less ambitious: it's goal is to collect demo data on people who pass by and stop to gawk at the ads: "The displays are part of a one-year trial being conducted by the Digital Signage Promotion Project, comprising 11 railway companies and their affiliated advertising firms. Their aim is to learn what kinds of people are interested in which ads at what times."

You can find additional details about the billboards in this press release (pdf in Japanese). Here's the project's website (Chrome does a decent job auto-translating it).

The technology is not very new; AdLab's posted about it two years ago. Much cooler are these mannequins with face recognition.

Check out CNN's coverage of the billboards back when they were displayed at a tradeshow in March complete, of course, with a Minority Report reference.

Mobile Check-Ins And Future Loyalty Programs

I first witnessed the excitement around the potential of location-based mobile marketing back in 2000 at one of the numerous m-commerce conferences. Back when the coolest phone was Nokia 9110, and mine was more of a cute Alcatel, the common marketing dream went like this:

Stores will be able to market their products and services by transmitting promotional coupons and messages to passers-by: "Come in and enjoy a complimentary cup of our new coffee blend," or "Get half off, if you make your purchase within the next 30 minutes". (The quote and the image above are from this pdf published a decade ago.)

It seems like a lot of thinking today rolls along the same tracks: a user pulls out his smartphone, opens an app, and sees banners with offers from nearby establishments. I've been somewhat skeptical about the whole banner-on-the phone thing as much as I once was about SMS promos, but this kind of location-based advertising probably makes sense, not least because it has been around forever in its lower-tech form of the "Sale" signs you see in store windows every day.

One thing I'm hopeful for, though, is this whole emerging checking-in behavior. If enough people get used to the act of announcing where they are,  retailers will get a new way to guide and measure shopping behaviors with the granularity that can't be afforded by the traditional loyalty card. Loyalty cards reward purchase. A program based on check-ins would be able to reward a much wider range of actions, from spending a certain amount of time checking out the merchandise in a particular aisle to bringing along friends. The reward might not be large enough to get people to drive all the way across town to check in, but it might just be the force that gets mall shoppers to poke their nose into the store they wouldn't otherwise visit.

I don't think badges and other forms of social recognition will remain a very strong incentive for a whole lot of people for too long, and I just posted an argument to that effect on Forbes,  but a program that follows the frequent-flyer mechanisms of point accumulation and tiered rewards could be very interesting.

Idea: Augmenting Printed Pages With Digital Comments

SFWeekly unearthed the pitch deck (pdf) by Mekanism to Fast Company that lead to the magazine's widely discussed Influence Project.

It's always a voyeur fun to look at others' pitches, and there's a lot to see in Mekanism's deck (although not as much as in that Arnell's logo doc for Pepsi). I really like the idea of using smartphones to augment printed pages with digital comments: "When a reader sees something comment worthy, they lift their phone, tap the spot on the page that they want to comment on, enter their comment, and upload it. Of course, they would also be able to see other people’s comments as well."

Imagining Apple TV

With the mythical tablet finally out and going strong, the next object of forward-looking gadget fetishism has gotta be Apple TV. Not the TV of the set-top box "hobby" variety; the real thing. A Piper Jaffray analyst said as much, Wired speculated about it, and patents shed light on some of the company's thinking. And then it kind of makes sense, too, for Apple to get into the business of pairing quality content with beautiful screens as it has done so successfully in the past.

I've just fretted, pretty publicly, about today's television sets being way too complex and yet failing to deliver the one thing we expect from them -- an uninterrupted stream of interesting moving images. Apple, of course, knows a thing or two about simple. A DVR that would program itself, channels that would organize themselves around your interests, un-buttoned remote controls, multiple sources of content converging in the background into one seamless stream, auto-adjusting volume. All the stuff that would makes watching TV easy again in the same way iPad has made computing accessible for two-year-olds.

The downside: expensive proprietary cables, no porn, and iFart apps stretched across a 50-inch screen playing in surround sound.

-- image source

What the iPad Could Have Been

A set of mock-ups from last fall that show iPad as a two-screen device. Maybe one day.

Your Family Pictures, Now With Limited Commercial Interruptions

Here's one genius idea whose time is yet to come: let people stream online pictures from their accounts on sites such as Facebook and Flickr to the digital frames on their desks, walls and nightstands along with news, stocks and weather updates, and an occasional ad.

There's a company called Thinking Screen Media that does exactly that via its FrameChannel service. Get a wifi-enabled frame, plug into the info stream via FrameChannel and select among dozens of sources, and there you have your own Captivate screen you stare at during elevator rides in the office.  Only now it's in your bedroom. Incidentally, Captivate's founder is on the board of this new company.

The company has done tests with IPG and plans to start selling its ad inventory some time this year. It also has just launched an iPad app that turns the device into digital frame.

The idea is genius because as hardware prices drop and people's comfort with the tech grows, everyone will soon have as many screens on surfaces around them as they now have old-fashioned paper photos. All of these screens will be online.

The idea is early because today wireless frame penetration is at 5%.

Some 5.9 million digital frames shipped in 2008 in the US and the market will remain flat until 2013, and IDC expects that by then two thirds of all frames shipped will have a wireless capability.

Funny, there are people who have already figured out how to block ads on this barely emerging medium (lie about your location during sign-up).

Eventually, digital frames will become wallet-sized. They will be monetized as well: every tenth time that you open your wallet you'll see an ad. Then, our windows will be internet-ready as well.

MIT Tech Review: Social TV Will Change the World

MIT Tech Review has published its 2010 list of ten technologies that will change the world, and one of them is social television. Wonder why now; I first posted on the subject five years ago, and the research goes a lot further back. It seemed like a pretty cool idea back at the time -- imagine connecting with those other wonderful people watching The Steve Wilkos Show! -- but the more I keep thinking about it, the more it seems like a solution in search of a problem.  Besides, with a combination of Twitter on a smartphone, hashtags and a TV, this isn't even the only solution.

That TV remote on the picture above looks pretty much like a new Dell smartphone with Twitter on it.

Anyway, the article highlights work by a Media Lab's research group: "Marie-José Montpetit, an invited scientist at MIT's Research Lab for Electronics, has been working for several years on social TV--a way to seamlessly combine the social networks that are boosting TV ratings with the more passive experience of traditional TV viewing. Her goal is to make watching television something that viewers in different places can share and discuss--and to make it easier to find something to watch."

A few years ago, John Batelle had a pretty cool idea of using online conversations around TV programs to rank shows in importance, the idea that has later materialized as Twielsen.

Sometimes, it feels like the TR suffers from the availability bias: two other technologies on the list are real-time search and 3D (mobile) displays.

Last year, they put Siri on the list, the same company Apple just bought.

Projector Turns Surfaces Into Touch Screens

A follow-up to the post from earlier today about student experiments with projected interfaces:  "Light Touch is an interactive projector that instantly transforms any flat surface into a touch screen."  Not for sale yet, but apparently available to potential partners.
- via

Skinput Body Interface Listens for Taps on Skin

CNN Labs (?) runs a story about Skinput, a prototype interface that appropriates the human body as input device, developed by a Carnegie Melon grad student and Microsoft researcher. "Skinput can tell whether a person tapped a middle finger or an index finger, because the two moves sound slightly different to the springy receivers."

Related:  some other work in this area as well as the now-famous Sixth Sense prototype from MIT.