Agora Media Group Innovation Blog

In an informative five minutes on Discovery Channel, numbers were presented on the Gaming industry.

Gaming is increasingly becoming a lucrative and competitive market with a huge global target audience.
The fastest growing entertainment industry, is indeed Gaming.

Figures compared to other industries (global turnover on the first day):
Game: Grand Theft Auto 4: $210 million
Game: More than 400.000 copies are reserved for the new Mario Bros game.
Book: Harry Potter (which part was not mentioned): $140 million
Movie: (forgot which one): $40 million

In terms of usage, FarmVille -which is the biggest Social Game on Facebook of 2009- has a whopping 27,5 million daily active users and a 72,9 million monthly users!

Gaming becomes more and more intertwined within our global culture, gaming often is a social event where people gather to play a game which they all fancy.
The Wii took this to the next level, by appealing to the conventional-non-gamers and attract them to game together with an innovative console, taking away perceived risks of this new target group.

As mentioned before, the Gaming industry is the fastest growing, and technology enablers will only push the growth further. Cross-media Social Gaming is the next step, take FarmVille, Mafia Wars or any other kind of Social Game and take it to the television.
The Wii already does this with Mario Kart, enabling players all over the world to game with each other through Internet connection.
By enabling Social Gaming as well through the television, the experience itself can be magnified by adding more features which relate better to the television device than the computer, therefore enhancing and creating new cross-media experiences.

The (social) Gaming industry will grow, diffuse amongst core-gamers and non-core-gamers, within daily lives and within our socially morphing framework.

What do you see as important developments and trends for the Social Gaming industry?

We are looking to take Social Gaming to TV via Social TV platform – think Mafia Wars, Farm Town, and even Second Life on TV.
We have developed and successfully broadcast Social TV in Europe bypassing the remote using telephony 2.0 (mobile and landline), advanced IVR and business logic servers, realtime 3D along with web integration.

We need partners. We need financial backing to redevelop the project.

… where viewers can create a virtual character, pilot it in the TV environment, meet, compete, play and even talk to other viewers/competitors via phone.

What is the Cross Media Social Platform (CMSP)?

The TV market is ‘on the move’ – competition is growing and digital channels via ISP’s and IPTV providers are now crashing through what was once the walled fortress of broadcast television. Interactive content and social media are the buzz and broadcasters are looking for both innovation and revenue generation models that fall outside of the traditional advertising box of the past. And the need for all types of content is growing exponentially, of which one is created by users themselves.

The Cross Media Social Platform is a unique product that not only offers a business model that encompasses current and widely spread advertising revenue – it also has added value by offering broadcasters the opportunity to earn money via telephony (Premium Rate Numbers and Premium SMS) via freemium modelling, as well as web and phone subscription models – where users can augment their profiles and characters on the web for TV and the web.

We created an interactive, virtual world on both television and the Internet that envelops social networking, community, user generated content, competition, and entertainment. And we are interested in developing this further with principles who were involved in the previous project. And it works on both standard broadcast or terrestrial TV as well as IPTV, Satellite, Cable etc.

See video of work we did in the past at Youtube

Visuals of the Cross Media Social Platform (CMSP)

Below you will find a basic CMSP architecture demo and a couple of screenshots.

It evens goes further, technology developments are evolving, partners have released an API enabling developers to create unified communications (telephone, cellular text message, instant message (Jabber, AIM, Yahoo, MSN) applications using traditional document-based web development flow. This sort of technology can be implemented in the Cross Media Social Platform, adapting to the needs and ways of nowadays communication.

Why Agora Media?

We have the experience and know-how, without having to invent the wheel and exploit this competitive advantage, we can respond very fast and accurate to the concretizing needs of the Social TV/Social Media/converging Media community and industry! We have a vast network of 2.0, cross media and technology pioneers, working closely with them to stay on top of trends and developments which will enhance the Cross Media Social Platform.

Why now?

The interest in Social TV is rising, the television landscape is changing, permanently. Media consumption is converging and increasingly socializing. More and more experiments, products and services are initiated and developed to meet these changes. Being on top of these trends and offering new digital cross media experiences to your target audiences and putting you permanently on the map!

Feel free to contact us if interested or wish to receive more information.

As stated on the Deloitte’s Fast50 webpage:

Deloitte yearly forecasts the major trends expected to impact the Technology Media & Telecom (TMT) business in the year ahead. In 2010 the Deloitte TMT Predictions will be launched on March 2 during the Predictions event (Almere).
Deloitte Fast50 challenges TMT entrepreneurs to launch an own Prediction. What will be the major trend expected to impact your business in the year ahead and how many persons agree with you?

Agora Media has entered the contest with two predictions:

By Richard Kastelein:

Media Convergence and Social TV

If we all thought the Facebook and Twitter social media growth phenomena were extraordinary, wait until social TV hits your screens. And it is not as far away as you think – not only with the logical IPTV market, but also terrestrial TV. Social media fused with TV is …the future and the implication of reach that will touch billions not millions.
As Facebook revolutionized the way advertisers can niche-target their online demographics, social TV will profoundly change the ad agencies and marketing departments will offer their wares in the television realm. It’s called tCommerce and watch out – TV widgets and recommendation engines are not far away.
Neilsen ratings seem vague, less targetable and will likely become obsolete in TV 2.0. See http://agoramedia.co.uk/blog/?s=kastelein&x=0&y=0 for articles I have written on Convergent Media and Social TV.
Contest link

By Gianluigi Cuccureddu

The Synaptic Web, Ubiquity and Augmented Reality
The Synaptic Web, where relationships between nodes are more meaningful than the nodes (alone), is a new way of looking at the evolution of the Web (in comparison to the Semantic Web). Augmented Reality perfectly fits within the Synaptic Web, enabling users to create meaningful relations between all sorts of content/data (nodes) and enhance their reality. Mobility and media/content consumption are two important subjects which will transform by the Synaptic Web and Augmented Reality.
The hyperconnective society wants to consume whatever content, wherever they are, when they want. Ubiquity as an aspect will move further up to the core of marketing strategies by means of mobile devices.
A key word within ubiquity is of course real-time. Mobile devices suffice this need and (will) challenge businesses in the near future to be omnipresent with the brand at all touch points of their target groups.
Contest link

Both the predictions approach the same future outlook: a convergent socializing digital world which is available anywhere at any time on any screen with more meaningful and relevant content.
Do add your comments on our predictions’ pages if you think these are the outlooks we can expect in the near future?!

Proximity Marketing as described by Wikipedia is “the localized wireless distribution of advertising content associated with a particular place.”
The commercialization of location will get a boost by the power and opportunities offered by Mobile Augmented Reality applications.

Have a look at the first real-time Augmented Reality proximity marketing platform by Insqribe:

read more

by Richard Kastelein (originally published at Atlantic Free Press)

Whilst the mainstream media players are quietly pushing their technology and innovation teams to the maximum across the world in a race to marry Social Media and TV, most of the public remains oblivious and left out of the loop, mainly due to offerings being in Proof of Concept (POC) stage or not even… and still on the chalkboard.
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The Online Strategy encompasses those elements of the business- and marketing strategy that must be employed to contribute efficiently and effectively to its goals.

As for all strategies, the Online Strategy should consider the brand, the target audience, products & services and the positioning of the brand. ( read also The Content – Context Diarchy to understand the relation between offer and context in the online landscape )
Be it on an overarching level or on execution level (see the three parts below), consistency is key to achieve brand recognition.
It’s tempting to divert from this focus because the Internet offers lots of possibilities which can be applied, but not neccesarily relevant and this non-relevancy might cause a distanciation of the target audience.

The online strategy for your business can be divided in three main fundaments:
* Website Strategy
* Internet Strategy
* Social Strategy
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WOW!

I can’t simply express it differently, these are the next steps in the Augmented Reality evolution and diffusion.

First of all, Sketch Recognition is a development which will make QR Codes / markers redundant on the long run and will create a more natural/organic augmented reality.
View below the video which shows how the technology interacts with the augmentated content! This goes beyond the abilities of current browsers and technologies which do not understand the augmented data, but merely shows it based on markers or GPS data.

The next video will really blow your mind because the technology enables recognition upon natural shapes.

When you combine the two new developments, the extra opportunities -enabled by them- are vast.
Not only will it be more organic and user generated, but based upon the initial augmentated reality, the meta-data can undergo interaction with the user and thus altering the intelligence extracted by the superimposing!

The good news for developers is the following, quoted from the GamesAlfresco blog:

For the first time ever, the core code necessary for real augmented reality “(real” here means precise alignment of graphics overlaid on real life objects) on iPhone 3.0 is available to the public.
To get access to the source code – send us an email ( comogard@gmail.com ).

The precise alignment of graphics on real life object will be an improvement compared to the current abilities to align.
I do wonder what new applications will be developed and how industries will benefit from this.

What do you foresee?

The interest in Augmented Reality is growing which brings along hype and by that, irrelevant applications which misuse the Augmented Reality technology or just hype along concerning the term. When relating this to Gartner’s Hype Cycle, it’s a phase which every technology has to overcome before it diffuses in markets and consumers.

I’ll refer to two kinds of misuses of Augmented Reality, one is with regard to the technology itself, the other is from the utility point of view. Both are equally important as they sustain each other. If one is off, than there’s not symbiotic benefit.
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(Originally published at Atlantic Free Press)

by Richard G. Kastelein

If we all thought the Facebook and Twitter social media growth phenomena were extraordinary, wait until Social TV hits your screens.

And it’s not as far away as you think — not only with the logical IPTV market, but also terrestrial TV. I recently attended the International Broadcast Convention (IBC) in Amsterdam, which bills itself as ’The content creation management delivery experience’. IBC2008 attracted 49,000+ visitors and 1,300+ exhibitors from more than 130 countries. This year is expected to be bigger. Last year, I was part of a team exhibiting at MIPTV in Cannes, and was expecting something a bit similar… but this was almost all about hardware and software and less about the actual formats and programs. However, this was not a disappointment. For embedded in the show there were some jewels… which have profoundly altered my view of Social Media, the future and the implication of reach that will touch billions not millions.
read more

A couple of days ago I was watching a show of a Dutch stand-up comedian, who at one point began talking about the excessive choice consumers are given nowadays. He gave the example of having many kinds of toothpaste, which burdens him, because a person becomes indecisive, whilst the only thing he wants is to have clean teeth and a toothpaste which takes care of that.
When he talked about this topic, sociologist Barry Schwartz came to my mind which wrote the book “The Paradox of Choice: Why More is Less” on customer behavior. In the book he explains that choice overload can lead to decision-making paralysis. Choice is the hallmark of individual freedom and does fit the New Consumer which I referred to in The Axiom of Self-Segmentation , a type of person that seeks authenticity, is individualistic, independent and well-informed.

To give you a short insight in the overwhelming offer, here a part from chapter one “Let’s go shopping” of Schwartz’s book:

A Day at the Supermarket

Scanning the shelves of my local supermarket, recently, I found 85 different varieties andbrands of crackers. As I read the packages, I discovered that some brands had sodium, othersdidn’t. Some were fat-free, others weren’t. They came in big boxes and small ones. They camein normal size and bite size. There were mundane saltines and exotic and expensive imports.

My neighborhood supermarket is not a particularly large store, and yet next to the crackerswere 285 varieties of cookies. Among chocolate chip cookies, there were 21 options. Among“goldfish” (I don’t know whether to count them as cookies or crackers), there were 20 different varieties to choose from. Across the aisle were juices—13 “sports drinks,” 65 “box drinks” for kids, 85 other flavors andbrands of juices, and 75 iced teas and adult drinks. I could get these tea drinks sweetened(sugar or artificial sweetener), lemoned, and flavored. My neighborhood supermarket is not a particularly large store, and yet next to the crackers, were 285 varieties of cookies.
Next, in the snack aisle, there were 95 options in all—chips (taco and potato, ridged and flat, flavored and unflavored, salted and unsalted, high fat, low fat, no fat), pretzels, and the like, including a dozen varieties of “Pringles.” Nearby was seltzer, no doubt to wash down thesnacks. Bubbled water was displayed in at least 15 flavors.

In the pharmaceutical aisles, I found 61 varieties of sun tan oil and sunblock, and 80 differentpain relievers—aspirin, acetaminophen, ibuprofin, 350 milligrams or 500 milligrams, caplets, capsules, and tablets, coated or uncoated. There were 40 options for toothpaste, 150 lipsticks, 75 eyeliners and 90 colors of nail polish from one brand alone. There were 116 kindsof skin cream, and 360 types of shampoo, conditioner, gel, and mousse. Next to them were90 different cold remedies and decongestants. Finally, there was dental floss. Waxed andunwaxed, flavored and unflavored, offered in a variety of thicknesses.
[...]
A typical supermarket carries more than 30,000 items. That’s a lot to choose from. And morethan 20,000 new products hit the shelves every year, almost all of them doomed to failure.

These figures to refer to American supermarkets, but I do think these scenarios count for many other countries as well.

The ambiguous title of this article is The Paradox of Choice 2.0 , the aforementioned supermarket example is analog, if we move such a scenario to the digital world, we get a squared choice overload.
First because online stores like Amazon.com have many titles along the Long Tail terms. Secondly, global is the new local, besides the increased choice related to the books themselves, the amount of e-stores from where a customer can order, has increased drastically as well.
The second explenation of the title is the fact that the Social Web adds a new layer to shopping -opinions- which only will add more to the decision-making paralysis next to the online characteristic.
Due to collaborative filtering, recommendations, opinions, ratings and implicit and explicit personalization tools, customers are getting quality assistance in their decision-making which paradoxically is relevant to their search, but at the same time could be paralyzing in achieving their goal.
Think of Amazon.com which recommends other books in the same category, recommends books which are bought together with a certain book, shows the actual % of people which in the end bought that particular book and the % of people who did buy another one. Next to the recommendations, the large amount of reviews and rating does add value to being well-informed, but does make it harder to decide.

There is a fine balance that C-level and seniors need to find in terms of portfolio, product lines, offer and effects on customer behavior like this, responsibility needs to be taken towards customers in regulating the choice overload.
This is referred to as strategic clarity ,this goes hand in hand with More is Less, where these kind of decisions are not made by businesses and therefore will be emotionally and psychologically detrimental.
Too much is not and won’t be a success factor business-wise and customers will ignore all that is too much, from either perspective too much doesn’t get each of the two further.

How will the two entities -advancing technologies/business and online customer behavior- behave and react to each other now and in the future when the freedom of choice is most probably squared once again?
Will the effect of too much choice reach the top which will negatively impact business or shall strategic clarity diffuse more amongst businesses and prove its importancy?