Agora Media Group Innovation Blog

Originally posted on the AppMarket.tv blog

There are multiple aspects that define the Social TV experience.

Some of these aspects are:

*Changing basic TV experience from lean-back to lean-in;
*Technology factors like Internet-Connected TV adoption;
*Remote controls that support the social experience effectively and
*Broadband access and so on.

These aspects are all external when we look at the social experience itself, namely communication/interaction.
Would (the type of) interaction be a determinant of how the Social TV experience is created?

What if instead of the enabling of interaction being the starting point for Social TV developments, we take the TV content and its public interaction as starting point.

In the Social TV: Designing for Distributed, Sociable Television Viewing paper, the type of interaction is being researched.

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In a previous article, (Social) Gaming – significant numbers & the next level, Karl Long commented on it, referring to a presentation of Amy Jo Kim, about applying game mechanics to social sites.

The five game mechanics she refers to, are:
1. Collecting
2. Points
3. Feedback
4. Exchanges
5. Customization
Applying those to the context of social sites is easy to understand, it motivates. Motivation increases usage and usage increases loyalty, traffic, income and so on.

View below the aforementioned presentation:
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by Gianluigi Cuccureddu and Richard Kastelein.

That’s right.  Unbelievable. Even to us.  And it only cost us sweat. Making sure the copy was interesting and well written. Making sure we took a little extra time to tweet and retweet. Making sure we pushed it to Reddit and Digg. Making sure we used Facebook and Linkedin as well to disseminate our ideas to our friends and business partners.

Scroll down to the very bottom of this page and see the dynamic PR ranking.

A check three weeks ago, delivered us a marvelous sign that we are doing well with the Agora Media Group blog. After the Agora Media’s own Social Media case -> 16000% growth we pushed further in order to expand our visibility and expertise.

Corporate Blogging and an attached Social Media strategy to get our opinions and analyses out is practically the only Marketing we did to get the word out of the Agora Media Group.
Surely PageRank is not the most important metric, but what it does tell is that we’re linked back from important sites.

We achieved this by applying the Social Media Framework which we wrote about. In essence it’s about the Content, Context and Social Media Intelligence which enhances both Content and Context.

Content * Context * Social Media Intelligence = Powerful Social Media

Tagwhat is a geo-centric mobile Augmented Reality application that by means of a social network, users can create and share content which can be seen on location.
Some of the opportunities -as can be seen in the video- are Local Businesses, keeping a journal, Videos, store locations and advertising.
Furthermore it’s possible to follow other people enabling a network of Augmented Reality tags.

Augmented Reality networks still have to validate their value, but novelty of such networks and the AR technology itself fuel initial interest of users.
A business model for Tagwhat is of course advertising which blends in with other types of tags, creating a less pushy advertising model. Besides this, context/location is key, making advertising more relevant and less disturbing.

Pre-conditions like the following make or break a social network:
*The amount of interaction between people.
*The amount of quality content/interaction between people.
*The amount of people.
*The amount of active people must be big enough, most people are passive, they like to sign up and read, but are not the content/interaction generators.
*The community must be relevant and specific to one or more segments, the more niche, the higher value added, but the fewer people and thus interaction.
*People need to make a choice.

The furthering fragmentation of the social network landscape will create increasing pressure on succession or failure. Augmented Reality has the power to uniquely position a platform in favor of its usage. It’s up to the users to adopt and integrate a network like Tagwhat in their daily lives.

Will such social Augmented Reality networks diffuse or not?
What could business models be for User Generated Content networks like these?

Google Buzz is “a Google approach to sharing.”

Google is making an interesting move which is two-folded.
At the one hand, it’s trying to enter the social networking business, on the other hand it’s trying to do what it’s overaching goal is: organizing information, in this case, social information.
Google’s trying to get a grasp on Facebook and Twitter. Especially Facebook is unstoppable in its advance in monthy traffic.

What Buzz does is incorporating social tools in Gmail.
It has five features:

• Users can auto-follow people which he/she is frequently communicating with, be it email or chat.
• Sharing becomes much easier, the user will be able to share content from Flickr, Youtube and so on.
• A recommendation service where Buzz will help you find popular content.
• The user will get social updates.
• The user will be able to update his/her status, be it to the public or private.

Some features do look alike the ones which are available on Facebook and Twitter. Gmail is a perfect platform to deploy these social tools, a huge userbase of 170+ million, which will return Google lots of intel, on usage, functionality, usability etc.

One of my last articles, The Synaptic Web and the Flux of Information, referred to search and filtering and why filtering is becoming the mechanism in this highly communicative digital society.
Google Buzz will create Google’s own real-time stream of information, how will Google manage the flow for the user, in terms of keeping an overview and not being overloaded?
Yet another tool is not adding more simplicity to the overcrowded landscape. Looking forward how and if Google is able to convince its users to go for Google Buzz.

What are your initial thoughts?

With a userbase big as Yahoo’s one, it’s a logic result that Yahoo is figuring out how to leverage its users to create an Augmented Reality application which differs a bit from others.
Instead of tagging pictures to a geolocation, Yahoo’s goes social by making it possible to leave notes on specific surroundings, which can be read by the user’s network.

Read here the patent which is filed by Yahoo. Read up the detailed decriptions, some interesting notes are made.
The abstract:

Disclosed are methods and apparatus for capturing information that is pertinent to physical surroundings with respect to a device, the information including at least one of visual information or audio information. Overlay information for use in generating a transparent overlay via the device is obtained using at least a portion of the captured information. The transparent overlay is then superimposed via the device using the overlay information, wherein the transparent overlay provides one or more transparent images that are pertinent to and in correlation with the physical surroundings.

There are many Augmented Reality applictions developed or in development, the potential application by Yahoo differs in terms of existing userbase and possible mass adoption. The social aspect might drive adoption, being able to identify oneself faster with overlaying data, than any kind of data which is not close to someone.

Would this move make sense by Yahoo?

(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.
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That is what Chitter.tv is offering people. Right now it’s in beta, but you can sign in with your Twitter account.
Watching TV becomes interactive, from a passive modus, you are now able to interact in real-time with other watchers who happen to consume the same content at that time.

Right now TV and Twitter are two major activities, TV is being consumed more and more in combination with other activities like Internet, radio and so on. Combining these two is bound to trigger interest from users, companies and the market in understanding the converging phenomenon and how users will intertwine the two.
At this point, some of the channels which can be watched on Chitter.tv are: MTV, Fox News, Sky News, Bloomberg, but also channels like Classic.fm TV, RaiNews, RTL-Z, Humor-TV and AT5.
Depending on your interest it certainly has its charms to engage with current watchers and talk about the live seen content, it feels odd, but that has to grow on you.

This is just a beta version, but many features can be thought up which will add value and experience to Chitter.tv, probably initial experiences and opinions are awaited till further development is undertaken.
It’s not possible to scroll down the list of tweets or directly interact with another user. From a commercial point of view all kinds of interactive commerce can be implemented to convert impulses and enthausiasts.

Interesting to see where this will head to, the perceived risk is low, so many will at least test this, how many will experience this as a added-value service and convergence?
What’s your opinion?

Informitv – a convergent communications consultancy agency – is one of our regularly read websites, an authority when it comes to television and its convergence. Their publication Connected Vision is well worth the read as well, which you can download here.

Dr William Cooper of Informitv has given 20 predictions for the next decade on television and its developments:
(Visit their website to read the additional information per prediction)

1. Television will be less dominant.
2. Fewer television channels will survive.
3. Global communities will dominate media.
4. Audiovisual communication will become personal.
5. Most viewing will be on personal screens. .
6. Mobile video will be delivered over data networks.
7. Displays will be network connected.
8. Displays will become resolution independent.
9. High definition will be standard.
10. Fidelity of reproduction will improve.
11. 3D will be a limited success.
12. Network distribution will become more efficient.
13. Fibre-optic networks will reach the home.
14. Broadband will become a utility.
15. Home networks will become ubiquitous.
16. Massive data storage will be cheap as chips.
17. Physical media distribution will decline.
18. Global releases will reduce piracy.
19. Copyright protection will be invisible.
20. People will pay to avoid adverts.

When reading through the 20 points, an apprehension is becoming clear that this industry is at the dawn of thorough transformation, melting with other media into a morphed new industry that has much more opportunities for that what it sustains: Content.
Summarized can be said that important developments are the fact that every screen can be used to consume content (whatever screen works to service what a user wants, when he wants it and where he wants it), television -as we know it- will decrease in importancy and hardware/underlaying technologies will advance the ‘front-end’ developments.

An exciting decade is awaiting us full of media convergence and evolutions. What are your most important conclusions or predictions?

View the short introductory video by Google where it announces you can discover breaking news on the web with real-time updates from news, blogs and social networks! After Bing has introduced Twitter results in its search results, now it’s time for Google to show its abilities.

Finally, it was bound to happen that Google is displaying real-time results from microblogs, blogs and social networks, next to this news, Google announced as well partnerships with Facebook, Myspace to get real-time data and not to forget, the deal from October with Twitter.

What are the effects and implications of Google’s real-time search and what questions are being raised?
* Will SEO be expanded with optimizing tweets and other public data as well?
* Will all this real-time data be available in Google Analytics, the social media monitoring market will have a new worthy competitor?
* Is Google Search the right place for real-time data (in combination with ‘historic’ data)?
* Will users make use of Google as an aggregator more and more (kind of Friendfeed), or will they make use of each network because it’s more relevant contextually (Google in time will integrate that as well)?
* Will real-time efforts be mechanized just to make sure that people or companies rank high in the search results?
* If Google will prove its importance to real-time search, what about SPAM just to make sure that people or companies rank high in the search results?
* How will real-time results weigh against ‘normal’ search results?

When Google launches new tools, it almost always reshapes or at least shakes up the established Internet landscape.
This is not so bad, it keeps companies focused and it ignites creativity and innovation to come up with solutions for questions as the abovementioned.

If you were the devil’s advocate, what questions would you raise?