Patent Battles

BBC News - Patent wars: Stripping the iPhone bare

The battle for content over style plays out in the increasingly bland looking devices.

Google+ launches pages

So five months after it was promised, possibly the most anticipated social platform launch of the year, the great hyperbole that is Google+ pages finally arrived last week.

It met with the now expected polarised coverage from:

"Why Google Plus Pages (Will) Beat Facebook. And Twitter"

to

"Google+ Is Dead"

Frankly how one can make predictions this early on (we smell linkbait) is beyond us.

So the facts are that Pages provide organisations with the ability to broadcast and interact with their customers in much the same way as Facebook pages. As Robert Scoble points out though they currently appear to be more suited to small companies or companies with a small social presence rather than large corporations, as the management options for multiple logins are currently absent meaning companies with advanced social strategies touching many parts of an organisation will find the management tough at present.

These types of tools will arrive over time but for now the key benefit (which is why we can't understand the ‘Google+ is dead’ headlines) is the baked in search boosting tools, which is where Google+ really has an advantage over other social platforms.

Companies that are serious about natural search rankings have the opportunity to really consolidate through their presence on the platform and this is where we think the real growth will start. The attraction of improved natural search will inevitably attract companies to set up stall (61% of the top brands already have) and if they start to run promotions through the platform the users will follow, which means there will be a natural activation of what is currently a relatively inactive Google+ consumer base. Interestingly this is the Facebook growth model in reverse.

So after 5 months of wondering we now know what Google’s ambitions are and the next year is going to be a fascinating spectacle.

The true price of free

If you've visited Facebook or read any business or technology pages in the past couple of weeks you will be well aware that facebook has made one or two changes.

The changes have been discussed at length so we're not going to explore them in any great detail, but instead consider the furore that has engulfed the user community. A survey of 1300 users noted that 84% of the base didn't like the new changes. But so what.

As Adrian Short pointed out last week if you haven't paid for the service then you have no real say. Certainly you don't have rights. As a facebook user you're merely a tenant, you don't pay anything to be there so you need to expect things to change. If you want to control your web experience then you're going to need to be prepared to pay. facebook answers to its advertisers and those advertisers are the ones looking for more time online, better targeting, greater engagement and that is what the interface change is designed to deliver.

The radicalism of the change is something that brands have to be vigilant about. For years facebook has provided a free platform to develop your brand space on. If this is the decision you're making, you need to be prepared for the unexpected. You don't get anything for free and if there is a decision in the future to change things this could affect your wall, your apps or any tools you build in and fundamentally the brand experience you're building. With a long rumoured IPO in the near future, monetising the site has never been more important for facebook and one thing we can expect is more of these types of changes in the future. facebook has been a fantastic innovation for brands, but its best to remember facebook are doing it for facebook not for your brand.

Is it milliseconds or days that count?

In 1986 the financial sector's Big Bang saw the explosion of the industry. It was the end of October 1986 when the Stock Exchange Automated Quotation system replaced the trading floor. This screen-based quotation system was used by brokers to buy and sell stock rather than meeting face to face. It's been the technological advances in the sector that has kept it competitive and continues to do so.

Work has just got underway on the Hibernian Express a 6000 mile fibre optic cable that will cost over £300 million and is being justified by the fact that milliseconds will be saved in trading transactions providing the edge that companies need to ensure they stay competitive.

However, increasingly it is not just the huge infrastructure projects that are necessarily giving the edge, but easily accessible and free platforms. Analysts at Derwent Capital Markets have launched a £25m fund that makes its investments by evaluating whether people are generally happy, sad, anxious or tired, because they believe it will predict whether the market will move up or down. How do they do that? Well it's Twitter. The millions of tweets posted on Twitter are being analysed by their hedge fund managers in conjunction with a research team headed by Professor Johan Bollen, they have developed a predictive modelling technique for the Dow Jones with 87.6% accuracy.

Paul Hawtin, Derwent's founder and fund manager, has an exclusive contract with Bollen to use his technology. Mr Hawtin told the Sunday Times "Investors have always accepted that markets are driven by sentiment, mainly fear and greed. When people are greedy the markets go up and when they are fearful they go down.

"When sentiment dropped, and people tweeted about feeling tight on money, were worried or anxious, the markets would crash two or three days later."

This is not the only tool on the market, but increasingly small houses are looking at investing in social technologies at a fraction of the price of large infrastructure projects and in some cases predicting market shifts far earlier than the milliseconds that may be won by the Hibernian Express.

10 things Google+ has done for me

So straight off the top of my head here we GO...

1. It's cut out the noise of Twitter

2. It's helped me discover interesting content more quickly

3. It's facilitated better conversations

4. It's made me feel innovative again

5. It's made me be more rigorous about how I'm presenting myself online again

6. It's started me blogging again

7. It's helped me choose who and how to share better

8. It's made me like people I'd started to go off

9. It's sparked my imagination back into life

10. It's bumped me out of a bit of a lazy hiatus

First campaign on Google+

It's a bit clunky (and the spelling leaves a bit to be desired) but it's good to experiment, it's why I like hackers and hats off to these guys for finding the first hook

ph creative - the first campaign ever on google+ - 2011

Google+: Social networking grows up

Google+ launched last week. The demand was so great that Google were forced to shut down invites within a day. Having been lucky enough to get in as one of the first though, I've been playing around for a few days now and can't help concluding this is a service that really is going to be a game changer both for consumers and for brands involvement in social.

The service has variously been touted as a Twitter, Facebook, Apple, Myspace, Skype (and it goes on) killer. I'm not going to speculate here about whether it will kill any of those, but suffice to say it does many things that all of those brands should be wary of. I believe after my first dalliances, there are four aspects that make this service amazingly strong.

First and possibly most importantly is its core strength. Google+ pulls together all of Google's services seamlessly. Your Google+ alerts are sent through Gmail. The photo upload is through Picasa. The event scheduling is through Google Calendar and so it goes on. As there are currently over 1 billion Gmail customers alone, let alone the other services, when the service comes out of beta it could well be hugely dominant.

The second is the Circles feature. Circles is an incredibly simple and intuitive way of building your friend lists. Contacts can be dragged and dropped into one or as many different circles as you like and then any content you share can be published to any of those created circles or, if you wish, made completely public making privacy simple and easy. This group function is far simpler than either Facebook and Linked In Groups and arguably far more baked in to the service than Twitter lists and therefore far more likely to be integral to its usage. It also fundamentally inverts the privacy pyramid back in favour of the user.

The third is Hangout. Hangout provides group video calling to anyone with an enabled webcam. Rumour has it that Facebook could be releasing something similar this week but the ease with which it is to fire up a Hangout is frightening and frankly Skype could definitely be under threat.

The fourth is the photo and video sharing. This sounds like the classic me to service and it would be easy to copy existing models, however Google has created a drag and drop experience which is Apple-like in its ease. You simply drag any photo onto a box and it uploads instantly. Working similarly to the recently launched Google images preview function, you can then scroll through gallery lightboxes seamlessly. The user design in this area really makes you feel this whole new proposition has been amazingly well thought through. Added to this great functionality, the upload interface with Android on the mobile side is seamless and if there are some fence sitters out there, this will definitely provide great reasons for choosing Android over the Apple iOS.

If we were to pick just one killer app over everything else it would have to be Circles, this puts privacy absolutely in the hands of the consumer and as such this really sees social platforms growing up. This is the reason we think that Google+ is a game changer for brands. Brands are going to be forced to look at more complex metrics than simply followers or fans, as it has been easy to rely on up to now. Engagement is going to have to be based around much more solid content interaction strategies if brands really want to spread through the Circles structures. This social platform is putting the power back in the hands of consumers and brands are going to have to step up their game to have real impact.