Steve Rubel (bio) is SVP, Director of Insights for Edelman Digital, a division of Edelman - the world's largest independent PR firm.
He is charged with helping clients identify emerging technologies and trends that can be applied in marketing communications programs. He also explores these topics on his lifestream site, a monthly Forbes.com column and in a bi-weekly AdAge column.
Steve can be reached via email at steverubel@gmail.com.
Note: Everything posted on this site is Steve's personal opinion. It does not represent the views of Edelman or its clients.
The holiday crush is on and the clock is ticking. But what do you get the geek or coworker in your life who has (or wants) everything? How about something intangible: a web-service subscription.
Over the last few years, as I have moved more of my life into "the cloud," I have started to rely on a handful of such services. They keep me in sync, in the know and in touch. Here are three that passed my "30-day test."
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It was nice to get an email from Friendster today about their relaunch, detailed below. I wouldn't count them out. You never know who can make a comeback today. Just as it's easy for a site to come out of nowhere and dominate, it's equally possible that an existing player can find their footing again. Worth watching...
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"But because I was too close to the source material, I couldn’t think of another way to do it. So I asked Twitter.jeffkirvin
How would you kill something that had nanites in its blood that repair damage (injuries, aging) almost as fast as they happen? #research"
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"Imagine you're a tourist and you arrive at this place and you want to know more about it,” said (Google Product Manager Hartmut) Neven on a visit to the Santa Monica pier in Los Angeles the show off the technology. “All you will have to do is take a picture of the sign. We send the information up to the serverand we recognize this as the Santa Monica pier. The idea is you see something that interests you, you whip out your camera phone, take a picture of the object of interest, and this will trigger a Google search."
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Google today rolled out a public DNS service that anyone tech savvy can use to make their browsing faster. There's no word yet if the domain name service will be built into other services like the Google Toolbar or Google Chrome as a default setting. Here's my quick take: Google says this is about making the web faster, but I think there's more to it.
"The average Internet user ends up performing hundreds of DNS lookups each day, and some complex pages require multiple DNS lookups before they start loading. This can slow down the browsing experience. Our research has shown that speed matters to Internet users, so over the past several months our engineers have been working to make improvements to our public DNS resolver to make users' web-surfing experiences faster, safer and more reliable."
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I subscribe to an ego search via Google Web alerts, which is separate from Google News alerts. Normally, I get one or two of these a day - typically after one of my columns go live or when I post here.
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A race is underway to turn social networking into an engaging 10-foot experience--one that we interact with via TVs. The technology has been in place for years. However, the price of Internet-connected HDTVs was, until recently, out of reach for most. No longer. High-definition TVs were among the top sellers on Black Friday, according to ShopperTrak RCT Corp. And just in time, the major social networks are racing to make the entire experience more interactive via number of channels--not just cable TV, but gaming consoles too.
Television inherently has been a social experience for decades, dominating water cooler conversations worldwide. But as social networking enters the living room via embedded Twitter and Facebook streams and more, some observers see it changing the live experience, which has largely remained passive. This potentially could shake up the millions of dollars spent on TV advertising, while ushering in new ways to reach both women and men.
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According to Experian, the majority of US searches (at least those that generate clicks) incorporate more three or more keywords. This is likely being driven keyword suggestions, a feature that's now the default for virtually every search engine and every browser. To get a sense for what this means from a PR point of view, all you need to do is visit Question Suggestions. Even better, try Google Suggest yourself on topics related to your brand. The results are sometimes eye opening.
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