web strategy, social networks, game thinking, and the future of good
Through its partners, mPowering distributes smartphones loaded with mobile apps to monitor desired behaviors, such as kids attending school or expectant mothers accessing prenatal care. Participants can cash in their earned credits for “food, medicine, books, or even extras they’d never be able to afford, like bicycles,” Sugrim says.
Very interesting approach. Game mechanics + rich data + long-view empowerment.
I had an interesting opportunity this past week to attend a "meeting of the minds." In Albuquerque 17 people convened, each bringing a different skillset: economic development, architecture, philanthropy, non-profits, for-profits, branding/marketing, tech strategy (that's me). The subject was how to fix some of the world's biggest problems. No biggie.
Leftronic is part of an emerging market of "Dashboard" apps--apps that help organizations with data all over the place get that data into one place so that wisdom can be drawn from it.
The concept of having a Dashboard is 100% good. The ability to create an application that executes properly on the concept is 100% difficult. There are still no standard, copy/paste methods of syncing data across a variety of sources like Google, Twitter, Facebook, and the hundred other apps your organization uses.
Worse still, even if we could solve the data collection problem, we're still at a loss for drawing wisdom from the data to make decisions. "What does 1,000 visitors last week really mean?"
I played with Leftronic for 10 minutes and feel they're on to something. This beta is still a developer's application, not something an executive or intern could just point-click-launch. It does have a simple, straightforward interface that lets you drag and drop widgets on to different dashboard pages, but getting data, even from sources like Google Analytics let alone custom sources, is just not going to be simple for the layman. Nevertheless it's a preview of things to come for this important market--and a good preview at that.
Building on the highly successful campaign from Toy Story 3, the marketers at Disney Pixar have crafted this hilarious and well-produced faux used car advertisement in honor of Cars 2.
Storytelling at its best. What intrigues me is how they are specifically targeting the older demographic with these types of campaigns. They'll get to kiddos by virtue of being another Cars movie, but they'll garner an even larger audience than that first film because of special outreach to my age and higher.
Cars 2 will definitely be even more successful than Cars.
When I talked about the evolution of sharing & syncing a few days ago, I was happy to see Color get unearthed.
It's a photo sharing app. Simple, right? Instagram, Flickr, MobileMe. Photo sharing has "been done," but Color shows how it hasn't evolved--yet.
Color takes the concept of sharing much further by allowing you not to have to think about how to share photos from memorable experiences with those closest to you. That's it! All it's doing is simplifying the act of sharing photos of my daughter's birth with my family, that pain point I talked about and why sharing and syncing must change from active actions to automatic experiences.
This simplification comes from two concepts spoken about in the video: "photo lens" and "elastic network."
It's very simple, yet a perfect example of the evolution of sharing & syncing.
The popularity of Facebook and related gaming applications is still on the rise and will likely see even more growth in the next few years. Twitter provides instant gratification for millions around the globe, while niche networking sites are gaining market share as well.
Even though we see these giants of social networking sites dominating the U.S. market, a look around the world reveals a much more diverse social media marketplace and plenty of opportunity.
When you see this type of fragmentation around the globe (read the full article) you realize that the global phenomenon that is social networking is still in its infancy. Both in the number of people who have access to the Internet and in the quality of social connections available via the current offerings, we haven't even scratched the surface of truly connecting to each other globally.
