My four year old niece -whoops! now FIVE – observed me buying up Tamagotchis and pets the other day and told me I was “just a big kid!”. Pfft. What does she know? Bandai America has invited children (with adults permitted to help) to create a PowerRanger movie. The scene featured on GetPowerized.com takes kids through a classic confrontation of good versus evil, featuring the Spring lineup of Power Rangers Mystic Force action figures and vehicles against the relentlessly attacking Evil Space Aliens. Though it seems that the Power Rangers will prevail, the mysterious ending indicates that there might be Continue Reading…
Last week, I read Suite Francaise, by the daughter of a Russian Jewish Banker, Irene Nemirovsky. The family fled Russia to France but unfortunately Irene, now a famous French novelist and her husband died in the concentration camps. I loved the books – ironically gentler to the marauding Germans than to the French social system – but only two were completed before she was taken away. It felt a little macabre reading a book with sweet humour and soft romance knowing what was about to happen to the author. She knew what was coming too and wrote frantically to try Continue Reading…
The Web Essentials conference has been renamed to WebDirections this year. Its on Sep 26-29 and yours truly will be speaking on the Friday morning. Ignore the chattering teeth and wobbly knees, as I’m going to be talking about the Business end of online communities. Oh yeah and there are some other people talking there too. :p Nah I’m not quite that narcissistic, I’ll post more about the conference and the speakers in a few days time. It’s being held at UTS – interesting, as I’m teaching some courses on marketing with online communities at another University later in the Continue Reading…
From NMA.co.uk: The BBC, ITV and mobile handset manufacturers LG Mobile and Samsung are believed to be on the verge of announcing a full-scale mobile TV trial in the UK planned for later this year. The trial will be the first national level barometer of the potential take up of mobile TV services and will see channels including BBC News 24 and an ITV Digital channel broadcast live and continuously to handsets across the UK. Other trial broadcast partners are believed to include Eurosport, Turner owned Cartoon Network, as well as a consortium that includes telecoms giant BT and radio Continue Reading…
Now that I have your attention. Cheryl Lead, Online Manager over at Virgin Money sent me this info: In June we are lucky to have Joseph Konstan, a Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Minnesota and President of ACM SIGCHI talk to us about bridging computer science and behavioral science. Please note, as Joseph is only in Sydney for one day, this event will be held on the 2nd Tuesday of the month – which is Tuesday the 13th of June. Further details of the event are provided below. ‘Bridging Computer Science and Behavioral Science: Research Continue Reading…
Yep, a nice easy way to create content on mobiles other than fotos. I said that already. If you want to create a community in the mobile space that generates content in a MySpace way, make it easy. Which segues me into this article about a potential MySpaceMobile-type environment. What’s needed for the perfect mobile MySpace. Why is MySpace such a runaway success? Because it’s a jack of all trades, apparently. This, at least, was the message from Frederick Ghahramani of technology firm AirG, speaking at today’s MEX conference in London.He was talking about mobile communities, but took time to Continue Reading…
From Dion Hinchcliffe, Editor of OpenSource: I call the use of Web 2.0 for business purposes, both internal and customer-facing, Enterprise Web 2.0. At its core, Web 2.0 is about harnessing collective intelligence and most of the rest of the Web 2.0 ideas fall out from this concept. And that highlights a monumental difference between the way the Web was used in the past – and indeed is still largely used today – and the way it works best. Most Web sites still push content one way out to their visitors, don’t have any means to interact with them, or Continue Reading…
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