Facebook Places just became the No.1 in location based services. End of.
For brands the opportunities are massive. You get all the nice bits of Foursquare (check-in, location data, feedback, competitions, redemption, vouchers, loyalty schemes, social gaming, etc) but with the 500 million people on Facebook.
There’ll be loads of smart activity based around people ‘coming together’. Wearable technology will soon enable automatic check-in to stores. Deep and immersive social gaming becomes a reality. We all know what’s possible. But now the numbers make it exciting and viable.
Everything just became connected and the wider implications are big.
Each brand needs to think about what that means for them. But If you’re doing ‘digital stuff’ well and you’ve got a high street presence. Game on.
Here we go. Google launches its first UK 60-second ad to promote search and mobile.
The follow-up to last year’s “Parisian Love” (see below) uses the strapline “Search On” and is the first in a series that will be hosted on a special YouTube page.
Vimeo have rolled out a shiny new mobile site – and yes it looks at gorgeous as website. All videos are served in H.264 goodness. I like the little touches, like the fact Vimeo removes the Safari “browser” shell. You’ll have to see what I mean for yourself.
The choice of H.264 encoding is significant because it means another prominent site is making video available in a non-Flash format. In a similar vein Vimeo also launched a beta of their new HTML5 player, and Google is now testing an HTML5 version of YouTube.
I don’t know exactly when it happened but it’s just dawned on me. I’m sat here doing a bit of work using Google Docs, working/sharing files with Dropbox. I’ve started using the Cloud.
I don’t use Docs for work yet, but for personal stuff it’s great.
I all over it for Docs and Spreadsheets but avoid the Powerpoint / Keynote side – its not feature rich enough yet.
Dropbox has become an installation essential for me. Bascially it’s what .Mac should have been. The big difference is that you get a folder on your local drive which is kept in sync with the cloud – meaning you have online/offline access to all the files.
It can also ACTUALLY handle large files (which .Mac is absolutely shambolic at), it gives you progress feedback, and doesn’t cause your machine to freeze up. Love it.
There’s also a web interface too which is dead easy to use.