Leo Burnett - Cultural Fuel

great execution
(via Aleksandra:-)

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Loving the Google goggles:

I know that there have been some iphone apps like this for a while now, and they will get better, but I think it will only really take off when the platform wars go to another level.

Most people have some natural fear to pick a platform based on capabilities like this - since they are afraid that they will end up with “Betamax” - or the losing technology in a format war.

For sure - marketers would love to pick this kind of functionality up and make great experiences for their consumer with them, but many will also be hesitant, until they know that a significant installed base can enjoy them.  Who’s feeling brave?  Let’s get going!

via: Nico Nicomedes on the TechCheck GoogleWave.  Thanks Nico!

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In an attempt to find yet another way to create buzz, the band “Editors” present themselves and their new album in the context of Google Street View. Of course, it is not a real hack but more an overlay (or mash-up) of their own content in the context of their website. Still, even it is a novelty one-off, it is a great idea to use technology like this, and it is well executed. User can use well-known google maps and street view navigation to listen to the album’s songs and see the band members hiding in the streets of London.

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Fun non-sequitur movie about two animated characters capturing the world for Google Streetview. It’s amazing how well it streetview lends itself to stop motion animation. In Germany, we are still waiting for Google to finally overcome privacy advocacy groups.

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Google released Google Squared today, and as usual with out Google needing to advertise it, people go nuts about new stuff released by Google.

Essentially Google square takes your search results and contextualizes the search results with dimensions you can choose yourself. Pretty neat, and actually, pretty straight forward in terms of visualization. Calling it a revolution may be a bit excessive. It’s like Google search had a lovechild with Microsoft Excel.

For now, how Google Squared assembles the results of the square are a bit random in a way that doesn’t make it easier than google search to find specific things you are looking for. It may prove to be a more useful tool to get an overview of larger topics quicker for now. So it seems that we are getting a preview of where search might be going, not a final product.

Via Alina’s FB Stream

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Google announced its investment in Pixazza, a service that is aiming to be an AdSense for images, meaning that what currently can only be done on search query text or contextual text, could be happening even within images. The idea has been around for a while, but no one apparently has tried to offer it, or previous go-to-markets have failed. Google’s investment could indicate that it is now deemed as mature enough to go to market with it.

Essentially, how it works is that website owners tag products contained in the images of their websites, and link to providers offering these products. Obviously the generated click-throughs then are paid for by e-commerce vendor.

What is particularly smart about the business model is the involvment of “shopper experts”, meaning anyone out there who is a shopaholic. You can sign up to become such an expert and get paid for finding and tagging products on websites and matching them to Pixazza merchants, such as Amazon, Bluefly and others.

The trick is going to be to balance blatant price tagging with maintaining the site’s original user experience.

This is the process description from the Pixazza website:

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How often did you regret sending that e-mail that you wrote to someone in a fit of rage, or where you accidentally cc’d someone that shouldn’t see what you really think about them? It has happened to all of us.

Well, you now have 5 seconds to undo your possibly career-killing e-mails when you use Gmail.

After enabling the feature, Undo Send works much like Gmail’s other “undo” features. When you send an email, you get a message confirming it has been sent, along with a link to “Undo.” This message lasts for 5 seconds, at which point you lose the opportunity to take it back.
While that might not be much time, it’s probably enough to pull back emails where you forget an attachment, forget to cc someone, or catch an obvious typo. As for emails you later wish you hadn’t sent because of the content, Gmail still can’t help you there.

Via Mashable

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When we started using Google Trends to glean some trend insights, it was all business at first. Then, it became a tool look at some trends no one likes to talk about. We started entering stuff like “Porn” or even worse “child porn” or anything nasty. Hence, I coigned the term “Nastiness Trending”. It’s quite a sublime thing, from which to derive a weird, negative pleasure. The pleasure part comes from knowing which countries have the nastiest google users, and being lucky if your country isn’t in the Top 10.

Obviously, we weren’t the only one with this idea, in fact a German newspaper made an article about it.

However, the whole thing is a bit tricky, because you have to choose the keywords in a certain language, so you cannot definitively say that, e.g. in the porn case, South Africans are the nastiest.

I am waiting for the day where you can do compound trending in different languages.

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