IFTF's Future Now

Cell Phones and Viral Marketing

Dreamworks has created a viral marketing site for the horror film sequel "The Ring 2" (click on England to see how the campaign works).  Here is Adfreak's description of how the viral campaign works:

You enter a friend’s e-mail address and cell-phone number. The site then sends the friend an e-mail, inviting him or her to view the Ring Two trailer online. As the video plays, the friend’s cell phone rings, and a voice on the other end whispers “seven days”—which, if the friend has seen the Ring movies, might just prompt a soiling of the friend’s trousers.

This viral campaign uses the cell phone as central part of the campaign.  Dreamworks is doing this promotion in a variety of countries, but not the US.

This reminds me of the very successful Tide Coldwater Challenge, which asked visitors to the site to send emails to their friends in support of energy saving cold water washing.  IFTF's Future Now has a more complete post on the coldwater challenge, which ended up reaching over 1 million people in the US.

links for 2005-08-26

• The Human Touch
  2000 review of John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid's "The Social Life of Information."
  (tags: IT STS)

Put down the mouse, and go read the Little Red Book

Given their interest in regulating and monitoring Internet traffic and access to politically objectionable content, this is hardly a surprising move on their part. Still, it's worth noting: the Chinese government plans to begin regulating online game playing times, according to this report (via Terra Nova):

GAPP Regulates MMOs, Announces Fatigue System

General Administration of Press and Publication (GAPP) vice director Kou Xiaowei said at a press conference in Beijing on Tuesday that the fatigue system for online games will be launched on October 1, Donews reports. The purpose behind the fatigue system is to reduce the amount of time gamers spend playing online role playing games.

The system will only award players full experience points for the first three hours of each day, half experience for the next two hours, and no experience after five hours. According to Kou, a limited trial of the fatigue system will begin on October 1 and large scale trials for 11 online games will begin on October 20.

The 11 games are Shanda's (Nasdaq: SNDA) Legend of Mir 2 and World of Legend, Netease's (Nasdaq: NTES) Fantasy Westward Journey and Westward Journey II, The9's (Nasdaq: NCTY) MU and World of Warcraft, Sina's (Nasdaq: SINA) Lineage 2, Sohu's (Nasdaq: SOHU) Blade Online, Kingsoft's JX Online and The First Myth and Optisp's Legend 3G. GAPP will roll out the system industry wide at the end of this year or early next year, said the report.

Though in its defense, five hours a day is hardly Draconian. But still....

My own prediction: by next year they're going to build on the success of America's Army, and start using first-person shooters as a drafting tool: "Congratulations! You got the high score... Private." Don't laugh: Terra Nova also reports that "by year's end "Anti-Japan War Online," an MMORPG developed by PowerNet Technology in cooperation with the China Communist Youth League, will begin commercial operation."

Technorati Tags: China, games

Betting on cooling

I wonder: did Newton and Leibniz, or Darwin and Lamarck, ever bet on science?

Climate change sceptics bet $10,000 on cooler world

Two climate change sceptics, who believe the dangers of global warming are overstated, have put their money where their mouth is and bet $10,000 that the planet will cool over the next decade.

The Russian solar physicists Galina Mashnich and Vladimir Bashkirtsev have agreed the wager with a British climate expert, James Annan....
vTo decide who wins the bet, the scientists have agreed to compare the average global surface temperature recorded by a US climate centre between 1998 and 2003, with temperatures they will record between 2012 and 2017.

If the temperature drops Dr Annan will stump up the $10,000 (now equivalent to about £5,800) in 2018. If the Earth continues to warm, the money will go the other way.

The bet is the latest in an increasingly popular field of scientific wagers, and comes after a string of climate change sceptics have refused challenges to back their controversial ideas with cash.

Technorati Tags: environment

Typepad and the marketing of informality

Now that most of the summer interns have gone off to college, or otherwise returned to their regularly scheduled lives, the Institute is starting to shift into fall mode: lots of travel, a busy conference season, and lots of articles and reports going out the door.

One thing I'll probably be doing is a subtle redesign of this site. Typepad has reforged the tools blog owners use to control the design and layout of blogs, and they've also added capacity for displaying RSS feeds from other sites, podcasting support, and a couple other cool new tools.

As nice as that is, just as interesting is the way they've decided to communicate this to the Typepad community: not through a FAQ or dry technical announcement, but through a series of interviews with Typepad programmers. In each interview, the programmers talk a little about what they do, what new feature they've developed, and why they wanted it (or why it's cool). Obviously it's a lot more personal and informal than a more traditional announcement, and is probably overdetermined (as the Marxists used to, and probably do still, say) for a blogging company; but I think it works, for two reasons.

First, most of us blog as a serious hobby, or are pro-am about it, adopting an informal, person-to-person mode makes plenty of sense. Second, Typepad is one of those institutions that doesn't so much have customers-- in the sense of people who just buy and use a finished product-- as a large mass of people who are constantly pushing, remixing, and creating with their service. For such a group, interviews probably work far better than a traditional corporate release.

Technorati Tags: blogging, Typepad

Gartner's Highlights Key Emerging Technologies

Gartner released their annual Hype Cycle report, which attempts to cut through tech industry hype (or lack of hype) to identify the technologies that IT should be investing in.  Here is the press release - the study is only for subscribers.

Gartner liked collaboration this year and corporate blogging, wikis, podcasting, and RSS are all on the list.  Others on the list include location aware applications, mesh networks and RFID.  See the press release for the complete list and descriptions of the technology.

Thanks to the prolific blogger Steve Rubel at Micropersuasion for this.

links for 2005-08-25

• The New Age of the Book (Robert Darnton, NYRB, 1999)
  "By now, the conventional book has been pronounced dead so often that we shouldn't be surprised to find that it seems in excellent health."
  (tags: books cyberspace)
• FT.com / World / Asia-Pacific - China moves to zap online game addiction
  " Under the new standard, up to three hours of play is considered “healthy” - and more than five to be “unhealthy”."
  (tags: China government games youth Internet cyberspace)
• Institute for the Future of the Book
  (tags: books future media)
• The Battle to Define the Future of the Book in the Digital World
  "[H]ow do we think of books in the digital world, and how will books behave? How will we be able to use them, to share them, and to refer to them? In particular, what are our expectations about the persistence and permanence of human communication as embo
  (tags: media books future digital/physical)
• The Places of Books in the Age of Electronic Reproduction
  The future of the book as an artifact is uninteresting; "the question comes down to, can there be print culture after print?" A now-classic essay by Geoffrey Nunberg.
  (tags: books digital/physical culture future)
• Review of "A Brief History of the Future of Libraries"
  "This book contains five essays that survey the library literature, written between 1876 and 1999, for writing and research concerning the future of libraries."
  (tags: books library future)

Great Use of Laser Technology

Precision Shots has released the world's first laser slingshot.  From the website:

The secret to the Laser Slingshot lays within its dual offset pivoting system. This system is able to precisely align a laser or sight to the trajectory of the fired projectile. This revolutionary breakthough allows the Laser Slingshot to precisely split pencils at 20 feet, hit cans as far as 150 feet, and hit flying targets with a shotgun spray of BBs (with optional addon shotgun pouch).

I know I'm getting mine with the optional addon shotgun pouch.  On a more serious note, it is interesting to see how quickly advanced technology spreads to even relatively low priced consumer products.  The laser slingshot costs $49.95 or $69.95 for the more advanced model, which will split pencils at 60 feet.  They never do say why you would want to split a pencil. 

I saw this on Dave Barry's blog, and he references Gizmodo.

links for 2005-08-24

• The places and spaces of cyberspace (2000)
  Ana Viseu's response to critiques of the metaphor of cyberspace. "[T]he 'place' metaphor is an adequate way of creating awareness to the fragile nature of the Internet."
  (tags: cyberspace place/space)
• The Spirit of the Internet: Speculations on the Evolution of Global Consciousness
  "[S]peculations about the Internet, the noosphere, virtual reality, shamanic plants, and other seemingly unrelated domains."
  (tags: cyberspace collective_intelligence place/space)
• Law And Borders--The Rise of Law in Cyberspace
  ""Many of the jurisdictional and substantive quandaries raised by border-crossing electronic communications could be resolved by... conceiving of Cyberspace as a distinct "place" for purposes of legal analysis."
  (tags: cyberspace law place/space digital/physical)
• Place and Cyberspace
  "Instead of concluding that cyberspace is outside of the physical world, courts are increasingly using the metaphor of cyberspace as a "place" to justify application of traditional laws governing real property to this new medium."
  (tags: cyberspace law digital/physical place/space)
• The Second Enclosure Movement and the Construction of the Public Domain
  James Boyle's influential essay arguing that "[w]e are in the middle of a second enclosure movement," involving intellectual property, genomes, and other intangibles.
  (tags: law cyberspace place/space digital/physical)
• Tragedy of digital anti-commons
  "This article presents conceptual frameworks that help to understand Internet intellectual property right regulation issues."
  (tags: cyberspace law mobility digital/physical place/space)
• Cyberspace: Getting There From Here (1988)
  "To me, Cyberspace is a place, not just an interface or a metaphor."
  (tags: cyberspace digital/physical place/space games)
• Culture War
  The second enclosure movement is "part of a culture war, a war over the means of production of creative content in our society. I argue that the best way to understand this war is to view it as a Marxist struggle."
  (tags: cyberspace law culture digital/physical place/space)
• No There There
  Jonathan Koppell 's August 2000 Atlantic Monthly piece: "I'm a pretty Net-savvy guy.... Still, I have never been to the magical land called cyberspace."
  (tags: cyberspace digital/physical place/space)
• You Are Where? Building a Research Presence in Cyberspace
  Argues that "cyberspace actually predates the “cyber”; we have been shifting in and out of it for as long as we have been communicating at a distance. "
  (tags: cyberspace culture university place/space)
• Against Cyberanarchy (1998)
  Argues that arlow et al "overstate the differences between cyberspace transactions and other transnational transactions."
  (tags: cyberspace law digital/physical place/space)

This has gone far enough, people

I'm all for user-driven innovation, Google Map hacks, and all that, but all of you need to get back to work right now:

Google Maps + HotOrNot = Today’s Preferred Time-Waster

[W]e’re loving the mash-ups internerds have been cranking out since Google Maps released some of its code. The latest time-waster to capture our fickle hearts is an extremely handy Google mapping tool for internet popularity contest HotOrNot. By entering your zipcode and your sexual preferences, the program can give you a handy map of available “hotties” in your preferred neighborhood. You might not like who turns up, but keep in mind that your search results are only going to turn up the sorts who would put their picture up for mass judgment on something like HotOrNot. But whatever: If you’re seriously using this thing, you can’t afford to be choosy.

Technorati Tags: geoweb, innovation, internet, place/space, social_software