There is no foolproof recipe for creating great, believable, attention-grabbing creative. Until now. Great and believable you’ll still have to come up with yourself, but for ‘attention-grabbing’ you can try Feng-GUI (www.feng-gui.com), a website that “generates a visual heatmap” for your creative.

In their own words, “Feng-GUI empowers designers, advertisers and photographers to effectively analyze Attention and Attraction in visuals.” They do this by simulating human vision during the first five seconds of exposure to visuals, then creating heatmaps based on an algorithm that predicts what a real human would be most likely to look at. “This offers designers, advertisers and creatives a Pre-testing technology that predicts performance of an image, by analyzing levels of attention, brand effectiveness and placement, as well as breaking down the Flow of Attention.”

Which is all really just a way of saying ‘Hey, test your image on us before you use it to see if it’s going to sell a damn thing.’

To use Feng-GUI, you simply browse for an image using their browsing tool at the top of the home page, then press ‘heatmap’. The image should be less than1MB and either in jpg. or png. format. The site will then bring up the same image you uploaded, just with various colours and numbers on it. The numbers show the order in which a person’s eyes move, while the colours show the quantity of interest – bright blue means minimal interest, aka lose it; and bright red means it’s a main focal point.

Quite nifty really. Especially for those of us who use words like ‘nifty’ when trying to produce world-changing creative.

There I said it. Judge me if you will… but I think you won’t when you see what I’ve found to make this whole invisible friend thing just a leetle more grown up.

PC users, say hello to your new friend: the talking desktop buddy from Deskbot (http://www.bellcraft.com/deskbot/), “A freeware, multi-featured Clipboard Reader, Text Reader, Time Announcer, Desktop Application for Microsoft Windows featuring Microsoft Agent Animated, Talking Characters. For use with Microsoft Windows 98/2000/XP/Vista.” (For Mac users, try the Dragonball Z Desktop buddies at http://desktop-buddy.smartcode.com/)

Once you’ve downloaded the app, a little blue Genie will pop up in the lower right corner of your screen, allowing you to start setup. You can set him to greet you every time you start up your computer. You can open up entire text files and have your talking desktop buddy dictate the text while you finish other tasks. Your character will let you know the time as often as you like, and offers a bunch of different characters (far removed from the annoying Word and Excel help dude) and voices in French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Russian and Spanish.

It’s silly, but it’s fun and we like it.

Okay, so we exaggerate. But Google CEO (and we all know Google is still the guru of everything) Eric Schmidt does believe that five years from now the Internet will be dominated by Chinese language content. What’s more, he made this revelation at recent techie heaven expo – Gartner Symposium/ITxpo Orlando 2009 – in front of thousands of IT gurus, so it must be true!

The good news for those of us who don’t speak Chinese is that other radical changes will occur in the next five years which will actually benefit us. We won’t send you to watch the full 45-minute interview available on YouTube – it’s a super-snooze fest and besides, the kind, now-snoozing-no-doubt ReadWriteWeb (www.readwriteweb.com) folk already did that for us. But we did think these points he made were interesting (highlighted by aforementioned now-snoozing ReadWriteWeb folk):

1. The Internet will also be dominated by social media content. (We could have told him that!)
2. It will be delivered over super-fast bandwidth in real time. (Super-fast? Well, us South Africans can live in hope.) We’re talking broadband well above 100MB in performance.
3. Content will move towards more video. We love us some YouTube.
4. Real time information will be recognised as being just as valuable as all other information, and will be included in search results.
5. Google specifically will also be looking at how to rank real time info. “The fundamental shift towards user-generated information means that people will listen more to other people than to traditional sources. Learning how to rank that is the great challenge of the age.”

That, and learning how to speak Chinese so we can follow it all.

The great thing about Google Wave is that it stores a single copy of everyone’s ideas, suggestions, RSVPs etc, instead of using multiple tools. You can draft content, discuss and solicit feedback in one place instead of sending numerous emails with large attachments, which can get lost along the way.

You can bring as many people as you like into a chat and use it as a brainstorming session, you can easily add rich content to the conversation to narrow down your ideas. There are multiple extensions that can be added such as Sudoku games, weather reports, real time video chats, Google maps and many more.

If you’d like more information, please check out their introductory video. Yet another genius idea brought to you by the Google nerds.

source tom’s hardware

Happy Birthday to the Internet!

Zoom

Today the Internet turns 40. Before we get into the details of all that this wondrous creation has brought us, let’s look back to where it all began.

Around forty years ago, UCLA Professor Leonard Kleinrock and his colleagues were working on a project funded by the Advanced Research Projects Agency, a program of the U.S. Department of Defense. The project was called ARPANET, and it was a network comprised of four nodes with terminals in UCLA, Stanford, the University of California-Santa Barbara and the University of Utah.

On October 29, 1969, a message was successfully sent from the terminal in UCLA to the terminal in Stanford. Although the system initially crashed, another attempt was successful and here we are, forty years later, with our bottomless pit o’ porn and Viagra that is the World Wide Web. Group hug!

So, let’s raise a glass to the Internet. You’ve grown from that oh-so-primitive network to something that can pay my bills, feed my cat, buy my shoes and feed all of my tech-related habits. Is there anything it can’t do?

What impact has the Internet had on your life? Let us know in the comments below!

Now, where should I send this horrible, singing, ecard …

Will all news content always be free?

So as the online world becomes bigger and greater, with more and more information being consumed all day, what will we see happening to these content providers?

In the dawn of the Internet age, we have seen people adding websites about their companies, their lives, their stories, all types on interesting articles have been uploaded onto the World Wide Web. Some companies seeing it as a necessity for them to be online, but with this has come many barriers and problems to existing business models. One big example of this is the music industry, with album sales plummeting due to the fact people getting their music free on the Internet.

“Why pay when it is free”

We have now also started to see this with news publishers. Most newspapers have an online portal for readers to consume as much news as possible for free. Now from this they have started noticing a decline in newspaper sales. Which many have them have seen it as a concern due to the lost revenue but to counteract this they began with online advertising. Which is a good source for income but the main question was…was it enough.

So now we have started to see a trend in paid for content, which the top news people like to see where it should be going and not allowing people to read the news for free, because it could be very lucrative for them. Recently the Newspaper Association of America requested information from Google to see how they can successfully monetize their content but by also not shooting themselves in the foot.

So Google is now starting to develop a mechanism that will be attached to its existing Google checkout system, which will allow users to seamlessly pay for content on a subscription type basis. All though Google claims that most of the revenue will come from advertising, but this will give publishes an additional source of revenue.

So the question at the end of the day is, will we the readers be happy with this decision, will we fork out the money to read the content and do the newspapers really care what the readers think or are they just seeing dollar signs in the eyes.  And another thing, will there be pirated news sites starting to pop up on the web.

So we might start seeing a similar trend in the news industry as we saw in the music on. Because the main question for the consumer will be, why pay when we can get it for free.

Mind Mapping made easy

So, you know those stories of the business plan written on a napkin or beer mat? Or those guys with the big glass screen drawing up their plan to take over the whatsit market? Well, if you ever felt like you aren’t that cool and that you can’t draw a square never mind a process flow, have I found the site for you. Check out www.exploratree.org.uk

Here you will find easy to use (and understand) tools or frameworks for thinking through an issue and considering different aspects or perspectives.  Choose from a set of templates to analyse or appraise anything in a structured way, from SWOT analysis to a Futures Wheel that will help you think through the consequences and knock-on effects of a problem. 

You can also create your own mind map once you get the hang of things and then you can save them, share them and edit them. Then you can present your ideas, add them as project documentation, send to a group or syndicate for input and comment plus a host of other great features.  And best of all, it’s FREE!  All you have to do is register and have Flash on your machine and away you go! Go on Exploratree.

Oh, and if you’re Welsh, there’s a bunch of maps just for you. Detholiad o drefnwyr meddwl yn Gymraeg.

http://www.exploratree.org.uk

Finally, Adobe has assisted Apple by means of providing a viable platform (namely their Flash CS5) to convert software written in Flash into standalone iPhone apps.Developers will soon be able to submit their creations to Apple and if approved  sell it through the iTunes App Store!

The reason why this is such awesome news, is that up until now Flash programmers were hard-pressed to make money from their work. And that’s where the App Store might help. Now that they have the ability to program, convert and port these creations to be sold to iTunes, they too can skim some cream off the fresh milky Internet.

Reference:

http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2009/10/flash-economy/

Mercedes, after the large scale online launch using 3 well respected newspaper websites, moved their media buy towards networks of sites that allowed for a more efficient buy.

While Mercedes was happy with the newspaper sites’ performance, it shifted money to cheaper, more tightly aimed ads bought through networks, which bundle ad space from many Web sites.When Mercedes advertises its more basic models next year, it will largely avoid newspaper Web sites and rely on networks. That lets Mercedes “be very targeted and efficient with our dollars,” said Beth Lange, digital media specialist for Mercedes-Benz USA.

Is this the future of online media buying – large scale premium position launches then a migration to cost effective networks like Google ad exchange?

Read the article here

As Mashable reports, Facebook has fallen victim to the “insensitivity of the algorithm” with their ‘reconnect’ feature – it’s managed to upset a bunch of Facebookers by telling them they really need to get in touch with old friends. And dead friends.

The idea is quite noble in theory – it aims to reunite users with friends they have not communicated with for a while – but within minutes of launching this feature they’d managed to reconnect a whole slew of users with the grief they felt when their friends first died!

Upset users took to Twitter, one of Facebook’s mortal enemies?, to write about it: “Facebook just told me to reconnect with a friend of mine who died a couple years ago. Not cool, Facebook,” one user tweeted. Another says: “One of my friends on Facebook has passed. FB keeps asking me to reconnect with her… FB will never be smart enough…” And another: “Facebook just suggested that I ‘reconnect’ with someone who passed away 2 years ago. That’s so messed up.”

The list goes on. And on. In fact, there are now more than 950 000 users who have reacted against new changes to Facebook by joining a Facebook group – the irony just kills me (excuse the pun) – called ‘Change Facebook Back To Normal’. We’d have to agree that no more Whoopi Goldberg Ghost moments would be good.