Open Source is Business2.0

On Monday, Tesla Motors finally revealed the concept for a high-speed transit system called the Hyperloop. Inventor-entrepreneur-mad-scientist Elon Musk just released an alpha design of his vision for the future of high-speed transit.

The visionary high-speed train would get you from San Francisco to Los Angeles in about 30 minute, and has been described as "a cross between a rail gun, the concord, and an air hockey table." Musk's inspiration for the Hyperloop was borne out of his distaste for another unrealistic, state-of-the-art transit proposals connecting  the two coastal cities. So he created something more in line with current limitations, borrowing heavily from already proven designs.

But the really interesting part of this story is that all the plans are open source. meaning that anyone can use or modify them.

"I really hate patents unless critical to company survival. Will publish Hyperloop as open source," Musk wrote on his Twitter feed. Anyone on the project, however, needs to "share philosophical goal of breakthrough tech done fast & w/o wasting money on BS."

Launching this project in an open source model is truly revolutionary, seeing as how intellectual property is one of companies most precious assets. It is usually the game changer in any speculative investor, how is hesitant to invest. Running open source deals this asset right out of the picture, however this does not seem to concern Musk. Nor has it scared any investors away. 

Regardless of whether the project succeeds or not, this marks an important step in innovations, and start-up evolution. As a supporter of most anything crowd sourcing, I personally think open sourcing plans is the way future. A large (but not to often talked about) part of Apples success is their open source policies; major parts of the Mac OS is built on open source programs. Combining open source plans with crowd sourced funding, and the business model of the future emerges. 

I give you Business2.0.

Dr Who Google Easter Egg

One minute you're walking down a London street, minding your own business, when you accidentally step into a police call box and all of a sudden you're inside the TARDIS and the Doctor has enlisted your help fighting aliens.

Google are famous for their pranks and plays with its users. We have all once been Rick Roll'd and the trend seems continuing. I cant do anything but laugh and look forward to the next one.

You Go Google!

Here is the address to the famous phone booth:

https://maps.google.com/maps?hl=en&ll=51.492159,-0.19092&spn=0.005291,0.013937&sll=51.492140,-0.193028&layer=c&cid=12502927659667388442&panoid=c9UMhWP_MWm9U0L48xEjYw&cbp=13,291.8,,0,18.86&gl=US&t=m&cbll=51.492132,-0.192862&z=17

LinkedIn out of the water ... again

When you keep blowing away people’s expectations then you just find yourself striving to keep ahead as more is expected of you. This has become the case with LinkedIn who, for the past eight financial quarters, have surpassed Wall Street’s projections in terms of their earnings. Ever since it became a public company LinkedIn has been going from strength to strength with its own unique brand of social media. A far cry from the normal frivolous social media we all use daily, LinkedIn is more professional and with unemployment so high in many places it is invaluable.

Undoubtedly LinkedIn is a huge success but with success comes expectations of better, so the question is how much longer can the company exceed projections? As the company produces more revenue and earnings Wall Street is making larger and larger projections. Eventually LinkedIn must fall short of reaching the projections set by Wall Street too much will be expected. At the close of business today Wall Street projects earnings per share of 31 cents and revenue of $354 million. This is a jump from the same quarter last year which posted 16 cents and 228 million revenue. The question is will LinkedIn break expectations for the ninth quarter in a row or will this be too ambitious?

Subway Supermarket

While most food dealing businesses sell their products in grocery stores, Homeplus decides to sell theirs in a virtual subway supermarket.

Homeplus is Korea's second largest home goods store chain next to E-Mart, which leads in first place with more stores. To increase the amount of traffic to its stores, Homeplus decided to create a virtual store in the subway so people can easily shop without the need to travel to a store. Subway riders purchased goods by scanning the QR code, which automatically stores every item into the cart.

The selected goods are then packed and delivered right to the buyer's doorsteps. As a result of this clever marketing technique, Homeplus became number one in the online market and if it keeps up the good job, they'll eventually become number one overall.

Serving the Hive-mind

Always had a feeling that individualism really doesn't matter? Have you always strived for the greater good of the colony? Want to live life mindlessly serving the almighty hive? Want to be an drone?

The new game Swarm!, currently under development for Google Glass, may soon fulfill all your dreams! Created by Daniel Estrada of the University of Illinois and Jonathan Lawhead of Columbia University, the game will connect Google Glass wearers to a virtual ant colony vying for prizes by solving real-world problems that vex traditional crowdsourcing efforts.

Similar to the pheromone trails laid down by ants, players leave virtual trails on a map as they move about. These behave like real ant trails, fading away with time unless reinforced by other people travelling the same route. Players will also be encouraged to seek out virtual resources to benefit their colony, such as food, and must avoid crossing the trails of other colony members. They can also monopolize a resource pool by taking photos of its real-world location. The photos and location data recorded by Google Glass could then be used to generate a map that anyone could use.

At a larger scale game data collected from Swarm!, and similar crowdsourcing applications, could help city planners optimize a transport system by having fine-grained data about where and when people tend to travel. For example, if the developers wanted to create a map of the locations of every power outlet in an airport, they could reward players with virtual food for every photo of a socket they took.

The team is currently seeking donations for Swarm! to get the project moving. Please check out their video below:

Living like a LODDER

I recently went on a vacation with a few close friends of mine to northern Sri Lanka. My friends are avid kite surfers, and I have long since wanted to try this new fad, but residing in artic Sweden limits my options for most any water-sport quite drastically. For this reason, and with the added opportunity to spend some good time with excellent company, I packed my bags and left for Sri Lanka.

Before we go deeper into the social media nature of this post, there is a few things that needs to be said about kite surfing first. The sport combines elements from wakeboarding, surfing, paragliding and acrobatics to form a very addictive extreme-pastime. Once you have mastered the arts of controlling the kite, and you are able to surf back and forth, the next thing is to start practicing on your tricks. A kite is not a transport vessel, nor is there any credit given to the fastest kite surfer. Rather than that onlookers will gasp at the one who jumps the highest, or pulls of the most daring stunts. Kite-looping seems to be the main focal point. 

Adding to this, the untouched part of the Sri Lankan nature, the jungles, and its people, makes for a lot of very good and beautiful photo opportunities. Needless to say; we took a ton of pictures during our trip, most of which ended up on our shared DropBox folder (amassing some 3 GB in total), but some of them also found their way out on the social scene.

Now, after the mandatory heavy retouching, obligatory #nofilter, as well as comrade-tagging, the photo was posted on Instragram and/or Facebook, instantly followed by offline haggling, bartering, and finally complying.

As you all surely already know, a post’s popularity on any social network is determined in part by how many “likes” it gets. If a post gets a high number of likes, it will reach a larger scale of the entire network, and the poster will become more influential. This is core, old news.

Consequently, nights in our hut, in the remote wildernesses of Sri Lanka, consisted of getting the rest of the group to like your photo, while at the same time making sure no other photo got more likes than your own. This is a tricky business, especially in a closed group of friends, and immediately triggers back-stabbing, connivance, and deception. Often a person fishing for likes would formulate set rules for how the other would get liked back; effectively making the other person “Like on Demand” or LOD, for short.

Quickly the word LOD, and the affiliated person the “LODDER”, became regular practice for the trip. “Don’t be such a damn LODDER Erik. Just like what you truly like!” was a standard façade statement, often utilized by con-artist Jesper, covering the heavy LODDING taking place behind the scenes. 

LOD carried on all through the Sri Lanka trip, and got more and more intense by each passing day. LODs could be traded for small favors; borrowing sunblock, fetching the next rounds, even throwing the occasional game of Settlers of Catan - just to name a few examples. Paying for LODDING was not far away. Obviously you didn't want to be caught as a LODDER, LOD was synonym with swindling, not something you wanted to be public with. This also carried over the Sweden as we got home; we would send PMs on Facebook, encouraging the other to comment or like certain pictures to raise it to the top of the feed, again with a re-comment or re-like not far away.

This whole social experiment does not come without some reflections. I know there must be professional LODDERs out there, I just cannot see any social media campaign run today that does not employ some fact catalysts to get posts flying, even though no one would ever admit to doing so. What our Sri Lankan LODDER Experiment also have shown us is that as soon as you know the post has traded likes - a LOD post - you lose all respect for it. And the higher the percentage of known LOD the less likely I am to actually fall for it. If I knew that the status update of a company with 1000 likes got 500 of those like directly from LOD, all my respect and trust for that company would go out the window.

The question here is naturally; is LOD and the employed LODDER already an Internet norm, and if so is this to be expected as the next evolution of online marketing? Word of mouth marketing has long since proven itself as a powerful tool; social media likes is a marginalized, but still influential version of that. Would you trust companies, political campaigns, or think tanks that had a LODDER on its staff? 

In the words of Jesper: “Don’t be such a damn LODDER. Just like what you truly like!”

Welcome to Geek Week

For those of you that might have missed this historical event, we are now in the midst of Geek Week! After the successful experiment with Comedy Week, YouTube decided to try something similar but yet very different.

This time, however, it is not comedy that will be front and center, it is instead geeky content. YouTube features a wide variety of videos related to those shows that help us all get our geek on.

Content from over 100 YouTube channels will be promoted, out of which 7 carefully chosen users hosting their own specific days. As the week progresses there will be a wide variety of content including comic books, SciFi, Cosplay and even geek cooking shows. Today is Super Wednesday, featuring all you ever needed to know about everything super! 

Check out these 10 forgotten but very real superheros!

It is felt that YouTube itself is a huge part of geek culture so this week dedicated to all things geeky seems like the perfect fit. Much of the content will be fresh and new so fans of all things geeky will have what all geeks require, the inside scoop. So check in with YouTube for some really interesting clips and shows that anyone will love - geek or no!

This is why I'm Leaving You

So people are not really into what you're selling. And subsequently leaving you. Gone. Alone. But why? On the Internet people don't smell (yet), but people do smell when they are being served crap - and this is usually why users, customers, clients, and potentially new business leave websites. The Internet is cluttered with information, and if your website is not interesting enough or serving up the right info, the visitor is going to leave. This is your bounce rate.

So, what is a good bounce rate? Sadly, there isn’t a golden number for bounce rate or average time on page. Also, many factors can go into these metrics, such as what kind of traffic your site is attracting and the SEO that’s been done.

In general, a good bounce rate would be anything under 50%-60%. A large factor influencing bounce rate is what kind of page you’re looking at and what the content is on that page. If the page is largely informational on a topic without many links to other parts of your site, then a bounce rate above 60% wouldn’t be out of the norm. However, if the page is mainly a directory of links to, say, products you make or services you offer, than you should see a much lower bounce rate than 60%.

If your bounce rate is high, the first place to look is your site design. Make sure that links are easily identifiable, relevant, and intuitive on each page. Main site navigation links should be located on every page of your site, with the exception of landing pages. The aesthetics of your site should also be up-to-date since an ugly or out-of-date site can cause a user to turn away instantly. Unfortunately, your flashy confetti animations on the sidebars are not as attractive as they were last decade.

Finally, look at how long it takes to load pages on your site. If you have a ton of large, high-resolution images, pages may take too long to load. People are impatient and will most likely hop off your page and go onto the next one if the load time is excessive.

For more about bounce rates, check out this infograph from KissMetrics.

Social Trends 2013

Social media networks were a novelty 5 years ago and today they are no longer debated around the dinner party table. Its old news, the conversation has moved on. Social media is not new, its the norm.

And with that norm comes expectations, development, and new trends. The Global Web Index recently compiled a study concerning the Social Stream of Q1 2013. Here are two key factors driving the social web in 2013:

• Mobile – with the number of people accessing the internet via a mobile phone increasing by 60.3% to 818.4 million in the last 2 years. 
• Older users adoption – On Twitter the 55-64 year age bracket is the fastest growing demographic with 79% growth rate since 2012. The fastest growing demographic on Facebook’s and Google+’s networks are the 45 to 54 year age bracket at 46% and 56% respectively.

It is clear that both the social platforms and the marketers that use them to engage consumers will need to adopt a mobile first strategy in future.

This brings with it significant opportunities for brands to leverage social, mobile, in-store, TV, outdoor, and print using creative, integrated campaigns and engagement strategies.