Mockumentary called Flutter

Here it is! A nano-sized Twitter - new app for micro-blogging! As simple as Twitter with 26 characters almost without using vowels.

Enjoy the mock up video from the stable of SlateV.

This makes Social Media Marketing look so simple and easy. Isn't it?

However do not yet fall for the iPhone application and the spiel on diode enabled mind reading. That might freak you out!

Hold your drink, Ladies and Gentlemen!!

Cheers

Twitter a threat to text messaging....

As I mentioned in one of my earlier posts, Twitter is undoubtedly the latest muse to court. The WWW is flush with numerous successful twitter stories. If your brand has a great story to tell, if the story is enticing enough, so that twitterers can contribute and distribute in a positive manner, then your brand is a winner. All our latest social media containers that have been successful in building brands are being picked up by media planners and their clients like hot cakes, despite most of them still grappling to identify a robust advertising strategy. Needless to say, the digital properties can clearly build a brand or destroy it!

With the advent of Twitter on the mobile (another addition to the plethora of converted apps from web to mobile), the mobile world is undergoing a world of change. Countries like Japan, Korea, Australia and Singapore are fast catching up on what I call the Twit to-mania, depleting thousands of dollars from the kitty of the mobile service providers in these countries. As a reactionary measure, many of the major mobile service providers in Singapore like SingTel, M1 and StarHub are in the process of re-jigging their service bundle tariff to accommodate the loss in texting (SMS) revenue.

I would imagine, if Twitter can be harnessed and utilized well, it’s a real boon to most marketers. It’s cheap, simple and comes with no baggage.

Look out for a line extension of Twitter...in my next post!!

Peace..

My Google strongest - at what cost?

As online marketers, most of us cannot help but idolize Google and look up to its founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page. They have made an enormous contribution to the online world and helped many of us tread this new medium as our careers in the last 10 years odd years of its existence. While WWW was always a destination for information seeking and knowledge hungry individuals, it would have been extremely difficult for all of us to hunt the relevant and much needed information that you could be looking out for, had Brin and Page never cracked this idea of online search, one day at their university dorm. They not only revolutionized the concept of search but devised a unique and efficient way to monetize their prized and successful idea. Today Google is worth upwards of $160Bn (year 2008) and still growing. We all are a part of their growth (contributed in some form or manner), know its history and some of us (including me) aspire to crack a Google-like killer idea and rule the world….someday!!

Since its inception, the corporation has now built multiple properties that leverage the core strength - search. However, somewhere in the collage of colorful Google, shades of gray have now started to appear. The most recent revelation has been very serious and has shaken me from top to bottom.

I make most of my purchases using my credit card, be it at offline retail or for online buys. I am a complete sucker for online sweepstakes. Needless to say, all my credit cards have done the rounds across all leading global websites, be it on amazon.com, ebay.com, airline ticketing sites...the list goes on. When I read a news article today on a website which said that over 19K credit card information detail of British web surfers have been found to be available on simple Google search. I froze and shut myself up for almost 5 minutes! Yes, online privacy (and fraud) is a huge concern in today's expanding web world, despite evolution of data encryption, but if private credit card data is available on simple Google search, then it will be a serious problem for the global e-commerce industry.

It's going to be extremely tricky for Google to alter their search algorithms to ensure that credit card and other payment detail are never picked up by their crawlers on any user search.

Those who transact primarily through the web medium, exercise caution!!! Keep your eyes and senses wide open…