If you grew up in the 80s or earlier, you’ll likely remember making mixtapes from the radio. Today, the advances in technology have eliminated the need to record using analog tapes but for those of us who miss the old-school process, there’s a way to fill the void.
Stereolizer brings users over 10,000 web radio stations from across the globe and through its retro-style interface, users can create vintage mixtapes from any of the streaming channels.
The user interface sports a sleek-looking 80s style 3-piece stereo equipped with a radio receiver, amp and tape deck. Similar to turning the dials on a real-life system, Stereolizer’s digital stereo enables users to change radio stations and utilize the built-in tape deck controls; record, rewind, stop and fast-forward. It has even included the appropriate sound effects you’ll remember from ejecting a tape –it’s a nostalgic experience.
Radio stations can be browsed by country or in alphabetical order and can be saved to a preset button allowing users to quickly access their favourite stations from the stereo. The numerous stations should keep audiophiles busy for hours, and the ability to flip through thousands of radio stations worldwide is extremely interesting if you’re fascinated by music.
What It’s Cool:
There are a myriad of apps capable of streaming radio stations but Stereolizer is unique in both design and for its ability to record audio. The tape deck is always loaded with a fresh tape so if you hear something awesome, audio can be recorded easily. It will store and save your tape stash and as an added plus, it will additionally post a handwritten label on each tape after you’ve included a title. Recording your own audio tape is also possible within the tape deck using the iPad’s built-in microphone.
Stereolizer has gone all out in design and there is definitely something extra fun about playing digital music on a vintage stereo.
What We Didn’t like:
The only obvious drawback is within the sharing feature. While Stereolizer does offer Twitter and Facebook buttons on the stereo, it merely posts the name of the radio station with a link to the app –no title of the song or preview of the track.
The Bottom Line:
Stereolizer is a solid, beautiful iPad app for jamming to tunes, recording audio and discovering world music. The app is available for $1.99 in the app store.
In the scheme of things, social media marketing is still incredibly new, and what I find fascinating is the new trend of strategies that companies employ to create a following in social media. New tricks get old very, very fast as consumers wise up, or simply get bored.
What’s becoming evident is that gaining a Like, follow or check-in is becoming almost a game in itself, as companies try newer ways to get the all important trade from their consumers. I believe this is largely a result of the fact that as people become more comfortable with following brands online, we realise that we can only realistically follow so many, before they take up a large portion of our newsfeeds. So your Likes or follows become even more valuable both to you and the brand. The solution that many companies are looking at now, is what you can offer users that makes the action of Liking, a game or challenge in itself, beyond the content you actually offer them in the long run that would draw them to you.
Rewarding Likes
Porsche were there early with their stunt to reward Facebook Likes by pledging to engrave its fans’ name on a custom car. All you had to do to get your name on the car was Like the page. Then Heineken followed by celebrating 1 million Likes with 1 million hugs. Heinz has explored this most recently, when it decided to release a brand new flavour of Ketchup, only available through its Facebook page, which you had to Like first in order to purchase.
From a user point of view, this adds completely to the experience of following a brand. You’re not just following to get updates, you get your name on a car, a hug, and the chance to buy a bottle of ketchup. What’s interesting among these campaigns is that it’s not about rewarding fans through anything monetary, it’s about adding to the social experience. They can get something that no-one else can, and this is how hard brands now need to work, to get that all important Like.
Points for Check-Ins
What’s interesting is that this concept of rewarding a virtual ‘follow’ is now very much extending into the real-world, when it’s no longer about what shop you walk into, but which shop is going to reward you when you check in. This is evident through Foursquare’s recently launched version 3.0 . They’ve learned very quickly that it’s not necessarily about sharing location with your friends, but the points and rewards you get from organisations in return for this. They’ve revamped their points system to open up the opportunities for businesses to reward customers, extending from just mayors to include groups, swarms or pretty much anyone. While Foursquare may no longer be the dominant player in location, the fact that the way deals or specials operate is such an important part of their update, shows the interest between both customers and businesses, for rewarding checkins beyond the social element.
It’s clear why a Like, checkin or follow means so much to brands : because of the entire community that comes with just one person joining your page. Heinz made the decision it did not only because it was a new marketing gimmick, but because of the huge potential social reach in return for taking the action on their page. Not just 3,000 bottles, but 3,000 bottles seen by 390,000 people. That’s serious numbers for a lot of brands, and it’s easy to see why the tactics to reach Likes or follows would be so extreme. There has always been competition between brands through social media, but lately it seems to be reaching new levels. Constantly more inventive ways to celebrate Likes or reach a goal, but what happens when you reach that goal?
The worrying thing of course, is that it all becomes too much of a game to get people to simply Like you, without that really meaning anything to a brand. There is a big difference between someone joining your page because they’re engaged with your brand at a meaningful level, and joining your page to get their name engraved on a car. The long-term effect of that, for many brands, will be painful. The quality of conversation, and value you get out of the page may be negligible. The long-term effect this really has on brand loyalty remains to be seen.
Saad Khan is a hacktivist and Partner at CMEA Capital. He’s a seed and early stage investor in companies like Blekko, Pixazza, Jobvite, and Evolution Robotics. He blogs at SaadWired and conversates on Twitter @saadventures. If you’re a hacktivist, reach out to him — he wants to connect with you.
A young hacker is holed up alone in his apartment. His face is lit by a laptop screen, monitor split between a live video stream and a text editor filled with code. Fueled by Ramen Noodles and caffeine, he codes away through the night, monitoring the latest hashtags on Twitter, never a few seconds behind the newest exploding meme, instantly transmitting the latest news to others in his social graph.
This is a scene that is played out in the rooms of countless hackers and their “lean startups” around the world. Only for the past few weeks, it could have just as easily described an entirely new, organic, philanthropic phenomenon: Hacktivism.
Hacktivism is the use of hacking and the startup mentality to tackle and support social good causes. Here’s a look at some of the minds behind hacktivism and ways that it is helping charities worldwide.
Welcome to the Hacktivism Era
I was invited to Washington, D.C. for the Tech@State: Open Source event hosted by the Office of e-Diplomacy at the State Department. Rather than besuited C-SPANers, geeks from around the world had descended on D.C. to intermingle with practitioners of statecraft. It was also unusual for another reason — a hemisphere away, a million Egyptians had descended on a main square in Egypt and demanded of their government and the world that their voices be heard. A couple of hours into that Friday morning, they got just that when Hosni Mubarak finally stepped down after 30 years.
In a cosmic coincidence (the event had been planned for weeks), I was on a panel two hours later discussing the political implications of new media with people like Habib Haddad, one of the many volunteers involved with the AliveInEgypt initiative and recently vindicated friend of Wael Ghaneim (the Google employee who had, until very recently, been incarcerated). The panel also included Katherine Maher, ICT program officer at the National Democratic Institute, and Mark Toner, deputy spokesperson for the State Department.
Consider the propagation of organic efforts like AliveInEgypt. When Internet activity had been shut down in Egypt, volunteers from Google and Twitter launched international lines that one could call to leave voicemails that would then be tweeted out with location hashtags. The creators of AliveInEgypt set up a crowdsourced translation service to take those mostly Arabic voicemails and convert them to text in as many languages as possible in the Twittersphere. Loosely organized, geographically dispersed, and entirely volunteer-driven, hundreds of people contributed.
This Visualization of the Egyptian Twitter Sphere helps put into context the various efforts. Its designer, Kovas Boguta, called me a few days before I went to D.C. saying he wanted to do something useful for the Egyptian cause. We discussed what was possible over the phone, and three days later I was showcasing his #Egypt visualization on a big screen at the State Department.
Another interesting example is the OpenMesh project. It’s a virtual collaboration with the objective of developing a communication solution for when Internet and/or mobile communications are shut down as they were in Egypt recently. Among the many options being explored are ad hoc mesh networking solutions that enable peer-to-peer communications.
These are just a few examples of how entrepreneurial creativity has been unlocked over the past few weeks to respond to a higher cause. Others are creating Gov 2.0 apps. I suspect countless ideas and plans are hatching in cubicles everywhere.
A New Kind of Activism
The events of the last few weeks have clearly galvanized a new kind of lean entrepreneurial activism. It’s enabled by the same drivers as lean startups: Free software, pay-as-you-go data centers and social distribution channels. But these entrepreneurs aren’t trying to be the next Mark Zuckerberg. What drives them is the desire to effect change, a sense of digital empowerment and an intuition that we are at a unique moment in history, one where generational transfers of leadership are at stake and increasingly possible.
Underlying much of this energy is an unprecedented global solidarity among people traditionally separated by thousands of miles of physical space and cultural artifacts. It’s forged by a very visceral empathy that comes with directly shared images and personal connections that today’s technology enables. Tens of thousands of people followed the unfolding saga of Ghonim’s capture and redemption on Twitter and Facebook. They saw what he saw and read what he was thinking. They watch. They connect. And then they want to do something about it.
Make no mistake, these people are entrepreneurs. They are agitators, opportunists, and catalysts for change. They measure success one follower at a time. I for one, think it’s time to get behind them. Let’s start activist hackathons, organize StartupWeekend “.gov Edition,” and engineer for a higher cause. We just might start a new kind of revolution.
The Future of Search Series is supported by SES New York Conference & Expo, the search and social marketing conference helping brands, agencies, and professionals connect, share and learn what’s next for the interactive industry.
A “social search” is one that ties a searcher’s social graph to his search queries. With social search, each searcher sees unique results that are shaped by the interests of his social network friends.
Google, not the company to often fudge with the appearance or function of its search results, turned on its version of social search more than a year ago. It has since gone on to more prominently feature social search results and blend them in with regular results.
One should not make light of these changes; they point to the company’s recognition that the average web user, who now spends more time on Facebook, may be not-so-quietly demanding a new form of search.
In fact, Facebook is more than a social network for many these days. It’s the center of our social graph, it’s where we go to find and read the day’s news, it’s how we comment on articles, and its ubiquitous “like” buttons help us refine our interest graphs and are becoming the de facto way for us to voice our approval for nearly anything on the web.
“Likes” have become so significant that they factor into Bing’s algorithm for social search results, and even have a place in Blekko’s human curated search engine. “Likes” also determine popularity: the more “likes” a piece of content or status update gets, the more that item is resurfaced inside and outside of Facebook.
The Changing Definition of (Social) Search
The rise of Facebook and its hold over our attention begs the question, should we still think of search as an explicit query-driven practice? Or, is search in the traditional sense outdated?
Are social networks (or information networks) the new search engine? Or, as Steve Jobs would argue, is the mobile app the new search engine? Or, is the question-and-answer formula of Quora the real search 2.0?
The answer is most likely all of the above, because search is being redefined by all of these factors.
Because search is changing, so too is the still maturing notion of social search, and we should certainly think about it as something much grander than socially-enhanced search results.
The average Facebook user does not say to himself, “I want to search for the most popular stories among my Facebook friends.” No. Facebook does the work for them by crafting a search experience, without search, that highlights content of social relevance.
It’s for this reason that one-off social search engines like Sharetivity are not the future — look at Sentimnt, which has closed down its consumer-facing social search product. A social search engine that requires the user to think about surfacing content from social networks is one that misses the point.
Semantic Analysis, Machine Learning and the Next Generation of Social Search
Let’s embrace the notion that social search should be effortless on the part of the user and exist within a familiar experience — mobile, social or search.
This social search future is already unfolding before our very eyes. Foursquare now taps its massive checkin database to churn out recommendations personalized by relationships and activities. My6sense prioritizes tweets, RSS feeds and Facebook updates, and it’s working to personalize the web through semantic analysis. Even Flipboard offers a fresh form of social search and helps the user find content through their social relationships.
Of course, there’s the obvious implementations of Facebook Instant Personalization: Rotten Tomatoes, Clicker and Yelp offer Facebook-personalized experiences, essentially using your social graph to return better “search” results.
Then, there’s a crop of new startups that dig through the clickstreams of friends, all of which have plans to move into content recommendations.
We’re just now scratching the surface of what’s possible when one’s expanding social graph becomes intertwined with search. But as time goes on, the social search experience will be so fluid — it will seem more like discovering than searching — we won’t even know it’s happening.
Series Supported by SES New York Conference & Expo
The Future of Search Series is supported by SES New York Conference & Expo, the search and social marketing conference helping brands, agencies, and professionals connect, share and learn what’s next for the interactive industry. Learn why more than 5,000 brands and agencies from the enterprise level to brick and motor businesses choose SES for their online marketing education.
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A “social search” is one that ties a searcher’s social graph to his search queries. With social search, each searcher sees unique results that are shaped by the interests of his social network friends.
