Tomer Tishgarten is vice president of technology at Engauge, one of the nation’s largest independent advertising agencies. Follow him @tomerific.
If you’re among the many marketers trying to grasp the game-changing impact of Xbox’s motion-controlled add-on Kinect, you’re not alone. Even Microsoft didn’t realize what it had on its hands. When launching in November, Microsoft predicted sales of 3 million units by the end of 2010. Instead, the company sold 8 million in two months and recently entered the Guinness Book of World Records as the fastest-selling consumer electronics product in history. For brands, the excitement is just beginning — and so are the challenges.
In addition to sensing motion, Microsoft’s newest periphery for the Xbox 360 recognizes voices, captures facial expressions in real time, and can even tell players apart. It’s arguably the biggest advance in mainstream digital interface design since the widespread adoption of the computer mouse in the ’80s.
Kinect and its underlying PrimeSense technology promise to open new doors and could explode our conceptions of what’s possible online. Today’s online world remains governed by the conventions of preset hyperlinks and point-and-click devices, but over time, those constraints will be shattered. The popularity of touchscreens on smartphones and tablets suggest we were already headed in this direction. Marketers may play an important role in determining how quickly Kinect technology crosses the chasm from hardcore gamers to mainstream adoption.
The Engagement Potential for Brands
Big brands, including Burger King and Samsung, jumped in first with Kinect gaming promotions. But the marketing potential of Kinect extends far beyond video games. In the near term, marketers could leverage Kinect technology to create eye-opening trade show displays and in-store promotions. Freed from the gaming console, the technology can draw people into an immersive, interactive experience.
Innovative web-based applications will also be worth considering as the technology reaches a critical mass of 15% of households or users, a point at which adoption rates tend to accelerate.
With Avatar Kinect, Microsoft will soon move into augmented social media. Microsoft’s plans for the new technology clearly go beyond gaming. And Kinect’s controller-free environment should appeal to casual gamers, not just the hardcore console jocks, which will heighten appeal for mass marketers. Indeed, the pitch to advertisers from Microsoft is that women, younger children and tweens are “joining in the fun” with Kinect. Most importantly, perhaps, the price is relatively inexpensive; approximately $150.
In the future, it’s conceivable that consumers scanned into the system could theoretically interact with three-dimensional models of products. Why couldn’t Ford, which recently launched an exclusive Xbox campaign for its C-MAX, put consumers behind the wheel and let them take the newest model for a spin?
For catalog clothing brands, the ecommerce implications are immense. Why couldn’t Eddie Bauer let consumers try on clothes virtually? In the travel industry, the applications are even more numerous — a walking tour of the cabanas at Club Med, anyone? And with the capacity to scan an entire room, why couldn’t The Home Depot let customers design the layout of new kitchen cabinets or Ikea showcase sofas within digital models of consumers’ living rooms?
Peak Expectations Meet Practical Challenges
Marketers have tremendous opportunities to differentiate themselves from their competitors in this new environment. Yet they also face the challenge of developing those experiences without instructions or precedents.
Before agencies and developers can create the architecture of this new world — and customized applications for brands — they must first study what makes the new technology tick, which is why developers have been so busy “hacking” Kinect.
The development tools for Kinect are still fairly immature at this stage, but they do provide enough capabilities to build some interesting applications. As more work is done to support these tools by Microsoft and the larger development community, the possibilities for Kinect will grow exponentially.
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This post originally appeared on the American Express OPEN Forum, where Mashable regularly contributes articles about leveraging social media and technology in small business.
With technologies evolving every day, human resources professionals are realizing that the fast-paced, ever-changing digital world impacts their jobs and workplaces — not only today, but in the future.
Bersin & Associates, a global research and consulting firm focused on learning, talent and human resources strategies, recently published a report on the Top Best Practices for the High-Impact HR Organizations. The report noted that overall budgets, organizational structure and department size have less impact on business performance than the skills of HR professionals themselves. The research also outlined the key competencies driving results today — familiarity with integrated talent management, understanding of workforce planning and comfort with social networking and HR technology.
As organizations and business leaders position themselves for the future, the following five workplace challenges will continue to change human resources.
1. Evaluating Early Adoption
Truth be told, HR is traditionally not known for early adoption. Case in point: the slow adoption of social media. Bill Kutik, technology columnist for Human Resource Executive magazine, explains, “HR loves talking about social media, but so far has done very little with it. Fears emanating from the legal department have stuck HR in its tracks.”
While some people will try all of the latest and greatest options, others will want to wait until platforms have been proven. Being on either extreme could be detrimental. It’s important to evaluate each and sometimes take a chance.
Kutik says, “Just like the introduction of all new technology — from the telephone, to e-mail, to the Internet — which have all scared HR to death, it will eventually come around.”
One early trend Kutik believes is gaining traction is mobile. “Every vendor has either released or is about to release a mobile application for smartphones and soon for the iPad. While much of it is a ‘nice to have,’ mobile apps will get most traction in workforce management — the nuts and bolts of time and attendance and absence management — where they perfectly meet the needs of a distributed, mobile workforce.”
2. Balancing High Tech and High Touch
Being able to recognize the need for a technology solution will be a significant business advantage. HR will have to evaluate what functions can be automated and still provide desired levels of service.
Naomi Bloom, managing partner at Bloom & Wallace, a consulting firm specializing in the application of HR technology, shares how companies are evaluating digital solutions. “Increasingly, HR leaders are starting with the desired business outcome and working backwards from there to answer questions, rather than starting with the question of what to automate.”
Bloom cited the investment that Kronos has made in going mobile as an example of meeting a growing need by both the business and its employees. “If your business results are driven by optimized workforce scheduling, as is absolutely the case in most retail businesses, then you must focus some of your automation investments right there. And since the retail workforce may be young and used to communicating via their smartphones, you’d better consider delivering most of the transactions and analytics that your employees and even those first line managers use, directly to their smartphones.”
With increasing technologically advanced options, human resources professionals will be tasked to figure out when processes should be automated, versus when a human face or voice is the best route.
3. Information Curation
Kutik says it best, “We are all desperately in need of a good editor.”
HR is experiencing a flood of information. It will be critical to have an effective means of filtering necessary and relevant information. The new term in the digital space is curation.
While Kutik labels curation an “awfully fancy word” he does acknowledge the necessity for picking and choosing among various information sources. “Few people remember that Yahoo began by having human editors read and evaluate sites for their quality and determining how they would appear in searches. No more. Relying on what our friends link to on Twitter is not going to solve the problem. Happily, people are working on technologies to solve the problem.”
For recruiters, the ability to sort through loads of information — including applications from various platforms and employment data — will be a skill worth honing.
4. Training for Accountability
Many of these challenges come down to being better communicators in order to effectively leverage the digital space. As such, HR needs to place a priority on management and leadership training to ensure line managers are able to effectively convey expectations and outcomes.
Stacey Harris, principal analyst at Bersin & Associates, says development of line-manager capabilities should be a top priority. “Our research found there was a one-to-one correlation between the effectiveness of an organization’s line managers and the overall effectiveness of its HR function. In simplest terms, as a company’s line managers increased their management capabilities, the effectiveness of the HR function paralleled that upward progression.”
Harris explained that, on the digital front, companies need to partner with providers who deliver excellent support and service and deep understanding of its audience’s needs. “Organizations that offer completely integrated support for line managers are still difficult to find, but suppliers are making dramatic headway. Companies like Saba have spent considerable resources integrating social networking that can be used for development and knowledge transfer, with learning curriculums, performance management tools and competency maps.
“Organizations such as Triple Creek provide competency-driven mentoring programs over the web,” continued Harris. “Plateau has built on an integrated architecture introducing integrated and highly-scalable solutions for career development, compensation, pay for performance, and employee profile management — all which are used in line manager support.”
5. Metrics and Measurement
Bloom says, “When it comes to metrics, the easiest to do are very rarely the most valuable!”
There’s no question that HR needs to create data structures that will deliver information on business goals not only to help the company understand their workforce, but also to optimize their talent-related processes.
Bloom notes, “The most important metrics for any business investment, including those in HR technology, are the business outcomes that the investment is intended to achieve. If we’re trying to speed up and improve the selection of quality hires, then we’d better be looking at elapsed time to productivity and quality of hire.”
Then the challenge, as Harris points out, is most companies don’t have a single, accurate database for storing and accessing relevant HR information. “Data that is scattered among multiple systems and acquired in varied formats can make it difficult for most organizations to provide a clear picture of their current workforce. Many organizations capture only limited employee details in master data systems.”
Harris noted that SAP has made substantive progress in this area, pulling together data from the HR and talent management systems then analyzing data with the same analytic tools used in their other business intelligence platforms. Additionally, SuccessFactors has similar analytics and planning tools.
While many advances have been made in the human resources digital space, there are still new developments to look forward to. These advancements will bring greater opportunities to align human resources with business goals. HR professionals will need to remain aware of these challenges and develop their own strategies to stay within the path of progress.
Over the course of our series on the Future of Cars, a clear picture has emerged of where traffic flow is headed in the next few years. If today’s traffic is like a bloom of bacteria that responds collectively to changes in the environment, then tomorrow’s networked traffic, where all the cars are linked to the road, to the cloud, and to one another by a wireless nervous system, will be more like a fully formed, adaptive and evolving organism. In addition to the existing network of sensors already embedded in roads and highways, the cars themselves will become collections of sensors enmeshed in a peer-to-peer wireless network, with some master nodes on that network connected to the cloud via 4G.
But while picture of the evolution of traffic over the next decade has started to take shape, what isn’t yet so clear is the future of the actual car that will take part in this next-generation traffic flow. Specifically, one question remains unanswered: will the silicon brain of a future car be built-in, or will we plug our smartphones into the vehicle and use the smaller devices’ processors, wireless radios, and displays?
I put this question to our OpenForum participants, and the discussion that ensued was very, very good. But before I summarize what the OpenForum agreed on as a long-term solution (there was a surprising amount of consensus about how things should go), I’ll first present a summary of both sides of the issue.
Mark Zuckerberg may have come to China, but Facebook is unlikely to enter anytime soon. Neither Facebook nor the Chinese government are interested in a messy compromise on freedom of expression (all Chinese networks are censored), especially after the Facebook-fueled revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt.
Instead, China’s social media scene is different from anywhere else: Four homegrown networks are vying for the mass market. Renren, a faithful copy of Facebook, is China’s leader and is planning for an IPO soon. In addition to its nickname-based network (Qzone), internet giant Tencent is at long last awakening to real-name social with its new network, Pengyou. Finally, Kaixin001 is dying, stuck between the decline of its social games and rise of Sina Weibo (China’s Twitter).
In addition to the top four, China also has a “long tail” of social networks that are more specialized — just for children, gamers or lovers. Here, we take a deeper look at those top four networks and what makes them tick.
Renren is like a miniature Facebook with a mean streak and a quest for monetization. One year ago, Renren was concerned that Kaixin001 might overtake it. Kaixin001 attracted a white collar audience before Renren had fully expanded out from its on-campus origins (like Facebook, Renren started at its nation’s elite universities). But Renren has since left the slower Kaixin001 in the dust and is now China’s leader in real-name social networking (even though Tencent’s Qzone has far more users overall).
As one social network operator (who asked to remain anonymous) described it, “Renren is all about business. Kaixin001 has a tech founder [Cheng Binghao] who wants to do more than just copy.” Kaixin001 was reportedly offered the domain name Kaixin.com for 500,000 yuan (about $75,000), but the Binghao passed. The consummate businessman Chen Yizhou, chairman of Oak Pacific Interactive (OPI is Renren’s umbrella group), jumped at the opportunity. OPI set up an exact clone of Kaixin001 at Kaixin.com. That cutthroat tactic was a masterstroke.
Anything Facebook releases, Renren immediately copies: Connect, Like, Places, Groups, etc. To be fair, a few features are localized: brand advertising, a game layer and emoticons.
Renren is strong when it comes to monetization. Brand campaigns are sold to companies at high prices. Fan pages, while free on Facebook, start at 600,000 yuan (about $90,000). That said, Renren’s fan pages are like mini-sites, such as the example from Nike above. Targeting is used only sparingly and the “long tail” of small, local advertisers has yet to arrive in China.
The umbrella group, Oak Pacific Interactive, is building an empire on top of Renren. Renren users are channeled toward Oak Pacific Games (gaming is the traditional cash cow for China’s Internet) and now Nuomi, one of China’s top Groupon clones. OPI is far more aggressive than Facebook in terms of monetization.
Renren has the most open third-party ecosystem of any social network, but unlike Facebook, it has been unable to effectively monetize social games. One of its competitors is now opening up to third-party developers. That could be a point of weakness for Renren.
User experience cannot suffer too badly during Renren’s aggressive monetization and IPO focus in 2011. Renren’s social graph is strong and it executes faster and better than any of its competitors, but it’s still nowhere near as dominant as Facebook is in the West.
Tencent should own real-name social networking in China, but has instead been sleeping on the opportunity until now. Tencent has similarities to AOL, circa 1998. Its walled garden is the Internet for many Chinese, particularly in second- and third-tier cities. QQ, its dominant instant messenger, claims 637 million active accounts, a flood of users that it can direct at any service or content it cares to. Moreover, Tencent monetizes much better than AOL was ever able to via games and virtual goods.
But Tencent struggles among sophisticated netizens (though most still use QQ Messenger) and is playing catch-up in real-name social. Tencent’s most popular social network, Qzone, claims 492 million active users. It’s unclear just how active those users are though; many profiles are simply skeletons. And just like on QQ, many users go by a nickname rather a real name. Users are younger and from comparatively more rural areas of China, making it less attractive to advertisers.
Benjamin Joffe, Tencent expert and CEO of Internet market research firm +8*, states, ”Tencent is definitely not the best in terms of products or innovation — similar to Zynga in that sense — but their ability to deliver a ‘good enough’ mass market service and integrating it within their ecosystem is impressive.”
On January 6, 2011, Xiaoyou’s users were just merged into a new social network, Pengyou (friends), which is finally Tencent’s attempt to reach the entire population of Chinese social networkers.
With Pengyou, Tencent is pushing into real-name social and taking a step toward becoming a more open and mature firm. The network has an open platform with about 90 applications and games – a step forward for the notoriously closed Tencent.
But ”open” still has limits in China. “The problem with the Chinese market is that the social networks are game developers themselves. There is a conflict of interest. If your games are popular, they’re not only not helping you but even put pressure to squeeze you out,” says Liu Yong, the CEO of social games firm Rekoo. Rekoo is based in Beijing, but focuses on the Japanese market.
But Tencent can use QQ Messenger to direct near limitless traffic to its own offerings. On the downside, it’s difficult to persuade China’s sophisticated netizens to “trade down” for a service with a less urbane user base. That’s the reason why Pengyou is Tencent’s first major product that is not branded with the cute and youth-friendly QQ penguin.
The sleeping giant is awakening from its slumber, though it still has a long way to go in real-name social. 2011 should be a decisive year in the Pengyou (friends) vs. Renren (everyone) showdown.
In 2008 and 2009, Kaixin001 gained a widespread following among white collar office workers in top tier cities and threatened to become China’s leading real-name social network. But it’s now in trouble.
Kaixin001′s meteoric ascent was fueled by two factors: 1) social games, and 2) a content forwarding feature, where users share the hottest news, jokes or celebrity gossip, with comments attached.
These two attractions have since lost appeal. Social games have dropped in popularity, and post forwarding — quick updates on the hottest news — is now provided in a purer form by Sina Weibo, China’s popular micro-blogging service. The other opportunity they missed is group buying. Kaixin001 had a huge amount of white collar users, which is the perfect match for a group buying service.
Because Kaixin001 is still popular in tier one cities like Shanghai and Beijing, foreigners in China often have a warped perception of the network’s nationwide popularity. In reality, Kaixin001 does not have much traction elsewhere, nor does it have the funds or network — like Tencent (Pengyou) and Oak Pacific Interactive (Renren) — to push into China’s “lesser-tier” cities.
All the tech insiders I’ve spoken with tell of a site in decline. One post on Zhihu (China’s Quora clone) estimates that Kaixin001′s acquisition value has fallen from 500 million to 50 million ($75 million to $7.5 million). Kaixin001′s Binghao has expressed his ambition to join the rush of China tech IPOs, but that seems highly unlikely.
These setbacks will test the true strength of Kaixin001′s social graph. But not all news is bad. The network does still command a large, high-value audience, and it has strong ties to the Sina Corporation, so being acquired is a possibility (Sina holds a stake in Kaixin001 and Binghao is a former Sina CTO).
Sina Weibo is a microblog that far surpasses Twitter in functionality (threaded comments, groups, audio messages and direct video uploads). And it is hot in China right now. Sina Weibo has more than 100 million registered users, expects to keep growing rapidly, and perhaps even exceeds Twitter in active users. This explosive growth has brought the value of the network up to an estimated $2 billion.
Yu Jin, analyst at China International Capital Corporation, writes: “Microblog services became popular at the end of 2009 as [they] match the needs of Chinese Internet users. They have acquired users at an astonishing speed, to some extent at the expense of SNS websites.”
Sina, also the owner of China’s largest portal site, has lofty ambitions for Weibo that could compete with traditional social networks. It’s constantly experimenting with new features and already seems to have stolen away much of Kainxin001′s audience. You don’t understand China social if you don’t understand Sina Weibo.
The Next Tier of Networks
In China, the difference among the “top four” social networks and the next tier is not as vast as the gulf in the U.S. between Facebook and “the rest.” Notably, 51.com and Douban are two mid-sized networks that are neither mass-market nor niche.
51.com started strong with backing from Sequoia and Giant Interactive and an audience of users in rural areas but now has no chance of conquering the mass market. Social networks often operate on an elite spread basis: You can move down the “social ladder” but not up. It’s no accident that Facebook started at Harvard and Renren started at China’s elite Tsinghua University. Although 51.com has dropped off from the top ranks since last year, it still claims to have 40 million monthly active users. But Chinese tech news site DoNews reports that its peak user base is down from 11 million to 700,000, a big flameout for a site that once had intentions for an IPO.
Douban, an urban network built around fan groups for books, music and movies, has 20 million active users. Douban has a highly engaged and participatory user base, making it worth watching. In addition, there are countless additional Chinese social networks for dating, business, and any other community you can imagine.
Despite government regulations that make the Internet an “invisible birdcage,” Chinese social networks have just enough space to fly. The social media space is diverse and thriving, with Renren, Qzone, Pengyou and Kaixin001 leading the pack. Just don’t attempt to directly port your “global” Facebook strategy here.
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For the past few years, CSS grid systems have become increasingly popular with web designers. Thanks to efforts like Nathan Smith’s 960.gs, designing with a grid is less complicated, and better looking sites can be crafted with ease.
One of my favorite CSS grid systems of late is Less Framework. Now in its fourth revision, Less Framework takes the power of a CSS grid system and adds in support for CSS media queries to support multiple design and typography layouts.
In May 2010, Ethan Marcotte’s “Responsive Web Design” helped spur a movement of building websites designed to fluidly adapt to various platforms and device sizes — think mobile optimized sites and tablet-specific layouts — without the need for an entirely different design or special URL.
Less Framework is, in my opinion, one of the best ways for web developers without lots of experience in designing responsive websites (or media queries in general) to take advantage of this new trend.
I am currently in the process of redesigning my own very out-of-date website and am using Less Framework as my base. Here are some tips and tricks that I’ve come across for newcomers looking for a way to get started using Less Framework or just testing the waters of responsive web design.
Knowing the Basics
Created by Joni Korpi, Less Framework is built on a single grid and includes four layouts and three different typography presets. The default layout is a 10-column, 992-pixel grid. This layout is what larger screens or browser windows will display, and it is also the layout that older browsers lacking support for CSS3 media queries will use.
There is also an 8-column, 768-pixel layout for iPad and other tablets, as well as two mobile layouts. When you download Less Framework, you can also choose to include a retina media query that targets devices — like the iPhone 4 and iPod touch fourth generation — that use a device-pixel ratio of 2 or more.
Text, images and columns adapt to the needs and size of the web browser or device. It’s a really great way to create a design that can be optimized across platforms.
Guides and Templates
Sitepoint’s Guide to Responsive Web Design with HTML5 and the Less Framework 3 — Sitepoint’s guide to using Less Framework and HTML5 in creating responsive web design is a great starting point for new or unsure designers. This guide was written for the previous version of Less Framework, but the tips and information still carry over to the new version.
Less Grid Overlay — Arnau March created his own grid overlay plugin for help in developing his own Less Framework 4 site. The tool works the same way as the 960 Gridder and it uses jQuery to display a proper grid overlay on your website. This is especially useful for designers who like to design in the browser.
Mark Host’s Less Framework 4 PSD — Mark Host created a PSD that combines various Less Framework grids from Ari Palo and Henry Moran. If you use Photoshop, you might want to start with this file.
Less Plugin for Compass — Compass is a stylesheet framework that is designed to make stylesheets easier to build and maintain. William Wells created this plugin for Compass that utilizes Less Framework 4 and can really help speed up development time.
Less-Ready Themes
A number of themes and templates are already available for platforms like WordPress that take advantage of Less Framework. They include:
Whiteboard Framework 3.1.2 — Whiteboard is a WordPress framework designed to take advantage of not just Less Framework, but also various WordPress features. Using Whiteboard, theme developers can create their own responsive WordPress themes and still easily take advantage of the features in WordPress 3.0 and up.
Less Work for Mura — I’ll be honest, I’m not familiar with the Mura CMS. However Ryan Ward created this free theme based on Less Framework 4.
What do you think of responsive web design and frameworks and grids like Less Framework? Let us know in the comments.
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For the past few years, 