Pepsi Refresh vending kiosks to add gift capability

Nice idea from the Pepsi Refresh project, so far only (US) text enabled, but extrapolate the possibility to properly web connected / socially connected units and imagine the potential.

Short term it's probably best not to dwell on or scrutinise the data capture / privacy angles but Apple have provided more than enough food for that fire this week.

Interestingly, whilst running a quick search for the URL of the Pepsi Refresh project to embed in this post I noticed (dynamic) image results being triggered on the right hand side of the results, changing as you overed over different links. That pleases me inner nerd and feeds my inner curiosity. Better go and do some snooping on Google algorithm changes.

Nice touches within search results from Google

I've been a fan of the Leicester Tigers Rugby team for years. I just ran a generic team name search because I wanted to check when they were next playing and got this result, immediately telling me what I was looking for without even having to click again.  Nice touch Google.   

Given the rugby ball icon, it's not really a "news" result so now I just need to find out how they did that. Curious.

Winter Olympics - get your round up here....

The Winter Olympics are currently upon us, starting in Vancouver on the 12th Feb, and somehow, despite the appetite for all things snow related amongst the huge number of avid winter sports fans I know, it just doesn't seem to get the same level of buzz and coverage as the Summer Olympics.

On the subject of which, only 898 days to go says the BT Tower out of my office window today - they've had a daily countdown showing for weeks now but it took me a while to figure out what the random number was, 'til I twigged they were a sponsor of the 2012 London Olympics).

Doh, where's the paid search on that activity??  Joined up thinking people???

However,  back to the Winter Olympics, and those ever helpful folks at Google have kindly pulled together a handy Winter Olympics 2010 quick reference guide where you can check out the medals table, get links to event coverage, see the buzz around events via a link to real time search and even check out the slopes in Street View (clearly they should have called that Piste view but never mind!).

Worth a look.

It does a nice in-one-place showcase of the many things Google brings you, that lesser geeks than I may not have realised.

But nice as that is, I still like the daily pictures on Bing. They make me smile. And therefore divide my search love :-)

 Utterly gratuitous but here's some very cool camels from yesterday

Google "SuperPhone" good but still can't make tea!

The two big tech events of the week are

1) CES (the consumer electronics show in Las Vegas), which is basically one enormous santa's grotto for tech and gadget lovers, full of shiny toys and promises of things to come (more later on that).

2) the launch of the first Google phone, the Nexus One.



There was hefty expectation of what the phone would do, but in reality Google's first move into vertical integration (making and selling handsets direct to the consumers) didn't really deliver anything hugely surprising.  Well at least not to me, most of the leading smart phones, irrespective of the operating system they are based on do the same thing: provide pocket-sized computing services on the go.  And none of them can turn the kettle on yet before I get up /  home. I am sure that is just a matter of time

What does it do better than my HTC Hero?  Well it has a 5 megapixel camera with a flash  so that's an improvement but otherwise.... not much really that I can't do already.  For me the big thing Google / Android need to fix to seriously compete with Apple is to allow you to save apps to external memory (micro SD) +/or significantly increase onboard memory. I can add seemingly limitless numbers of apps to my iTouch/iPhone without affecting performance, but download too many on the Android based phones and they start running out of processor capability pretty fast.

The real "big deal" about this launch is the fact that you have to buy it straight from Google direct:

By cutting out the handset manufacturer that gives them a huge degree of influence / control over what they include as features.

Not to mention how much greater share of insight / data they get on usage behaviour in addition to all the other things the google.com/dashboard reveals they know about your online behaviour already.  I think it's also interesting from a directional point over the entire Android developer community. Developers for Apple iPhone apps are all working to the same handset, whereas by making the Android operating system open source there are already strands developing that fragment towards Motorola Droid / HTC phones and so the presence of a Google phone on the Google owned operating system potentially leads direction amongst the pack. Throw in the increasingly direct and tangible relationship with the consumer via an object that is on hand 24/7, 365 days a year and it makes for interesting times ahead in the battles between [inherently, should be invisible] technology provider and consumer  to brand relationships across multiple touchpoints.

All that notwithstanding I think this is going to be a really year for mobile and the Android platform in particular. We shall see.

Banging on about Bing...

I know, I know, I've talked about search and Bing a LOT recently but it's important. Competition in the market is healthy.

I have a Gmail account, I use the Google reader for RSS feeds, this blog is written on a Google owned platform, I upload to YouTube (owned by Google), and I am enormously excited about the scope and potential of the Google Wave (a new communication and collaboration platform/approach coming soon) so I'm far from entirely disloyal. But it's important to share my love too.

I am enjoying playing with Bing not just for the way it processes queries and displays results, but for the small moment of happiness I get from the stunning pictures they have on the homepage everyday. Yesterday it was Angkor Wat in Cambodia, and the day before a stunning image of a turtle which made me think about a great holiday in the Whitsunday's last year. I engage with it. I play guessing games with myself as a result of the image I see. And clearly I am not alone and Bing have twigged that too as in the last week they've taken to adding clues under the image.

This morning I logged in and spent a few moments trying to work out where I recognised that skyline from. After a quick memory scan, and even before I looked at the clues, I realised it was the Yarra river and Melbourne, a city I love but haven't been back to for a few years now. But the fact that I go back to see the picture every day and I've been telling lots of my colleagues to do the same too, suggests they've got something right.

In an earlier post I talked about how smart it was for Bing to have launched a homepage photocontest via Facebook. I logged into Facebook this morning to find a status feed item reminding me that voting for the photocompetition closes on August 3rd, and encouraging me to go a vote (which I duly did). I'd encourage you to do the same. Why not? It's easy to do and easy on the eye. Well done, Bing, I think you are doing a good job. You are demonstrating that you are understanding your consumer and what is motivating (some) of them to use your decision making engine, and, how social media spaces can work hard for you: you don't have to drag people out of an environment that they are in anyway to make them consider and engage with your brand.
It will take a long time to shift people's behaviour from using Google as default, as there's many more of us using search than the was when the big shift from Yahoo search to Google happened in the late 1990's, but I feel compelled to encourage people to explore the search options available too us. There's more to search than the big G.

Google this, Bing that, Search Me

It's been a busier than average few weeks in the world of search engines.

With over 80% of web journeys starting with a search engine (according to some recent EIAA stats) , it's little wonder that in the last round of IAB/PWC figures that PPC / paid for search accounted for circa 60% of digital media spend in 2008. Success in search whether it's natural search rankings of paid for listings, is all about being at the top. Page position is everything.

Search is an interesting marketplace. Google has become a verb. But B.G (before Google), we all happily used Yahoo or Ask Jeeves, and before that those of us who've been navigating the interweb for over a decade can probably recall using AltaVista. Search wars are nothing new. They've just got a bit more interesting recently, as people try and challenge the dominance of the almighty G.

A few weeks back we saw the launch of Wolfram Alpha a "computational knowledge engine" that process queries and returns results in a very different way to Google. A simple search for "London Weather" in Wolfram Alpha gives me current weather across a range of metrics (pressure, dewpoint, temperature), details about the weather station used, graphed trends over time, whereas Google gives me a snapshot for the next few days and text links to the BBC and Met Office. WA has been called the search engine of choice for scientists and techies. I like it. For certain searches I will almost certainly use it over Google because I get a more holistic view of related information and answers in easy to process format. Try it.

Last week saw the much discussed launch of Bing, the latest incarnation of search offering from Microsoft. Although they are positioning it as a "decision engine" rather than a search engine. It's visually arresting without question, with big beautiful pictures that change everyday, and the reason we're all supposed to love it is because it's taking a "vertical" approach to search so that we get actual results relating to our searches (e.g integrated price comparison results) that we can interact with without leaving the search results page. Full functionality on this level hasn't hit the UK yet but most of the reviews I've read seem quite positive, and I do rather like the fact that video search results auto-play in the results page when you hover over them, which plays nicely into that notion of content snacking and removes the frustration of you ending up on a click-chase to find the content you were actually looking for.

But the fact remains that in the time-stretched world we live in, we're creatures of habit and it's going to take a lot of motivation and perceived benefit to convince the masses to shift from the habitual Google search to trying something new and getting used to processing the results in different ways. I hope the media buzz does succeed in convincing people to try it though. It's healthy to have a competitive marketplace.

For me search-wars don't stop there either. Visual search is going to play a big part of the future. Younger generations process information in increasingly visual ways rather than the text-based world I grew up in. So why wouldn't they want search results presented in the same way? More and more kids start their information searches with YouTube, not Google.

I increasingly play with Search Me, I like the interface and the way it presents results. Like Bing, I can get an at-a-glance view of results that enable me to judge much more quickly whether a suggestion is what I am looking for or not.

Mobile search is going to get bigger and bigger as penetration of smartphone continues to grow rapidly and the networks facilitate mobile web use via sensible data packages that remove the barrier of un-predictable pain in the wallet. Image recognition based search apps like Kooaba and SnapTell might still be relatively fledgeling but the potential of this for consumers and marketers alike fills me with excitement.

But search engines still only reach the consumer actively seeking information, and there are times when brands need to interrupt people to get their message across, so getting overly-obsessed with search engine marketing would be potentially missing the chance to talk to lots of potentially valuable prospects, via paid for advertising or deeper consumer connections created in a myriad of ways.

So challenge yourself, go play, there's much more to search than Google if you can be bothered to try.