Jul 02

Genuine's Justin on the MTV VMA Tour

Congratulations to Genuine rockstar, Justin, whose band, The Hollow Sound, just won a spot on the MTV Video Music Awards Tour. We hope Justin gets famous enough to have a E! True Hollywood Story made about him while still having time to produce stellar video edits with the Motion team here @ Genuine. And when he does go "Axl Rose crazy" on us all - we at least would like to partake in destroying a hotel room or two with him.

Tags: the hollow sound

Jun 22

An Open Letter to XBOX

Dear XBOX,

I'm getting tired of holding my Wii controller.

I'd definitely rather hold nothing than hold my Wii controller. That would free up my hands for more important things - like a Toasted Almond bar or a ChocoTaco. Also, I’m tired of leaving my living room to shop, meet with friends and exercise. Is there anything you can do that would help me stay homebound and still free up my hands for snacking?

Also, all this typing all day is getting old. (OMG...so true) My 5 year goal is to be able to work here at Genuine and conduct meetings without putting down a snack over an 8 hour period.

Lastly, in certain public bathrooms that DON’T have auto water sensors I am confused as to what I need to do. I wave my hands under the faucet yet water STILL won’t come out. And don’t get me started about towel dispensers without sensors.

If you guys can think of anything that would help me out I might be willing to pay $199 for it.

Regards,

Chris Pape

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------

From: Bill [mailto:bill@xbox.com]

Sent: Monday, June 22, 2009 8:05 AM

To: Chris Pape

Subject: RE: Dear XBOX

Dear Chris,

We hear ya. See below.

Bill

Tags: xbox, next generation of interaction

Augmented Reality | Gaming

Jun 10

Augmented Reality: Integrating Your Consumer with Your Brand.

Augmented reality is a technology that blurs the lines between virtual reality (computer generated) and the real-world (you, not the show). It has been around for a few years now, but only recently made a push into digital marketing. Car manufacturers such as Nissan, MINI and Toyota, were quick to use augmented reality capabilities to show off their new models. We’ve also seen baseball cards, t-shirts mashed up with Twitter, drum kits, movie trailers, music videos, and of course more advertising care of GE Smart Grid.

Augmented reality is still in its infancy and there hasn’t been too much actual and practical commercial use for this technology. That is, until the USPS: Priority Mail Virtual Box Simulator. This augmented reality simulation allows a user to see the different flat-rate shipping boxes in 3D. So there are practical uses for augmented reality – and for brands looking to let the consumer connect with their brands in a different way this technology has great potential.

The creative applications are limitless. In fact, you can even make an augmented reality 3D version of your logo as a shameless self promotion. We did.

Try it out. Here’s how it works:

Print this Genuine Interactive augmented reality marker (I promise it won’t bleed all your black ink).
Turn on your webcam and then click here to launch the flash player.
Finally, hold the marker in front of the webcam to see the Genuine Interactive cube live in your desk. All the kids want the cube!

Tags: augmented reality, self promotion, world domination

Augmented Reality

Jun 04

Bing is here, but are people really going to stop using Google?

Earlier this week Bing, Microsoft’s self-proclaimed “decision engine”, was released. Bing is Microsoft’s latest (and may be last) attempt at becoming a viable player in the search engine market. At press time, Coremetrics reports that Google has 63% of the search marketing while Yahoo! (20%) and the old MSN Live (8%) are getting further and further behind.

Bing is a bit different for a search engine. For starters, Bing attempts to make sense of a mish-mash of random content for users by grouping like content into categories and presents the data for the user to navigate. A search for “baseball” will result in your expected standard search rankings with mlb.com on the top of the list. The categorization is on the left as Bing presents categories as it relates to baseball – baseball equipment, baseball teams, baseball tickets, etc. It’s not a perfect system, but interesting nonetheless, and for some users this guided search navigation is a new thing.

Where Bing really excels is with shopping searches. Search for “cell phone” and the user can navigate further to search phones by brand or by price levels. Sure navigated grouping features have been done before, (Home Depot does it great) but Bing is the new kid on the search block - not to be confused with the five now fully-grown men - and there’s an audience of users that’ll be seeing navigated search for the first time and I’m thinking they’ll like it.

On contrary, if I have to pick one of the more frustrating components with Bing it’s the annoying flyout that appears when you hover your mouse over the right-side of an ‘ organic ‘ ranking in Internet Explorer, which ironically happens to also be owned by Microsoft. For starters, there really isn’t that much valuable information presented in these annoying flyouts, although one guy thinks its Freakin Amazing, and if I’m a user and I’m moving my mouse over to the right side of the page, something has caught my eye and I’m probably not interested in the content presented in the organic rankings. I don’t know… maybe I’m interested in reading and/or clicking on one of the PAID SPONSORED ADS in the right column. Are you reading this Microsoft???

Bing used in IE makes it extremely frustrating for users to click on a paid ad if it’s not ranked within the top two positions. So I predict this flyout feature will not only annoy users, but online marketers will notice considerably fewer clicks and decreased click-through rates as they’re normally accustomed to in Google and Yahoo!… and not to mention potential lost revenue to Microsoft. Again, are you reading this Microsoft???

In summary, Bing is new, Bing is a bit different, and Bing is at least worth trying out. But Bing has a lofty hill to climb if it plans to try and wrestle away even some of Google’s stranglehold on the juicy search engine market share.

Tags: bing, pay-per-click advertising, ppc, search engine, nkotb

Search Engine News

May 08

Should I Twitter? Yes, You Probably Should.

Unless you've been stranded on a deserted island with a volleyball named Wilson for the past year, you're probably familiar with Twitter. I don’t think I need to detail what Twitter is and does, but in order to fill up this blog post with SEO rich content, I’m going to anyways. If you are indeed familiar with what Twitter is and does, please skip the next paragraph.

Twitter started as an online dialog and communication application where users connect and repeatedly share short answers, known as tweets, to the question "What Are You Doing?" in an informal and instant manner. The Twitter community has since opened the line of interpretation to the "What Are You Doing?" question. Today, the Twitter community regularly shares information about just about anything - “What’s cool?”, “What’s not cool?”, “What number am I thinking of now?” – it’s all on Twitter. Basically, if people have something on their mind, they’ll share it on Twitter.

Now back to the original reason why you are reading this: Should I Twitter? Yes, you probably should. And you have think beyond using Twitter just to tell your buddies you're hungry and what you’re going to eat for dinner. There are real business opportunities using Twitter.

For one, Twitter is absolutely exploding with new members. Let me repeat that – Twitter is ABSOLUTELY EXPLODING WITH NEW MEMBERS! In March 2009, Twitter had a growth of 1382% according to a Nielsen.com blog ranking the fastest-growing sites in the Member Communities category for February 2009. There’s an audience for just about everything on Twitter.

And if sheer volume of members isn’t enough, it was announced this week that Twitter Search is not only going to index and rank tweets in their search ranking results, but Twitter will also index and rank the links to the content within the tweets in their search results. Twitters’ search results will be one step closer to a search engine serving real-time information. If something’s being tweet-ed, especially something very 'now' and very topical, you will not only be able to search for but also find plenty of open dialog about that topic on Twitter - and in real time. Take that Google!

If you have brief newsworthy information to share and want to share it right now, Twitter allows you to both collect a captive audience and also provide an outlet to get your message out to the masses, fast.