There is now no doubt that we are in the early part of a massive shift in the culture of Australia.

We are about to become a fully integrated YouTube society.

For a lot of people this will not be apparent for possibly several years. By that time the momentum will be sufficient that many marketers and PR people will not be able to get their clients and employers onto the bandwagon.

The amazing thing is that this revolution is being led by the mainstream political parties in Australia. First the Liberals with 4 major policy statements being announced by our Prime Minister, John Howard, on YouTube.

Then, the launch yesterday of the Kevin07 website. Laden with video - that is also on YouTube - it, together with the PM, is setting the pace for communications this spring in Australia as we head into a Federal Election.

At the same time there are new websites in the process of coming onstream like www.federalelection.com.au. The goal of this one is to provide the total forum for debate in the coming months. A site where all parties and candidates can be presented side by side. Great idea. Not sure if they are going to be able to make it the commercially viable success they would like as rapidly as they would like. We shall see.

What I find amazing is that this sea change to our culture. Because this is as big as when TV became the debating platform in the US. And Richard Nixon became 'Tricky Dicky' because under the powerful TV lights his 12 0'clock shadow made it look like he wasn't clean. Or prior to that when Eisenhower used TV to advertise in his presidential campaign. These were firsts.

Now in Australia we will have the first true YouTube election anywhere in the world. It stands to be a bell weather that campaigners in the US and UK will watch and use to avoid mistakes. And it should also set some examples for how we can expect corporations to get their marketing messages through to us in coming years.

(By the way, at Vquence we are starting to realize that the tools that we have been developing that enable us to rapidly crawl video hosting sites and monitor changes in near real time also provide us with a huge amount of raw data that can be massively valuable to companies that want to play in this space.)

Advertising

Got game

Jun 7th 2007
From The Economist print edition

Inserting advertisements into video games holds much promise

THEY are known to television executives as the “Lost Boys”—the generation of video-gaming young men who are watching less television and, thanks to ad-skipping technologies such as TiVo, even fewer advertisements. The obvious response is to start putting advertisements into games instead, by incorporating billboards into the game environment, for example. But incorporating static advertisements into games is unsatisfactory. Now that most PCs and a growing number of games consoles are connected to the internet, however, it is possible to update advertisements when required. As a result, static in-game advertisements are now giving way to dynamic adverts, which accounted for $26m of the $76m spent on in-game advertising last year, and will account for 55% of the $182m spent this year, says the Yankee Group, a consultancy.

One of the interesting little bits of trivia about the record, "High Voltage' is that it was not on the album called, "High Voltage".

I remember suggesting to George and Harry, and the band, that we call the first AC/DC album, "High Voltage". Which we did. The band really liked the title, so they wrote a song by that name. But by the time they had recorded it, we had the album in production in Australia and had already gone gold, and were on the way to going platinum.

But we were two singles into the album and didn't feel like we had a third, and George and Harry were keen to get High Voltage out, because it really rocked and sounded so fresh. Michael Browning, the band's manager, wanted the song out too, because the band were playing it live and it was going down a storm.

So we took what I believe is an unprecedented step. We released a single with the same title as an album, without the single being on the album of the same name. No one in their right mind would do that today.

And what happened was wonderful.

The album had done about 75 or 80 thousand copies in Australia at the time we put the single out. It flew up the charts and helped drive album sales of the album of the same name, without the single on it, to over 120,000 copies. (I remember it like yesterday!) And no one complained!

In fact when the next album came out - I think it was "Dirty Deeds..." which did feature the single, that album took off at a fantastic rate....

I think it is all about the power of doing what feels right at the time. And of course having a hot band helps!

"This is a discussion of the eight realities of technology and social experience that are shaping the world of today's teens and twenty-somethings.

It looks at the growing role of technology in teens' lives, the way they use their gadgets, their expectations about how to find and use information, and the social consequences of their use of technology."

by Lee Rainie Director, Pew Internet & American Life Project

I'm with VQUENCE and am always intrigued by the machinations of GoogleTube here on the BBC.

I had an opportunity to meet Guy KAWASAKI last week at an AMCHAM event in HK.

 

An Apple Fellow, and now MD at Garage Technology Ventures www.garage.com , Guy makes for a compelling funny and pithy speaker.

 

I got talking to him about VQUENCE and his main comment was show people what a vquence is and also – so when do you ship ?

 

He sent me a copy of his ppt. centered around his latest book ‘The Art of the Start’ and I managed to get a picture with him “advertising” VQUENCE.

 

In conclusion he told us to 'kick butt' and after reading our white paper said " ..I could make the case that it's a very valuable service for people who are pushing out video. "

 

He also mentioned a neat company called iStockphoto.com which he is mentioning around on his travels - it's cool .

The rising popularity of user-driven online services, including MySpace, Wikipedia, and YouTube, has drawn attention to a group of technological developments known as Web 2.0.

These technologies, which rely on user collaboration, include Web services, peer-to-peer networking, blogs, podcasts, and online social networks.

Respondents to a recent McKinsey survey show widespread but careful interest in this trend.

They say that Web 2.0 technologies are strategic and that they plan to increase these investments. But companies aren’t necessarily relying on the best-known Web 2.0 trends, such as blogs; instead, they place the greatest importance on technologies that enable automation and networking.

See pdf. attached

Popular photo-sharing site Flickr has announced plans to launch a version in the Chinese language.

The move from Yahoo-owned Flickr is part of its attempts to localise and increase the accessibility of its websites, especially in Asia.

It's no surprise we like video. It's the future. So good news. Today we announce a heavyweight contender launching into the video arena. We know it remakes content on the web. Why? Chris Gilbey founded it with a very fine technology thinker, Silvia Pfeiffer.

The company went public today in Sydney and Santa Monica. Read the release. Remember the name.


Sydney, Australia/Santa Monica,Ca

Australian start up video search, socialization and advertising company, Vquence, commences business today at the heart of the Internet hotspot, video, promising to remake the web experience.

“The Internet is now driven by video. The video quotient of any business or consumer communication: the VQ:is becoming the key factor of success” said co-founder and CEO, Chris Gilbey,

“Vquence helps solve revenue problems for content owners. We make finding videos easy for consumers. We hasten content distribution.”

Vquence provides a one stop shop for content owners to monetize video to consumers under one seamless umbrella. Vquence has a patent pending for an instantaneous approach to clickable video.

“Vquence’s technology and business model turn today’s video assets and costs into online reach and revenue. Consumers, publishers and content owners are united by Vquence” Gilbey noted.

The basis of Vquence is a technology leading video search engine. Users easily discover relevant video content. An authoring toolset then permits easy creation of a playlist of thin sliced videos (or ‘vquence’). The vquence is presented through a specialised video player. This playlist will play in any Web page. Users can cut and paste the code for their vquence into a blog or web page. Dynamic insertion by Vquence places ads into the vquence, based on relevance.

“Vquence boosts social networks.” Gilbey said, adding “Consumers find and aggregate video, then share it widely. They get paid. Content creators and publishers are rewarded from embedded ads in the vquences their communities share.

Initial seed funding to establish Vquence came from Information City Australia Limited, a Melbourne innovation incubator.

“This changes the market dynamic. Consumers become legitimate distributors of the video asset rather than pirates. In contrast, old school DRM brakes distribution” Gilbey said, continuing:

“Vquence gives consumers the ability to opt in or out of ads. Advertisers are getting smarter and making their messages more personal. Passive consumers no longer exist. It’s a community driven outlook now – with the emergence of almost a hive mind. The wisdom of crowds is a powerful market force.”

Vquence was formed in July 2006 by Gilbey and Dr Silvia Pfeiffer, a former CSIRO research scientist. Gilbey is a long time entrepreneur in the content and technology arenas, a former CEO of Lake Technology who consulted to Dolby Laboratories for two years on a global basis.

Dr Pfeiffer is a leading authority on Digital Media Analysis. During a seven year stint at CSIRO she led the team that developed Annodex, an open source platform for video distribution, and her continuing research over the last decade has deepened industry’s understanding of how to apply algorithms to analyse and mediate video content.

“Vquence takes the World Wide Web immeasurably closer towards a Web of Videos, where people build communities around video content published anywhere on the Web. But, uniquely, Vquence guarantees the original content owner will not lose an audience or their content.” Dr Pfeiffer noted.

“Video is the centre of the internet’s next big leap forward. Vquence will be one of the key accelerators.” Pfeiffer said.

The Vquence R&D team is internationally spread and headquartered in Sydney. The company expects to announce a slate of initial customers that includes media and content companies in both the US and Australia.

“Vquence lets consumers click through video and go beyond. Previously, all you could do was click to a video. Vquence is transformational. Vquence gives media publishers the powerful tools of comprehensive, easy search of all their video assets, and then super-distribution.” Dr Pfeiffer concluded.

About Vquence. Vquence is a video search, socialization, and advertising company that has a comprehensive model of monetizing video for content owners to consumers. Demonstrations of the technology are being conducted under NDA. The Vquence website has more information on the company. www.vquence.com. The company has offices in Sydney Australia and Santa Monica Ca.

McDonald's taps into "you" craze.

The move by the world's biggest restaurant chain to feature customers on its packaging is the latest proof of the importance marketers are placing on so-called user-generated content like the homemade videos and blogs that rule the Internet on sites such as social network MySpace and Google Inc.'s video-file sharing site YouTube.

"People are really interested in reality," McDonald's Chief Marketing Officer Mary Dillon said in an interview, pointing to the rise in popularity of reality television shows. "It's about real people connecting with our brand."

"They've really tried to be on the cutting edge of change and the cutting edge is viewed as user-generated content," said Mark DiMassimo, chief executive of New York-based ...   more »