Fresh Takes on Innovation

If you have no clue what twitter is, don’t worry. It is quite a recent habit. To tweet or to use twitter is to send a very short message (a maximum of 140 signs, actually) to other people, giving some valuable information. Other people can follow you on twitter and see what information you have to share.

It is that shortness of the message that makes twitter so intreaguing to me. You have to be very precise and short to sum up your thoughts in a nice, round and attractive message. It’s like creating the perfect headline for a newspaper: A fun challenge. The better you do it, the more people will crave your tweets!

A good post on twitter is considered to contain some valuable bit of information with a link or an image. Some people say that twitter is “micro-blogging”, others just want to share their thoughts and feelings, and most professionals who have knowledge about a certain topic use it to get the word out about their skills. Go to www.twitter.com if you want to try it out, it is free and easy.

As twitter is becoming one of the most interesting “social media” tools and a great way to share information quickly with others, companies start looking for people who know how to use twitter. Pizza Hut, for instance, is hiring a “Twintern” (twitter intern) to bring the Pizza chain up to scratch with the new social media age. Great idea!

(Pizza Hut story via Braden Kelley)

Twitter related, check out these two useful tools: Tweetdeck, Friend or Follow.

If knowledge is power, personal newsfeeds are your weapons. A newsfeed customized to your information needs allows for professional news monitoring and information retrieval like previously only news services and professional communication agencies could.
If for instance you wished to be constantly informed about your clients, suppliers and competitors, then an aggregated newsfeed could be an interesting solution for you.

In the following example I’ve combined selected data sources to process them with different methods. Eventually the outcome is a helpful aggregated idea-feed.

This is comparable with the concept of a search engine: finding what one is looking for via queries from any number of sources. So instead of constantly dealing with complicated Google scanning on a certain subject, you can continually inform yourself of a predefined field.

In this aggregated newsfeed example, articles of selected sources on the subjects of trends, ideas, innovation and future are displayed on a daily basis. For instance, you can subscribe to the Yahoo! Pipes aggregated feed as badge for iGoogle or Netvibes.

The Internet includes an elusive quantity of information. If we visited each existing URL on the Internet for only 10 seconds, we would be busy doing so for roughly 317,098 years.

Google and Yahoo search engines let you browse through this enormous amount of information as quick as lightning. And by using social bookmarking service providers such as Mister Wong and Delicious clever discoverers can find the information looked for in no time.

Based on a content analysis of social bookmark service providers, I have listed and summarized the most interesting websites on the subject of ideas, trends and future in a Google Custom Search. That is about the same as analyzing how many guests go to which restaurants. The best results however are not compiled in a list but in a search engine based on Google’s technology!

The result is a niche search engine to track trends, future and innovative ideas!

I suggest you begin searching for new business trends right away or start your discovery of exciting ideas from a land faraway.

Niche Search Engine to Track Trends, Future and Innovative Ideas:

Custom Search

For more informations see:
- We knew the web was big…
- Google Custom Search Blog

Players of PMOG, a multiplayer game grafted onto the normal experience of browsing the Web, get a profile on the PMOG site, shown above. The site tracks their equipment in the game, their list of allies and rivals, and their progress making and taking missions, which are interactive tours through the Internet that can earn points.

To get started, players download a toolbar. When they log in to PMOG, software tracks the sites that they visit, and gives them points for each unique URL they visit within a 24-hour period. Then they can create and take missions. For example, a PMOG player might visit the homepage for the forthcoming Batman movie, The Dark Knight, and find a pop-up from a fellow player inviting him to learn about the history of Batman. If the player elects to follow the mission, a series of pop-up windows would lead him through sites where he might, for example, view cover art from the Batman comic books, read trivia on the Batman TV series, and view information about the making of the new film. At each site, he’d find pop-up windows displaying notes written by the mission creator, perhaps giving additional background on the site, telling a story, or leaving clues to a puzzle.

Suddenly the Internet is not a series of untouchable exhibits, but rather a hackable, rewarding environment!

Start now: http://pmog.com

The city of Solothurn is an inconspicuous small Swiss town and within easy biking distance from the BrainStore headquarters in Biel. To explore it, Brains (as the employees of BrainStore are called) can from now on leave their bikes in the garage. Taking a tour on www.touchtown.ch comes as close as one get to actually strolling downtown Solothurn on a sunny day!

Using the latest image-rendering technology this virtual tour is nothing like you have experienced before: it does not only allow city strollers to enjoy every corner of Downtown Solothurn by the clicks of your mouse – no – it takes you inside many shops, bars, restaurants, hotels and even churches!

If you are planning a stay in town or an evening out, this website constitutes a real and valuable innovation: before you make your reservations you can check out the restaurant or the hotel of your choice and decide on your favourite room and table.

This Pipe takes the BrainStore Blog, passes it thru a Content Analysis and uses the keywords to find Photos at Flickr for Inspirations. The photos appear in date order.

Clone the “BrainStore Blog Inspiration” pipe and fit them to your interests. And even begin to use flickr.

Pipes is a free online service from yahoo that lets you remix popular feed types and create data mashups using a visual editor. You can use Pipes to run your own web projects, or publish and share your own web services without ever having to write a line of code. Learn more…

Referring to Jan’s article about the «Powershift to Creative People» I would like to go a little bit more into the Radiohead example he mentioned.

It’s not the first time that a music band gives its newly released hits as freebies to its fans using the latest available technology. By announcing that their 7th album will be available only as a digital download online for a price which the person downloading can decide him- or herself, Radiohead is offering a deal that is both innovative and interesting from a moral as well as an economic perspective.

The band obviously trusts the “invisible hand,” the self-regulatory forces of the market, to determine a fair price – an interaction between supply and demand or production value and perceived value. The band believes fans are willing to pay an appropriate fee for what the artistic performance is worth, and will therefore pay a fair price.

The economic point of view is very logical: the biggest revenue slice, based on past experience, will be the income from touring, merchandising, and copyright payments – taking this into consideration, the decision is therefore not that radical at all.

The innovative and interesting thing is the continuing change of the business model in the music industry. The self-distribution model could inspire other artists and hopfully enhance artistic liberty and creativity!

There are a lot of meta search engines out there. They look almost everywhere and return a mixed collection of results. Sputtr has another apporoach. Enter your search term, then choose where you want to search: Google, Delicious, Flickr, Digg, Youtube, Technorati… You get the search results directly on the chosen site.