Displaying posts tagged as "Google"

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Sweet Google Moog Doodle Recordings

In the mid-1960s, Dr. Robert Moog unleashed a new universe of sounds into musicdom with his invention of the electronic analog Moog Synthesizer. The timbre and tones of these keyboard instruments (true works of art in and of themselves) would come to define a generation of music, featuring heavily in songs by The Beatles, The Doors, Stevie Wonder, Kraftwerk and many others.

When people hear the word “synthesizer” they often think “synthetic”—fake, manufactured, unnatural. In contrast, Bob Moog’s synthesizers produce beautiful, organic and rich sounds that are, nearly 50 years later, regarded by many professional musicians as the epitome of an electronic instrument. “Synthesizer,” it turns out, refers to the synthesis embedded in Moog’s instruments: a network of electronic components working together to create a whole greater than the sum of the parts.

With his passion for high-tech toolmaking in the service of creativity, Bob Moog is something of a patron saint of the nerdy arts and a hero to many of us here. So for the next 24 hours on our homepage, you’ll find an interactive, playable logo inspired by the instruments with which Moog brought musical performance into the electronic age. You can use your mouse or computer keyboard to control the mini-synthesizer’s keys and knobs to make nearly limitless sounds. Keeping with the theme of 1960s music technology, we’ve patched the keyboard into a 4-track tape recorder so you can record, play back and share songs via short links or Google+.

Moog Doodle recording of ‘Daylight’ click the photo and you’ll be redirected to the tune.

Or, some Phantom of the Opera?

My personal favourite would have to be Rick Astley’s smash hit “Never Gonna Give You Up”.

 

Happy humpday and thanks to Google, and Moog – obviously :)

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Category: Apps, Design, Digital, Music, Online, Social Media, Video
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Google Launches ‘Google Drive’

We’ve heard the rumors for weeks, and seen leaked versions during an Android developer’s Google+ Hangout and in one employee presentation. But now Google Drive, Google’s 5GB cloud-storage service, is official.

Announced on the company blog Tuesday, the service will integrate with Google Docs and will allow you to access files from anywhere and collaborate on documents with colleagues.

Google Docs is built right into Google Drive, which means you can work with others in real time on documents, spreadsheets and presentations. Once you’ve shared content with someone else, you can add and reply to comments on anything (PDF, image, video file, etc.) and you’ll receive notifications when other people comment the items you’ve shared.

One interesting feature of the service is smart tagging, which allows you to tag items stored on your drive. So if you’ve uploaded a picture of the Golden Gate Bridge to your drive, the next time you perform a search for the bridge, your photo will show up along with other results.

Google Drive also uses image recognition — so if you drag and drop photos from your recent vacation into Drive, you can later search for locations you’ve visited and those photos will show up.

Using Optical Character Recognition (OCR) technology, Drive can also recognize text in scanned documents. That means if you’ve scanned in a page from an old book, for instance, you can search for words in that document.

When it comes time to access your files, the service can open a variety of different files types – 30 of them to be exact – within your browser, regardless of whether or not you have the required software installed. Supported file types include PDFs, HD video, and images from Illustrator and Photoshop.

You can install Drive on your Mac or PC , and use the service via an app on your Android phone or tablet. Google also has plans for an iOS app in the future. Blind users can access Drive with a screen reader.

Google is offering all users 5GB of storage on the service for free. If you need more than the 5GB, then it is offering several tiers of storage options.

You can choose to upgrade to 25GB for $2.49/month, 100GB for $4.99/month or 1TB for $49.99/month. When you upgrade to a paid account, your Gmail account storage also expands to 25GB.

You can check out Google Drive for yourself at the service’s brand-new homepage.

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Category: Apps, Online, Social Media
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3 Twitter Rumors and What They Could Mean for Brands

David Clarke is CEO and co-founder of BGT Partners, a 2010, 2011 and 2012 Ad Age Top 15 Best Places to Work in the U.S. honoree. BGT creates interactive marketing and technology solutions for global corporations that strengthen brands, develop more engaging relationships and transform businesses.

With increased competition for ad dollars, Twitter is making a big push this year to become more attractive to advertisers. It has invested in a redesign, as well as brand pages, but that may not be all the social network plans to unveil.

According to a recent Ad Age report, the company is looking to add new experiences to its platform, in the hopes that the move will entice brands to spend more ad dollars.

Although Twitter hasn’t officially confirmed these rumors, it’s worth taking them seriously. See below for the three possible changes, and what each could mean for brands.

1. Open Platform

Facebook and Apple transformed their businesses by opening their platforms to third-party developers. The move allowed independent developers to create new ways for consumers to engage with brands. As a result, we now have multi-million dollar businesses built around these apps.

 

If the rumors are right, Twitter is heading in the same direction by opening its platform to developers.

An open Twitter platform would allow brands to create deeper interactions with consumers through custom experiences. This would not only be an opportunity for developers, but also for brands — especially those with strong Twitter presences. For example, if you’re using Twitter as a customer service channel, then a customer service app could potentially streamline the way you handle customer support.

That said, apps on Twitter will face inherent challenges. The Twitter stream is the main attraction, and most people don’t visit brand pages directly. Plus, popular Twitter browsers such as TweetDeck and HootSuite are built around the Twitter stream, which deals another blow to the power of brand pages. Perhaps custom apps can find a way to drive more traffic to brand pages, but it seems doubtful.

2. T-Commerce

Social commerce was hailed as the next big thing in ecommerce. Several brands developed ecommerce integration on the Facebook platform, hoping people would want to purchase while on Facebook, but it never really took off. Gap, JC Penny, and Nordstrom closed down their Facebook shops because customers preferred to shop on the main websites. This probably had more to do with the poor Facebook ecommerce user experience than with Facebook itself. Most of these early f-commerce attempts were simply developed without an understanding of how Facebook could add value to the shopping experience.

 

Now, Twitter is rumored to try its luck with social ecommerce for brand pages. Will it be successful?

Fundamentally Twitter has to succeed where Facebook failed. Twitter ecommerce, or t-commerce, has to create a significant added value to make it more compelling than shopping from a traditional web store.

“It’s likely that Twitter’s ecommerce solution will include a deep integration with Square, the mobile payment company Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey established in 2009. It’s possible that t-commerce will be a mobile-only service that uses location-based technology and one-click payments with your Twitter name. That would add significant value to Twitter’s mobile user base, especially when you consider that 50% of Twitter’s users are accessing Twitter on mobile devices.

3. Contests and Sweepstakes

Lastly, Twitter is rumored to introduce contests and sweepstakes for brand pages to create deeper brand engagement. That said, brands have been pushing contests and sweepstakes on Twitter for some time, and given the viral capabilities available with retweeting and hashtags, it will continue to happen.

 

Will an official change by Twitter be groundbreaking? Probably not, but it’s likely that these changes will allow brands to more efficiently manage and execute campaigns on this social network.

From Mashable.com 

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Category: Apps, brands, Facebook, Online, Social Media, Twitter
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TRENDING: Twitter Rolls Out Promoted Tweets for Mobile

Twitter on Tuesday announced it was bringing Promoted Tweets to mobile devices.

The move, which Twitter had announced was coming last month, means Promoted Tweets will join Promoted Accounts on users’ mobile devices. Advertisers can also specify whether their Promoted Tweets will run on iOS, Android or other mobile platforms.

In a blog post, Twitter noted that the targeting is “great for brands who want to increase the prominence and reach of their message to a particular type of mobile user. For example, mobile game and app sellers can now pinpoint the users who are likely to purchase their products.”

Mobile users will see such tweets in the timelines of their iOS and Android Twitter apps. Promoted Tweets will appear in the timeline just once. The company claims that it will only display the Promoted Tweets in the timeline when they’re “relevant.” If the Promoted Tweet isn’t relevant, you can dismiss it from your timeline with a swipe.

Twitter was careful to note that as users scroll down their timelines, Promoted Tweets will flow with them. Users complained loudly when Twitter rolled out the “Quick Bar” — more commonly referred to as the “dickbar” — last March. The bar hovered at the top of screens as users scrolled, prominently displaying a rotating list of trends, including those paid for by sponsors. The Quick Bar was removed within a month of its release. The new version of Promoted Tweets for mobile appears to be Twitter’s more user-friendly compromise.

Twitter’s migration into mobile advertising comes as Facebook has also begun the process of integrating ads into its mobile apps.

Both are behind the curve compared to Google, which could see as much as $4 billion in revenues from mobile advertising in 2012, according to one analyst’s projection.

Advertising accounts for the bulk of Twitter’s revenues. The company generated $139.5 million in ad sales in 2011, according to estimates from eMarketer. Ad revenues are expected to grow 86.3% to $259.9 million this year.

Image courtesy of iStockphoto, ymgerman

By Mashable

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Category: Advertising, brands, marketing, Online, Social Media, Twitter
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The Restart Page is a walk down OS memory lane

There are lots of computer experiences that come and go. The apps, the bugs, the features… and they all fade away with time. But there’s one thing that’s burned indelibly in our memories: the restart screen. Just like holding a wife’s hand while she gives birth, this excruciating, drawn-out experience actually brought us closer to our machines — and we didn’t know it until The Restart Page let us play it all back, one OS at a time.

http://www.therestartpage.com/

From: http://www.theverge.com/2012/1/7/2690920/the-restart-page-is-a-walk-down-os-memory-lane

 

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Category: Llifestyle, Online, Social Media, Uncategorized
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Google glasses could revolutionize virtual ads

As a technology, the screen is sort of a kludge. It only works if you’re looking at it. For an advertiser, that’s just not good enough. If you’re out walking around, the screen on your desk or your console isn’t doing anything. The one on your phone is a little better, but not if it’s tucked away in your pocket.

That’s why the new glasses Google plans to begin selling by the end of the year are so promising. A built-in screen allows them to function as a so-called heads-up display, overlaying whatever the viewers is looking at with a digital layer. The glasses will be tricked out with a wireless internet connection, an Android operating system, motion sensors, GPS and a camera.They’ll also be rather ugly, apparently.

The glasses were developed by Google X, the blue-sky lab that focuses on ambitious projects that often seem more rooted in science fiction than in current reality. As such, there’s no business model to speak of, beyond selling them to consumers for a few hundred dollars.

Google being Google, however, you can be sure advertising will eventually enter into the picture, literally. And when it does, it will most assuredly be in the form of augmented reality. Google already incorporates AR in Google Goggles, a smart phone app that “uses image recognition technology to recognize objects and return relevant search results.” Those objects can include ads, which come alive when viewed through Goggles, as you can see in this demo.

So far, Google has only scratched the surface of the advertising potential here. That makes sense: How many times in your life are you actually going to point your phone at an ad?

Google glasses could change all that. Now the user doesn’t have to point his phone at an ad to activate the AR layer — he only has to look at it. Combine that with location data and all the other rich targeting information Google has at its disposal and you’re talking about potentially the most valuable advertising medium ever invented.

Imagine it: You’re walking home from work. You put on your Google Glasses to check your email and notice that the sushi place across the street, where you frequently go for takeout, is highlighted. In the window is a glowing icon that lets you know there’s a discount available. A tiny tilt of your head brings up the offer: 40% off any purchase plus free edamame. With a bit more tilting and nodding, you place your order. By the time you cross the street, it’s ready for you. Would you like to pay via Google Wallet?

You nod.

Note: from www.Forbes.com

 

 

 

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Category: Advertising, Design, Llifestyle, Online
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All that is important and matters…according to Google

Pretty basic concept. This is a guide to the year based on how the world search the internet.

Directed by Scott Chan of Whirled and set to the Mat Kearney song “Sooner or Later,” it features many of 2011′s biggest news stories, videos, obituaries and other viral content.

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Category: Llifestyle
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