Speeh to text and Voice Tweeting: The next big thing?

Voice recognition has been in the human imagination since the advent of modern computers. In the early days of personal computers, where computing power started to become stronger and faster, the expectations that humans would be able to speak to computers has come in and out of popularity. Shows like the Jetsons, with talking robots and flying cars only served to cement this idea.

Thirty years later...were getting closer to that dream.

Speech recognition technology has been developing since the early 1970's ,and with every new year the technology becomes a little better.

So much better, that new net apps are popping up such as ShoutOut and Dragon that translate your speech into text messages, so you no longer have to fiddle around on your keypad to send a text. And it keeps on getting better, you can even start surfing the net with your voice .

Let say you want a review on a restaurant on robson. You just lift up your shiny little iPhone and say "yelp dot com sloppy joe's restaurant review Vancouver" and your good to go!

The speech trend has even been moving forwards with a popular Indian social media site called
"Bubbly". Bubble already has over 100 million users and is essentially like Twitter, where users can send a small voice message up to a minute long to subscribers. The end users decides to whether or not to accept the message and pays for the airtime of the call if accepted.

Media Networks in India, such as BBC, are even beginning to sign on to the Social Media site's network and is experimenting with it as a way of disseminating information.

Bubbly monetizes its services by creating a revenue sharing partnership with telecoms and is very lucrative in India where access to a cell phone is much more common then the internet.

So keep your eyes open, this might be your new twitter or facebook.

Nestle social media kerfuffle

The Empire Strikes Back: Google Pulls Censors in China

A few months ago, in a land far far away, a corporate empire was locked in a heated battle over the freedom of the minds of the middle kingdom with the Chinese Rebel Army.

Ho ho!

But no really, on a more serious note.

Google entered the Chinese market in 2005 with its own specific .cn domain name to service the Chinese market of 2968 million, almost more than the entire US population. Before the google .cn domain was available, Chinese internet users had access to the American google.com domain, however most of its content was unavailable due to censorship.

To remedy this situation, Google made a deal with the devil and compromised on its "don't be evil" motto and replaced it with a "there is an evil scale, allowing smaller evils for a greater good"


So this all went nice and swell for the next of couple of years, and google settled on a 30% market share of the Chinese market against competitor Baidu.com

....until..

China pushed too hard!!

The Chinese government got caught with their pants down and their hands in the cookie jar,attempting to hack into the Google gmail accounts of human rights activists.

After a maelstrom of controversy from all sides and speculation for months Google pulled the plug on its censors on google.cn and redirected all traffic to its google,hk.com website.

So the big question is, what does this mean to e-commerce world?

Well for starters, if or when the Chinese government decides to ban google, from operating in China, it will send a chilly message to other western companies operating in China, that China is may not be a safe place to invest in despite its huge potential. This is cherry on top with, other popular websites such as Facebook, Twitter and Youtube already being blocked.

With an internet user market that is predicted to outstrip the American internet market in the near future, the Chinese market does present itself as having huge potential for revenue and will likely change the face of the internet in the future.

Social Media for Bettering Society: Kiva.org

Preamble

In my short life, I feel like I've been a pretty lucky guy. Grew up in a nice neighborhood, nice home cooked meals everyday, roof under my head, good friends, and hey, even a few nice girls.
Growing up in all this wealth gotta make you wonder how you ever got to be in the place you are. My personal belief is that it's the community, friends and family that has gotten me this far and let enjoy all these nice things in life.

Basically, it's people. Kinda of makes you want to give back a bit, doesn't it?

So I look around me, and well...I won't lie, it seems like we got a lot of bases covered here in Canada. So I apply my awesome commerce degree and put my head to the grinding stone.

Charities: egh..give poor incentives, and you never quite know how your hard earned dollars are being spent

Community Work: Third World Countries are too far away

The answer?
My friends, I present to you the lovely www.kiva.org.
Kiva.org applies the concepts of Micro Financing first pioneered by Nobel prize winner Mohammed Yunus is the basic of idea giving poor people small loans so they can help themselves out of poverty and work towards self-sufficiency.

This idea was first practiced through physical banks, but with the advent of the internet and social media, things changed.

Before Kiva, it was very difficult if not impossible for an individual to make a loan to another in need. This was because of the high risk, the limited access to reliable information, the high costs and most glaringly the lack of an institution.Kiva used Social Media to enable thousands of donors to organize into a cohesive entity to help support and fund third world entrepreneurs through safe, small, and trusted means.With their innovative web out lay, they created a community that competes in donations and tracks all of your donations against those of others. Furthermore, users can independently customize there searches for who they would like to fund, based on gender, country, and more.


So, if you ever feel like throwing in your two bits, check this site out

http://kivaworld.com/

http://www.kivadata.org/

A Fistful Of Dollars: The Story of a Kiva.org Loan from Kieran Ball on Vimeo.

"Content Curation": Whaaaa?

The blogosphere is abuzz with the newest upcoming prediction for web trends in 2010...

To get to the point.

A 'curator', as my friend dictionary.com defines it, is "the person in charge of a museum, art collection, etc"...and in the case of the web as we see it today, a content curator, in a nut shell, cuts the crap.

With the advent and growing trend of web 2.0, we see millions of status updates, a bazillion tweets a second, thousands of videos being uploaded on to Youtube every second. The volume of information that is being thrown on the web user is out pacing our ability to consume it.
People are putting too much useless garbage on the net! (not that the net can't handle it)
With scarce time resources, users must find a way to find the most pertinent, useful, and perhaps even the most hilarious information they are seeking.

So how will a solution to this come about you ask?

Let me first define the term content curator more specifically, this time using the words of social media blogger Rohit Barhgava, "A Content Curator is someone who continually finds, groups, organizes and shares the best and most relevant content on a specific issue online."

Rohit, seems to believe this content curator will be a single person, however I'm putting my money on our algorithms and crowd sourcing techinques of digg and stumbleupon. And as expected, even google has it feet in its newest product google social search!

Predict the Future with Crowd Sourcing: Online Prediction Markets

Ever wonder how that big election will turn out? Or who will be the next big American idol star?

With the power of crowd sourcing, an innovative website has created an online predictions market that predicts events with surprising accuracy.
A early innovator of web 2.0 ideals, 'intrade.com' supplies questions to large crowds to predict the outcome of many events ranging from presidential elections to climate changes. This is all powered by a market style process where a set of 'shares' for a event are issued and members bid real money on the likelihood of the event occurring.

If the crowd believes the event will occur people will pay more money for a share of the stock and if the event seems unlikely to occur people will pay less for a share of the event. The value of a share is between 0 and 100, where 0 is completely unlikely and 100 is completely certain.

An interesting example was during the American Elections for President Obama, where intrade successfully predicted a victory for Obama over Mccain over the course of the the 2007-2008 campaign.

So next time you just gotta know...check it at intrade

Facebook Tops Google in Hits, but struggles in translating into Revenue♦

With over 400 million users, Facebook topped Google last week for the third time this year in the number of visitors of all US internet visits.

Facebook garnered 7.07% of all US internet visits for the week ending March 13th.

However, comparing a social media site against a search engine are two very different things. Had Yahoo sneaked past Google this week in the number of hits in the US, it would have been much bigger news.

To put it into perspective, Google's gross revenue last year was 6.67 Billion dollars where as Facebook's revenue was estimated to be around $700 million last year. According to one market analyst Facebook's inability to create large revenue stream is due to its inability to move from a entertainment and communications site into a more "practical website that offer utility to end-users".

Yet where Facebook lacks in revenue it more than makes up for it in potential. With a rapid growth rate and innovative history Facebook is far from down and out.