Interesting move by Google as blogged on the Wall Street Journal on Friday.  They’re running tests of a new ad format in the US which is focused around product and pricing.  Commission based, rather than classic CPC, they definitely seem to be mixing thing up!

Google to Test New Product Ads on Prize Real-Estate

Kenneth

This is simply brilliant.  Although some of the peeps in the office thought it was somewhat staged (poss an understatement!), its still a very interesting watch. In a nutshell, Peter Molyneux (the infamous game designer who brought us Populous II and Theme Park in the 90’s) demos Project Natal.  Project Natal is the code name for a “controller-free gaming and entertainment experience” which has been developed for the Xbox 360.  Its all about 3D motion capture, facial / voice recognition and a huge leap forward in human / game interaction.  In this demo, Peter introduces you to “Milo” …

Enjoy!

Peter Molyneux Project Natal E3 2009

Kenneth

The Rasmussen brothers, who brought us Google Maps back in 2005, have been keeping themselves very busy over the past couple of years. Last Thursday they presented the fruits of their labour to 4,000 developers attending the Google I/O developer conference in San Francisco.

This was the early unveiling of their open source “personal communication and collaboration tool”, Google Wave. Built on the principle that email is out dated and that our current communication methods are disconnected and inefficient, Google Wave has been developed to bring it all together. The idea is that email, IM, photo/rich media sharing and collaborative document editing is combined in one concurrent conversation contained in the Google Wave interface. Also a publishing tool, Wave can simultaneously embed these conversations, or ‘waves’ in other web services, to instantly build blogs and discussion groups for example.

Key to all this is the ‘wave’ itself. Simply put, a wave is a centrally shared message that can involve any number of participants. Everyone on the wave can use richly formatted text, photos, gadgets, and even feeds from other sources on the web in their conversations. All participators can insert a reply or edit the wave directly, and because there is only one version of the wave, concurrent edits can be made and observed live by all participants. And if that sounds like it could get messy, a nifty “playback” function means any additions or edits to a wave can easily be unravelled, reconstructing the message to show how it evolved.

Packed full of features, Google Wave is a powerful demonstration of what is now possible within the browser. Based on the design principle that “the product of the wave is as important as the wave itself”, sourcing, adding and publishing content has never been easier: Functions like desktop drag and drop and integration with other web based communication systems are provided, making communication and collaboration as efficient as possible.

Google has designed Wave with a rich set of open APIs that will allow developers to build extensions that work within Wave, and to imbed waves in web-pages. Encouraging innovative Wave applications is a key part of the plan to make Wave the next generation communication tool. And now that the system has been opened up to 4,000 developers, we can expect plenty more before its launch later this year.

See Google Wave in action: http://wave.google.com/

Simon

Found this interesting little experiment which allows you to enter your search term and shows you the results from three search engines (Google, Yahoo and Bing - Microsoft’s proposed new “Google Killer”).  The clever thing is that it does not show you which engine provided you with which results until you vote for the column that best matches your search query.

BlindSearch

Have fun!

Kenneth

New Media Age

EasyCar has launched its first mobile site as it looks to capitalise on holidaymakers renting cars overseas.

Simon O’Flynn, a freelance consultant for easyCar, said, “Some of our customers don’t have access to a PC while they’re on holiday abroad.

So rather than just launch a standard mobile site, we wanted something that enabled customers to hire a car once they were on holiday.”

The mobile site enables users to search, book and pay for car hire. They can access the site by entering the URL into a mobile browser or texting ‘easycar’ to a shortcode to receive an SMS message which includes the link to the site.

EasyCar, which worked with platform provider Handy Group, is considering offering its mobile service to other travel organisations. O’Flynn said it may also sell ads across the site as traffic grows.

EasyCar’s digital agency TBG London will handle online and mobile campaigns to support the launch.