The umobit diaries

RainToday.gr

2011-09-27T11:02:00.004+03:00

Raintoday.gr is the simplest and very likely the most reliable weather prediction site on-line. Its main purpose is answering the simplest question of all: "Will it rain today in my area?".
All you have to do is enter your location and there you go!
A fast, reliable prediction of today's weather conditions in your district.

Raintoday.gr combines data gathered from different sources in real time, regarding the weather conditions and weather prediction in your area. It compares, analyzes and matches them using grouping and geolocation algorithms for deciding whether it will rain in a specific geographical section or not.

Try it for your location!

Avenir Group Portal

2011-05-06T12:36:00.005+03:00

A new case study for Corporate Website development with Investor Relations portal integration. We designed and developed a higly functional, user friendly site, based upon the corporate identity’s specific needs which focuses on meeting the new trends worldwide for content optimization.

Avenir Group is listed in the Athens Stock Exchange and is active in the sectors of Fixed Odd Bets (land – based and online), Online Gaming & Gambling (online sportsbetting, live and RNG casino games) and Casinos on Board.

Quotting Avenir's Press Release:

"AVENIR Group presents its new website as a part of the new corporate identity which reflects a more contemporary and dynamic image. Furthermore, through state of the art web applications, the new website ensures maximum disclosure and transparency providing a totally friendly navigation environment.

The new website was designed and implemented by Umobit S.A. and is available since Thursday 05/05/2011, at the url: www.avenir.gr.

In consistency with the new brand name AVENIR, the new website reflects the ongoing modernization and development procedure of the group, fully adapted to both new business and technological developments.

The corporate identity and the latest developments of AVENIR Group are reflected from the very first page. On the Home page, visitors can be informed about the group’s latest news, the share price, the number and type of agents available and use of navigation tools (email page, print page, bookmarks, rss feed, email alert, etc.). There is a triple A (3A) Accessibility tool to help users with special needs and a file collector application that enhances navigation by collecting the files of one’s interest and gives the opportunity of massive storage to his computer. Through a totally friendly navigation environment, every visitor can have a complete update about the Group's strategy and vision, the principles of Corporate Responsibility and Corporate Governance which engage its corporate structure, Corporate Culture which inspires all employees, partners and it’s area of activities.

Detailed information is provided in the Investor Relations section in order to fully adapt the existing institutional framework and promote a two-way communication between the Group and the investment community as well as other interested parties and stakeholders. In this context, an analytical presentation of corporate governance structure, financial profile and financial statements, notes, annual financial reports, general meetings and a host of useful information is provided to investors through a user-friendly environment. There is a separate section with information regarding the company’s share through a dynamic comparative chart, stock performance calculators, historical price and dividend yield, economic calendar, and investor’s news.

The list of applications provided includes an interactive map of the Group’s geographical presence with detailed view of the Group’s agencies, RSS feeds for company news, investment news and new jobs available, a requesting form for printed material and subscription for automatic updates through email (email alert), a multimedia gallery and much more."

Intranet + Social Media = Intranet 2.0

2011-04-28T14:47:00.004+03:00

Social media on the intranet (Intranet 2.0) is not a passing trend that will fade away.

Consider the findings of the Intranet 2.0 Global Study:

87% of organizations have at least one intranet 2.0 (social media) tool
53% have intranet blogs (an 18% increase from last year’s survey)
52% have intranet discussion forums (a 13% increase from last year’s survey)
51% have intranet instant messaging (an 11% increase from last year’s survey)
49% have intranet wikis (a 4% increase from last year’s survey)

The impact on internal communications is potentially greater than the impact on IT, HR, and all of the other groups combined. Intranet social media is changing the way we communicate.

Social media has taken our personal lives by storm, but in the workplace, it’s often met with raised eyebrows, a little excitement, and a lot of caution. The perceived risks with adopting social media tools keep many organizations’ social media endeavors from ever getting off the ground. Luckily for you, knowing the right facts, case studies and other organizations’ success stories makes the task much less daunting.

Everybody loves to hate twitter

2010-01-08T07:05:00.002+02:00

Everybody loves to hate twitter!
I know I do!
I have been using twitter for quite a while and have experienced more sorrow than happiness.
For the last couple of months I have been trying to get hastags and searches to work correctly without any success! My twits seem to get lost in outer space! But I keep trying! And I keep twitting!

Today I came across an article called Why Twitter Will Endure.

I think it describes very vividly why people get addicted to twitter.

SEO for videos: the new challenge

2009-11-24T10:44:00.002+02:00

Google launched an automatic video captioning service for YouTube videos in an effort to make the visual clips more accessible to deaf people or anyone searching for videos online, but some see advantages for search engine optimization, too.

The machine-generated service will generate English-only captions initially on 13 partner channels. The service combines Google's automatic speech recognition (ASR) technology with the YouTube caption system to offer automatic captions.

The idea of video captioning is not new at YouTube, but the automatic feature could help to further optimize videos for people searching for content across engines and on YouTube. In theory, video scripts should become more optimized by the keywords in the captions. And while it's a great feature to make content more accessible for the deaf, other benefits exist for marketers.

Source: www.mediapost.com

The strange numbers of ad clicking!

2009-11-24T10:30:00.003+02:00

While looking around for a report on ad clicking and the habits of clickers, I came across one demonstrating some spectacular results! Basically, all of the clicks for all the ads online come from only 16% of the surfers, and most of them come from just 4% of all internet users.

Take a look at this report.

So, looking at it from a negative perspective, optimizing your content and ads for clicks you would actually be ignoring almost 84% of the population.

You might want to reconsider your ad politics...

Augmented Reality on iPhone

2009-09-14T11:10:00.001+03:00

French app developmer PresseLite have built the first Augmented Reality (AR) supporting iPhone app live in the iTunes store. It's called Metro Paris Subway, and while the app isn't new, it released a new version that added an AR overlay that displays information about Paris businesses when you look at the city through your iPhone's camera.

Internet of things

2009-09-14T11:01:00.001+03:00

Just found a new buzz-word and thought i 'd might share it!

Quoting from wikipedia:

"In computing, the Internet of Things refers to a network of objects, such as household appliances. It is often a self-configuring wireless network. The concept of the internet of things is attributed to the original Auto-ID Center, founded in 1999 and based at the time in MIT^[1].

The idea is as simple as its application is difficult. If all cans, books, shoes or parts of cars are equipped with minuscule identifying devices, daily life on our planet will undergo a transformation. Things like running out of stock or wasted products will no longer exist as we will know exactly what is being consumed on the other side of the globe. Theft will be a thing of the past as we will know where a product is at all times. The same applies to parcels lost in the post.

If all objects of daily life, from yogurt to an airplane, are equipped with radio tags, they can be identified and managed by computers in the same way humans can.^[2] The next generation of Internet applications (IPv6 protocol) would be able to identify more objects than IPv4, which is currently in use. This system would therefore be able to instantaneously identify any kind of object.^[3]"

Online advertising is down

2009-06-29T12:27:00.002+03:00

According to research done by the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) and PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC), total online advertising revenues in Q1 2009 fell to $5.48 billion, down 10% from the previous quarter and down 5% from Q1 2008.

This is the first negative year-over-year rate since 2002.

David Silverman of PwC said, “Current economic conditions are clearly challenging.”

Online advertising had been relatively unaffected by the downturn, partly because it used to be considered experimental, but it is now an essential part of the media mix for many advertisers.

“In some ways the decline further reinforces how online ad spending is a central part of the mainstream,” said David Hallerman, eMarketer senior analyst. “As other media are experiencing even greater ad spending declines, the Internet cannot resist larger economic forces.”

source: emarketer.com

In dark days, is e-commerce the answer?

2009-04-28T12:45:00.004+03:00

We are in the middle of the most extensive crisis of the lasst decades! Most US economic indicators have suffered severely in Q1 2009. With one exception!

According to a survey by Forrester Research and Shop.org, US online retail sales rose an average of 11% in the first three months of 2009.

Of the 80 companies studied, 58% saw online sales increases compared with the same quarter last year.

Looking further into the findings, 44% of the e-tailers reported increases of over 10%, 14% showed increases up to 10% and 13% reported flat sales.

In the survey, about 70% of both consumer brand manufacturers and multichannel retailers reported online sales increases. However, Web-only merchants had a different situation. About six in 10 reported Web sales declines.

“It seems that consumer confidence is getting better,” Sucharita Mulpuru, a Forrester analyst, told Bloomberg News. “Hopefully the worst is behind us.”

Looking ahead, Citi Investment Research projects that US retail e-commerce sales will grow 4.4% in 2009 to $141 billion—and jump to 16.5% growth in 2010.

source: emarketer.com

Design matters

2009-04-09T20:34:00.003+03:00

Latest research in the UK showed that 93 % of iPhone owners accessed mobile media in January 2009. What does this show? That if you give users a beautiful phone and a handy interface design they will access media and they will be more willing to learn how to use technology!

According to the first data to describe iPhone usage in the UK, from comScore, 93% of iPhone owners in the UK accessed mobile media in January 2009.

Comparing iPhone users to smartphone users to mobile phone users, comScore found that the iPhone users did almost everything more on their phones than their counterparts.

Nearly 80% of iPhone users accessed news on their phones, compared with 48% and 20% of smartphone and mobile phone users, respectively. And so on down the line.

www.outalot.gr

2009-04-04T11:24:00.004+03:00

Like everybody else, we wanted to create a social network that everybody would love and would spread viraly . We decided to take a different approach. We decided to create a tool, an engine rather than a social network. On the way things got different. Everybody wanted to be able to add new events and meet new people and make friends. So we changed the concept and came up with a mixture of things. The concept is "Socialize more in the real world" rather than spending your whole day over your keyboard. It's a way of making real friends, people that you will actually meet. People that share one thing. They love to go out, have a drink or a bite and love to meet new people.

Take a look and try it out: outalot.gr! For the moment it's only in greek but you will get the idea.

Interesting numbers for marketers

2009-03-17T07:24:00.003+02:00

According to Nielsen Online, more people in the US and other leading digital countries worldwide are using social networks and blogs than e-mail.

While search and destination sites remain the most popular online activities, social network and blog use exceeded that of e-mail, increasing their reach by 5.4%.

In addition, time spent on social networks and blogging sites is growing at over three times the rate of overall Internet growth.

Source: emarketer

Late GSMA

2009-03-15T23:55:00.008+02:00

It's been a while...
Done some traveling, a couple of conferences and now I am back for good.
So, what we have seen so far. Budget cuttings are visible all over.
Take for example GSMA (Mobile World Congress). Empty exhibiting spaces, a lot less giveaways (almost none except for some rubber ducks from my friend Janis) and a lot less visitors! I mean the first day was a major disappointment. Walking around the GSMA was like walking around a park, or a not so crowded street. Second and third days were back to normal (companies not paying for the full Monty?).

So, what was the conclusion from this year's GSMA? As a friend quoted "At last, technology is stable!" No new super technology was presented and some of the major technologies of the past missing. As a result it seems safer to invest on the technology currently on the market and start making some real money out of it. It has been a race towards technological excellence in the past years with most innovations not finding their proper market share due to companies and investors being sucked in an opportunistic hype.

Let's see for example WIMAX. In the previous two years I can remember at least 20 exhibitors focused on WIMAX technology and hardware while this year only one came to my attention!
It was supposedly a major technological leap which didn't make it to the market as it is clear from the fact most deployments are still in trials, that it is largely used by start-up carriers and is supported by “second-tier vendors”. In comparison, HSPA with 154 commercial networks already in operation (at the end of 2008) and support from top tier vendors has taken over the market.

Cuts cuts cuts

2008-12-14T10:53:00.000+02:00

How much money are social networks making from advertising? Not nearly as much as estimated earlier this year. Back in May, eMarketer trimmed their estimate for 2008 social network advertising spending in the US to $1.4 billion. Today, they’ve lowered it once again, to $1.2 billion.

The cuts are more dramatic when you look to 2009, where eMarketer now projects ad revenue of $1.3 billion, down from a previous estimate of $1.8 billion and representing tepid growth year-over-year. Of that revenue, the firm estimates that 65% will go to MySpace and Facebook, leaving just $435 million in ads for the hundreds of other social networks and widget providers to fight over next year.

While hardly surprising given estimate cuts for the broader online advertising industry, the news is a sobering reminder of the need to find business models that extend beyond advertising. Perhaps that’s part of the reason we’re seeing so many new mobile applications and ways to charge social networking users money, like virtual gifts that can be redeemed in the real world.

Impressions

2008-11-29T22:20:00.003+02:00

The question that rises is whether we are headed toward a future where sites will no longer simply sell banner ads or paste in code to display text links and hope to drive more and more traffic to push up the number of impressions that they can sell. The impression based model is a numbers and volume game that is slowly dying online. Affiliate marketing, content syndication and other endorsement based models of online advertising are taking its place as a way to make advertising more effective, by doing what seems to be unheard of in advertising ... making content creators CARE whether or not visitors to their site click on the ads. This is leading to three big things:

1. More contextual and topical ads are more relevant for users
2. Endorsed ads for products are more convincing and reduce consumer distrust of advertising.
3. Better ROI (click rates, cost per click, etc.) for advertisers.

On the other side, the argument against askvertising is the often discussed separation between advertising and editorial. How can you expect content creators to be impartial and unbiased when their livelihood depends on the ads? When a content creator approves an ad to be placed along with content (which is the case with affiliate marketing), or the ads are based on the context of the content (which is how most text advertising works), then the lines between advertising and editorial become grayer. Combine this with the necessity for many of these new sites to support themselves with pay for performance based ads, and generating clicks from the audience becomes a necessity. In this sense, askvertising is the digital equivalent of the donation box at a church or temple.

What does this mean for online advertisers? Simply that online media planning today needs to be about more than just buying impressions and placing banners. Making askvertising work for you means finding the right strategic sites to partner with, building out a robust affiliate marketing program, and stop focusing on volume of impressions and more on effectiveness of placements in driving action. It's time advertisers and sites alike start to figure out how to make the trend towards askvertising work for them.

MSc & undergrad in Social Computing

2008-10-08T06:37:00.004+03:00

The University of Michigan, the first to offer a master's specialization in social computing, is now opening up the opportunity to undergrads with the launch of a new undergraduate major in informatics that features a social computing track.

Students in the social computing informatics track will build and evaluate social software applications and study the influences of these systems on society.

Mobile Internet Penetration

2008-10-06T14:48:00.007+03:00

I was sitting in my car the other day, waiting for a friend to arrive at the airport. Flight was delayed for 2,5 hours. Luckily enough I had my pda with me so I spent a couple of hours browsing around, reading blogs etc. Otherwise I would have to just sit in my car and talk on my mobile until my friend came to the rescue. Unfortunately it was almost 2:00 am so i don't think many friends would be available and willing to chat, at least in this continent. Alternative to that would be counting all airplanes arriving and leaving the airport and calculating the median of the interval between two consecutive arrivals and then divide it by the number of city buses leaving the airport and their departure intervals... Or something similar...
So, I felt very lucky for being able to just browse around, read my emails and access my office data from my mobile. I really felt joy and satisfaction in being able to do something useful with my time which would otherwise have gone to waste. I was thankful for the mobile internet service!
And then the question came to me. What is the penetration of mobile Internet usage? Is it something people use, or is it still considered a luxury service amongst the lucky ones who can afford it?

Next day, I googled a little bit and came across a research recently conducted by nielsen on the subject.

Nielsen currently tracks mobile Internet penetration in 16 countries (Greece is not one of them). Among these countries, the U.S. leads in mobile Internet penetration among wireless subscribers with 15.6%, followed by the U.K. (12.9%) and Italy (11.9%).

Of the countries tracked, Indonesia and New Zealand have some of the lowest mobile Internet penetration rates—just 1 out of 100 Indonesian subscribers uses the mobile Internet each month, and just 1.6% of New Zealand’s mobile subscribers do so.

In the U.S., mobile Internet has become a mass medium. As of May 2008, there were 40 million active users of the mobile Internet in the U.S., based on past 30-day usage. And this is just a subset of the 95 million U.S. mobile users who subscribed to the service but do not necessarily use it. To break it down:

There were 254 million U.S. mobile subscribers in Q1 2008, according to CTIA, the International Association for the Wireless Telecommunication Industry
According to Nielsen, 144 million (57%) U.S. mobile subscribers were data users in Q1 2008 (defined as those subscribers who used their phone for any data use, such as SMS [Short Message Service] text messaging or accessing the mobile Internet)
Ninety-five million (37%) U.S. mobile subscribers paid for access to the mobile Internet, either as part of a subscription or as a transaction
Forty million subscribers (15.6% in May 2008) were active users of mobile Internet services, using those services at least once on a monthly basis
Mobile Internet use accounted for $1.7 billion in revenue in Q1 2008 (more than $5 billion in total revenue in 2007)

The audience using mobile Internet in the U.S. is demographically diverse enough to present marketing opportunities for all types of products and services.

Less talk, more text

2008-10-06T12:03:00.004+03:00

Bring on the keyboard!

According to a new research by Nielsen, the average mobile subscriber in the US sent and received more SMS text messages than mobile telephone calls during Q2 2008. This was the second consecutive quarter in which the average number of text messages was significantly higher than the average number of phone calls.

Although the research is an indicator of rising mobile data use, the two types of mobile communication are not directly comparable. Users typically convey far more information in a voice call than in a text, so text "conversations" can require multiple messages.

It was clear until now that sms messaging was popular among younger mobile users but nowdays the tendency is towards global adoption. Features like click to map, click to call or click to video embedded in messages open an era of new possibilities and services.

Small problems, big business?

2008-08-17T21:37:00.003+03:00

While wondering around I came across Fonolo, a company in beta that spiders phone trees at big companies and promises to make it easy for you to go straight to the spot you want. Then it calls you when the phone is answered and records the call so you can keep a record.
So, what is this? It happens to me all the time. Wanting to call someone or some service in a major corporation and having to go through a really long path before getting who I am looking for (hopefully). Try Dell!
Is it going to work? We 'll see.

Great ideas can be found all around!

Web 2.0 tools help enterpises says McKinsey Survey

2008-08-17T20:43:00.004+03:00

Companies that are deriving business value from Web 2.0 tools are now shifting from using them experimentally to adopting them as part of a broader business practice according to the latest McKinsey Global Survey Results titled Building the Web 2.0 Enterprise.

This survey also shows that the fundamental changes to the way the companies view Enterprise 2.0. These companies are not only using more technologies but also leveraging them to change management practices and organizational structures. Some are taking steps to open their corporate "ecosystems" by encouraging customers to join them in developing products and by using new tools to tap distributed knowledge.

Isn't that interesting?

A lot of great ideas still looking for ways to monetize

2008-05-08T08:52:00.007+03:00

And now the million dollar question!

Ok, so you can get everything in front of you through a single interface. You can see which of your friends or the people you follow posted what, on facebook, myspace, flickr, youtube, twitter etc. You can easily view their photos, videos, blogs, comments etc. and everybody is happy.

But let’s try thinking the other way around. Let’s say you are that guy posting everything , leaving your mark everywhere. And your content is popular and you 've got a lot of views and a great bunch of people going through everything you post. You are That social guy. Or you are a band posting videos and songs on youtube and myspace and your music is often requested or streamed on lastfm and Pandora (by the way I really miss Pandora). Wouldn’t you like to know in terms of both quantity and quality, the extend of “your content’s impact on the world”. Wouldn’t it be great if you could get a great customizable attractive visual report of everything your content has gone through? How do you monetize? When and how do you collect?

Wouldn't be even greater if this could be the way for sponsors to search and find the exact content to sponsor? Advertising agencies would have a clear view of the popularity and buzz created by certain kinds of content and publishers.

In my search for a solution i came across traackr. This great little tool let's you track what's going on with your content on all the different networks it is posted. Through a clever scoring mechanism you get a clear view of what is popular and what is not.

Web 2.0 moving forward

2008-05-07T13:25:00.004+03:00

Ok, we live in a web 2.0 world. And there is a lot of small talk around about a web 3.0 coming up.

Web 2.0 is almost everywhere you look. Everybody has at least a facebook account. Well, almost everybody… I ‘ve been trying to get back in touch with old friends for quite some time with limited success. All I get is Texas holdem buddy requests, invitations, pokes, super pokes, kisses, hugs, extra hugs, bites, comparisons etc. Is it just me or is facebook getting too complicated, too spammy and impractical?

I guess I am not the only one.

The way to go is trying out aggregation models for the hundreds of social networks everybody is mingling on. Now you can control all your social networking (most of it actually) from single site, through a single interface with a single sign-on authentication model.

Users begin to employ these emerging new tools to better manage and track their various online relationships, both personal and professional. The introduction of these new Web applications, such as Friendfeed, Socialthing!, Spokeo, Second Brain, and Iminta, are making it easy for users to keep track of what their friends are doing online while simultaneously demonstrating that there are compelling alternatives to being social online without having to, say, actively maintain a Facebook account. In fact, that's the very premise of this new type of social Web utility, which automatically tracks a user's public activity at sites around the Web including blogs, Flickr, Twitter, del.icio.us and so on, and creates a single convenient feed for others to consume and track.