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Exploring The Intersections Of Technology and Society

Kmart’s Social Media AdventureYesterday

The economy is bleeding.

This might be the biggest understatement I’ve made in a long time but follow along. The economy is in trouble and retail chains, which usually spend lavishly around now trying to convince us all we need to buy the latest and greatest widgets and whathaveyous are pulling back their resources and sealing their war chests in preparation for a long, cold winter.

That’s why I found Kmart’s latest marketing push to be particularly interesting.

What are they doing? They have given 6 top shelf social media personalities $500 dollar gift cards and asked them to write a post about their experiences with Kmart. These writers can write whatever they want, and must disclose at the top of the post what’s going on. Anyone who reads one of these posts and leaves a comment or Tweets about the campaign is entered to have a chance to win another $500 Kmart gift card. To sweeten the pot for the participating bloggers, Kmart is running display advertising across the IZEA (Social Spark is brokering this contest) network, which will drive traffic back to the participating bloggers.

Hong Kong, Espresso And Robotic WaitersYesterday

Hong Kong found itself sitting at the cutting edge of robotic food delivery systems with the development of a brightly colored, autonomous robotic waiter by Cyber Robotic Technology. RoboWaiter #1 was the first of its kind and has made a real splash among restaurant goers.

The robot is currently doing its rounds in a Western themed restaurant in Hong Kong, and as it turns out it’s a great employee — it never takes breaks, it doesn’t ask for a raise and since it came on board the restaurant has seen a 20-30% increase in business.

The robot’s “job” is pretty simple, it rolls around the restaurant to customers, greets them with a menu and waits for them to say the menu item that they want. Besides this more obvious functions, the robot also dances and has a set of games it can play with the customers.

Robo Waiter #1 costs $5000, but the restaurant has been so happy with it’s performance they plan to bring on a robot chef in the near future. It might not be long before they replace the entire staff with kitschy robotic servers, like this restaurant in Nuremberg, Germnay did.

German Robot Restaurant

Here they have setup a gravity feed system that allows you to order from a touchscreen and have your meal delivered directly to you. It’s Jetsons meets Rube Goldberg and it looks really entertaining if you like watching your food fall from the sky.

Book Store MarketingDecember 3

Some days I go into book stores without any intention of buying a book.

Why? I won’t lie to you, it’s the coffee.

For someone who spends their days breathing bits and bytes, there is nothing more relaxing to me than sitting on a comfortable couch with a delicious, overpriced stimulant (even though all I drink is decaf these days) surrounded by the words of clever people. It gives me time to think about what’s really important, and inevitably my thoughts stumble back to one question –why in the world does every book store on the planet have a barrister?

Maybe it has something to do with this.

In the last week, I went to Borders twice. The first time it was to buy a book, unfortunately it wasn’t in stock. My heart was broken. What they did have, however, was the Cocoa Trio — a Holiday specialty drink that I will only describe as one of the best versions of hot chocolate I have ever tried. I left the store sad that I didn’t get my book, but extraordinarily happy that I’d stopped by the coffee hutch.

The next day, I came back to the store to try the Cocoa Trio again and who would believe it — my book had arrived. In sum, Border’s sold me $15 wort

Lessons From Entrepreneurs: WebnotesDecember 1

Alex King, Director of Marketing for WebNotes, an web-based annotation product for researchers was kind enough to talk to us about what makes his version of “Social Annotation” different and what it’s like to be an entrepreneur on the web.

Webnotes

At first glance, it may seem that web annotation has been done before, but we are really innovating in a different space than most other services. You’ll notice that almost all of the other companies (Fleck, Diigo, ReFrameIt, i-Lighter, etc) are all in the “Social Annotation” space, meaning that the primary use of their product is to create a sticky note on a webpage that other random people can view and also make additional comments on.

Most of these products are not exactly the highest of quality, and very few of them actually offer any sort of organizational structure that researchers need in order to do their work. Don’t get me wrong: social annotation services have a great goal, and one that requires a huge positive network externality to become valuable. We wish these guys the best of luck in creating that social value for their users.

At the other end are the serious research competitors such as Zotero and EndNote. These are the high quality,

Twitter And Magpie: Point And CounterpointNovember 27

I have been a user of the micro-blogging site Twitter for over 18 months and I love the social networking aspects of it – I have met amazing people and found out about the latest sites and applications through them. Twitter has always been an “ad free” oasis for me…until now.

Get Rich!

A Magpie is a bird that symbolizes Good Luck in some cultures, but in Twitter land it is an insidious ad that is sent out as a “tweet” to your followers into their timeline from you. This is how Magpie works: Magpie is an ad network for Twitter (they are not affiliated with Twitter) . By giving them access to your followers, it sends out tweets that are matched by the topics you tweet about. The more ad tweets the more money. You can set the ad insertion at 1:1 up to 20:1. So you can be really irritating or just an occasional “wtf?”. What Magpie is asking of you is to put a “sandwich board” on you every half hour and then shove you outside on the corner with balloons and a horn. The most distressing Magpie Tweet I’ve seen to date is from someone I follow has this in the ad “you can run your own ads in other people’s timelines, now, that’s a neat idea!”, I alr