Content vs. Platform

Today platform is more important than content.

Tomorrow content will be more important than platform.

Take heart.

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Brilliant Campaign – “I’m a PC”

Brilliant in it’s simplicity and it’s uncharacteristic audacity. Shows stature.

Kudos!

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Google Chrome – One Box for Everything

 

Their simple claim is “One box for everything”.

What I write here is really my first impression. I’ve been on Google Chrome for a sum total of 10 minutes. What I wanted to record here is my very, very first impressions and how intuitive I thought it was. I’m a fan of knowing what to do immediately and can’t be bothered clicking help or referring to manuals. I’m sure most of us are the same.

The first thing that impressed me about the Google Chrome browser which I am beta testing is that it actually gives you, upfront, a choice of which search engine to be used as default.  One would have imagined that they would automatically “force” Google and then the user has an option to change it later.

Not so. They ask you up front. Now, that is confident branding. Just how branding should be done in the era of Web 2.0. 

The major change is that the address bar doubles up as a search box. So while you are typing a search, a list of website suggestions appears in the window. If you choose not to take their suggestion, hit “enter” and the regular search results come up. At first, it’s a bit confusing but I’m guessing over a (short) time, you’ll get used to it.

As usual Google has maintained their clean UI, which is great.

Another new feature is the “tab” feature which stores a thumbnail of your most visited sites so you can go there in a jiffy. I’m not sure about this as it seems to work pretty much like the toolbar favourites. But then again, ask me in a week. I’ve been on this for a few minutes and these are really my initial, very raw and very first impressions. By the way, I couldn’t intuitively figure out how to delete a tabbed thumbnail which I don’t want.

There’s this new application tab which I haven’t figured out yet. So, low marks here for intuitiveness (or my intelligence).

The new “dynamic tabs” are pretty much like the old tabs where you click the plus sign to open a new tab, and like usual browers you can move the tab about. You can also move the tab into its own window (though I don’t know why you’d want to do that) and they claim it’s easy to move it back. I couldn’t work it out.

Crash control seems like a good one. Apparently, each tab is considered as a single browser. This means that if one application crashes, it doesn’t close all the other windows. Haven’t seen this at work but if it works, that’s a great feature.

Incognito mode is cool. This allows you to open windows when you don’t want it to appear in your web history. For example, you can use incognito mode if you’re sending flowers to your wife and you don’t want her to know from the history (although you can clear history quite easily). But nonetheless, I thought this was a cool feature.

Anyway, there are other features but try it out yourself.

You can download Google Chrome beta here (for Windows Vista/XP).

Let me know what you think.

 

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Asia Pacific Internet Usage

comScore, earlier this month released a comprehensive study of internet usage covering 10 countries in Asia Pac. This is great and information abounds on the US market but much less so for Asia. So thanks, comScore! Read their press release here.

Some tables (click to enlarge):

*Excludes traffic from public computers such as Internet cafes or access from mobile phones or PDAs.

**Estimated Users age 15+ active within 30 days from Home or Work computer as a percentage of total country population age 15+.

*** Total Asia-Pacific, including countries other than the 10 countries that comScore provides individual country-level reporting.

*Excludes traffic from public computers such as Internet cafes or access from mobile phones or PDAs.

** Total Asia-Pacific, including countries other than the 10 countries that comScore provides individual country-level reporting.

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Web 2.0 … The Machine is Us/ing Us

I thought this was brilliant! In 5 minutes, it summarizes the evolution of the web, issues and paradigm shifts concerning Web 2.0.

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The Right Way to Use “New Media”

I used “New Media” in inverted commas because it really isn’t new anymore. There’s also this Web 2.0 jargon being thrown about. It’s the web. It will evolve. It is the mainstream media and will continue to replace and supplant old media.

Anyway, I was personally impressed by the recent campaign, which incidentally I got via eDM for the new Volvo C30. Marketing Interactive had a summary of the campaign here. See the actual campaign here.

The internet has given rise to citizen journalism and an exponential growth in “Word of Mouth” (WOM) information dissemination. In the past WOM would have been restricted to your immediate social circles but the internet puts the power of publishing in everyone’s hands.

Hence, a wired person will typically (anecdotal evidence) surf independent review sites and blogs before buying a product and be wary of marketing information from manufacturers. For example, when I bought my Canon Digital SLR, I relied on bloggers information and the independent review site Digital Photography Review and not once did I got to the Canon Website. Why would I when I want impartial information?

So, Volvo’s decision to allow users to submit self created UNCENSORED video interviews is a very mature and enlightened way to go in my opinion.

I’ve maintained many times (including an article I wrote for Marketing Magazine here) that the internet as a medium will force manufacturers to be more transparent and focus more on product quality and service delivery. I think Volvo here is very confident of their product and hence brave enough to launch this campaign. It is the right thing to do, of course, since even if Volvo didn’t provide this platform, the information would have appeared in blogs, in car forums and other digital platforms.

Well done, Volvo.

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What’s the Size of the World Wide Web?

I remember spending hours in a Langkawi beach with a number of beers in a star washed beach pondering the size of the universe, how far it extended, where it ended and what was beyond where it ended. And if there was a beyond after its end, was that part of the universe or not. If not, what is the definition of the universe? The beer and sunrise would get the better of the night and the conversation would end with the conclusion that the universe was expanding; which is a pseudo intellectual way of copping out of the inevitably inconclusive and meandering contemplation.

Now, the question of this age is how large is the World Wide Web? Evidently, like the universe, the WWW is expanding. I think that proposition, not many will disagree with. So, once again, we have established the cop out answer; an escape valve. So, now that we are on safe ground, what is the size of the World Wide Web?

According to pandia.com, the size of the WWW in 2000 was some 7 million sites which was a 50% increase over the previous year. OK, 2000 was a long time ago as far as net life is concerned. Let’s look at a more recent study. According to a study by Antonio Gulli and Alessio Signorini the size of the indexable web is a staggering 11.5 billion pages as at the end of January 2005!

Now according to the CIA World Factbook, the population of the entire world (July 2006 estimate) is 6,525,170,264. That works to about 17.6 pages per each and single person in the entire world. Probably more because presumably at July 2006 there were more than 11.5 billion web pages.

If you however, take the internet penetration of 16.6% or 1,093,529,692 (as of January 2007) according to internetworldstats.com , that works out to be over 105 pages per internet user (based on 11.5 billion pages). I’m not sure how many percentage of internet users actually create content but I assume it’s not very high (I’m guessing less than half). This means a bunch of people are creating a whole lot of pages for the rest of us to aimlessly go click crazy around.

The problem is that while searching for this information, it is clear that, like the universe, no one really knows how big the WWW is. OK, I’ve thrown out the 11.5 billion figure from the Antonio Gulli and Alessio Signorini study. However, in 2005 Yahoo! announced that its search engine index contained more than 19.2 billion documents.

Another study claims between 15 to 30 billion….

So, like the beer lined question of my teenage years, “how big is the universe”, the question of the teens of today is, “how big is the world wide web”.

The answer, like the answer in my youth is the cop out “no one knows but it’s expanding”

Whatever the answer, each generation has it’s imponderable, perhaps even rhetorical question to wile away countless hours while downing the lager. Perhaps in the distant future, after all of us are dead, the raging debate could be whether the World Wide Web was created or did it evolve from a primordial soup.

In the meanwhile, I add another web page in this ever expanding universe.

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Internet Statistics from internetworldstats.com

According to the above chart Asia leads the way in total number of internet users. However, this should not be confused for penetration as Asia boasts 56.5% of the worlds population. You can see the actual penetration figures below.

Still when considering marketing, it’s not only penetration that matters but absolute numbers.

In the past, penetration would be equally important due to the nature of traditional media, it would be more effective from a CPM POV to go after a highly penetrated market. However, while this remains true to a certain extent, the impact of penetration is lower due to the wide spread and reach of the digital media.

The only thing that really holds back efficiency in mass communications through the digital media really is language. An English viral marketing piece through Youtube for example will have limited impact in a market like China.

However, looking at the macro view, the prevalance of the digital media may even lead to a more rapid diffision of a common global language. And at the moment, it’s looking like it’s going the way of the English language (or at least its variation in its perpetually evolving form)… no room for English language purists in the digital space, I’m afraid… or should I say, IMHO

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