Social Consumers & the Science of Sharing.

If you’re buying a car, do you check Facebook? Or do you read up on Kelley Blue Book values and scour the company website for every spec, from horsepower to miles per gallon? What about music — do you check Top 40 radio charts or scope out what your Facebook friends are actually listening to on Spotify?

Social media has infiltrated the purchasing funnel, helping consumers make informed decisions, from what to have for lunch to where to go on vacation. Depending on the decision, sometimes you turn to your social graph, and sometimes you turn to Google. So, as a brand marketer, you want to know what online channels you should be targeting in order to reach the perfect audience for your product.

But regardless of what kind of consumer you’re trying to reach or what you’re selling, your SEO better be top notch — search is the most important influence on the web.

The infographic below, featuring data from M Booth and Beyond, analyzes the differences between high and low sharers and various purchasing decisions, helping brands to understand how should be targeting consumers.

What kind of consumer are you?

http://mashable.com/2011/10/25/social-consumer-sharing-infographic/

Touch sensitivity on gadgets and robots is nothing new. A few strategically placed sensors under a flexible, synthetic skin and you have pressure sensitivity. Add a capacitive, transparent screen to a device and you have touch sensitivity. However, Stanford University’s new “super skin” is something special: a thin, highly flexible, super-stretchable, nearly transparent skin that can respond to touch and pressure, even when it’s being wrung out like a sponge.

The brainchild of Stanford University Associate Professor of chemical engineering Zhenan Bao, this “super skin” employs a transparent film of spray-on, single-walled carbon nanotubes that sit in a thin film of flexible silicon, which is then sandwiched between more silicon.

After an initial stretch, which actually aligns the randomly sprayed-on conductive, carbon nanotubes into microscopic spring-like forms, the skin can be stretched and restretched again to twice its original size, without the springs or skin losing their resiliency. Darren Lipomi, a postdoctoral researcher who is part of Bao’s research team explained, “None of it causes any permanent deformation.”

This unique makeup allows the malleable skin to measure force response even as it’s being stretched, or “squeezed like a sponge.” Researchers noted that it can also sense touch and force at the same time.

This super skin is not simply a thicker, more flexible version of the touch screen on your iPhone 4S. Virtually all touch-sensitive smartphones feature transparent films that sense touch. However, these capacitive screens are only responding to the tiny electrical charge in your fingertips and do not actually know if you’re touching lightly or hammering the screen.

Flexible touch screens for computers and smartphones is one obvious super skin application idea, but the Stanford researchers have larger goals. They envision future robots wearing this flexible touch and pressure-sensitive skin. From there, the next logical step is replacement of skin on people, especially burn victims or those who have lost limbs.

http://mashable.com/2011/10/24/artificial-super-skin/

Google & Microsoft a little unhappy with Siri...

By now we're all used to the "soap-like" goings on at the top of the technology industry so the news that Google and Microsoft had a couple of dig's about Apple's new Siri will come as a huge shock to well...none of you.


With Siri's upcoming launch, and speculation on how much of an impact the voice-controlled application will have within the industry, it's obvious fellow industry leaders are beginning to feel the strain. Google's Head of Android - Andy Rubin was quoted as saying: "I don't believe your phone should be an assistant...Your phone is a tool for communicating," further adding, "You shouldn't be communicating with the phone; you should be communicating with somebody on the other side of the phone." - Fair play, apart from Google's numerous app's unrelated to telecommunication whatsoever and it's Google Voice-Search & Goggles, Google's alternative voice- and image-based ways of interacting with your phone....maybe it slipped his mind? 


Microsoft's Windows Phone president, Andy Lee had also mentioned that Siri "isn't super useful." At the same time, he noted that Windows Phone 7 has a degree of voice interactivity in the way it connects to Bing, and thus harnesses "the full power of the internet, rather than a certain subset."

Perhaps its not just being well ahead in the technology race in getting Siri to the table, but the threat that the application poses on technologies where Google and Microsoft are respected leaders. Siri allows searches of Google and Bing when it can't find an answer that merges Wolfram Alpha's natural language query responses with its own easy-to-use, natural language interface.

Siri also acts as a first sift "layer" for users seeking information over the Internet. When you ask Siri the data gets whizzed off by Apple to its cloud servers, where the speech is processed and then interpreted. It is then found if the question is "intelligible, being answerable by Apple itself and thus severely limiting the ad revenue both Google and Bing could see in the future.

There's no way in denying that Siri will change the way we look at our smart devices, and offers a fantastic foundation on which to grow from. Google and Microsoft may well be snubbing the much anticipated Siri, but there's no doubt they'll be working intensely on their own voice controlled applications, if they do indeed find time away from the development of a "handbags at dawn" app.

Laugh as they may, it could come back to haunt them, and comments taken into account - Putting constraints on technology only hinders innovation - a race which Google and Microsoft will surely like to shorten the lead in.