Grown Up Thinking

After uproar over Google Maps leaving some faces and private property captured in their Street View feature unblurred, and Google Buzz’s questionable privacy settings, some major international players are putting their foot down and demanding change. Most of us can breathe easy– Google has been working to address these repeated concerns.

Heads of 10 countries just sent an open letter to Google CEO Eric Schmidt demanding that the internet powerhouse step up its game when it comes to protecting users. Overall, they say they want to see Google:

- collecting and processing only the minimum amount of personal information necessary to achieve the identified purpose of the product or service;

- providing clear and unambiguous information about how personal information will be used to allow users to provide informed consent;

- creating privacy-protective default settings;

- ensuring that privacy control settings are prominent and easy to use;

- ensuring that all personal data is adequately protected, and

- giving people simple procedures for deleting their accounts and honoring their requests in a timely way

So I have to ask, do you feel violated? What concerns do you have over Google’s privacy issues? Do you think the open letter is more whiny than it is warranted?

QR codes have been all the buzz these past few weeks and many companies are taking advantage of this new trend. QR stands for Quick Response- because they can be scanned quickly by a mobile phone via its camera. QR codes can be used to pull information from one location and stored directly into your mobile phone- anything from links, videos, photos and more.

One company that sticks out (literally and figuratively) is Stickybits. Stickybits produces two-dimensional barcodes users can attach to any real world object. For example, take a sticker and put it on your business card, scan it with either the iPhone or Android app and upload a full PDF version of your resume to the sticker. When others scan the barcode on your business card, your resume will be at their fingertips.

This is just one example of how QR codes are changing the way we think about barcodes. Facebook is also jumping on the QR bandwagon and will be used with an upcoming version of the Facebook mobile app. Facebook is still keeping the details under wraps until April, but some predict that QR codes will be most useful for Facebook’s integration of location-based social networking. In addition, QR codes will be useful for businesses who want to engage with consumers on a deeper level.

Stayed tuned, and don’t be surprised if you start seeing QR codes everywhere. Happy scanning!

Perhaps the coolest thing I’ve seen all week, yellowBird is utilizing a variant on Google Street View technology to provide a true 360º view in video. (Video!!!) By using six divided lenses, it essentially collects data of every possible viewing direction. I won’t get into all the gloriously geeky details on exactly how it works, but it is definitely pretty flippin’ cool. Nothin’ like soaring high as a bird…from the comfort of my cozy cubical.

Few things in the 2.0 era have received so much buzz so quickly as Skittle’s recent social media effort. I logged on to Twitter yesterday to a literal hashstorm of all things Skittles. I realize people get excited about candy, but this was ridiculous. What was going on? Obviously I did what any responsible digital marketing  professional would do–I went to Skittles.com.

Something wasn’t right–why did Skittles.com take me to Twitter’s search page with a little branded overlay on the top left?  Where’s the flashed out, high res animated page loader? Where’s the ambiguously organized homepage with different content engagement opportunities?  All I could see were different users’ tweets about Skittles. I clicked around the overlay, and was taken to….Facebook? This was something entirely new.

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So, much has been said about Joe Six-Pack and the newly famous Joe the Plumber but convenient store chain 7-11 actually conceived of an ingenious promotion to use Joe to predict the election. In this case, a cup of joe. The idea is quite simple, 7-11 created red coffee cups with McCain’s name on them and blue cups with Obama’s. They then track the cups that their customers are selecting on a nationwide map on their 7-Election.com web site, which even allows consumers to view results by state. Even more remarkable, the results of this poll were within 1% of actual results in 2000 and identical to final results of the 2004 election. Guess Joe really does play a big role in this year’s election.