For those that didn’t catch the latest announcement from Microsoft at the E3 expo about their new Xbox. They have squarely taken aim at the huge success of the Nintendo Wii and it’s motion sensor controlling.
Microsoft is hoping to take things to the next level by incorporating voice and facial recognition and doing away with a controller altogether, thus letting you be the controller.
Check out the video demo below for an overview of the new functionality.
In addition to the game play aspects of the unit, the new Xbox heavily focuses on being a movie player and delivery system, with full HD movie downloads from the device. Time will tell how many of the displayed features make their way out to Australia, but things look promising.
Google today previewed a new product called Google Wave. As Google terms it, it is a “new tool for communication and collaboration on the web”. Little vague, but put simply, they are not only combining the best elements of email, instant messenger and social networks, they are doing it all in a browser environment.
The basic idea is that you can communicate by any means and it is all centralised in one place and different people that might join a conversation at a later date can see the history of a conversation and respond to a particular point in the message not just simply replying to a long email message
To get a better understanding of how this works, check out the sub-site over at http://wave.google.com. You can also sign up to be notified of when it is ready and even help out with bug testing and some user surveys.
The video below is the full developer demonstration of Google Wave. Video is about 1 hour and 20 mins, but the first 30 mins focus on the UI.
For those that have not seen it yet, the image below is an excellent visual representation of social networks and micro communities.
It is a perfect example of just how many sites, platforms, ecosystems, etc.. are out there, and need to be utilised by organisations in a constantly shifting landscape.
The now famous/ infamous Clare Werbeloff was initially thought to be another social media stunt.
Either way, the very interesting fact is that it has made many people think definitely about social media and traditional media in general. Did this even change your views?
Twitter is truly hitting the mainstream now, and for many of us there is a love hate relationship with the network. Some pick it up and ‘get it’ instantly, whilst others are seemingly frustrated with the method of networking and communication.
To help you through these steps and to manage the huge amounts of information that you need to process, there are some excellent tools or twitter ‘clients’ to help you follow, unfollow and manage your twitter experience. Below are a list of some of the ones I have found useful.
I have been receiving Virgin Blue’s newsletter for some time now, and use them almost every time I need to fly to Melbourne to visit family. Recently the frequency of their newsletter was on the rise, and coinciding with their push relating to QANTAS’s change to their frequent flyer points system. It was at this point that I felt that I wanted to unsubscribe from their newsletter, simply because I didn’t need the updates, not that I wanted to discontinue my relationship with them in any way.
My first thinking was to simply scroll to the bottom of the most recent email and click the unsubscribe link. Much to my surprise, there was no such link to be found. Although they had taken the time to include about 4 paragraphs of terms and conditions relating to the offers within the newsletter, they had not included one of the most standard (not to mention required by law) features of a newsletter.
Instead there was simply an ‘Update Details’ link at the bottom of the email. This link took me to the Virgin Blue site and requested me to login with my Velocity number and password- neither of which I dad on hand nor should need to unsubscribe.
Feeling a little annoyed, I placed a post on twitter about the oversight, and gave it an @ reply to Sir Richard Branson. You can see the post below:
Next is where things TOTALLY turned around and forced me to not only praise Virgin Blue but prompted me to write this post.
The following day, just shy of 24 hours after my original post (23 hours an 47 minutes) I received the following tweet from Virgin Blue:
It is great to see brands monitoring what is said about them online through different social media, and very pleasing that they are taking the time to reply to individual post such as the one I sent. This is in stark contrast to the way that Jetstar seem to be using Twitter, as illustrated in Tiphereth Gloria’s Digital Tip blog post today Jetstar’s 5 cent Fail Sail.
