Michael Berner
Director of Global Social Media Strategy @amex. Wanderlust addict, NYC (trans)planted. Foodie by self appointment.
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*Content my own
Trolltunga, Norway - I want to go to there
Behold! What the Stop SOPA blackout managed to accomplish in 24 hours.
Ahh the power of community and data viz
(via thedailyfeed)
This is Father Bob. He baptized, confirmed and/or married everyone in our immediate and extended family.
He is a great man…
It’s Friday night and I need a dinner reservation for my family. Lacking the foresight on such things, I am looking at 7:30pm for said reservation and coming up understandably empty handed unless 10:30pm is my ideal eating time.
This isn’t a unique situation. Reservations are made on a first come first serve bases across the board. Plan ahead and you’ll be golden. Don’t and you’re SOL.
But does it always need to be this way? Imagine if restaurants would hold a small portion of their table inventory for auction. People finding themselves in my situation could pay flat out or bid on tables/times based on anticipated demand.
Would I drop $25+ to avoid the preplanning and hassle and get me and my family into a good restaurant right now? Yes. Would other people? Well certainly not everyone but I’m sure there is a fraction of eaters who would appreciate this service even if it came with the cost.
Varying entry points to accomodate the consumer can benefit not only the dining guests but puts added cash into the coffers of the restaurants. Win Win
*Note, I only endorse this if on a fraction of tables and in certain circumstances. I would be crazy if I felt like paying for a reso all the time
As I do every million, lets celebrate Taz hitting 4MM views! Thanks to the Aviaros del Caribe, Taz is the most watched sloth video in the world!
This is unbelievable
(via mexicanfireworks)
New York Tech Meetup did it again this past Wednesday with 9 demo’s of some amazing new startup’s coming out of Silicon Alley. While all 9 had were compelling in their own right, here are my top 3 coming out of this months demo’s:
1. Sonic Notify
I first heard of these guys after coming to our agency for a lunch and learn, and they hit it out of the park. Rarely do I see a new service that has so many practical applications across multiple facets of consumer industries. While their demo at NYTM didn’t do them justice, this is without a doubt a company to watch out for.
From sonicnotify.com
SonicNotify is a platform that enables media to be delivered to a smartphone or tablet based on presence. No technology to date has enabled media delivery based on a consumer standing in front of a shelf, television, or at a concert. The patent pending technology enables the communication of data in the ultra high-frequency inaudible range between any speaker and microphone. The decoding algorithm enables a common process for extracting data from audio using any microphone on any smartphone or tablet.
2. ObscuraCam (Witness & The Guardian Projet)
There is a noticeable difference in crowd reaction when someone demo’s a product that has humanitarian impact. ObscuraCam is a joint partnership between Witness (an international nonprofit set to empower human rights defenders with video/photo tools to fight injustice) and The Guardian Project (an open source programming company building products to protect unjust intrusion and monitoring in technology). A camera app that goes above and beyond the rest by providing advanced meta data inclusions/exclusions, facial recognition and blocking, integrated tagging and advanced security measures to provide human rights activists with a safe tool to monitor and track injustice. This is a step in the right direction for activists.
3. PunchUp
These guys make the list primarily because I just lost my Joe’s Coffee punch card after being one latte away from a free one. PunchUp takes the physical loyalty cards out of the equation by making this engagement digital, social, and reimbursable directly to your card of choice. Twenty bucks Foursquare is an iteration away from introducing these functions themselves, it’s a trend in loyalty I think we’ll see a lot more of in the near future.
Props to the other demo’s for their great products, as well, which you can check out here:
If you’ve haven’t made it out for a nice yog today, this insane single track mountain bike video will get your heart racing
If you have an hour and thirty minutes, I highly suggest you check out Life in a Day by Ridley Scott, the groundbreaking YouTube video event:
From Life in a Day:
On July 24th, 2010, thousands of people around the world uploaded videos of their day to YouTube to take part in Life in a Day, a historic cinematic experiment to create a documentary film about a single day on earth.
Oscar-winner director Kevin McDonald whittled down over 4500 hours of footage in a 90-minute film that wowed audiences at the Sundance, Berlin and SXSW Film Festivals earlier this year.
I will not read your email. This isn’t meant to be a broad stroke statement but more for the daily deals, industry trades, news aggregators et all that send me 30 emails during the night.
When I wake up my email priorities are 1) Work 2) Family/Friends 3) Key Pubs that will be relevant to my day.
Newsletters like the above get instantly deleted to clear the way for the barrage of emails I’ll receive , unless they kill it with a catchy subject matter.
Hyper targeted open rates could fix this. Send me emails at different times of different days and stick with the highest open rate, but clearly they dont do this.
I’m sure I miss out on important items every now and then. But every newsletter sub isn’t the same and a more personalized attack could help grow your business.
The show went on sale at noon on Saturday, December 10th. 12 hours later, we had over 50,000 purchases and had earned $250,000, breaking even on the cost of production and website. As of Today, we’ve sold over 110,000 copies for a total of over $500,000. Minus some money for PayPal charges etc, I have a profit around $200,000 (after taxes $75.58). This is less than I would have been paid by a large company to simply perform the show and let them sell it to you, but they would have charged you about $20 for the video. They would have given you an encrypted and regionally restricted video of limited value, and they would have owned your private information for their own use. They would have withheld international availability indefinitely. This way, you only paid $5, you can use the video any way you want, and you can watch it in Dublin, whatever the city is in Belgium, or Dubai. I got paid nice, and I still own the video (as do you). You never have to join anything, and you never have to hear from us again.
I really hope people keep buying it a lot, so I can have shitloads of money, but at this point I think we can safely say that the experiment really worked
Love everything Louis CK did with this self promotion
Here’s some backstory on Louis CK’s plan for this: Comedians Sound Off On Louis CK’s Latest Funny Business
Louis CK with a sales report for his Live at the Beacon Theater show that he produced, directed and began selling for $5 off of his site this past weekend. (via futurejournalismproject)
(via fastcompany)
I was reading the interwebs this weekend and was diving into some posts on Fred Wilson’s AVC blog. He had posted an interesting presentation from George Colony – CEO of Forrester Research – from the Le Web conference in Paris, which I thought was an interesting, if not thought provoking, look into our “social” future.
Some key points coming from the talk:
- Social Saturation: We are running out of hours for social usage and we are running out of people given the high saturation of users around the globe.
- If you are building social platforms that require more time from users, you will likely not be successful (“nonsense” like Foursquare will go away. PS props to Fred for posting a clip knocking USV’s investment)
- Next wave of social will be more efficient, faster, easier to use and have a higher value per time equation
While none of this is groundbreakingly new information and his hypothesis and debates can be argued (I think Foursquare will secure its niche once it perfects Radar), the idea that we are migrating to more efficient apps that achieve our social goals is spot on.
Path is a prime example of a social oriented app that is owning my usage by eliminating the clutter typically involved with opening a new app for each separate function I hope to achieve. This ease of use saves me time and most importantly, provides a more seamless user experience.
Social clutter is the bloat that that will take down the periphery but what will emerge is an ecosystem of apps that engage smarter, connect further and enhance deeper.
My travel list is long. As much as I knock off a country or two each year I can’t seem to make a dent. So for the time being I’ll keep throwing suggestions onto the pile.
I am putting diving with Great Whites at the top…
If Earth had a tourism board, this would be its promotional video
