5 things we think are worth mentioning...

Do you know what the 2nd largest largest social platform in the world is?

If you said 'Yes, its QQ Instant messenger' then you're lying, well, unless you're Chinese. My own informal survey (asked everyone in the office) showed that none of the 485 million QQ users work in the office here.

When I looked at http://im.qq.com it told me there was currently 118,235,823 online. Could be time to start brushing up your Chinese methinks.

In fact, it's very interesting to see that regionally there are quite a few local social brands and networks that are doing quite well, Orkut in Brazil, VZnet Netzwerke in Germany and Tuenti in Spain for example.

Need more 4d mapping videos...

Advancing projector technology is enabling pretty spectacular outdoor promotional events thesedays.

Well, years ago when I was working at the NHK High Definition computer graphic research lab in Tokyo I heard rumors that the Japanese military (well, Self Defense force I guess) had a type of laser projector that could project moving images onto clouds!!  The idea being thousands of co-ordinated lasers with each laser acting like 1 pixel in the image..Bring it on!!

Hot Wheels Secret Race Battle - 3D projection mapping in Sydney
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6GcighIL9w0

Praetorian Building
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NNndiCJRHC0

Social Mention

Social mention is a free tool that does a pretty good job of scouring the net and aggregating 'social mentions'. You can search a keyword across blogs, microblogs, images, events, news, videos, audio and more. You can choose a category individually or search across all of them.

Social Mention includes a vast amount of statistics about the search in addition to actual search results. Thesestatistics include the sentiment (positive, negative or neutral), top keywords, top users, Postrank rankings, and sources.

http://www.socialmention.com
 

Sound Cloud

Soundcloud is a great example of a social media platform that has been tailored for a specific audience. DJ's and sound creators have really adopted Soundcloud as the way to get their music out there and collaborate, converse about all things music.

Here's what the one of the co-founders Alex Ljung said in Wired magazine

"We both came from backgrounds connected to music, and it was just really, really annoying for us to collaborate with people on music — I mean simple collaboration, just sending tracks to other people in a private setting getting some feedback from them, and having a conversation about that piece of music. In the same way that we’d be using Flickr for our photos, and Vimeo for our videos, we didn’t have that kind of platform for our music"

http://www.soundcloud.com

Need more Infographics...

I love infographics. Take something as dry as statistics..mix in some animated line art..and presto, I can watch them all day !

Mobile infographic
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5bHVGev9UCU

Social media infographic
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QSQrNUrGFr0

and not an infographic but anyway Microsoft envisaging the future tossed in there for good measure.

Microsoft envisaging future
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UHVjPCMEtts&feature=fvwrel