APPLE IBEACON USES BLUETOOTH TO DELIVER LOCAL CONTENT STRAIGHT TO YOUR PHONE
Apple’s iBeacon – a little spoken about feature of the iOs7 upgrade – is empowering your smartphone to become an intuitive, personalised device that seamlessly links with other tech in its vicinity.
So whether you’re in a shop, a bar, an art gallery or passing an advertising billboard, your phone will be your guide and information supplier without you having to do a thing to activate or prompt it into action.
Standalone iBeacons will communicate with the ones in our phones using bluetooth and leave ‘innovations’ like QR codes looking as dated as parchment. Because the information sources are constantly switched ‘on’, transfer is immediate and occurs in the background. So by the time you walk into your coffee shop, they know what you want, by the time you walk up to that painting in the art gallery, the information is already on your phone’s screen, by the time you stop at a concert poster in the street and get your phone out, ticket details are already waiting for you.
Early adopters Bar Kick, in London’s Shoreditch, are using iBeacons to automatically download the latest editions of two popular magazines to the Newsstands of all customers. It’s the digital equivalent of the magazines on the coffee table for customers to read.
Who knew Bluetooth would prove so useful?
NETFLIX USE INTUITIVE DATA COLLECTION TO INFORM FILM RECOMMENDATIONS
To some companies, collecting names, email addresses and phone numbers is an essential way of harvesting potential leads and making marketing more successful. However, there is a company with 40million subscribers worldwide who looks beyond this basic biographical information and is investing instead in other – more personal – means of finding out who you are.
Netflix, the on-demand TV and movie streaming service, is moving towards intuitive data collection with teams of data scientists and engineers trawling its records to find out exactly what you like and don’t like.
The company knows that between 75-80 per cent of the titles that users watch come from the recommendations that are displayed when they load the service. So they are working on making those recommendations as near perfect as possible.
So they are now tracking what you scroll past, what you linger on, what you begin to watch and give up on, if you watch a series how quickly you get through it, what time of day you prefer to watch certain types of programme and on what day of the week you prefer certain types of programme.
The end result? They want to know you better than you know yourself and make such spot-on recommendations that you couldn’t find anything better if you tried.
TWITTER TARGETING CHANGES
It’s been a week of big change at twitter, with a new look rolled out and controversial new features included in the service.
Most of the publicity has been around the block button. This was initially removed on Thursday with the intention of preventing perpetrators of abuse becoming even more enraged by being told they were blocked. Following a backlash from the twitter community, it was reinstated less than 24 hours later.
This controversy led to other, subtler, changes slipping under the radar. One concerns twitter ad targeting. Twitter is now letting advertisers target on ‘broad matches’ rather than explicit keywords that run together. This includes synonyms, mis-spellings, slang, and related terms and will ensure ads hit a much wider audience. Taking an example of ‘love coffee’, the following would now be covered – ‘coffee is my first love’, ‘I luv coffe’, ‘I adore coffee’ and even ‘I adore this latte’.
The benefits to brands are obvious as now twitter’s technology has allowed it wider scope to get to more of its millions of users – no matter how good or bad their spelling.
SOCIAL MEDIA ‘OUT OF OFFICE’ SERVICE
As many of us gear up for some time off over Christmas, what about your social presence? Does your twitter, FB, Google + and the rest go into cold storage while you eat, drink and be merry in a party hat and novelty jumper?
Not if you download a tool called Relaxed.
This smart piece of software is basically a 2013-style out of office response. You set your own message or choose from one of several pre-set options, link it to whatever social media accounts you wish and specify the dates you want it to run to and from. And, err, relax.
With brand reputations broken in moments online, it’s not something we’ll be recommending to clients.
61.5% OF ALL INTERNET ACTIVITY IN 2013 WAS FROM ‘NON-HUMAN TRAFFIC’
As companies go to every length to work out who is out there online, visiting and viewing their sites, it turns out that the answer is – a Bot.
Research by Incapsula shows that 61.5 per cent of all internet activity in 2013 was from ‘non-human traffic’.
This is a rise of more than 10 per cent on 2012, but the good news is that almost half (31 per cent) was from ‘good bots’ – those sent out by search engines to crawl content and provide accurate rankings.
That leaves the other half, which is broken down into five per cent scrapers, 4.5 per cent hacking tools, 0.5 per cent spammers and 20.5 per cent ‘other impersonators’.
The spam figure is so low due to Google’s Penguin update which made comment spam useless.
On the rise, however, are the number of bots who try to impersonate a real person, such as automated spy bots, or bare bones browsers. However, it’s only certain types of sites these would be interested in, so for the vast majority it’s business as usual.