B1BLOG

I’ve been read­ing all the excite­ment sur­round­ing Google’s new aug­mented real­ity project, Google Glasses.

In case you missed it, these are essen­tially Oakley-style sun­glasses with a lens-mounted HUD (the head-up dis­play fighter pilots use for alti­tude, vec­tor, tar­get­ing etc.). Wear­ing a pair, you can read and com­pose emails, view cal­en­dar events, check the weather, take phone calls and, accord­ing to the promo video accom­pa­ny­ing the launch, learn to play the ukulele.

While this all may appear like great fun, it’s being touted by some quite seri­ous tech journos as noth­ing less than the nat­ural replace­ment for the smart­phone as our pri­mary com­mu­ni­ca­tions device.

Read the full post »

This week saw the launch of Google’s lat­est devel­op­ment to lever­age the social graph for their search results. While the com­pany has used social cues from Twit­ter and Flickr for more than a year to improve organic rank­ings, they are now cre­at­ing their own rec­om­men­da­tion func­tion and extend­ing it to both paid search and organic search.

The fea­ture is sim­ply called “plus one”. If you’re famil­iar with Face­book adverts and likes, the con­cept is not very dif­fer­ent. When users are logged into Google, they will be able to rate indi­vid­ual search results and adverts by click­ing the “plus one” sym­bol. Their friends will then see the endorse­ment.

Read the full post »

A num­ber of years ago, we had a com­pany off-site fea­tur­ing a trea­sure hunt as the pri­mary chal­lenge for the day. This involved teams of Ban­ner­ites zoom­ing around Lon­don in black cabs look­ing for the answers to a series of cryp­tic clues.

Whilst it was com­pet­i­tive and fun, that approach seems anti­quated by today’s stan­dards. For an agency whose rai­son d’être is to under­stand and use tech­nol­ogy bet­ter than any other agency, scrib­bling the answers onto bits of paper wasn’t really a good way of track­ing progress or edu­cat­ing our team on new tech­nolo­gies.

Read the full post »