SnapChat for Pleasure & Business

What are you talking about? Snap to it...

For the uninitiated SnapChat is an App for your smart phone, officially described as a visual messaging app. It uses video and/or photo accompanied with text that can be sent to a select group of recipients. The best way to think about it is as a visual text message.

However it is the temporary nature of the images that last only for 10 seconds that is the most original function of the application service.


 *TM

It is very popular among teenagers and twenty somethings that reportedly love the anonymous nature of the communications. Messages abound about it's use in so called 'sexting', where body parts are filmed or photoed and sent to a 'friend' for a peek before disappearing. Some will find this disturbing, others liberating, depending on your age and motivations.

Naturally much speculation has been made about it's use in criminal activity such as threatening behaviour or stake outs of houses or objects. The apparent attractiveness being that there is no evidence of the images left to incriminate anyone.

Can it be used in business of some sort?

We've discovered that SnapChat has the ability to send these images messages to groups and this has been used by some innovative organisations to convey advertising messages or information messages.

If you're looking to differentiate yourself from the mob of social media promotions and wish to target switched on smart phone users then SnapChat is the business.

*TradeMark of SnapChat inc

Elephants and strippers love bitcoin

The internet has always been an elephant in most board rooms. It's big, popular, sometimes ugly and very energetic. The internet elephant uses more bandwidth than all the financial sector put together. Grows faster than a gold mine and adopts radically new business forms every few years. Though one nut the internet has found hard to crack is a simple universal micro payment method. Until now. The digital economy may just about to become turbo-charged.


A relatively new way we can feed jumbo is with a virtual currency and early indications show it's working a treat.

As is so often the case online, look to the online sex industry for an answer to a challenge.
Interestingly the digital porn industry has been suffering from it's own popularity. There are more terabytes dedicated to erotica that anything else. More importantly once a photo or film is taken it's replicated easily by hundreds of others who increasingly dilute the market and drive down the value of a "popular body of work". So much so that most 'bodies of work' are now free. The only commodity left is 'live' shows. These are strip shows where the viewers can login after paying, then 'chat' with the performer, who can choose to interact or ignore the heated banter. How though does the performer get paid?

Enter the challenge of quick, fast and relatively anonymous online micro payments.
Bitcoin and it's sister virtual currencies have recently gained a foothold, fast becoming seriously popular and useful. In the case of live shows it makes good sense to quickly transfer an entry fee to the performer and watch for a fixed time. This is happening too in the live online gaming space with platforms like Twitch.TV broadcasting live games to interested viewers around the world.

It's relatively easy to set up a Bitcoin wallet, there are several providers out there - once you've set that up you have a unique address to send payments to and of course ways to send requests to a bitcoin currency exchange to cash them out in 'real money'.

With the US reserve accepting that Bitcoin is now a semi-legitimate currency isn't time to feed the elephant with virtual 'nuts'. Weird, perhaps but it's happening and growing in popularity.

The author makes no apologises for using such huge, nutty metaphors about elephants. Instead he strongly suggests a small online payment to:

SavetheElephants.org 

Images are used under a Creative Commons licence via WikiCommons.org from their respective owners. Click on images to view sources.

Teamwork Travel

Travelling in a team can be a bit of lottery with the best of company at the best of times. Many of us will remember fateful school tours to a monument of some significance. Though the memories are often more aligned with the super silly antics of one or two of your fellow students.
Others remember trips with groups of colleagues on business conferences in far flung towns. Chances are the dramas involved leaving people in bus stations or airports, of lost visas or rapidly changing timetables. Where is Jenny !

Though these days you're more likely to be sitting at a free internet kiosk checking in of your FB status. In the mean time your group has taken the mini-bus to the conference centre in the middle of said foreign town.

This is where a little bit of experience in the form of team management software and methods can make a team trip memorable for the impeccable organisation and e'spirit . We've tried all sort of solutions over the years. Mixtures of email, SMS, document vaults and other free SM solutions. Though keeping it all simple was a challenge. Until we came across a tool originally designed for sporting and construction teams. it works on every platform and is easy to include people and assign delegations. It uses the vTeam engine and comes in many flavours.

vTeam software is used by 10s of 1000s of people in all walks of life to keep the groups ticking over on time and on song. Closed and private there's room for documents, videos, links and event calendaring and with the handy teamSMS you'll seldom be out of touch. vTeam takes the lottery out of organising team travel. www.organise.net.au

Lorde: A Weather Vane for Social Media Culture

A 16 year old New Zealander, Lorde has shot to unprecedented popularity in the global music race recently, topping the US & UK charts. She's a phenomenon that may be a much broader weather vane, signalling a wind of change in the online world. Challenging one of the founding tenements of the current pack of social media platforms; love of self. If so, teenagers like Lorde will again lead change as in the 50s & 60s.

There is evidence in Lorde's poetic song texts that indeed she may be heralding a major shift in our explosive interest in self focussed social media. If the popularity of of her online downloads and messaging is anything to go by this young woman may have pointed out one of those great shifts in online behaviour. One towards a desire for a more constructive, collaborative online reality.

Lorde. A weather vane? Pic by Thatboyrion

Lorde, AKA Ella Yelich-O'Connor is a particularly astute representative of her generation, in her own words she's no white teeth teen. A lover of poetry thanks to her mother and of music thanks to her father seems to have provided the ideal environment for a positive artistic questioning of the popular paradigm.

Her first & incredibly popular album named the double entendre 'Pure Heroine' is laced with strong subtexts that the(her) digitally native generation is tiring of looking at glam bang social media posts & ads.
Forbes magazine journalist Liv Buli (@lbuli), a specialist in online data analysis of the music industry published a revealing insight into Lorde's popularity last month in @Forbes. In it she cites an explosive weekly download from Sound Cloud of 825,000 for one song on the album Royals. A song with a strong generational critique of contemporary glamour culture with words like ".. That love just ain't for us, we crave a different kind of buzz" and "My friends and I have cracked the code". There seems to be an emerging commitment to working together for something more real, more satisfying in her texts.

Maybe her prophetic words "We're on each other's team" is a deeper cry for people to work together collaboratively rather than endlessly shout and brag to each other through contemporary social media sites.

Whether her honest observational song lines are game changing influences like Bill Haley's '54 recording of Rock Around the Clock is a matter for the future, Lorde's early popularity suggests she may very well be. It is possible that in being supercharged by today's internet world, her change could be more influential and spread more quickly than in the 50s & 60s.

The internet with it's ability to connect people together certainly can spread cultural change quicker than at other times in history. The internet constantly seems to surprise us. Who would have imagined a FaceBook or a YouTube being a billion people strong in such a short time. Or that Social Media would be a part of national revolutions. Though pretending that the online world will always look the way it does at the moment is foolhardy at best.
Lorde's "I'm kinda over being told to throw my hands up in the air" and "all my fake friends and all of their noise" or "Maybe the internet raised us" taps into a feeling for change in the way teenagers perceive things. Perhaps in much the way teenagers of the 60s used the music of their age to change the prevailing culture.

If the seeds of change are germinating online we should not expect to predict it with specifics. Instead we should be ready for the change by reading the shifting winds, expecting to find the signs in unusual places. Perhaps in the musical poetry from teenagers is a place to keep an eye on.

I'm not sure of the exactness of the sort of changes that will happen, yet there's a sense of a new examination of reality and how the internet can help better reflect that. It's early days, though research & development that OI's been conducting point to a desire emerging of a more collaborative context. A context that creates a more satisfying online reality. Granted a new reality may seem impossibly small as I write. The all consuming strength of FaceBook, YouTube & Twitter are pervasive.

To paraphrase Lorde's song Still Sane "I maybe little but I'm coming for the crowd". That crowd may very well be turning toward a renewed online reality as her songs suggest. If that is the case we've all got a lot to look forward to from her generation and the online tools that they will use.

In the mean time download and/or listen to Pure Heroine

Dave Abrahams
@digitdave - @OrganiseInt

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