QR codes facilitate a direct link between traditional and online media, and when QR codes are strategically targeted within a marketing plan, the cross in marketing mediums can result in successful goal conversions.

Something to consider: If consumers take the time to scan a QR code and land on a page that does not pertain to them, they leave and become a lost opportunity! One landing page can’t cater to an entire potential market, and having a dozen QR codes on one ad doesn’t appeal to any market. QR codes with a single landing page are great when they are placed in front of targeted, captive audiences, but what if there is a broad potential market?

A company called Kimtag might be able to help. The London-based company is a mobile compatible connection hub that allows users to create custom index pages containing all of their online media outlets.

Once consumers scan the single QR code, they land on the Kimtag index for that business and can choose how they would like to interact. Those invested in Twitter can navigate to the Twitter page, people who want more information can head to the company’s FAQ page, and so on. Consumers can even tap on the companies contact information to initiate Google maps, call, or e-mail them.

Any other information or landing page can be easily programmed into the Kimtag index. Plus, and this part is important, so I’ll boldface it: Kimtags are free to create and fully customizable. Play around with it and don’t worry about being charged.

The key concept is allowing a broad market to be reached through one QR code or link, and letting each individual choose how they would like to interact with the brand. One QR code, unlimited connection capabilities.

When building a new website, you want it to be eye catching and helpful to visitors. But something that can get lost while minding your new page’s aesthetics is how the website looks to Google.

A Sitemap, in simple terms, is a list of the pages on your website. Why is it important? We’ll let Google explain:

“Creating and submitting a Sitemap helps make sure that Google knows about all the pages on your site, including URLs that may not be discoverable by Google’s normal crawling process.”

Your page’s Sitemap gives it a clearer navigation and outline, which Google is happy to reward by boosting the search rank of your page. Google’s search algorithm is as secret as the KFC recipe, but here’s the truth: If you take two identical web pages and give one a Sitemap, that page will have a better Google rank than the page without the Sitemap.

If you have dynamic content on your page within a content management system, a Sitemap is absolutely essential.

Learn more about Sitemaps here.

A lot of times our creative pursuits outside the office help us find new technology. Since that’s the biz we’re in, we like that!

You  might remember a little post I wrote about the creatives here at DC. Danielle has a fabulous shop on Etsy called Whimsy Garden. When she decided to start showcasing her work at craft shows, she was a “cash only” kinda stand. But now, she is able to accept credit cards thanks to her little friend “Square”.

Square is a credit card reader that attaches to your phone through the headphone jack. With just a few steps, you can easily set up shop! Then you can use their free app to accept any Visa, Mastercard, Discover, or American Express card from your lovers…..I mean patrons at a small fee – similar to PayPal. This is an awesome deal for someone like Danielle, who gained around 50% more business this year by accepting credit cards at her booth. Of course, this app wouldn’t be so fabulous if it didn’t work for both iPhone/iPad users and those of us who are still using Android (ahem…Danielle). Either way, it’s worth checking out if you are in this kinda biz.

Your sad devotion to that ancient Jedi religion has not helped you conjure up the stolen data tapes, but now it may give you the clairvoyance to update your Facebook status. Or perhaps you’d like to boot up the old the W.O.P.R. or tap it out on your brand new iPhone 5.

Well now you can! With Status Via (inspired by a redit post) you can choose your method of Facebook status delivery.

But come on, really folks — let’s back up a minute. It’s cute. But how can we really use this to our advantage? Well, why are there those little tags declaring that that post was delivered from your Droid anyway? Advertising, of course. This is could be a clever little opportunity for marketers to allow customers to post status updates directly from their organizations or products.

Status updates from a product you sell or manufacture? How about from patients at your hospital? How can you do this? You’d have to use Facebook’s Status Message API to label updates with whatever source you want. Go forth and have some fun with your next marketing campaign. And may the force be with you.

Example:

Remember when seeing used to be believing? That time when photos never lied? When you could rely on an image to present the truth — in court, in the news or even with your friend’s vacation photos? Yeah, me neither.

The first photo manipulation happened in the early 1860s to a photo of Abraham Lincoln. Abe’s head was pasted onto the body of the 7th President of the United States (and Christopher Lloyd/Dr. Emmett Brown look-alike), John C. Calhoun. In fact, that photo served as the basis for the original Lincoln five-dollar bill.

Then along came more advanced tools like Adobe Photoshop that made it easy for just about any hack to doctor a photo. But thank goodness for video — especially live video. Praise the last holdout. You can’t doctor video easily — especially not live video. Until now.

The kids over at Germany’s Technische Universität Ilmenau have created a simple-to-use tool to remove objects from live video. You just draw a circle around the object you want removed with a stylus. There is no programming. No complex frame-by-frame edits. I’m not sure if this is frightening or super cool. But at least we can be reasonably sure this new superpower will only be used for good. (Right?)

You may have heard of augmented reality. That’s the process of altering live video to add elements, such as New York’s Twin Towers. Well, this is augmented reality’s evil twin. It’s called Diminished Reality and it takes only a fraction of a second to complete. Watch the video below.

According to a new report by the Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project people ages 50 and older are joining social networks at an ever increasing rate.

In fact, social networking has just about doubled over this past year, swelling from 22 percent in 2009 to 42 percent in 2010.  comScore, a digital measurement company, found similar results: 27.4 million people age 55+ used social networking in last month, up from 16 million one year ago.

Why is this happening? Well I’m sure you can guess. Older adults want to connect with friends and relatives. But to me, that’s the easy part of the answer. The other half of the answer is in how new technology is not just being created — but designed.

The doubling of any population is unarguably a dramatic increase. Any time you see a change this substantial there must be multiple elements at play. Older adults aren’t just joining social networks because their friends and relatives are there. They’re joining because they are able to figure it out on their own.

Let me clarify. What we’re seeing is a massive cultural shift towards technology — in part because of good design. We have a tendency to stereotype older adults as at best not tech savvy, and at worst Luddites.

As tools become easier to use and better design is incorporated into computer hardware, software and websites the intimidating or hard-to-use “tech” part of technology dissolves away. Older adults no longer need to rely on a grandchild or neighbor to help them. Now, if they can read the screen they can pretty much do anything. I would argue that the problem never was that most older adults were not tech savvy, but that they just didn’t have the patience to deal with something that wasn’t designed intuitively.

Better design isn’t just for those who are not techy. Better design is for everybody. Better design makes things that are complex usable. I’ll go even further. Creating something that is not designed well is inexcusable. There isn’t a single man-made object on this world that can’t be improved with good design from a paint can with a built in roller tray to a superbly designed and well organized website.

We hold technology meetings every month to talk about new interesting things we’ve found that will help us work more effectively and efficiently. Here’s a quick summary of what we talked about in this month’s meeting. Tell us what we missed!

• locafollow.com – Good for finding new people to follow in certain locations or industries on Twitter. Search Twitter users by full name, username, keywords, and location. Shows all the Twitter user details in a compact view without any need of “more info” buttons. Shows the last tweet of the Twitter users. Allows bulk follow. You can create Twitter Lists using the LocaFollow search results.
• leapfish.com – Provides a single, connected, multi-media experience for both searching and sharing traditional and real-time content, to make the new web easier, more integrated and efficient.
• twtqpon.com – Create Twitter coupons
• twtaway.com – A contest manager tool that lets people join your contests via Twitter and we randomly select a winner on a specific date.
• 16 Bitchin’ Commands and Shortcuts for Twitter
• addthis.com – Create social media sharing buttons quickly with tracking ability for eblasts, blogs, sites and more.
• tweepsearch.com – Search Twitter profiles by keywords in bio and location. Useful to help determine quality of your followers.

Someone’s watching you — and who you are determines what they’ll show you.

In malls, health clubs, gas stations and even grocery stores, small cameras are being embedded in the screen or hidden around it to track the viewer’s gender, approximate age range and, in some cases, ethnicity – and can change the ads it displays to those ads that are aimed at that demographic.

That could mean hardware ads for men, cosmetics ads for women and video-game ads for teens. Crazy, huh?

And even if the ads don’t change to match the viewer’s demo, the technology’s ability to determine and record this info in general market terms is important for advertisers who want to know how effectively they’re reaching their target audience at any given location.

While the technology remains in limited use, advertising people say it is finally beginning to live up to its promise. The manufacturers say their systems can accurately determine gender 85 to 90 percent of the time, while accuracy for the other measures continues to be refined. With hair styles on today’s youth, the system is probably more accurate than I would be.

Demographics, but no individual information

Remember “Minority Report”? Tom Cruise’s character enters a mall where a retinal scanner identify him and greet him by name. Well, it’s a little like that, but people are not identified by name. They’re just categorized by how they look.

Using this technology, a screen might show a truck ad for a group of men but switch to a minivan ad when women and children are spotted in the frame by the hidden cameras.

Anyone concerned with privacy?

Because face tracking might scare people (think “big brother”), manufacturers are hurrying to offer reassurances. When the systems capture an image of a person watching the screen, a computer instantly analyzes it for specified variables. The systems’ manufacturers say that nothing is ever stored and no identifying information is ever associated with the pictures, thus making the system less intrusive than a surveillance camera that records what it sees right now. At least that’s the manufacturer’s take.

How does it work?

In general, a sensor or camera in or near the screen identifies viewers’ faces by analyzing shapes, colors and the movement. The concept is similar to the way consumer cameras now can automatically make sure faces are in focus. Yes, those little boxes that make pictures so good are now coming back to haunt us.

When the system focuses in on a face, it compares shapes and patterns to those that are already identified in a database as male or female, thus allowing the system predict the person’s gender almost immediately.

“The most important features seem to be cheekbones, fullness of lips and the gap between the eyebrows,” said Paolo Prandoni, chief scientific officer of Quividi, a French company that is also developing the technology. Others include Studio IMC Inc. in New York.

The companies say their systems have become very good at determining a viewer’s gender, but age is not so simple. Currently, the software can group age in only the broadest terms – teens, younger to middle-aged adults and seniors. The companies developing this technology acknowledge that determining a person’s ethnicity is more challenging than figuring out his or her gender and age range.

Is It Accurate?

It may never be more accurate than it is now, but we should never say “never”. And anyway, even 70% accuracy is better than what is out there now. Think about it: If you’re advertising housing to empty-nesters, you can choose to have your ad seen in a mall by everyone who passes, or take a shot at targeting the ad to those in your demo. Even if you miss 50%, the other 50% will see your message — and only they will see it.

We’ve added a new feature to our blog, Odiogo, which has been automatically converting our posts into high-quality audio files. Each post that is written is transformed into an audio file that can be downloaded, subscribed to or played right from our blog.

This is a cool feature for readers for various reasons — readers now have more ways to experience our blog. It can be opened as a podcast channel at iTunes. This allows users to subscribe to the blog content and also to sync the podcast with iPods/iPhones for even greater access. Visitors can now take content wherever they go and listen to it while doing whatever they want. Converting a post to audio also enables those that are visually impaired the opportunity to follow the blog.

And the most surprising part is the speech quality is fantastic. It’s as close to a human voice as I’ve ever heard from an automated system.

So if you’re interested, click on the “subscribe to our audiocast” button in the left sidebar and start taking us along on your MP3 player.

UPDATE 11/18/08 — Livescribe has a similar product (pen) as below; however, unlike the Mobile Digital Scribe below, the Livescribe will work with Macs. Click this link: Livescribe Digital Pen

——————-

Mobile Digital Scribe is the first device ever to capture natural handwriting from any surface, and store it in the receiver for future use. Based on a revolutionary electronic pen that uses ordinary ink refill to write on any paper, the Mobile Digital Scribe stores handwritten notes, memos or drawings for easy upload to any computer at your convenience. No special digital notepad is required.
Additionally, if the Mobile Digital Scribe is connected to a computer, handwritten text and drawings are displayed directly on the computer screen.

The first device ever to capture natural handwriting from any surface, and store it in the receiver for future use.
No special notepad, digital pad, or ink is required
Included handwriting recognition software (OCR software) turns your handwriting into digital text
Full editing capabilities allow you to easily modify your notes
Export notes via JPEG format and share notes with other users via E-mail or Instant Messaging
Write on any paper up to Letter or A4 size
12 Language OCR Support (English, Spanish, Traditional/Simplified Chinese, French, Dutch, Italian, German, Portuguese, Swedish, Korean, Japanese, and Russian)
Great for Legal and Medical professionals
Students don’t need to carry their laptops to class, write on paper and upload your notes when you are back in the comfort of your room.

Go Digital

Requirements:

Microsoft Windows® 2000, XP or Vista (boo, no macs?)
Minimum 128MB RAM
50MB available hard disk space
Minimum 32-bit color quality
Office XP, 2003 or 2007
USB Port

Go to this link:

Mobile Digital Scribe