TechnoCloud

It’s not quite as good a ‘reveal’ as the ‘Sixth Sense’, but Dorling Kindersley’s take on the future of publishing is worth two minutes of your time.

It explores pre-conceptions of the future of the publishing industry, consumer’s interests and desires for content.

Just make sure you watch it at least to half way…

With an awful pun worthy of this blog, UMG are releasing an iPhone app, Mariah Carey-Oke.

Fans get to sing along to four of the her songs and are awarded points if they match her vocals - Singstar in an app, an interesting way to tie in the iPhone’s microphone functionality.

In addition, the app includes news and tour information, as well as integration with Twitter and Facebook, and links to buy songs from iTunes. It costs $3.99 in the US a premium on the cost of purchasing the songs through iTunes, but is as yet unavailable in the UK.

It was with great sadness that I learned of the tragic death in a plane crash of the ball of energy and ideas that was Martin Schaedel.

I played a small part on his journey to internet celebrity, giving him what I believe was his first ever job. as described in the article in the New York Observer.

I was managing the technology department at web marketing agency, Panlogic, and was on the lookout for a search engine optimiser. Round after round of uninspiring CVs came and went leaving me still no closer to finding that elusive staff member.

I then received a call from a confident and highly promising candidate who clearly knew considerably more about search engine optimisation that I ever would and seemed almost too good to be true, name dropping conferences, high profile contacts and pointing me to his real estate site to show off his skill at getting high rankings.

At the very end of his call he dropped his bombshell. “There is just one thing more I should tell you. I’m 17.” Clearly this was no ordinary candidate.

We flew him over from Sweden and the team and I grilled him on his extensive SEO knowledge, as he answered each question almost dismissively challenging us to test him further. He then stood his ground and haggled like a veteran over his wage demands leaving us not quite sure what to make of his young prodigy.

Age is no barrier to talent, so we asked him to join us and he accepted. He was quickly welcomed into the team attracting the nickname ‘Mini-Sven’ after then England football manager fellow Swede, Sven-Göran Eriksson.

His confidence was staggering for someone his age, quickly challenging the status quo and proposing that we changed our entire business model on his very first day. As it was, he had to knuckle down with the rest of the team and go through his probationary period.

His first review was a reminder of just how young he was, as he asked for an early answer on his probationary period as he had to let his school know whether he was coming back or not!

He was just as unique outside the office insisting that he only drank champagne and telling tales of the women in his life and his ambitions in the finance industry. You were never quite sure what the reality was with him, but he made entertaining company and did his work, so we got on fine. Perhaps a sign of the line between fact and fiction was in the reported claim in the New York Observer article to have made $2,000 a day doing SEO - I wish!

To his great frustration he never quite managed to beat me at the office table football, but proved a willing attacker in doubles matches against the combined forces of the Creative department…

I later left the company and a short time later so did he, but we kept up on Messenger as he began to realise his goals. There’s no doubt he would have gone onto extraordinary things and it is a tremendous tragedy that such a maverick with so much ahead of him was to end his life at just 23.

Now I’ve seen it all, with MSNBC’s NewsBreaker, news for the addicted gamer (or easily bored).

They have taken the classic brickbreaker game and added a news twist. During the game, news stories are released by knocking out certain bricks, with the headlines drifting down, before aligning themselves in a right-hand column. Click on a headline and the game pauses.

You can picture hardened news professionals (plus quite a few of the rest of us) raising their eyes to the sky at the mere thought of this, but no doubt some will enjoy this way of consuming the news.

If you could add your own feeds and escape the drudgery of ploughing through your news feed backlog while knocking bricks from the sky there may be something in this after all, particularly if you could tie it into a more entertaining game. Football news while playing FIFA on PS3?

Up to a couple of weeks ago very few visitors were coming through to this site from the search engines. In fact it took a couple of months for Google (MSN Search and Yahoo were more accommodating) to even offer up the site as a result for a direct search on ‘TechnoCloud’.

I’ve semi-dilligently built up inbound links and populated the site with content, but Google refused to send even a dribble of its endless traffic TechnoCloud’s way. This started to change thanks to inclusion in Dmoz.org, the Open Directory Project, which Google uses as one element of its ranking system. After that you could search for ‘TechnoCloud’ and find the site.

I’ve read before about Google ‘Sandboxing‘, but not experienced it first hand. The theory goes that Google will place new sites for around six months into an equivalent of internet purgatory.

Around six months after making my first post on TechnoCloud, it appears that Google has given the thumbs up to the site. As if a switch had been flicked all of a sudden, I started getting through a regular stream of visitors from the search engines on the likes of ‘Facebook mobile’ and interestingly the ever popular ‘Make your own Supermodel’.

Welcome to to the TechnoCloud blog where we’ll be discussing news, trends and developments in Media Technology.