Pandora Squared - Web and Business Architects, Consultants, Social Media Marketing, Software and Blogging hope not hype

Now being used by four of our clients and live for more than thirty days. Built upon the Genesis Engine Operating system. Play with it today:

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Music is the currency of all culture.

Christopher Carfi writes on a speech heard at Columbia Universities the Innovation Marketing :

Just finished the first session at the Innovation Marketing Conference, which was a presentation by Russ Klein, the CMO of Burger King. :

“Social currency is like a good joke. When a bunch of friends sit around and tell jokes, what are they really doing? Entertaining one another? Sure, for a start. But they are also using content mostly unoriginal content that they’ve heard elsewhere in order to lubricate a social occasion…

That’s why the most successful TV shows, web sites, and music recordings are generally the ones that offer the most valuable forms of social currency to their fans.

Through song, our ancestors passed down valuable information neccisary for the growth and survival of the social group.

We are social beings of course the need to connect and form groups is natural and forms the sense of identity. Often I hear many advertising types talking about eyeballs, or exploiting consumer information or the noise inthe market and the struggle to find new forms of advertising to reach your customers.

Then you have the neophytes afraid of this technology culture evolution, espousing on the dangers of all the technology, the video games, the hours on the web or chat gen y and gen Z (yes I used the term Gen Z) and how say we are isolating ourselves in walls,

So I ask where then is this evolution of technology taking us?

The result you see is almost often tied with song, and culture.

As Technology progresses it regresses into human natural behavior.

Here is an example:

As our technology grows our ability to form groups using say Web tools and tie them in with our family and close ties increases, (myspace for example) it is phenominally easy now to have everything in a common repository, reminders for birthdays and anneversaries now are a Text Message away.

I so wish I thought of Backpackit but that in itself is nothing new look at the oh so web 1.0 offerings that have been in market: icky web one oh site be careful, you might see that nothing is new with web twoooo just differing technologies

And Just think of this technology- a paper calander with a big red Texta circling stuff you shouldn’t forget?

Solitary Mobility vs. Mobile Sociality

Alex De Carvelo has important parts of this point of my discuission noted in his blog about Mobile Phones and Ipods…

usage of these devices depends on the context of the upcoming activity: when you walk out the door, would you rather stay in touch with others or would you rather listen to music? And if you have a fixed budget and have to choose between buying your first mobile phone or your first mp3 player, which would you buy?

Your choice depends on whether you value solitary mobility or mobile sociality:

• With an iPod while on the move, you create solitary mobility, by 1) signalling to people you are not available to socialize because you are wearing your headphones; and by 2) shielding yourself acoustically from your environment, by building your own private sound bubble (ie., listening to music).

• With a mobile phone, you achieve mobile sociality and can connect with the world while on the move, through voice, SMS, MMS, e-mail, internet access, etc.

Digital LifeStyle

Powerful work is being done much more in the past 3 years on digital lifestyle and social awareness than previous ten years. Start reading and you will agree that most interesting is to see the visual artifact that happens when you map out the digital life- via phone, email sms. The conversations held in email now hold the same power as aphotograph (MIT Media Labs thesis work by Fernanda Viegas here)

People are able to see how their lives are leaving a digital trace…

Again and I say this often it is more social Sciences than technology, technology is the adoption of a toolset to accomplish a purpose. The purpose of course eventually comes back to human behaviour.

Scandallous photos of politicians or actors in comprimising positions used to be understood as proof of the act, this weeks buzz about Katie Courac is interesting, since it was a photoshoped fake… Best Week Ever Blog

In todays blended life- the walls of work and play are becoming more blurred, the digital signal and life we lead is much more than a discussion point in a blog.

Social media is really digital lifestyle aggregation its…here deal with it

Business 2.0 Magazine By Erick Schonfeld, Om Malik, and Michael V. Copeland

Who needs TV networks and film studios? Netizens are creating their own blogs, photos and videos, and that’s translating into hundreds of promising new businesses.

SAN FRANCISCO (Business 2.0 Magazine) – The new culture on the Web is all about consumer creation; it’s composed of things like the nearly 30 million blogs out there and the 70 million photos available on Flickr. With a click of the mouse, anyone can be a journalist, a photographer, or a DJ. The audience-that 1 billion-plus throng linked by the Web-itself is creating a new type of social media.

wow, this was to be a quick blog…but quickly surmising the individuals social structure is global (yes even your ten year old son or daughter), Before our very eyes the Hunter S Thompson and Kerouac stream of conciousness reporting and literature is now written by millions. Just to think, my small nerdy social group was blogging oh so long ago in 1996, only we called it personal websites, struggled with HTML and learned to do more.

What will the next ten years bring us as our identities, relationships, personal and professional networks blend into a permanent idexible and searchable archive?

Hmm.

Enable any community to…

We were forwarded this link by Jay this afternoon: The Adventures of scaling, its close to the work that Hunter and Luis have been so hard a work to deliver…getting our engine tested on the scalability meaning what load will millions of users deliver and it raises a lot of architecture problems. Luis and Hunter, (If they ever take the time to Blog) could write a book and series on the backend scaling applications required for development in Ruby on Rails. Its important to note that by building an operating system for social networks via the Genesis Engine and The Leviticus Project we aim to enable any brand or community.

Become Part of The Trust Economy

The World is moving into something I often call “The Trust Economy” where trusted networks are becoming through technology enablement more important and active in peoples lives, directly affecting how they buy.

This is important and to now as I’ve been playing with LastFM a bit today as we have a pretty interesting Mash with the Genesis Engine the quality of the engine with its various mashes and extensions is timely especially with LastFM. Music is after all social currency.

We have an engine for peer recommendation we can use for any topic, Filmcrowd is taking off like a rocket.

So very much the point we have been making: Companies embrace Communities

A public relations firm Text 100 just opened an office in Second Life and offers to help companies to tap into the creative genius of the virtual communities.

But when you think about it, a lot of us have been doing the “New Media/ Community/ web two point oh!” work for years.

Our Mate in the UK Gary Reid has been advising and doing just this for nearly ten years this is not really anything new, its more social science than it is technology…we are simply enabling natural human behaviour

Its great having the entire team here but they Whine: we are too busy to blog… They say in Unison although it isn’t as if the 18 hour days haven’t taken their toll. Hunter flew into Manila roughly two weeks ago and hasn’t left the front of his Mac mini since (not as expensive as a laptop and small enough to travel)

The team is here working on a pretty huge project for us. We mean huge, when launched we will have something like 4.4 million users on the Genesis Engine. Not bad, as we see it that will put us on the radar a bit more.

Well its been another beer soaked 1 hour night (Note: We are so busy on this project we have only had two nights out in a month), Jay Aggarwal flew in from Brisbane to join Hans, and the crew, Hans was first he flew in 3 weeks ago from San Jose.

The nights have been mostly quiet however this past evening was full of madness a technicolor parade of Australian beer drinking humor, Mobius hosted chill club at Mcafe, and all I know is somewhere around 4am I was phoned by a concerned Philippino telling me to save the boys from Burgus street. So I rescued the guys from an exponential bar tab by dancing terribly. So on a napkin late last night or early in the morning (I cant remember) I compiled my

Top ten list of international startup rules for South East Asia.

10) Don’t blog about the rum episode, motorcycle helmets or the bet about testicles on the dinosaur egg. Ok so what that I kind of sort of just did just that.
9) Mexican Food is not international bring your own premium tequila and tapatio sauce.
8) Karaoke is acceptable form of team bonding, Poison and other butt rock band songs are never allowed.
7) Don’t interupt Hunter or Luis while they are programming. After the sign language you hit the three thousand yard stare, then have to draw pictures and slowly explain, what you mean when you say do you guys want any lunch?
6) It is a rule of thumb that everyones girlfriend will hate Kevin.
5) Always wake up your drunk buddies and drag them to work. Sleep can occur while working on UI.
4) Trying to explain AJAX while drunk and struggling in a foreign language is a nogo.
3) No one, I repeat NO ONE is excited about your technology as you are. Even when though you get goosebumps trying to explain it to really attractive nubile South East Asian women, they are only smiling so you stop talking and leave.
2) Asking “Dude does your wife know” to old beer bellied American Tourists at girlie bars usually ends in some sort of altercation.
1) Guapo means “Give me your money” if you have no money your name is “Joe”

Again, utterly mind numbing David’s alert for August here I have linked his chart on The Long Tail of media and Blogs…

The blogs are in red, MSM in blue. What becomes more interesting to me, however, is that as you continue down the long tail of media sites, the number of blogs starts to grow – to 11 of the top 90 sites, or 12.2% of the total, especially given the budget differentials, as shown below:

I about jumped out of my seat this morning when I read the article in Australian IT, that was oh so generously linked by Frank Arr Microsoft’s Evangalist and former CTO of NineMSN.

The Australian IT article does so many generic things like research Accenture, Gartner and IBM. They didn’t of course delve too deep into the IBM Blogging world or they would see that IBM itself is a leader in the world in: Blogging, Social Networking, and so called Web 2.0 initiatives.

The point is STOP IT. STOP the WEB 2.0 banter as if it is something new and some wonderful term that encompassess everything.

IT IS NOT ABOUT WEB 2.0 or some other naming cool thing of the day.

We have been saying it for years in Australia, we flew the team in and said it this morning in Manila, and we have been saying it in 5 major markets now for over 3 years:

It is about business and using technology as the enabler.

From the Article:

Accenture Australia technology consulting senior director Darren Russ says consumer sites that adhere to Web 2.0 principles are starting to make their corporate counterparts look tired in the eyes of new entrants to Australia’s workforce. bq. However, he says, he’s yet to find any major Australian enterprises or organisations prepared to commit to adopting Web 2.0 on a large scale. “Not at the moment,” he says. “Enterprises are just dipping their toes in the water, but we’re not aware of any organisation in Australia that’s moving to proper Web 2.0 interfaces.”

Gartner senior analyst Dion Wiggins says the Web 2.0 phenomenon is part of wider trend that has made the consumer market the “testing ground” for internet services, which later supply blueprints for enterprise applications. “I’d say that in a year’s time there’ll be a large number of enterprise products using Web 2.0, but today there are very few,” he says. We have Web 2.0 Enterprise Applications Today

Pandora Squared has an entire family of products that we have released for the Enterprise.

These products are being used TODAY, in corporations throughout south east asia.

Expect Pandora Squared’s announcement soon on these client partners and as well as our exciting investment news…

We have been so busy working on our TEAM Focus Family of products that we have neglected to start communicating about our most recent project…

TS MOO

We call this (for lack of a better definition) Top Secret Maybe One Organisation. OR TSMOO

We are kidding of course.

Truth is we have flown the entire Pandora Squared Team into Manila for The Leviticus Project.

A big part of The Leviticus Project is education, and of course launching brands around the user.

We just finished our Kickoff discussion with our client partner on the shift in the Web, and technologies behind this, most of this mornings discussion was a distilled version of our training program. We perfected this in April when we did our training at the Philippine Defense College, but no matter- each and every time we present and educate I feel we could have done so much better.

Here are the Points we suggest as the most important when it comes to understanding this shift.

Desire Lines

The Search

The Cluetrain Manifesto

Abandoning the news

Small Worlds phenomenon(network)

User Centric Business Models,

Agile and Extreme Programming as part of your markeitng!

(Youtube link of this mornings meeting will be inserted here)

Murdoch outs himself By Mark Jones

Rupert, the great white hope of traditional media, finally let’s it slip that he really doesn’t have any idea about the internet in this story: THE HOLLYWOOD REPORTER: WHAT HAS SURPRISED YOU THE MOST ABOUT THE MYSPACE EXPERIENCE? Rupert Murdoch: The speed at which it has grown. It has had no marketing. Not a penny has been spent marketing it before or after the purchase, and it just grows faster and faster every week. Now we’re taking it out to other countries.

Ben waxes poetical on everything relevant to a user centric business model. Through this Ben Barren reinforces our concept of a user ecosystem meme that we keep beating the crap out of clients with. (pun inteneded) http://benbarren.blogspot.com/2006/07/marketing-budget-crap.html

Rupert Murdoch: The speed at which it has grown. It has had no marketing. Not a penny has been spent marketing it before or after the purchase, and it just grows faster and faster every week. Now we’re taking it out to other countries. BB : The test of new products now is how much marketing they need. The more; The worse. “The future of local stations is very good provided they remain true to their roots, be very local, have their own local Web sites and do all that properly. And if they are aligned to a leading television network, they are going to be in good shape.”

I usually don’t write posts like this in the official Pandora Squared blog. I regularly use my personal blog, livingtrends.blogspot.com for things like this.

We are standing at the precipice of humanity staring down into complete and utter crash and at the same time massive blessings of promise…but it as always is the waiting game… midst our struggles it is here I learn the most.

Well- I don’t know if it is voice, I don’t know if conversations and that blogger is buggy or down at the moment, but I can’t seem to get in to post my thoughts. My understanding of the collected unconsciousness is that the blogosphere brings to the real world the ivisible conversations and allows me to write my thoughts here- on the corporate blog so here they go.

Black marks on a phosphorescent screen that stands as a metaphor for the enunciations of sounds that make up voice and the fabric of conversation, identity and community are here. These black marks are hyper linked permanent indexible and archivable.

Funny thing. These things, these qualitative concepts of black lines on paper then eventually screens moving today into social sciences are not as easily sold to those whose strength is ERP, or supply chain management. They say conversations are a soft science unable to be quantified, unable to have a real business value. ERP looks inward. CRM looks out, Social Software enables invisible markets and employees; Social Networks show us the strength of ties…

Ask Dan Rather. Ask Kryptonite bike locks Ask the citizens of Iraq, Israel, or Lebanon who blog midst political crisis, this is why blogs are linked 8 times over a corporate search result.

Markets are conversations indeed.

So my point?

A letter by our COO TOM W. LEE to a client, made me exceptionally happy tonight. It enforces what I have always known, any success is not I, it is the team that makes us great. I absolutely love everyone (I have hand picked to work with us), the fire passion and zeal pave the way and again you cannot outsource passion.

Personal Comment, keeping in mind, we have put four years of Blood, Sweat and Tears to bring the Genesis Engine Product to this 95% stage of completion. I agreed to join with Pandora Squared, because I have belief in what they are moving to do and I believe they are a Wave of the Future.

In my own career, I have been part of Start Up Teams that have taken five successful companies out… to going Public or significantly Upsize Revenues… Diablo Systems/Xerox, with George Comstock from Singer… Apple Computer, with Steve Jobs and Wosniak’s Team… Conner Peripherals, with Finis Conner’s Team… Quantum Peripheral’s with George Brown’s Team… and the Larry Sander’s Turn Around Team that took Fujitsu’s Storage Products Division from USD250 Million to over USD3.5 Billion in three years. A pretty good track record methinks. Five winners in a lifetime. I done picked some Winners… Tom W. Lee

Thanks Tom Lee