Google Wave may spell the beginning of the end of email as we know it. Google Wave is a new tool for communication and collaboration on the web, coming later this year. Watch the demo video below.
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BT are causing us more than a few woes . We've now had no phones for 24 hours and the problem has yet to be sorted. The fault is external to our building and we have been assurred that "there's a man at the exchange trying to sort it". If everyone could just bear with us and use mobiles and email. Hopefully normal service will be resumed shortly.
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Augmented Reality (where real world and computer-generated data are blended in real time) has been around for a while now - think of the Hawkeye replay clips you see in cricket and tennis coverage - but up to now it has not really been used to any great effect within the marketing space.

The Wall Street Journal (you need a subscription to read the full article) has a piece about how some brands are starting to experiment with it. Papa John's have launched a campaign based around a road trip in a 1972 Camaro (the car that the founder sold in order to fund the business). The road trip is happening for real but consumers will be given the opportunity to take part in a "virtual" trip by pointing the icon on the bottom of their pizza delivery box at their webcam. Once on the virtual trip they will be offered exclusive discounts on future purchases displayed on virtual billboards along the virtual road.

This all sounds a little bit gimmicky to me and I'm not sure how many times you are likely to go back to this site once you have played with it once. The United States Postal Service, however have come up with a genuinely innovative and useful implementation of the technology. Their Virtual Box Simulator allows you to hold an object that you want to send by post in front of a webcam and use the resulting 3-D image to determine the right size box for shipping the object.

Another area of AR that has been receiving a lot of attention recently is that of Building Recognition. There are a number of mobile applications being developed that allow you to take a picture of a building using your camera phone, upload it and then get information back about that building in real time. The technology uses GPS to narrow down the field of possible buildings that you could be looking at, and once it has identified the exact building from the database, returns you data about it. You can easily imagine a world of possibilities that this opens. For example, you are stood in front of a restaurant, you point your camera phone at it and immediately receive the menu with prices, opening hours, a list of customer reviews and a link to make a reservation. You can read a bit more about this here or watch an episode of BBC Click that features it here.

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Graffiti, by definition, is two fingers up at society - right? Well not in China, “One China forever.” That’s a bit like Banksy scrawling pro capitalist messages without the irony.

But graffiti is not the only anti/pro establishment activity you see. The BBC ran a report a few months back on China's hip hop culture. Kids on the streets of China rapping about family values, loving your parents and supporting the regime. Not quite in the spirit of rebellion you might agree? But whilst Chinas zero tolerance to social disruption might offend our democratic tendencies – you can’t help but think that the threat of a knock on the door and a long stay in Qincheng Prison does seem to encourage a more positive form of rebellion. Would Banksy agree, probably not – but then I did see his latest book being heavily publicised in a Hong Kong bookstore.

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Google will be launching its Google Squared product really soon now (like days or weeks but definitely not months).  Its pretty experimental stuff, it basically takes info from websites and displays it in a spreadsheet.  It works by looking at the structure of content on a web page and the “titles” given to content, sounds simple ?!  The really clever bit is that it pulls this content from lots of different sources (web sites and pages) and works out a common structure to display it as …

They recently showed an example of it where they ran a query for “small dog” in Google Squared. Seconds later a table appeared showing photographs of various dogs, their origin, height and weight in a really clear and simple layout.

This is just one constant flow of new products and features that Google is delivering to stay ahead and dominate search.  This is all good for consumers and web users but not necessarily good for content providers and online publishers.  Is it yet another way that Google is devaluing information?

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