The Pinevio Blog

Highlights of Thinking Digital Conference 2011

Pinevio team has attended the Thinking Digital Conference in Gateshead, UK. It was the first time for us both and to be honest, the conference blew our minds away even more then expected. It was professionally organised, the speakers were inspiring and the atmosphere was remarkable. I think it’s our duty to help spread the most remarkable ideas of the conference for the benefit of those who couldn’t be there.

Throughout the course of three days there were many speakers who all inspired the audience in their own ways. In this post I will recap the most interesting talks and ideas on last day of the conference, Thursday (26h of May, 2011).

On the last day of conference there was a wide selections of topics to choose from: entrepreneurship, brain-computer interfaces, cure for cancer, future of the web, uncertainty, 3D art, and more.

I would like to start with a rather philosophical talk delivered by a professional poker player, presenter, anthropologist and economist Caspar Berry. The topic of this talk was – uncertainty of the future.  Caspar argued we are frustrated due the unpredictability of the future: in terms of what’s going to happened in a minute, after a month or in 10 years. He raised a though that people have learned to live with uncertainty and that it’s its exactly this frustrating, insecure and mind bobbling feeling which drives us to grow and develop. Uncertainty itself is what makes life interesting and worth living, it’s what makes us look forward to the following day.

Personally, I can relate to his ideas, because the start-up world, which I’m currently in, is built on uncertainty and constant struggle to abandon your comfort zone, work beyond expectations, do something never done before. This is how you can create something valuable and interesting. Yes, this feeling is stressful and can be difficult to manage, but at the end of the day it makes something you do worth doing.

Secondly, I would like to talk about the future of the web and talk given by Allen Cohen, VP at Cisco in San Francisco. This talk has been very interesting for both me and colleague because Mr.Cohen was arguing that context is the future of the web, which is also at the core of Pinevio’s value proposition and ideology.  The main point of the talk was that contemporary web systems and applications on lack contextual value for the end user. Therefore, the next-gen web systems have to be more transparent, real-time and contextual.

Lets put this in context.

We can use foursquare to let people know our whereabouts. We can use Facebook to find out what our friends are doing.  But if for example we walk in to a conference and want to find who are the VCs I should approach about funding my web star-up or who of them are connected with relevant people, contemporary web systems might find it difficult to help you out. It’s exactly this real time contextual information discovery linking people with computer systems, which will be at the core of the next generation of corporations’ value proposition for the user.

Here at Pinevio we share the vision and believe that technology through real-time communication, transparency and contextual relevance can improve the quality and efficiency of our lives to an unprecedented extent. Its just a matter of who captures public’s imagination with the right value offering first. Next Facebook will be born in this space.

Dr.Vincent W.Li, the co-founder of the Angiogenesis Foundation, delivered third talk, which has caught my imagination. He was talking about a revolutionary method of treating and hopefully curing cancer. The approach is called anti-angiogenesis. The concept is simple. Both healthy and cancer cells in our body are fed in the same way. That’s via blood vessels. If a certain healthy part of the body is deprived of blood vessels - it dies due to lack of nutrients. The same thing happens to cancer cells if you cut of the vessels supplying it. The process by which body builds new blood vessels is called Angiogenesis and preventing that from happening is called Anti-Angiogenesis. If you cut the blood supply to cancer tumors they can’t grow and die.

However, the really interesting part of the approach is that you can adjust your diet to control your angiogenesis process naturally and basically prevent blood vessels from developing, which also prevents cancer cells from growing. Effectively you can medicate your cancer by eating the right stuff. Even more interesting is this anti-cancer diet includes regular, tasty, everyday products like strawberries, dark chocolate, green tea and a variety of other stuff, which we all love. Furthermore, if you cook these products in a right way, their anti-angiogenesis characteristics can increase sustainably.

This information is a huge breakthrough in terms of the approaches used to fight cancer. Majority of treatments used nowadays look as dangerous as the cancer itself: radiation, operations, transplants. This new knowledge enables us to prevent dangerous cancers from forming in the first place in a way that’s harmless to our body.

The key challenge here is capture public imagination and develop awareness that by eating the right stuff we can prevent cancer. For more information please click here and help spread the word as much as possible.

Lastly, I would like to tell you about a talk, which left the most impression and simply blew our minds away. Tan Lee, co-founder of Emotiv, introduced a revolutionary brain-computer interface. It works like this: you put an elegant head-net  with a bunch of sensors, which monitor brain waves,  on your head and via sophisticated software you are able to move objects with your…mind! Yes mind! Mrs. Lee showed a life demo on stage with a member from the audience.  Application of this is limitless but just to give you a taste of what it means: so far Emotiv has enabled people to drive cars, wheel chairs, create art, operate smart-home systems. All controlled with your thoughts.

Emotiv has opened their API for the developer community to engage and build great software around this brain-computer interface. The plethora of opportunities this creates has especially excited Pinevio team. So if you are a crazy developer and want to build insane stuff get in touch with us.  A cloud of start-ups is bound to explode as a result of the potential eco-system generated by the Emotiv. And the best part about this invention is its price – just $299.

That’s the end of our short report on the TDC 11. Please spend some time browsing the links provided in the post. There is so much more exciting stuff these talks had to offer.

Pinevio team is looking forward to the next year’s TDC. Hopefully we’ll also get the opportunity to share our ideas with people across the globe.

P.S. The man behind this event is Mr. Herb Kim . Special thank you to him for making this great event happen and inspiring so many people.

Post by Daumantas

Co-Founder @ Pinevio

 

Thinking Digital Conference - day 3

Today Pinevio team is attending the Thinking Digital conference in Gateshead!

Please follow our Tumblr updates on all the interesting action happening at the conference.

Also we’ll be capturing our perspective of the conference via the Color photo sharing app to Pinevio’s Twitter!

We wish a great day to all of the attendees! See you soon!

Co-founder - Daumantas

Problems faced by social web surfers

Dear social web surfers, I’m Mindaugas, one of the co-founders of Pinevio. I will be writing one more section on our blog starting with several problems that socially active web surfers face these days. 

Because of the huge number of social networks, blogs, forums, RSS feeds and socially interactive websites in our lives it has become incredibly difficult to select only the most relevant information. My colleague Daumantas has described the importance and the meaning of the interest graph in a couple of previous posts, so I will not get into great detail about that in this post. 

Firs of all, let’s start with a situation, that social media expert Tara Hunt has described as “social media black hole”. You might have noticed that links, posts, conversations, tweets, likes, shares and re-shares are getting lost after a short period of time on your social networks main page. A video from YouTube, a piece of music from SoundCloud, or just a funny conversation you had, sink into the bottom of your social actions ocean and sometimes it’s nearly impossible to retrieve it again. We can’t search for it on Google or Bing, because in most cases we just don’t remember the exact name of a link, or post, or conversation that we are trying to find. The question is, how can we organize and manage our historic actions on the social web, so that we can come back to them whenever we want. 

There are a couple of approaches to solving this situation. Curation and bookmarking. Both of these approaches require the user to be highly involved in manual processes and some web applications are so difficult to use that you don’t even want to come back to them after first time. I feel there is a need for some sort of cross-hybrid of content curation, bookmarking and influence measurement. Ideally this process should be automated initially and based on social recognition of content. Users would only have to confirm whether they agree or disagree if that content is truly relevant to them. Most likely it should be, because it comes from our own social activity history. 

I would like to expand a little bit more on “social content recognition” or as we would like to call it – the Social Equity. For those who are familiar with “Whuffie factor” or social capital, it is not the same thing. Our whuffie represents our influence, reach and impact on on-line/off-line society. Social Equity, on the other hand, is the value and the importance of a piece of content. Let me put it into context: if two unrelated and unconnected Facebook users post the same video on their walls they will most likely get different responses. The will get different numbers of likes, comments and re-shares. It is different because of the IG/SG ratio difference (Interest Graph/Social Graph). We all have different impact on our friends and followers base, therefore my argument is that there is a need to allow social web users to discover more people who have similar Social Equity counts on the stuff that they are interested in. The Social Equity of a number of different users can be accumulated and we get into an area of content spread, reach and virality, but I will talk about this in my later posts, once I have finished describing the problems on the social web.

That’s it for now! Leave your comments and ideas and we can have a discussion. I will tackle another social web problem next week.

Post by Mindaugas, co-founder @Pinevio 

follow me on Twitter @kurHOUSEaz

99.5% Social Media experts are Clowns?

Important Disclaimer! I’m NOT a Social Media marketing expert. I just operate in the space and have an opinion.

Recently there has been a lot of debate on the web around a somewhat controversial statement by an immigrant entrepreneur (this I can relate to), wine expert, best-selling author and the social enthusiast, Gary Vaynerchuk in a TechCrunch interview. 

On the big stage Gary called 99.5% percent of Social Media experts, or people who market themselves as such - Clowns.

For those who haven’ heard about it, the story goes like this.

According to Gary, the vast majority of Social Media marketers these people don’t have a thorough understanding of the underlying drivers and process behind the business, which they are consulting o Social Media marketing.  Therefore, they can you help you grow Twitter, Facebook, Quora, etc follower bases. They can come up with vague and general social media strategies, but those followers are rarely converted into regular retained customers generating sustainable ROI and the strategies are not really working.

As a result, many companies these days are disappointed by so-called SMM experts and start to doubt the whole efficiency of social media marketing. All this you would have understood having seen Gary’s video on TC or the after-interview blog post.

I’ve decided to write about this because Gary raised an interesting point on his response video-blog afterwards. With this straightforward in-your-face statement Gary, or at least he claims so, didn’t want to bullshit on his competition (although he has done a bit of that to be honest).

Instead, he wanted to start a debate around what it actually means to be a Social Media Expert and how should businesses deal with the problem of incompetent candidates. I think this is important, therefore lets continue the discussion.

 I agree with Gary. Too many people these days claim to be Social Media experts, even make decent living out of it. I think there are two main reasons for that.

Firstly, social media is a novelty for a lot of business and organizations, especially for those who don’t operate in a tech or digital space. Businesses across different industries are starting to understand that we “need” to get on board the social ship.  For many of them it’s a completely uncharted place, therefore, rather reluctantly they tend to seek help from “outside” people who claim to know it. Where there is demand there is supply, right?

Secondly, many of us have faulty pre-conceptions about what Social Media marketing is all about. Well, it’s NOT about getting 10000 followers on Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, Quora or other social network. It’s NOT about broadcasting pre-designed marketing messages made by some over-priced marketing agency. It’s NOT about doing immediate “push” sale to people who have expressed initial interests.

I think, it’s about developing targeted communities around your product or problem solved by your product. It’s about conversations not broadcasting. It’s about creating value relationships with your customers and retaining them over time. It’s about in-depth understanding of the underlying business marketed via the Social. And it’s a million other things as well.

These misleading pre-conceptions result in businesses apply faulty hiring criteria for SMM experts, which eventually lead to an unacceptable expectation gap and disappointed clients.

A huge number of businesses want outside help with SMM but limited understanding of the space makes them struggle to find a proper expert.  

The main point I would like to emphasize in this post is this.

Social Media marketing is difficult. It’s time consuming. It takes a lot of expertise and skill to get it right. Actual Social Media expert has to have an in-depth understanding of your industry, holistic expertise in relevant business process and feel the social media marketing pulse, a cherry on top of the cake. It’s difficult to find these people, they are far from cheap and they rarely market themselves as experts because other people do it for them.

So when you think about it, the best Social Media marketer is a person in charge of the business: co-founder/director/manager/Business owner, etc. Any good business owner should already be an expert when it comes to understanding underlying business processes, customer needs, the industry and all other crucial factors, so all is left is to understand the Social.

I know this might sound somewhat against the market, but if you are not willing to invest significant capital to find real SMM experts, educate yourself. Even though it’s difficult, the Social media is not a rocket science. It’s just new and has to do with people, which always make a tricky

Nevertheless„ my suggestion would be to use all of free resources available on the web to get grips with the principles of social marketing. Then build the strategy, grow communities yourself and only start looking for outside support when you need to take your SMM efforts to another level, and most importantly when you can afford a quality service from real experts.

This way, there will be less disappointing opportunists who diminish the credibility of the entire industry. Business will achieve better ROI because they will invest capital when it’s actually necessary to grow. And most importantly, the quality of social media marketing communications will increase substantially making the whole space a better place to be in. 

Post by @daumis2475

Co-founder @ Pinevio

 

The Social Consumer

 In this post I will define The Social Consumer, describe its behavior and explain why it’s crucial to engage this segment via the Interest graph.

 The Social Consumer has been evangelized by Brian Solis and other thought leaders for a few years now as the most important consumer segment in contemporary social marketing. This is why.

 The Social Consumer is a person who makes purchase decisions based on peer recommendations on social media.

 The Social Consumer is a direct “product” of the social web. These people are socially active on multiple social networks, content discovery platforms, blogs, etc. They constantly share favorite content, let the social graph know their whereabouts via foursquare, favorite videos on YouTube, music sets on SoundCloud, etc. Being a social consumer is all about sharing. A bit of friendly spam hasn’t heart anyone, right?

 The Social Consumer will notify the Twitter/Facebook follower/friend base straight away if: an unfriendly bartender gave a poorly washed glass, a brand new Burberry jacket has deteriorated in a month after purchase or someone was unreasonable at work, etc.

 The Social Consumer is open, friendly and transparent in exchanging and sharing information with peers. They don’t think twice before broadcasting details of their personal lives online. That’s because they trust their peers, trust the social web and feel the urge to share.  Do you know people like that? To be honest, I think I’m starting to become one of them.

 It’s exactly this openness, transparency, trust and love for the Social that makes The Social Consumer segment an ideal distributor for various content: marketing content, personal content and/or any other content. As long as it’s interesting, The Social Consumer will broadcast it to the world.

 Taking into consideration that they are well connected and influential among thousands of friends and followers, the preferred piece of content can be spread immensely over a relatively short period of time. And all of it is virtually cost free.

 Content distribution is just one piece in a huge puzzle of how an engaged social consumer is able to benefit your organization. Direct market research, product testing, product evangelism, brand PR, community management, damage control, etc., etc., etc. The Social Consumer is able to do it all by living normal social lives without extra effort, because this is who they are.

 Therefore, I believe that The Social Consumer is essential mediator of a new-wave marketing communications. Engaging with The Social Consumer is the obvious challenge. And the answer to it, in my mind, is to map current interests of the Social Consumer and monitor how it changes to target your marketing efforts accordingly, to achieve maximum engagement. In other words, it’s the Interest graph.

Post by @daumis2475

Co-Founder @ Pinevio 

The Interest Graph - Part II

In my last post I’ve tried to explain the Interest graph. Now I will add more relevance to the discourse and talk about why the Interest graph is at the core of contemporary marketing and advertising.

 The consumer/user is the most important thing to any good business. People is the reason why the business does what it does, operates they way it operates. Understanding your customer’s needs, wants, expectations, views, etc. is key to provide them with desired products and services. Needless to say that’s far from easy. People are complicated. Consumers, I would say, are even more complicated. Finding out what really drives a consumer to make a purchase decision has always been the challenge of marketing. There are several good reasons for that.

 Firstly, consumers don’t know what they want. So marketers have to tell them sometimes. Secondly, their needs and wants are influenced by numerous factors such as fashion, friends, mood, health of their cat, children, Tweets, Facebook updates, answers of Quora, Obama’s health reform, Pirates in Somali, etc. Lastly, consumer’s needs change very quickly, because that’s what life is all about, isn’t it?

 Ideally marketers would like to develop profound, complete, accurate, and regularly updated profiles of their target users. They would like to have an insight “lens” into actual aspiration, passions, ambitions, etc. of their target consumers. In other words what they really need is a cross-platform interest graph map of an individual and monitor how it changes over time. This could only happen when people are willing to share all that information themselves.

 Luckily, the Social web is an unprecedented environment, which motivates people to share their personal information, attitudes, opinions, interests, beliefs, etc. with the world. By sharing a link on Facebook about Social Media Marketing, Re-Tweeting a post on Bee keeping, blogging about the Interest graph, watching YouTube videos about Italian sports cars, asking/answering Quora questions on travel tips to Spain, listening to classical tunes on Spotify, etc. etc. Every single day we leave a trail of clues of who we are, what we are interested in and what really drives us. This trail is our Interest graph, or to be more precise a sum of multiple interest graphs coming together to portray our interests’ profile.

 The amount and accuracy of information we are willing to share online these days is vast. The concept of privacy is being pushed further than ever before, implications of which are beyond the scope of this posts. Now marketers, business people and anyone else who needs to engage with people has got a limitless goldmine called the Social Web at their disposal. All gold rushes have winners and losers. The key to succeeding in marketing on the Social Web will be to efficiently monitor, understand and be able to act upon the cross-platform Interest graph of your target audiences.

Businesses who will use the Interest graph wisely will accumulate extremely accurate, relevant and up-to-date knowledge bank on their target markets enabling them to gain a long-term sustainable competitive advantage over those who don’t.

 In my next post, I will take a deeper look at the most important thing for any business. Yes. It’s users/consumers/customers. In particular I will be looking at the new and emerging segment – the Social Consumer.

 

Post by

Daumis @daumis2475

Co-Founder @ Pinevio

The Interest Graph - Part I

In this post I will try to define the Interest graph, it’s nature and changes on the Web, which have taken the concept to another level.

Phrase the Interest graph is evangelised by new media guru, and recognized writer Brian Solis. In his blog (www.briansolis.com) he dedicated a series of posts trying to explain the Interest graph, show how it’s different from the social graph and underline the importance of it in terms of content consumption, marketing and business. 

 To understand the phrase better firstly we should define the social graph. That’s a network of relationships based on personal bonds. It’s your family, friends, colleagues, co-workers, people you know, have met, communicated, etc. It’s people you are connected to online.

In contrast, the Interest graph is a network of relationships around particular interests, which needn’t be personal.  The subject of interest alone is enough to gather people around it, without the necessity to develop rigid social bonds. The nature of interest relationships is more pragmatic and relevant information around interests is the key motivator to connect.

 Even though the Interest graph has been one of the trendiest topics in the Valley and other tech havens during last year or so, it’s not a new notion. Various interest graphs existed online since the beginning of the Internet. They are called – forums, websites where people are enabled to exchange views, opinions, etc, around their interest, without the need to connect further.

 So if interest graphs have been there for ages, why all of a sudden people have started to hype and consider it the future of the Web itself? The simple answer is  - Facebook. In pre-social media times, forums and other websites were like distant, disconnected islands, populations of which were bounded by the poor connectedness and immaturity of the Internet. Back then different interest graphs were located on different platforms, which rarely communicated with one other, making the broader exchange of information very difficult.

 Facebook with us for just 4 years but there are nearly 700 million people on it, one platform of communication. Moreover, that single social platform has penetrated millions of independent websites with Facebook Connect,  “like” button; recently “send” button and other options.

 The social media has transformed the Web from a dessert of dispersed information, where Google did a brilliant job in putting order to it, to a vibrant and inter-connected space where everyone could be linked to everyone. It’s exactly this inter-connection that has pushed the Interest graph potential to a whole new level.

 In the Social web people are enabled to discover information from more sources than ever before, since now we are potentially connected to the entire Web. Now everyone is creating, curating and/or distributing content for others. I would argue that it’s exactly this potential to discover best information from numerous relevant sources that will be driving people to move from more closed personal relationships to open and less binding interest-based relationships. 

 Facebook has managed to build the social layer on the web. The Interest layer is next!

 “The Age of Relevance is here” -  TechCrunch.

 In the next post I will go into the business side of the Interest graph. What it means for users, consumers and businesses.

Post by Co-Founder Daumis, @daumis2475

 

Introduction

Welcome to the Official blog by Pinevio!

Pinevio is a high-tech start-up based in Newcastle, UK. Recently out of the business acceleration program called the Difference Engine, working hard to build a great web app. 

Pinevio is a social content discovery platform, allowing our users to discover great content from people with shared interest.

The core idea behind Pinevio is to build the Interest graph, connections with people based around shared interests.

In this blog space the co-founders will be writing about the interest graph, the social consumer (our target users) and problems around managing mountains of social content generated throughout the social web.

Our mission is to help people make sense of the mess that the social web is now!

Please feel free to add your opinions, thoughts and suggestions.

Co-Founder  - Daumis