What is Lively?

Lively is a 3D virtual experience that is the newest addition to Google labs. It is available through a browser plugin for Firefox and Internet Explorer. It is Windows only for now. Lively does not feature one coherent world like Second Life but splits worlds up into different rooms. Lively was originally developed as a 20% project by Niniane Wang.

Google Lively is billed as a “chat experience” using avatars. Google says, “You’re about to embark on a chat experience in which you can communicate and express yourself using avatars in your very own space. Choose an avatar and use it to make friends and chat. Create rooms, decorate them to your liking, and make sure to invite your friends over.”
Choose a Google Lively room

What all does it offer
Lively runs completely in the browser and you use your Google account to log in and create your own avatars.

What all can you do on lively

Within the world, you can interact with other users, very much like you would do in Second Life. You can also watch YouTube clips on virtual TVs and share your own photos.

Users can choose from a number of preset animations for their characters, ranging from shaking hands with others, to applauding, crying, etc. By double clicking on certain items in the virtual world, users can also often activate some preset animations such as sitting down on a chair or jumping off a dive board.

Setting the plugin up and creating an avatar is a very simple process. Creating rooms, too, seems quite easy, as you can quickly import a number of templates to get started. Currently, all virtual items for Lively are for free, but chances are that Google will start charging for premium items in the future.

For now, the content in Lively is being created only by Google, though over time, they are planning to allow users to start creating their own content as well.

Rooms can be easily embedded into any webpage and worlds often launch with a basic skeleton of the room within just a few seconds.

Here’s how it works

Choose a Google Lively room

• From the Room List, click the title of the room you’d like to visit first.
• Use the tabs at the top of the page to sort rooms by most popular, most visitors, or newest.
• Once you’ve added friends or created a room, the My Rooms and Friends’ Rooms tabs will also be handy.

                     
Choose your Google Lively avatar

• Click My Avatar on the right sidebar.
• Click the avatar you like and choose Select Avatar (your avatar changes instantly).
• Once you’ve chosen the one you want, click the X to hide the menu.

Change your Google Lively avatar’s clothing

To change your outfit, check out the styles available in the wardrobe picker. Here’s how:

• Click My Wardrobe on the right sidebar to open your wardrobe.
• Browse or search the options in your wardrobe inventory and select items to wear. When you double-click an item, it’ll appear on your avatar instantly. You don’t have to close the window to find out if you like the look.

If you don’t like how something looks on your avatar, go back to your wardrobe, left-click on the item, and choose Remove Item.

If you want more wardrobe options, add new stuff to your inventory by o quickly change your entire outfit, click my avatar and choose I’m Feeling Lucky. You’ll see the new duds on your avatar instantly.

                        
Create your own Google Lively room

• Click new room and choose Create New Room to start the process.
• Look over each tab and choose what you want your room to look like, the permissions you want to grant visitors, and whether you’d like to play music in your room.

Conclusion

Lively lets you have the world available where you want it, rather than forcing you to go to a certain space. Or, as Google puts it: “It’s integrated with the Internet. It’s not an alternate destination. Our intention is to add to your existing life.”

Resources
http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/lively_google_launches_virtual.php

http://www.elearnspace.org/blog/archives/003432.html
www.lively.com

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2008/07/be-who-you-want-on-web-pages-you-visit.html

http://blog.searchenginewatch.com/blog/080708-181651

What is Piclens? 

It’s a free browser plug in from Cooliris, which provides astonishingly good image browsing facilities on the web. The best way to describe PicLens is that it’s a like the slideshow feature in Picasa or a similar photo viewing tool, but applied to web pages. Clever use of zooming, panning and 3D style presentation not only improves your ability to scan, but is also visually stunning. Piclens provides full screen immersive picture browsing of web sites that support Media RSS.

How and where it works 

To use PicLens, a user clicks a small translucent icon   that appears atop the image of   interest once the plugin is installed. The PicLens slideshow interface appears and the user can move from one photo to the next or press play and enjoy the show. A user can intuitively browse images within search results, photo albums, and Media RSS enabled websites.

Support is currently provided for Flickr, Facebook, Friendster, Picasa Web Album and image search results from Google and Yahoo. Site owners can add support to any site with photos by including Media RSS support.

What you can do on Piclens.

3D Wall

Transform your browser into a full-screen, 3D experience for online photos and videos

3D Video Search

Fly through 1000s of You Tube videos faster than you’ve ever imagined possible

 Discover

MSNBC, ESPN, movie trailers…Get the latest news, photos, and video feeds

Shop Amazon

Browse products from Amazon in a new virtual window shopping environment

Conclusion

The full screen rendering does require a decent internet speed when displaying large photographs, but visually the results are stunning. This Firefox plugin is going to find a lot of fans very, very quickly

Resources

http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/06/26/full-screen-web-photo-browsing-with-piclens/

www.greatapps.blogspot.com

www.piclens.com

given Apple’s habit of creating a bang, the latest gossip doing the rounds is the launch of iPhone 2.0. Forget about company sponsored leaks, the way apple news spreads, and conclusions derived, is all pure marketing genius. And it’s all go to do with the product’s hype value – and the obsession apple fans have for the brand.  Read more to understand the madness:

Reasons why Apple iPhone will be launched on 15th June:

1. Apple 24-hr store closed on May 29th on account of a commercial shoot. The only two times the store was shut previously was when the iPhone and OS X Leopard were launched.

2. AT&T sent all retail sales employees a no-vacation blackout memo between June 15 and July 15. Being the only carrier for iPhone 2.0, the assumption is valid that its all thanks to the launch. The same thing happened when iPhone was originally launched.

3. This is the weirdest. Fortune published a report on a major spike in Ocean Containers labeled "electric computers" by Apple. This is direclty being refered to the 3G-enabled iPhone 2.0 that has apparently been shipped from Apple’s two major Asian suppliers!

Compared to all other brands who love to leak stories, in Apple’s case, the non-leak formula seems to be the most effective!

Stay glued to your PC on the 15th! Love it or hate it, you want to know what’s next as far as Apple is concerned!

Guerilla marketing is an unconventional marketing intended to get maximum results from minimal resources.

Coined by Jay Conrad Levinson, Guerilla marketing is more about matching wits than matching budgets. Guerilla marketing can be as different from traditional marketing as guerilla warfare is from traditional warfare. Rather than marching their marketing dollars forth like infantry divisions, guerilla marketers snipe away with their marketing resources for maximum impact.The term has since entered the popular vocabulary to also describe aggressive, unconventional marketing methods generically.

Levinson identifies the following principles as the foundation of guerrilla marketing:

• Guerrilla Marketing is specifically geared for the small business and entrepreneur.
• It should be based on human psychology instead of experience, judgment, and guesswork.
• Instead of money, the primary investments of marketing should be time, energy, and imagination.
• the primary statistic to measure your business is the amount of profits, not sales.
• The marketer should also concentrate on how many new relationships are made each month.
• Create a standard of excellence with an acute focus instead of trying to diversify by offering too many diverse products and services.
• Instead of concentrating on getting new customers, aim for more referrals, more transactions with existing customers, and larger transactions.
• Forget about the competition and concentrate more on cooperating with other businesses.
• Guerrilla Marketers should always use a combination of marketing methods for a campaign.
• Use current technology as a tool to empower your business.

It was an attempt to get people to vote in the ‘Worlds Sexiest Women’ poll. The results were outstanding – all down to the stunt creating huge public awareness. For a small business, this would probably be a little too extreme, but you get the picture.

[slideshare id=297004&doc=304052-guerilla-marketing-1204913133402532-2&w=425]

The following ad is designed by Contract Advertising, Mumbai. I do not yet know if it has been published, but just reading it is heart breaking.

While its easy to say that most papers won’t have the guts to publish something so “in-your-face”, the truth is that this is what reality looks like. And reality bites.