Want To Better Understand How To Push Your Brand On Facebook? Have A Coke!

Coca-Cola's Facebook page has 3.3 million fans, the second most of any Facebook page. Only President Obama's Facebook page has more fans.

An interesting and informative Atlanta Journal Constitution story of how Coca-Cola's Facebook page came to be, and where it's going, may be found here.

NH House Approves Text Message While Driving Ban

Are 2012 First-In-The-Nation campaign communications strategies in jeopardy?

Via the AP:

A bill to make it illegal for drivers to send text messages on cell phones or type on laptop computers or other electronic devices is on its way to the Senate.

The House voted voted 222-137 Tuesday to pass the bill which exempts entering a number or name in a cell phone to make a call. Violators would face a $100 fine.

A similar measure passed the House last year but died in the Senate.

The bill would ban text messaging while driving and two-handed operation of electronic devices.

Microsoft's Ad Team Brings The Fight To Apple's Doorstep

I've been a Mac person ever since I first learned how to use a personal computer on the Mac Classic way back in 1991.

That said, Microsoft has a point in this new commercial (especially in this economy):



Microsoft's ad team is learning.

Watch This: Hulu Gains 10 Million Viewers In February, 4th Largest Video Site In US

Impressive:

Hulu jumped two spots to become the fourth largest video site in the U.S. in February, according to the latest data from comScore VideoMetrix. Hulu drew an audience of 34.7 million people who watched 332.5 million video streams. That is a 42 percent increase in unique U.S. visitors, up from 24.5 million in January, and a 33 percent increase in streams, up from and 250.5 million streams.

In a single month, Hulu overtook Viacom and Microsoft in total viewers and video streams (see January data). And Hulu is catching up to No. 3 video site Yahoo, which streamed 353.5 million streams in February. Fox Interactive (MySpace) was No. 2 with 462.6 million streams. And YouTube once again blew everyone else out of the water with 5.3 billion streams.

That's a lot of eyeballs. And growing fast (for now).

Which is great for consumers and business looking to watch, push or monitor high quality video content for dirt cheap on the web.

But we're still wondering how the Hulu business model will make any real money for Hulu.

Twitter Turns 3 Years Old

3 years down.

Unclear number to go.

Mobile Document Scanning (aka One More Reason To Love The iPhone)

As we've noted before on this blog, b-fresh is a Blackberry workplace (ease and reliability of email is our biggest concern and Blackberry is still the best).

But that doesn't mean that we're not constantly flirting with other phone types such as the Palm Pre and Apple's iPhone.

And today we have one more reason to flirt with switching over to the iPhone - mobile document scanning. Here are the details via TechCrunch:

We’ve all tried to use our camera phones to capture whiteboard notes, doodles, and other documents, but oftentimes poor image quality and odd perspectives can make them illegible. JotNot (iTunes Link) is a nifty new application that just went live on Apple’s App Store that allows users to take photographs of documents using their phones and runs them through an advanced filter that makes them much easier to read.

Using the application is simple: first, you take a photograph of the whiteboard, receipt, or document that you’d like to store as a photo (you can also import photos that you’ve previously taken). The application presents a blue box with four corner markers, which you drag to the corresponding corners of the document in question. The application then takes around thirty seconds to process the image, correcting for any issues with lighting, color, and even perspective (if you initially took a photo of your document at an angle, the final image will look as if it was taken front-on).

Cool. And most likely very useful in a crunch.

"Fashion Model Robot"

Sometimes the world feels like it is moving so fast that it's hard to keep up.

Via Engadget:

Japan has produced a walking, talking fashion robot. Standing at just over 5-feet tall and 95-pounds, HRP-4C, developed by Japan's National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology, will make its catwalk debut next week at the Tokyo fashion show. The she-bot features 30 motors spread throughout its body with an additional eight motors in its face for expressing general boredom and disgust with the help. Its main purpose is entertainment and to attract crowds much like its fleshy counterparts -- so don't expect home cooked meals and laundry service should you take the $200,000 robot home. Unfortunately, HRP-4C didn't function as planned today. Reports say that the robot, "kept looking surprised, opening its mouth and eyes in a stunned expression, when the demonstrator had asked it to smile or look angry."

Oprah Does Facebook

It doesn't get much more mainstream than this:



h/t Steve Case's Facebook feed.

Understanding Twitter (but not necessarily its $250 million dollar valuation)

Michael Arrington's thoughts on why Twitter technology is important to businesses and their brands is worth highlighting (even if b-fresh still doesn't buy that Twitter is worth a $250 million dollar valuation):

At a dinner tonight with a friend the conversation turned to Twitter. He just didn’t get it, and he’s certainly not the first person to tell me that. Specifically, my friend didn’t understand the massive valuation ($250 million or more) that Twitter won in its recent funding. I told him why I thought it was more than justified: Twitter is, more than anything, a search engine.

I told him what I thought of Twitter as a micro-blogging service: it’s a collection of emotional grunts. But it’s wonderful nonetheless. And enough people are hooked on it that Twitter has reached critical mass. If something big is going on in the world, you can get information about it from Twitter.

Twitter also gathers other information, like people’s experiences with products and services as they interact with them. A couple of months ago, for example, I was stuck in the airport and received extremely poor service from Lufthansa. I twittered my displeasure, which made me feel better - at least I was doing something besides wait in an endless line. I’ve also Twittered complaints about the W Hotel (no Internet, cold room) and Comcast (the usual Internet gripes).

More and more people are starting to use Twitter to talk about brands in real time as they interact with them. And those brands want to know all about it, whether to respond individually (The W Hotel pestered me until I told them to just leave me alone), or simply gather the information to see what they’re doing right and what they’re doing wrong.

And all of it is discoverable at search.twitter.com, the search engine that Twitter acquired last summer.

People searching for news. Brands searching for feedback. That’s valuable stuff.

Twitter knows it, too. They’re going to build their business model on it. Forget small time payments from users for pro accounts and other features, all they have to do is keep growing the base and gather more and more of those emotional grunts. In aggregate it’s extremely valuable. And as Google has shown, search is vastly monetizable - somewhere around 40% of all online advertising revenue goes to ads on search listings today.

And as John Battelle says, its not clear that Google or anyone else can compete with Twitter at this point (Facebook’s giving it a solid try, though).

And it’s not just ads that can bring in the money. Brands need tools to make sense of all this data that Twitter doesn’t yet supply. Third parties like Scout Labs are going to be mining this data themselves, I’m sure. But there are lots of other ways Twitter can tax the utility they are bringing to brands. If they manage to turn down the acquisition offers like Facebook did a couple of years ago, there’s no reason Twitter can’t find revenue streams that will support them as a standalone company. Possibly even a public one.

A Conversation With Eric Schmidt, CEO Of Google

Here is video of last week's Charlie Rose interview:



The interview is getting attention because of Mr. Schmidt's remarks that Google engineers do not "sneak a look" into the Gmail accounts of their users (minute 27), but the whole thing is worth a listen.

The Race To The Mass Market, One Perspective

A question to twist your (Facebook) noodle:

Q: How many years did it take for some of last century's innovations and present ones, to be adopted by 150 million users?

A: 38 years for TV, 14 for cellphone, 7 for the iPod and 5 for Facebook.

h/t The Hidden Persuader

"The Plot To Kill Google"

Wired Magazine has a terrific look inside the ongoing fight in Washington, D.C. (and among the true grassroots) between Google, Google's competitors, and the Department of Justice.

Really good stuff and well worth a read.