If Amazon's Kindle, Barnes & Noble's nook and the decade long rumours about Apple releasing a tablet product haven't whet your appetite for the promised new digitalage of magazine and newspaper publishing then this demonstration video of a digital Sports Illustrated magazine from Time Inc and The Wonderfactory just might do the trick. The demonstration shows the future of magazine publishingincorporating video clips, interactivity, branded content, games, content sharing and rich, interactive advertising possibilities – which looks and sounds an awful lot like the websites of today to me!
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Seans reaction: This is exactly the kind of bosh that demonstrates newspaper's desperate lack of understanding about social media. To say that Twitter doesn't create communities is ridiculous. No one brand creates a community anyway, they simple facilitate them. And Twitter is amazing at facilitating discussions across large communities of people.

The Australian has predicted that social networking site Twitter will fail despite the current buzz around it.
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It's been live for a few weeks, but the GTI Projectis worthy of a feature here on Digital Buzz. The game was created by Tribal DDB London to promote the new Volkswagen GTI Models. Once you get into the site, you'll realise there isn't much to it, but it brings back some great memories with a pretty addictive slot car style game. I think the best part about this advergame, is that its not over the top, its branded content, its addictive (to a degree!) and chances are you will tell the person sitting next to you to have a look! Job done! Check out the site here. Oh, and I love the art direction for this site, the hi-tech pixelated video look just feels so right for this style of game!
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This is the latest video by Socialnomics (the guys who created the Social Media Revolution Video that got over 1.2 million views on YouTube) and it showcases examples of Social Media ROI on campaigns and companies that have thrown themselves into the Social Sphere.
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Camerons reaction: This is impressive and its from ABI Research which has to make you take some sort of notice. Even if it was half true its still impressive!

According to new estimates from ABI Research, mobile marketing and advertising combined will grow at an impressive 40% CAGR over the next five years, bringing the numbers substantially higher than the well under a half billion dollars spent in total in 2009.
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Former IT engineer Steven Barnes has been sentenced to one year in prison after pleading guilty to computer intrusion charges. But wait till you hear how it happened.
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They're smart, they're young, they're tech savvy - and they're not afraid of the downturn. Meet SmartCompany's Hot 30 under 30 - a group of 30 entrepreneurs aged 30 years and under who are on their way to becoming Australia's next generation of business leaders.
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Brads reaction: Have been continuously fascinated by what this product has to offer. Will be interesting to see how it goes in the real world.

Google Voice, what the hell is that you say In one of Google's rather low-key acquisitions, they purchased a phone start-up called GrandCentral (founded in 2006) for about $50 million in cash mid 2007, GrandCentral offered a seriously valuable product one phone number for all your phones, for life. Can you imagine how many contacts you loose changing jobs, switching carriers, houses, apartments, states Well Google Voice is the answer, you'll get a single phone number for life, that rings or texts any phone you own, with a single voicemail box and best if all, it's free!
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Philips have just launched a very cool new social media campaign on Twitter (@Philips_vs) called Philips Vs Anything. It's a competition where anyone on twitter can submit crazy new product testing ideas to Philips, with the best ones to be created by their Agency, Tribal DDB, and everyone going in the draw to win one of Philips now famous 21:9 Cinema Screens. Check out the campaign website here. Or follow them on twitter here.
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The new 3rd Generation Prius Microsite has been launched by Saatchi & Saatchi (LA) with EVB& Laika. It's stunning a mix ofFlash,3D Video, Info Graphics and some amazing art direction. The site takes you through a 3D video world of landscapes and car sequences showcasing the newest features on the 3rd Generation Prius. Throughout the site you can view additional feature videos and access some coolcontent to help green yourself!
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HORROR stories about creating a website are common as some designers have abused customer's trust and caused a lot of apprehension in the market.There's a cast of thousands who can design websites - from school students through to huge IT firms - so choosing a designer can be a tough process.Toby Jenkins, the co-owner of Bluewire Media, says the Internet is becoming more regulated and unethical web designers are slowly being weeded out.Bluewire Media has even taken the step of having its processes externally checked by quality assurers so it can measure its success rate."There's a lot of measurements we do to see if things are working or not," Mr Jenkins says.
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Google is searching for "the next big thing" in technology as it announces its latest effort, Google Ventures. Its new venture capitalist arm pledged to help find and develop "exceptional start-ups", offering early stage investments to a range of new firms.
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Im live-blogging fromStartup School, a daylong program from startup incubator YCombinator held at Berkeley today.Mark Zuckerberg is on-stage for a question-and-answer session and I've embedded a short clip from the talk below. This is paraphrased.
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Happy New Year to all. I hope your festive season and New Year parties were just grand. It looks like it's going to be an interesting year, what with the launch of the first Google (slightly HTCish phone), Facebook challenging Google for Internet dominance, and MicroYahoo challenging Google for search engine dominance. I'm not going to touch on any of these subjects, not now anyway, but they will be covered in good time.
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An ROI (Return on investment) calculator can help you evaluate the performance of your communications spend. Not many of my clients have thought about it, and it's an important place to start when getting into digital marketing.
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One of the hottest frontiers in Web search is finding ways to improve results based on the searchers' preferences. Already, when you log in to Google, the search engine tries to personalize results by mining your search history: for an eighth grader who has performed lots of searches on marine life, a search for "dolphins" might provide more results for the animal than for the football team.
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Read on to hear about top trends and apps regarding microblogging tool Twitter by the respected Brian Solis.
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According to statistics published during the 2009 China Internet Conference held in Beijing, by the end of September 2009, the number of China's Internet users had reached 360 million.
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Stephens reaction: More grist to the mill as to why the traditional agency model needs serious re-examination. What's interesting is that Forrester is not coming with an ad agency hat on here. Given non-digital spend is either going to stay static or decline, agencies and their clients will need to re-examine everything they thought about advertising. This is the huge thing I point to in my own post on the break boundary.

Digital Spending Will Nearly Double in 5 Years, But Ad Budgets Won't Here's one of the things we do at Forrester Research: we interview as many marketers as we can about their plans, identify trends and project future likely conditions, and then we put together some numbers to make a projection. If you've ever seen a Forrester projection, it comes from a process like this.
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Shiv Singh from Razorfish has created (and shared!) a great presentation on the value ofsocial media as part of a combined marketingapproach. Shiv calls itSocial Influence Marketing, which whenyougetrightdowntoit, isan approaching to marketing by including customers in the processes. Check it out on SlideShare!
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