Mobile Visual Search

I am impressed with a new mobile application that allows iPhone users to quickly search consumer product information. Currently, the Visual Search is designed for iPhone only and is not yet released by IQ Engines.

According to IQ Engines’ Website, you can use your iPhone’s camera, point at any product to retrieve detailed product information, reviews, prices, and purchase links.  To learn more about Visual Search, please view the following video created by IQ Engines.

I think Visual Search is an interesting mobile application that has a potential use in education and training.  Image that we can use our mobile devices and an application like Visual Search to find similar drawings, paintings, images, music sheets, art works, and etc. from libraries and museums in the world.  I guess it won’t be long to see more powerful media-centric Web applications.  Web 3.0 is coming soon.

 

Gary Hayes’ Mobile Count

Besides Gary Hayes’ social media count I introduced in my blog last week, Gary also created a mobile count showing interesting statistics driving the mobile revolution.  According to Gary, the mobile data was taken from the source articles/statistics below:

• TechCrunchies – Mobile Video Viewers Statistics
• AdMob June 2009 Mobile Metrics Report
• PortioDirect Mobile Factbook 2009
• Mashable – CITA report – 4.1 Billion SMS Messages Are Sent Daily USA
• iPolicy UK – SMS messaging has a bright future
• Research and Markets Global Mobile Broadband – Statistics and Trends
• Smartbrief Sharp Increase in Mobile Internet
• ABI Research In 2014 Monthly Mobile Data Traffic Will Exceed 2008 Total
• HotHardware Huge Growth in Daily Mobile Web Access
• Ecoustics
• Cio GPS Enabled Mobile Phone Shipments to More than Double Over Next Five Years
• Nielsen Americans Watching More TV Than Ever: Web and Mobile Video Up too

To see Gary Hayes’ Mobile Count running in real time, please click on the following image to launch the live counter.

Also, Gary provided some of the interesting statistics about the tremendous growth of games recently:

• 50 million daily users of Zynga social games (Inside Social Games 2009)
• $2.8 bill generated yearly by China MMOG players (Raph Koster 2009)
• 16 million quests per day completed by WoW players (Maximum PC 2009)
• $22 Billion US games revenue in 2009 (IDE Agency 2009)
• 50 000 person to person auctions per day on Gaia
• 1 million currency transactions per day in Eve Online (MMORPG.com 2009)
• 9 games sold every second 2007 (GrabStats 2007)
• $5.5 bill spent on virtual goods globally
• 4.1 million new MMORPG subscribers 2009 (MMORPGChart.com 2008)
• $125 mill advertising revenues in Social Virtual Worlds (GamineExpedition 2008)
• 575000 log into Fantasy Westward Journey per day (Seeking Alpha 2009)
• 250 thousand virtual goods created on Second Life per day (MarketWire 2009)
• $594 million invested in Virtual World companies in 2008 (Engage Digital Media 2009)
• 1.5 million new 3-11 US children subscribing to Virtual Worlds annually (GamineExpedition 2009)
• 1 million message board posts per day in Gaia online
• 7.5 million per month use Habbo
• $2.45 billion per year revenue made from World of Warcraft (Edge Online 2008)
• 13.4 million portable game units sold in 2007 (Grab Stats 2007)
• 936 mill Chinese user hours per week in online games (78 mill @ 12 hrs pw) (Futures of Learning 2008)
• 1250 text messages sent per second in Second Life  (Linden Lab 2009)
• 465 million user hours in second life over the last year (Linden Lab 2009)

Did You Know 4.0

I was deeply impressed with the original ‘Shift Happens‘ video created by Karl Fisch, Scott McLeod, and Jeff Brenman in June 2007.  I have shown this video to students, teachers, administrators, school administrators, and government officials at numerous conferences in several countries.  I think the video is powerful in which it helps raise awareness of the issues of globalization in our newly connected world.  The video was then remixed and became a very popular YouTube hit called ‘Did You Know?‘ and attracted over 6.5 million views.

A new/updated version of the Did You Know video, called “Did You Know 4.0?” was released at the Media Convergence Forum run by The Economist in New York City, October 20-21, 2009.  The latest video provides facts and stats focusing on the changing media landscape, including convergence and technology, and was developed in partnership with The Economist.

This 4.0 version was created in the same spirit as the previous versions, but has less of an education focus and more of a business slant.  Some interesting statistics include:

• Newspaper circulation is down 7 million over the last 25 years.  But in the last 5 years, unique readers of online newspapers are up 30 million.
• The average American teen sends 2,272 texts per month.
• 40 million people have been Rickrolled.
• 95% of all songs downloaded last year weren’t paid for.
• Wikipedia launched in 2001.  It now features over 13 million articles in more than 200 languages.
• The mobile device will be the world’s primary connection tool to the Internet in 2020.
• The computer in your cell phone today is a million times cheaper and a thousand times more powerful and about a hundred thousand times smaller than [the one computer at MIT in 1965].

After watching this video, what are your thoughts? Please feel free to share your thoughts and comments here.

Gary Hayes’ Social Media Count

Over the past few years, social media has exploded into the mainstream. It is everywhere. I have followed closely with the exponential growth and latest development of social media these days. I have been amazed by the unbelievable growth of Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube discussed in my previous post “Top 10 Social Networking Sites in the US and UK.”  Recently, Gary Hayes created a social media counter – a Flash app showing how active and dynamic the Social Web is.  It is intriguing to view this counter showing the enormous growth rate of social media in real time. Unfortunately, the WordPress.com will not allow the embedding of the flash object so you cannot see the counter running in real time here. So, please click on the following image to see the live counter.

 

The followings are some of the key data points that the ‘Gary’s Social Media Count’ is based on.

• 20 hours of video uploaded every minute onto YouTube (source YouTube blog Aug 09)
• Facebook 600k new members per day, and photos, videos per month, 700mill & 4 mill respectively (source Inside Facebook Feb 09)
• Twitter 18 million new users per year & 4 million tweets sent daily (source TechCrunch Apr 09)
• iPolicy UK – SMS messaging has a bright future (Aug 09)
• 900 000 blogs posts put up every day (source Technorati State of the Blogosphere 2008)
• YouTube daily, 96 million videos watched, $1mill bandwidth costs (source Comscore Jul 06 !)
• UPDATE: YouTube 1Billion watched per day SMH (2009)- counter updated!
• Second Life 250k virtual goods made daily, text messages 1250 per second (source Linden Lab release Sep 09)
• Money – $5.5 billion on virtual goods (casual & game worlds) even Facebooks gifts make $70 million annually (source Viximo Aug 09)
• Flickr has 73 million visitors a month who upload 700 million photos (source Yahoo Mar 09)
• Mobile social network subscribers – 92.5 million at the end of 2008, by end of 2013 rising to between 641.6-873.1 million or 132 mill annually (source Informa PDF)
• SMS – Over 2.3 trillion messages will be sent across major markets worldwide in 2008 (source Everysingleoneofus sms statistics)

Social Networking in E-Learning Courses: Building Sense of Community

While social networking shows great potentials for e-learning in general, little is yet known about how to integrate social networking focusing on building a sense of community, particularly in e-learning courses.  With this in mind, Dr. Harrision Yang and I conducted a case study almost two years ago to design, develop, and integrate social networking into two graduate courses for the purpose of building a sense of community, improving communications and interactions, and promoting student-centered collaboration.

The results of the study were written for a book chapter in our recent book, Collective Intelligence and E-learning 2.0:  Implications of Web-Based Communities and Networking, published by IGI Global. Also, the study was presented at the 2009 AECT/SICET International Conference this week in Louisville, Kentucky.  To learn more about this study, please view the presentation shown below.  We welcome your comments and suggestions.