Blue Star Mobile

I met with the guys from Blue Star Mobile last week to catch up about recent developments.

We worked together on a campaign for British Airways but haven't done anything together recently.

They've done a lot of growing over the last year or so, opening small offices in the US and in China.

I got them talking a bit about The Sun and their plans to increase the mobile content associated with their paper edition. There are plans, apparently, to use WAP pages and mobile video streaming to provide content via short code response and QR codes in the paper. I'm not too clear on what the timelines are and what the take up is likely to be but it sounds interesting.

Visual Sciences

I've recently become exposed to Visual Sciences , a tool that looks like it deserves its growing reputation as a next-generation web analytics tool.

I have a client who is going to do a test implementation on their site over the next couple of months. It sounds as though they will likely be the first major UK client for Visual Sciences, which was acquired by Web Side Story about this time last year.

They seem to be mostly 'under the radar'. The site is not particularly enlightening, and web searches for the product name don't through up a great deal of commentary that isn't ophthalmology-related.

Clickz.com has a good list of predictions for analytics in 2007 which suggests that Web Side Story enterprise customers will be gradually migrated onto the Visual Sciences. It certainly seems to be the case with my client, who sent an RFP to Web Side Story, and was pitched Visual Sciences in response.

It sounds like it's a pretty great tool. Apparently it does the sort of thing that you'd expect would be common place (but aren't) - segmenting data 'on-the-fly', giving evocative visualisations of the strengths and weaknesses of websites and merging different data sources.

I have a friend who has had a couple of meetings with the Visual Science team. He was very enthusiastic about the tool and its strengths. There do seem to be plenty of 'hooks' - rumours that the technology is based on algorithms developed by the CIA, an interface designed by 3-D game designers and anecdotes about vast amounts of incremental revenue earned by existing clients through optimisation and A/B testing.

It will be very interesting to watch and participate in the implementation. Hopefully the reported price tag of about $300k will mean that the client is ambitious with their allocation of human resources as well. Even a user-friendly analytics package needs trained and experienced operators, not to mention people to co-ordinate web designers, developers and agencies.

Advertising Time Capsule

Those living in London will be aware of a refurbishment underway to the platform and tunnels of the underground. This is in preparation for new advertising installations by Viacom, who were recently awarded the contract to sell the advertising space for Transport for London.

Currently, in one of the hallways to the Southbound Victoria line at Oxford Circus, there is an advertising time capsule. For some reason, someone has gone to the trouble of removing layers of advertising and has revealed posters, mostly intact, from 20 years ago. It's a really neat effect. There are ads for exhibitions at museums, for films and for clothing stores, all from about 1990 I think.

I wish now that I'd stopped to look more closely and take a couple of photos with my diabolically bad cameraphone. Hopefully the posters will be there next time I go through.

Brand New Tag Cloud

I've just added a tag cloud to the blog with the help of the very useful explanations and code here . It's very e-pisteme.