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Social Media Advances On Display In Sarasota

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By RICHARD MULLINS rmullins@tampatrib.com

The Tampa Tribune

Published: November 3, 2008

SARASOTA - For people into social media - and making money off social media - Sarasota was the place to be last week.

The Ringling College of Art and Design hosted a design-focused conference all about how companies can generate products, publicity and revenue through things such as the Apple iPhone, from social media Web sites such as Facebook, and from instant messaging sites such as Twitter.

The show organizers have already posted videos of the presentations at media.sarasotadesignsummit.com. For some stunning visuals about how people travel, I recommend the presentation by Matt Jones of Dopplr, a service that connects friends who happen to be in the same town as they travel.

But first, here are some excerpts from the show:

•Google makes a bunch of fun products. But a conference highlight was a presentation by Charles Warren, a top designer at Google.

He showed video of a merchant in India who found a free way to use his cell phone to take orders for tea.

Diamond polishing workers in this merchant's city enjoy their daily tea, but can't just wander out of their secure factory. And the tea merchant doesn't want to run up airtime on his cell phone taking all their orders one by one.

So diamond workers ring his phone and hang up.

His phone's missed call log becomes his order log. Zero airtime billed to anyone. In case anyone didn't know, Warren said there's a thriving culture in India using only missed calls - a good lesson in how human nature trumps engineering.

Other factoids Warren offered: About 70 percent of Google's traffic comes from outside the United States. Google develops programs in 40 different languages. About 10,000 software engineers work at Google.

•AT&T is getting huge data traffic from the iPhone and other wireless doo-dads. And they run faster than ever. But they still run at a relatively paltry 1.5 megabytes per second or so, said Ritch Blasi, the director of AT&T Mobility Network Services.

But newer wireless links will boost that speed by a factor of 10. When? Here's the rub.

Blasi expects about 100 Mbps speeds by 2011. At that speed, cell phones could display HDTV-quality video and run about five times faster than the fastest residential broadband from cable or fiber optic Internet service now.

•Twitter.com is one of the hottest properties in social media. If you don't know Twitter - picture yourself subscribing to a spigot of short blurbs from your friends, co-workers or celebrities about what they're doing, thinking or seeing. You also serve up "tweets" on what you're doing, too.

(Want to try? The Tribune's online partner, TBO.com ,has one: "TBOcom" My Twitter ID is "DailyDeadline." Tribune food writer Jeff Houck is "TheStew.")

That's a long way of saying the Twitter culture is pretty diverse and complex - just like real life. That means archetypal characters will develop, said Ed Schipul, founder of a Web marketing company in Houston called Schipul.

Here are some archetypes, with their Twitter IDs:

•The Tampa Red Cross, playing the role of "The Brave Hero." Its ID is TampaRedCross.

•Harley-Davidson, playing the role of "The Rebel." Its ID is hdmoco.

•Political satirists playing the role of "The Joker." Sample IDs are FakeBarakObama and FakeSarahPalin.

Reporter Richard Mullins can be reached at (813) 259-7919.

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