btrax blog

MyTown takes social networking to whole new level – beating giants like Facebook to the punch through its addictive location-based gaming approach.

Much like Foursquare, which has recently emerged as a serious challenger to Yelp, interaction isn’t limited to only personal communication, but engaging the user by having them make their neigjhborhood and environment part of the experience.

It will give you a whole new experience on exploring your own city or others, because of its central gaming elements. The user (or player) can “purchase” real places near your location, such as a Starbucks., then collect rent from people who visit your places. The experience is like playing Restaurant City on Facebook, but in real life.

As similar social gaming platforms in Asia have experienced, MyTown has zoomed from a small startup founded in 2008 to a 800,000 users platform with 3.5 to 4 million check-ins per day. The brains behind MyTown is Booyah and CEO Keith Lee says that average users spend 50 minutes per day on MyTown.

Because of Foursquare, the gaming concept of check-ins has gained traction and is gradually becoming a must-have for social networking site. Even Yelp is getting into the action, rolling out a check-in function on its iPhone application. Facebook is also currently developing this function too.

One of the reasons Facebook has lagged is that gaming has not been a core part of its business plans, instead farming it out through APIs to secondary app developers. Yelp was also founded on very different community principles, rewarding an elite, serially posting set of super-users.

By comparison, MyTown was developed by a group of veteran game designers.

As smart phone ownership and usage continue to rocket upwards, Foursquare and MyTown will only grow, either eclipsing their competitors or more likely get acquired by their more heavily funded counterparts.

What’s Beyond Web 2.0?
It’s been a while since Sramana Mitra has defined “Web 3.0”. She predicted that the next generation of Web technology would aim to integrate a variable “Place” with Content, Commerce, Community, Context, Personalization, and Vertical Search. And the trends are increasingly bearing out that description.

Nowadays, for example, you search for a local (community) car dealer near you. You see the locations on maps, and you can drive there instantly. But if I were a customer, I would need more information.

Applying Social Media & Geo-Location Tools
For example, even after Toyota’s ecall news, suppose I am still interested in the gray color the Prius with a sun roof. I want to test drive it to make sure that the pedal problem is fixed.  I want the best deal. Which dealers have the exact car in stock? I don’t want to waste my time driving around to dealers on the map to find the answer to my question.

According to Sramana, the “place” variable is more than just location, but it shows where ‘things’ and ‘places’ are that you are searching for through GPS. Then people want to take actions. They want to visit the place and make a purchase or dine out after they search “Place”.

So people want to be sure that they do not waste time when they visit these places. They want to know inventories, available spots, menus, and other information when they search for their target places.

The Open Source Era
As these data became accessible by the general public,  it will get difficult  to draw a line between trade secret and public information. If a competitive company gets the data of your inventories and prices, it can take an advantage of them. They may offer a lower price of the same item or they may promote an item in different colors which you don’t have.

Suppose you want to protect your website code from viewers, then you need to hide the “View Source” option. If you want to disclose anything to a certain group of people, you could send out passwords and log-in names. But it prevents timely interaction and people may not want to go through the trouble of getting login information.

Open Information Speeds Up Innovation
It is said that Silicon Valley has a spirit of sharing information, reflected in its very high employee mobility rate. They also move within a small geographic area. And people talk! So it is realistically hard to keep trade secrets. Even Apple has been relatively unsuccessful in fully hiding its next major product release up to a year in advance.

In addition, it is said that Silicon Valley does not appreciate people suing former employees over trade secret violations.  So it seems that the Silicon Valley’s love for sharing information is likely to prevail, which in turn helps drive innovation at an ever faster speed.

Photos by xwelhamite and rnair

If someone asked you to name the top 10 websites in Amercia, most likely you could come up with a few or even most of them. Google.  Facebook. eBay. Wikipedia.

But could you name the top 10 in China?

What we think of the web is shaped largely by the few sites we use constantly. But those sites can differ widely country to country.

As businessness continue look for new markets, especially in Asia, knowing web landmarks becomes critical to succesfully navigating a foreign audience’s home landscape.

Towards that, Alexa’s ranking of the most trafficked sites in China is a good test of your knowledge of China’s Internet world:

1. Baidu.com
Baidu is the Google of China. It is the most popular search engine site, indexing over 740 million web pages, 80 million images, and 10 million multimedia files. Baidu was also the first Chinese company listed on the NASDAQ-100.

2. QQ.COM
People in China do not use AIM or Google Chat. This is were juggernaut QQ comes in with its popular instant message platform serving over 300 million users. It includes videos,  online shopping, search, games, and ringtone downloads for users.

3. Google China
Although much is made of Google lagging behind Baidu in search, Google’s China engine still has 30% of the search market while hauling in enough traffic to make the top three among all website in China with 338 million internet users.

4. Sina (新浪新闻中心)
Founded in 2001, Sina.com is the largest Chinese-language infotainment web portal with almost 100 million registered users. Users can read news, discuss with others, and browse photos.

5. Taobao 淘宝网
Taobao was founded by Alibaba Group and is the Amazon of China with 78 percent of the Chinese domestic online consumer market for online shopping. With over 170 million registered users, it has become the primary e-commerce site for people in China.

6. Google
Google’s English site also performs very well in China with a healthy showing in traffic.

7. 163.com 网易
163.com is a rapidly growing web portal site with 1.8 million visitors annually. The site’s primary draw is online gaming, and majority of the visitors visit the site to play online games.

8. Sohu 搜狐
Sohu is another search engine that provides latest news and information, entertainment, and communications. It attracted 250 million visitors with its online gaming.

9. SOSO搜搜
SOSO is a sister company of QQ – both are owned by web business giant Tencent. It is rapidly growing more popular in China with users drawn in by photos, entertainment, and music.

10. Youku (优酷)
China’s homegrown YouTube 149 million unique visitors and 57 million visitors from internet café, translating into RMB 200 million of revenue in 2009. Visitors spent a total of 229 million hours on the site in October 2009 alone.

Photo by Peter Fuchs

Silicon Valley is the place where Netscape lost its war. The competition of browsers is fierce and harsh here. But without fear, a new browser has entered the market. It was born in Japan. It is named Lunascape. It is very Japanesque when you see the design templates of the background which you can choose from. They have samurai and kimono color backgrounds.

Lunascape opens multiple windows vertically

Lunascape is the world’s first and only triple engine browser. It has been downloaded over 15 million times and it’s available globally in 11 languages. The download is free and you can open three different web design engines in one page and they are Trident (Internet Explorer), Gecko (Firefox), and Webkit (Safari and Google Chrome). They say they are very fast with the triple engine and triple add-ons.

Professionally, I enjoy it when I have to test sites with different browsers. All I need to do is to open all three of them in one page and compare the layout. All three pages can be displayed vertically or horizontally in one page. It is pretty convenient.

The question is how much market share Lunascape can get in this competitive market. Internet Explorer is dominating because Microsoft bundled with computers. Since Mozilla has Mozilla Foundation (non-profit) and Mozilla Corporation (for profit organizations) to support Firefox, the non-profit gets donations which are used by Mozilla Corporation. Firefox gets money from Google by having its search engine on the browser, but besides that it is said that they get donations.  And the strength of Firefox is that it is an open source browser. Everyone tries to fix the problems andmake it better. Lunascape is not an open source browser yet.

Black pins of Firefox Photo by flod

Since Google came out with its own browser, I doubt how much longer it will stay generous to other browsers. The competition will be fierce. But all browsers have passionate fans to protect them. It seems that Lunascape survival depends upon how many passionate fans it can create.

Hello.  I’d like to introduce myself as Erin, one of the new btrax interns.  Lisa asked me to write about my internship experience up to this point, to which I will gladly oblige. But to understand my point of view on my btrax internship experience, I want to tell you a little bit about my work history.

I’ve worked at two other internships within the two years, both for print media, but I’ve never had the opportunity to intern for a web agency.  Initially I wanted to begin my career in website design and HTML/CSS coding, but I slowly gravitated towards print design, as the concepts for me felt a little easier to grasp at that moment.  After my second internship I felt that I wanted to come back into web design since, in the long run, I didn’t want to forget everything I learned about web design and coding.

I started working at btrax a little over a month ago, shortly before Thanksgiving, and the experience has been nothing short of amazing.  What may seem like mundane work to some people is actually very eye-opening to me, as in my past two internships I’ve only worked as a lone in-house design intern at a university organization and a small business, respectively.  Outside of classroom assignments I’ve never worked with a team to complete a project, and so far I’ve learned something new about designing for every day I’ve worked here.

From participation in my first btrax project, I found that even the small tasks (photo editing and inserting chunks of code into pages) could take hours to do, and understandably without someone to take care of the little things it could easily push a project deadline back a day or two. Designers here often work on two or more projects at a time, leaving a very tight time frame for small tasks like photo editing and placing lightboxes into pages.  I helped the team edit product photos, and with my HTML/CSS knowledge I also inserted Javascript and CSS for a photo lightbox as well as write a basic style sheet and some HTML for their photo credit page.  I won’t lie; it was a little intimidating writing code onto those pages because they contained a lot of PHP, and I’ve never dealt with PHP before.  More importantly, I was afraid I would change something that shouldn’t have been changed, ultimately creating more work for the team than they had already.  But careful navigation helped me change what I needed, and by the end of the day I felt tired yet accomplished, even by doing the “grunt work” for the site.

After that first project, I felt I accomplished something great by allowing the designers to work on the more important parts of the project while I took care of the smaller time-consuming tasks.  Web design called to me once again, and I could not resist this time; I’ve finally found my design comfort zone.  While web and print design both have their pros and cons, I felt more accomplished working on a small part of a website than I did with, say, a large poster or a set of flyers for a given event.  This isn’t to say that I don’t love creating print advertising materials, but in the long run I am more motivated to work on web design than on print design.

I continue to be thankful that I am an intern at btrax; this internship feeds my hunger for knowledge about corporate web design and branding.  Before this I had trouble envisioning and designing on a corporate level; I can safely say that now that I’m learning to tune my style to corporate, professional websites and their respective branding systems.  It is mentally exhausting at times to work on a project, but at the end of the day I always go home satisfied with what I’ve done at btrax.

For those who wished instead to skim my entry, the faces on the oranges are (more or less) how i feel when i come to work for btrax every day.

Many star singers and musicians have started to use social media to reach their fans (and potential fans).

Twitter and Facebook fan pages have become particularly popular ways to engage with exclusive updates, blog musings and photos.

Now artists are taking it to a whole new level by debuting music videos, live streaming of concerts and fan contests.

Although emerging artists have been able to use this asymetric marketing to big effect, mainstream artists are increasingly embracing it. Shakira recently released her newest music video on Ustream , embedded on her Facebook page as well.

Likewise, Foo Fighter held a live concert using LiveStream on Facebook, and Jason Mraz chatted live diretly with his fans. All of those activities help them engage better with their fans through the virtual platform, rather than radio spots with its pay-to-play system and hard to penetrate broadcast TV shows.

Shakira and Foo Fighters are not the first ones to do this, but the fact that big labels see social media marketing as athe main stage, instead of a sideshow.

Photo by alejandroamador