In this ambitious webspecial Volkswagen Germany is taking a go at predicting the automotive future. In it’s scenario the company shows a day in the year 2028 and the way people could use mobility vehicles in the future. Not only a big vision, which shows how things could be in twenty years, but also a bold statement by a car company about it’s ambitions to shape the future by acting now.

Guy Kawasaki has written a post called The Inside Word on Word-of-Mouth Marketing over at the
Marketing & Strategy Innovation Blog. It features an interview with Dave Balter, who founded BzzAgent in 2002. Good insights about the grown up consumer, so give it a read.
Balter’s latest Book called The Word of Mouth Manual, Volume II  is available as a free download here.

For a long time we had to handle interfaces that didn’t seem to be made for humans. Keyboards and other awkward input devices aren’t made for spontaneously interaction. Seemingly engineers had forgotten that we are, after all, living beings who want to touch and move things in a natural way.

Now slowly companies seem to have realized what power the gesture can have. Take Nintendo’s revolutionary WII or the iPhone and you can already see how they move consumers. They brought back real body movements into interaction design. And increasingly interfaces will be developed which offer natural movements as a way to interact with a product.

And consumers seem to like it. Take a look at this amazing Orange Interactive Shopping Window. Now AT&T has unveiled a Microsoft Surface device in 12 of their stores on April 17, 2008. Also see this demo on YouTube.

Another interesting possibility is the chance of building the same experience on- and offline: For example Publicis & Hal Riney’s site allows visitors to navigate either with their mouse or by using their hands and a webcam.

So the future of building brand touchpoints is becoming more exciting than ever with the digital and the haptic world finally merging.

On Saturday Scholz & Volkmer held the see conference for the third consecutive year in Wiesbaden, Germany. As last year, this small, well organized conference took place in the Caligari Film Theatre, a nice place to spend on a rainy Saturday.

Among some nice speeches, there is especially one, that I want to point out. Frank van Ham from the IBM Visual Communication Lab in Cambridge showed a site they developed there called Many Eyes. It offers several visualisations for data. So you can upload data, choose the form of your graph/visualization, and you immediately have a visual compelling, interactive way to visualize any content, even text.

But what’s even better, you can share your this content with others and even implement it into your website, blog, etc. As Frank van Ham points out, what happens here is a very interesting form of social interaction: People start to comment on the data, on certain formations or peaks in the graph. Sometimes a discussion breaks off - some blogs have about 100 comments - Where people start developing their own visualization to argument in their favour.

What’s so appealing about this is the idea of visualisation as a way to easily share your thoughts with others. A website that enables that ads a new dimension to our way of communicating.

It took some time, but the videos from the “Innovation Forum Interaction Design“, which took place in Potsdam, Germany last year, online now. IA and usability gurus like Bill Moggridge from IDEO and Bruce Sterling give interesting insights into their work and thoughts on interaction design.

The aim of the two day conference “Innovation Forum Interaction Design“ is to focus on all aspects of interface and interaction design: mobile telephone and media interfaces, problem solutions und product visions, web pages and virtual worlds, art und commerce, business and science.
Speakers: Gillian Crampton Smith, Anthony Dunne, Tim Edler, Frank Jacob, Gesche Joost, Bernard Kerr, Patrick Kochlik, Kristjan Kristjansson, Bill Moggridge, Dennis Paul, Mike Richter und Bruce Sterling.

I’ve really noticed the relevance of mobile social networks in the speeches at this year’s CHI in Florence, Italy.

I’ve always been on an upbeat note about mobile social networks, but here more than before, there have been some great papers on this topic, which all really show where all this can be heading. The only issue is that there just isn’t the killer-app out there yet in order to reach the critical mass: As long as there’s no one running the same social network app around me it doesn’t make any sense at all to me, and in turn I don’t run it either.

As Louise Barkhouus, Barry Brown, Marek Bell, Scott Sherwood, Malcolm Hall, Matthew Chalmers from San Diego and Glasgow point out in their study “Connecto”, the demand really would be there. They developed a location-aware system for mobile phones, which they then tested on a group of students and young adults in Glasgow, Scotland. People could leave status-messages as in Twitter and this information was enriched automatically by their location using triangulation and transferred to their friends mobiles. The group soon developed a high usage of this system. There doesn’t seem to be anything online concerning “Connecto” right now, but if possible, I’ll get back to you soon to write more on this interesting research.

There’s also an article on Techcrunch today, that I would recommend reading about a possible first step in this direction with an iPhone-only social network: in his article “I Saw The Future Of Social Networking The Other Day” Michael Arrington writes about a still anonymous start-up.

And then don’t forget Aka-Aki. The Berlin, Germany based project looks really promising, there’s just the chicken and hen problem. As long as the critical mass isn’t reached, they’ll have a hard time. Also read more on this topic in one of my recent articles “Mobile Touchpoints”.

Writing from Florence, where I arrived today to attend the CHI, this is just a little update on my recent work. Yesterday we got the Webspecial for the new generation SL up and running. Based on a 3D model of the SL in the same setting as the TVC is produced in, the user can view several features of the vehicle by navigating around it. The highlights like the SL 350 Sports Engine or AIRSCARF are explained with animated graphics.

The CHI - Computer Human Interaction - Conference 2008 will be taking place in Florence, Italy from Saturday, 5th to Thursday, 10th of April.

During CHI 2008 Luca Chittaro will keep an updated blog in English and Italian where he will write about “news, interviews with internationally-known researchers, and the latest trends and discoveries in human-computer interaction”.

Chittaro, who is a professor at the University of Udine, also writes for Novà, the innovation supplement of Il Sole 24 Ore, Italy’s business newspaper, and keeps a blog on the Novà site.

As I’ll also be in Florence, there will be some news coming from me, too. - And perhaps the chance to meet there directly.

In their forthcoming book “Groundswell. Winning in a world transformed by social technologies.” Charlene Li and Josh Bernhoff, two of Forrester Research’s top analysts show how to use the new ways customers are connecting with each other for marketing purposes. They write about a social phenomenon - the groundswell - which transforms the way information flows and people link themselves.

To promote the new book and create some buzz, Forrester Research set up a website including not only info on the book and the authors, a blog by the authors and a discussion section, but also created an online tool to build your customers’ “social technographics profile”. The interesting part about that is that a regular, printed book is enhanced by an online tool, that lets me utilize the knowledge of the book directly for my purposes. There’s no better way of explaining new concepts than directly delivering the proof of concept.

In this way a publication and an online tool match perfectly. - Besides creating some useful marketing buzz.

To demonstrate the advantages of the Nokia N82 R/GA London created a nice online campaign. The mobile, which Nokia describes as “multimedia computer” and which features photography navigation and internet connectivity, is featured on the website “The Urbanista Diaries“. Nokia set up a platform for people to upload pictures and videos, which then can be followed as trails on a map. To kick things off four bloggers travelled to 22 cities, equipped with the N82, and uploaded their photos to the website.

The nice idea to communicate the advantages of the product is enhanced by co-operations with journalists and writers from “Wallpaper”, “CNN”, “National Geographic” and “Lonley Planet”, who also contribute to the campaign.