| This guest post was written by Josh Gertz, the VP of Marketing and Content Licensing for Hip Digital Media. Previously, Josh pioneered digital promotions as SVP at Neurotic Media and co-founded XACT Radio, an Internet radio network partnered with virtually every major broadcasting group. When not working, you can usually find him in the kitchen or at a poker table. Follow him on Twitter @joshgertz and @hipdigitalmedia. I am constantly amazed at how quickly our world seems to change. Lately it feels like modern technology is a snowball rolling down a mountain growing ever faster, challenging consumers to have the latest and greatest almost hourly. As a child of the 70's I can honestly say I remember a simpler time when the things we bought were expected to last forever. The family car, the family TV, dad's home video camera – it seemed like these things never changed. Today our insatiable hunger for all things new leads thousands of crazed consumers to camp out overnight yearly in front of retail stores for the newest iPad or an unheard of discount on a flat screen for Christmas. We have even reached a point where TV commercials tout wireless customers who have new and exciting information 15 seconds before others. This obsession with new technology fuels a worldwide connected web of computers and phones (and phones that look like computers) where everyone who's anyone feels the need to check their friends status updates every 30 seconds. It also leads us to find our favorite brands online. Just like we wear them on our clothes, the logos and "likes" of our favorite brands on our profile page is a key part of our online identity. What logos adorn our pages – who we "wear" online, is a reflection of who we are. So for brands who work so hard to generate fans and be worn by the coolest kids at the back of the bus…I ask you:
At Hip Digital we believe that offering people something in exchange for their loyalty, their engagement and their attention is a winning strategy for all involved. The ROI for brands is simple. Spend less money in promotional marketing than you see in sales lift, Facebook likes, tweets or whatever metric you feel is important. For content owners, these one to one relationships mean an entirely new channel of distribution has emerged. The model of brand supported legal downloads is growing almost as fast as the traditional brick and mortar retail channels are shrinking. And still the real winner is the consumer. Love me on Facebook, buy my products, spend your time with me – I will offer you the best music, movies, ebooks, apps, games and virtual currencies. Social rewards are a key component to engaging your fans in social media. Hip Digital licenses the most desirable content available including:
You have probably seen our work 100 times but didn't know it was Hip Digital because we create white labeled solutions like:
Having run more than 3,000 promotions in our 7-year history we have solutions for every sized brand. Our team can integrate social rewards into any website or Facebook page. Our customers know that differentiating their products from the others on the shelf is as easy as 1-2-3:
When you are ready to supercharge your online marketing we would love to hear from you.  |
Tuesday, April 10, 2012
Guest Post: Social Rewards and Consumer Engagement
Thursday, March 22, 2012
I’m visiting CNU on April 4th
| I’ll be in Newport News, Virginia this April 4th to give a talk at my old school, Christopher Newport University. I’m really looking forward to it! The chaos of the past year and a half didn’t leave me with much time or energy for travel or events, so it’ll be fun to get out and meet people again. I’m also looking forward to seeing the campus, which I hear has changed substantially since I left. The talk isn’t limited to CNU students, so if you live nearby, you’re welcome to come! Admission is free, but since space is limited, you’ll need to reserve tickets here. Hope to see you there! |
Friday, March 16, 2012
New Audiobook Retailer: Audiobooks Online
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Through this retail store, Audiobooks Online prides itself on offering "a wide range of formats to suit your individual needs." Indeed, their thousands of customers can purchase favorite audiobook titles as CD ROMs, preloaded MP3 Players, USB Cards, and now audiobook downloads provided through OverDrive. Audiobooks Online describes their customers as people who "love books, but don't have the time to read." The addition of audiobooks from OverDrive will speed up delivery for those busy customers by allowing them to purchase, download and listen to their title, all within minutes.  |
Congratulations to the 2012 Audie Award Finalists
| The Audio Publishers Association has announced the finalists for the 2012 Audies Competition. The Audies, sponsored by the Audio Publishers Association (APA), is the premier awards program in the United States recognizing distinction in audiobooks and spoken word entertainment. The APA has nominated 140 individual titles for categories such as best Audio Drama, Fiction, History, Humor, Non-Fiction, Solo Narration and many more! We would like to congratulate our publisher partners who have 104 titles nominated for an Audie!
Visit www.theaudies.com or the APA website for more information about the 2012 Audies competition and about the titles nominated. Congratulations to the publishers, authors, narrators and production staff for all the wonderful material!  |
Monday, February 27, 2012
Geohashing
| Almost four years ago, I posted a comic laying out the Geohashing algorithm. The algorithm generated a set of random latitudes and longitudes each day, spread out across the globe so there was generally always one within a few dozen miles of every location. I figured they could be used for hiking destinations, sightseeing, meetups, or whatever else people came up with. I wanted to make an algorithm that anyone could implement, which didn’t rely on a central authority or ongoing support from any one maintainer. I also wanted to make it impossible to know the locations more than a day or so in advance, so that if geohashing became popular in an area, no one could publish a list of future locations that woud give property owners, park rangers, or local police time to prepare. So each day’s coordinates are randomized using the most recent Dow Jones opening price, which isn’t known until the morning of that day—or, in the case of weekends, a day or two in advance, which helps with planning larger weekend trips. In the days after I posted the comic, there was a flurry of geohashing activity, which quieted down as the initial novelty wore off. But it didn’t die, and for the past several years there’s been a small but vibrant community building around the Geohashing Wiki. There are numerous daily expeditions, and they’ve taken some beautiful pictures and come up with a lot of neat tools, games, and achievements. One of the many things they did was use a tweaked version of the algorithm to come up with a globalhash, a single coordinate for the day somewhere on the planet (biased toward the areas near the poles). They’re usually over the ocean, but a few of the land ones have been reached. Yesterday’s globalhash fell less than a kilometer from the South Pole. User Carl-Johan got in touch with the Scott-Amundsen research station, and later that day, the hash was reached by Katie Hess, Dale Mole, and Joselyn Fenstermacher of the US, Robert Schwarz of Germany, and Sven Lidström of Sweden. Wow. Just wow. Congratulations. If you want to look up today’s geohash for your location, you can use this online tool, or one of the others listed on the Coordinate Calculators page. |
Tuesday, January 31, 2012
Tsunami photos and videos
| In xkcd.com/1010 (I have a hard time not reading that as “ten”) I said that before 2004, there weren’t really any photos or videos of tsunamis. This isn’t quite true—there were a handful of photos and at least one video. When I was a kid, I was had an irrationally powerful fear of tsunamis (Etymology-Man would suggest “cymophobia”). I swam in the ocean a lot when I was very young, so waves were a big part of my world. I would fret about tsunamis whenever I was near the coast, and to this day I have occasional nightmares about a wave coming out of nowhere and sweeping me away. Looking back, part of what made tsunamis frightening was was that I didn’t know what they looked like, and my imagination ran wild filling in the gaps. I read what I could find about them. In particular, I remember being just old enough to work my way through this book, and carrying it around with me so I could read the tsunami section over and over. It included a grainy photo of a ship in a Japanese harbor plowing through an unimpressive-looking line of breakers. I think that’s also where I found a photo of some people running away from something (it was this photo, but the reproduction in my book was too grainy to see what they were running from). Years later, after the rise of the web, I realized maybe I could now find a video of a tsunami, and finally see the thing that had so captivated me as a child. But my searches for videos didn’t turn up much of anything. Then the 2004 tsunami happened. Shortly after, as YouTube and its various clones proliferated, there was more horrifying footage available than I could handle. A year or two ago, I read an article somewhere (I have tried to find it again with no luck) which mentioned that before 2004, there hadn’t been much in the way of photographic or video records of tsunamis, and that this had contributed to a lack of understanding of their form. My childhood impression seemingly confirmed, I worked this into a comic. It turns out I was mistaken. There are several photographs, some of which can be seen here, here, and here. There’s also a video here (sent in by Phil Plait). I think what confused me as a child was that none of the photos showed the wave I expected—just debris, and occasionally some visible water. Now that I’ve seen horrifying videos like this, I’ve gone back to some of those old photos and realized that they did show a tsunami. It was just so unlike what I was expecting that I didn’t recognize it. So thank you to everyone who sent in information. It’s really fascinating stuff. Oh, and anyone interested in the history of tsunamis might want to check out a Google Books advanced search for material published before 1850 containing phrases like earthquake wave, earthquake tide, or earthquake water feet. There are some gripping historical accounts buried there, along with some really interesting speculation by 19th-century scientists about the mechanisms behind earthquakes and their associated waves (the consensus seemed to be hot gas moving between subterranean chambers). |
Saturday, December 31, 2011
GoDaddy
| xkcd.com is registered with GoDaddy. This is an artifact of my registering my own domains nearly ten years ago, back when I was completely new to making websites. I’ve always been a little uneasy about having all my domains with them, since they’ve got a long history of screwing over domain owners, but never got around to doing anything about it. A little while back, as the SOPA thing blew up, I poked davean, the xkcd sysadmin, about whether it was time to make switching to someone more geek-friendly a priority. He’s also wanted to switch away from GoDaddy for years (and recently met with the reddit folks to chat about SOPA stuff). He’s periodically done surveys of the alternatives, but—strange as it sounds—he’s actually had trouble finding an affordable registrar with the feature set we needed. In particular, he said he had trouble finding any that support IPv6 Glue and DNSSEC via a control system that doesn’t rely on filing and waiting on support tickets, which he says (and I quote) “freaks me out” as a means of handling registrar stuff (he’s very much an xkcd.com/705 style of administrator). The ones that did offer those features tended to be a little too high-priced for our large number of domains. We’ve had a number of alternatives recommended in the past week or two, but none have quite satisfied davean’s criteria. If you know of any registrars that might work for us, you can email us at contact@xkcd.com and he’ll take a look. We’re being cautious about how we handle this switch, since GoDaddy has seemingly been obstructing transfers in a way that can leave the sites trapped in limbo. But don’t worry—it’s in the works! |