Leading The Way Online

QR codes are popping up on everything from magazine ads to bus shelters. Slowly but surely, Americans are learning to point and click.

ComScore in their June 2011 survey of the funky, black and white squares found 14 million mobile users in the US have scanned a QR code. That sounds like a nice number until you put it in perspective. That’s only 6.2% of all mobile users!

Not surprisingly, 60.5% of the code scanners were men, mostly between 18-34 with an income of over $100k.

Where did they find these codes?

Nearly half said they saw the QR codes in print magazines or newspapers. A close second with 35.3% was product packaging. Posters, business cards, flyers and storefronts also made the list. The two strange choices were websites (27.4%) and TV (11.7%).

Websites perplexes me because the usual purpose of a QR code is to link the user to more material which is generally located on a website. If you’re already there, why make you jump through hoops to use a code? Why not just show me what you want to show me or create a link?

TV is odd because you’d have to either be very quick or use a pause command to stop the TV commercial long enough to scan the code. I’m surprised that even 11% of the people mentioned that option.

A college saw a QR code was on a soda cup from a fast food restaurant. He was in the car, so he didn’t activate the code until he got home, which put him in the majority. 58% of QR code users say they scan codes at home. 39.4% said they do it while in a retail location, grocery stores, restaurants, work and on public transportation.

Most likely we have a long way to go before QR codes become part of the common usage. But the fact that people are scanning at home shows that mobile isn’t just for those on the go. More and more we’re seeing people using their cell phone as a substitute for their computer and that’s going to have a big impact on online marketing.

Stay tuned.

As we all know Technology waits for no one. It moves faster each day with no end in sight. What was new this morning is considered old by the afternoon. What was working on Internet Explorer (IE) 7 won’t with IE 8. Keeping up with the latest technology can be a nightmare and to make matters worse It gets more confusing with each new added custom feature.

I understand they added some new fancy widget up loader that can simplify my life by saving seconds in my batch upload but why do I have to read ten pages just to understand how to use it? Let’s not forget  the migraine headache that is digital video which has me constantly screaming “PICK ONE FORMAT AND STICK WITH IT!!! ”

There has been a war waging on the Internet, one that seems endless and with no real winner in sight. Just a pile of videos waiting to be left in the digital dust and forgotten. They are the WMVs, FLVs, M4Vs, ….. the list goes on and on. These formats were the engines that drove the digital video movement YESTERDAY. But today the format war seems to be continuing with no real solution.

Sure your  FLV (flash video) will play on Internet Explorer but what about Firefox? Chrome? Safari? These are the questions you have to be asking yourself if you want your video to be seen by as many people as possible. We have the questions but what about the answer?  Can the answer lie within the code? Can HTML5 be our savior? Can it end  the war and  be that hero we have been waiting for? Or is it more like a hero in training?

Let’s start off right and with as little technical jargon as possible. HTML5 video is a video tag from HTML5 which is the new version of HTML.

Confused?!?!? Ok, one of the ways you create a website is with code called HTML. HTML5 is a new version of that code and HTML5 video is a player created out of this code that can detect what browser you are using and adapt to a video format that can play in your browser.  It claims to have the ability to play in most web browsers and mobile devices. You can see an example of the player here.

At first glance you probably won’t notice a difference but if you open another internet browser, (IE, Firefox, Chrome) you will see the player change. That’s because the code is detecting the browser and switching the video to a format that works best for that browser. The code is relatively simple and can be found at Video For Everybody, Video JS. These sites provide the necessary files and simple step by step instructions for upload. Problem is, you need to convert the video file, THREE TIMES?!?!?

The biggest downside of HTML5 video is the amount of work that will have to go into converting the video for the web. What took one conversion (of a familiar format) now takes three conversions which have to rely on open source converters that often produce inconsistent results and take a great deal of time to convert . The big payoff is during that sales meeting you can pull out any Internet device and show that presentation video without any worries of compatibility.

A simplified breakdown reveals HTML5 player requires three different video  formats to be so cross compatible. These three formats are the old H.264(MPEG-4) and two relatively new formats Ogg and WebM. These two new formats are claiming territory through new updates in most web browsers except IE9. Not to worry IE will play the H.264 format which is referred to as ” flash fallback.” WebM and Ogg are the self proclaimed winners of the new digital video format war and with all the browsers backing them it’s getting harder to disagree. Yet all the hype is quite reminiscent of HD DVD, Beta Max… anyone.

OK, I know I haven’t written anything for over 4 months.  And how do I expect people keep coming back if I don’t add new content more often?  Well, I don’t have a good answer, except over the last 6 months we have been focusing on building a new 100+ page website with any free time we have had.

Allow me to introduce the new VisionFriendly.com website proudly debuting on Leading the Way Online.

If you haven’t seen the site I strongly suggest checking it out. It’s chocked full of information about the Internet and marketing your business.  We have 4 blogs, 16 products, 20 services and whole lot of site prototypes for your review.

And from now on, we will all be keeping our social networks and blogs updated more regularly.

Look for a quarter of phones to be smart by 2011.  That’s double what it is today accuring to Kiplinger Letter.  New chips will speed processing and technology will make the airwaves less crowded.  battery power will be less of a problem. 

Worldwide sales for smart phones will be 600 million by 2011 with retailers dipping their toes into m-commerce, (mobile online sales).

As I have stated before, in four or five years your cell will replace your home and office phone and your home and office computer and become part of your dashboard and radio in your car.  Your smart phone will become part of you, as you won’t be able to leave home without it!

Oh yea, what happens if you lose it, drop it or throw it out the window?  Don’t worry everything will be backed up in the “Cloud”.

Cell phones have been mobile PCs for a while, but it took Apple’s brilliant App Store to really set the idea of downloading apps to your cell phone in motion. Today, the mobile app market is thriving. Hundreds of handsets are capable of installing and running Apps, and a slew of big-name app stores are striving to compete with Apple, including BlackBerry App World and Android Market.

For a quit some time I have felt it was iPhone or nothing.  Applications and capabilities on the iPhone were light years ahead of everyone else, but as has been the case since IBM and punch cards, technology has way to level the playing field.   However, dispite the other options, I still think you can’t go wrong with the iPhone as it has it all.

Thanks to Steve Jobs and Apple our future of mobile computing can be in your hand now and it is only going to get better.

I found it extremely fascinating that there is a new study out that says top CEOs should do a better job managing their presence online, on social sites like Twitter and Facebook and even Wikipedia.

Sharon Barclay, who runs the executive public relations firm Blue Trumpet Group took Fortune’s 2009 list of the top 100 CEO’s and found what she calls a “miserable level of engagement” when it comes to social networks.

Barclay only found two CEO’s with Twitter accounts and only 13 had profiles on Linkedin, the social network for professionals.

She found only 19 with a personal Facebook page and while 75% had “some kind of” entry on the online encyclopedia Wikipedia, many of those entries had incorrect titles, missing information or a lack of sources.

So it looks like there are an awful lot of us that still need to get our act together!

If you are like most of us, you haven’t yet noticed that there’s a quite new phenomen going on out there that is changing the way we can get information. It is called a Netbook (even the spell checker can’t find the word).

A Netbook is a laptop computer designed for wireless communication to the Internet. Primarily designed for web-browsing and emailing. Netbooks rely heavily on the Internet for remote access to web-based applications and are targeted increasingly at cloud computing. It is much smaller than a normal lap with some devices below 5 inches in width and typically weigh just a couple of 3 pounds. They cost around $300.

I’ve had something similar for about 3 years now before it was called a Netbook. Sony and later Acer can out with full-functional mini-laptops but they cost around $2,000 then and they are the size of a book.

Starting from essentially zero market penetration in late 2007, roughly 10 million netbooks have shipped, according to IDC. Netbooks now account for seven per cent of all portable PCs. That is extraordinary growth rate in a short time.

So what we have a new computing structure. I think it goes something like this from handheld to Servers:

It’s early evening July 4th, and we’re driving to our favorite fireworks spot when my stomach informs me I haven’t eaten since our cookout hours ago. I got this urge for a pizza – a Papa Johns pizza. But I don’t know where one is and I don’t want to wait for one.

For as much as I have a ploblem witht how much time it takes to keep up with technology and information, I found a techinical solution to my hunger problem.

Using my iPhone I bring up the Papa John’s website. They’re on top of things as they already have a moble web site designed just for me (so it seems). Using my GPS it finds the nearest store. Then I order my pizza online using the online special.

By the time I get to the store my pizza is ready and waiting for me. How cool is that?

For tonight I just love technology!

Well, it’s been over a week since my last blog. Either I can’t find the time to add one more thing to my list or I haven’t put a high enough priority on blogging. Maybe both.

But the time for social networking is still my number one concern. I find the opportunity to share information with the world exciting – no make that intriging. But to tweet and blog and email and etc., am I being productive. If its social then productivity doesn’t matter. But my goal in not gabb and be social but rather to provide something of value. If I can provide value then I can justify the time part a little better.

Now if I can provide value for our customers, that’s a bonus and I’m happy. That then is time well spent. But with just two followers it just isn’t worth while. However, what comes first the Chicken or the Egg? I need a little more time to think about this!

Have you ever seen technology move as fast as it is today? Phones are turning into computers, newspapers are going online, wireless everything including hand tools, social networks are changing the way we communicate and the Internet is growing at a lighting pace. How do we manage all these changes? What should we do? And how do you fit in?

These are all questions we all need to address at some point. Sure there will be those that just stick there head in the sand. But, for most of us we will get caught up in this new whirlwind of information exchange that is going to change our lifestyles? Do you want that?