BIZTECHBUZZ in the world of social, cognitive, IoT and startups

Month: February 2010

Robots Begin To Socialize!!!!

From one of my favorites — Ray Hammond!

A pan-European team of robotics researchers begins a project this year that could see humanoid robots interact with groups of people in a realistic, anthropomorphic way for the first time.

If successful, the project will give future humanoid bots something that existing robots don’t possess – the simple social skills necessary to deal with small groups of people, including the basic intelligence to pick out a group of humans and determine which ones want to interact with it. It could also endow robots with the ability to infer meaning from incoming sense data, which would be a rudimentary step towards truly anthropomorphic robot intelligence.

Virtual gifting — researching it!

I am intrigued by virtual gifting ever since I went to a Social Media conference that was housed with an online dating conference.  Yes, I know an interesting combo!   But as I walked through their solution conference, I found some interesting items!

First, let’s start at the beginning.  Per Wikipedia,   a virtual gift is a picture of an item, instead of the item itself. The item may have a digital social capital value, esthetic or functional value. The item may or may not be paired with an offline equivalent.

This HEX necklace was the first virtual gift that I created for an IBM event….it is a HEX necklace!

Second, people love them!   57 % believe virtual gifting is as meaningful as real life gifting.  WOW!

Third, it drives money. It is about 10% of Facebook’s revenue from the beginning in 2007.    (Couldn’t find any new factoids!)

Fourth, I want to see what you guys think about virtual gifting.  Are you using it?    See below what we created for my team mates below.

Steel Magnolias!

Gang:

I had a great opportunity to present Social Media & Personal Branding at University of North Carolina.  Yes, I am a southern woman — loving my sweetened ice tea and the hospitality!!

The day before the event, I had the pleasure of meeting with a group of Steel Magnolias — strong business women and professors of North Carolina.  It was an amazing lesson in networking in person with amazing women!

More than one-third (36%) of online US and Canadian women would give up chocolate, their Pradas, or their mother-in-law before they gave up their social networks!  53% of online women use social networks at least weekly.   These women were savy business leaders making their mark on the world — and understanding the new world enough to drive their growth in the new world.

Here we are in the Hyde Hall, a great building, on campus!

On the next day, I presented to a great group of students and professors on Personal Branding!   There were lots of great questions and I am still amazed at how much can be done with social media and branding!

Let me know if I can help out your university !

How did they know that?

I was on our monthly Social Business lunch n learn today and received a great question.

The question was ” I tweeted about silent auctions and immediately was approached by many silent auction vendors on software, thoughts, points of views, etc.  How did that happen?”

Well, smart users of Twitter will have set up a tool like TweetDeck flagging key search words.   Then you can immediately see who is talking about subjects that are exciting to you.  It is so valueable to find those interested in your topic.

Tweetdeck

What are your best tips?