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Technology in 2015: 4 Future Tech Trends

Tuesday, March 16th, 2010

Technology’s relentless charge into depths unknown shows no signs of slowing up, the huge advancements we have made in 2010 will start to look prehistoric in the very near future. So with that in mind I thought I would let you get ahead of the technology beast and give you a few trends that will be making the iPad look like a calculator in 5 years time!

Ubiquitous pillar providers
Google, Apple, Microsoft and Facebook will continue to dominate, the crucial difference in 2015 is that they will all start to become more alike in terms of what the services they offer. In 5 years time each will structure themselves around some easily comparable pillar services:

real time search
rich media content in the form of music and video (with free and subscription models simultaneously)
internet browsing
data manipulation tools (office and media applications)

As a result of this convergence in terms of offer, each of the pillar providers will try to differentiate around hardware (where Apple will tend to lead), relevance (a Google stronghold), access to content (an Apple and Microsoft battleground), quality of product (again an Apple and Microsoft fight) and prevalence/ubiquity (a Facebook trait).

We will see a Facebook web browser and web search, Google begin syndication of media content, as well as Facebook office applications in the next couple of years.

Everything IP
The internet of things will continue to grow apace, and increasingly everything will have an IP address, internet capabilities will be built into electronic devices at the point of manufacture. Remote control and monitoring of household appliances is set to become commonplace in the next few years. We’re already setting our Sky+ boxes via our iPhones, by 2015 we’ll be controlling our heating, washing machines and ovens remotely.

Cloud living
By 2015 hard data storage will be a rarity. Using mobile devices, and fixed in-home and public portals we will plug into the cloud from anywhere to access our media content, personal data, finances and communications.

Ultimately we will have something resembling our own roving IP address, that we can use to plug into the system and access cloud data wherever we go. Financial connections will increasingly take the form of electronic transfer within the cloud between people or institutions along the lines of PayPal. This will see traditional banks will finding their role in everyday transactions severely reduced.

Netbooks are the harbinger of this age of cloud living, and ultra high speed mobile internet through the 4G network will make this experience a tangible reality.

Haptic navigation and manipulation
The trend for visual navigation systems as evidenced in devices like the iPhone and iPad, and browsing applications like Cool Iris, will continue to grow in significance. Cloud living is a key driver for the relevance of this trend – as our data becomes increasingly remote in the physical sense, tactile data manipulation helps us to retain a sense of connectedness, giving us a physical sense of interaction with our ‘stuff’.

Microsoft are poised to gain huge traction in this space with Project Natal for Xbox 360, a gestural hands-free gaming environment launching at the end of 2010, and the same 3D camera tracking technology that powers it will form the basis of browsing applications to access all manner of data, from searching the internet to surveying images.

The continued evolution of tablet technology is relevant here, as iPad style devices will become a convergent middle ground that will take over from both iPod-size and netbook-size devices, offering a combination of multi media player (audio, video, text), browsing and creativity.

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South by South West Interactive: a weird science

Monday, March 15th, 2010

Right. So, where do we start? Well I guess I should have sent updates from the front earlier, but I got sucked into the carnival of geekdom and couldn’t help but just enjoy it. Three days into South By South West Interactive and the first thing I feel I should mention is that I’m tired. I’m knackered infact, as if I had been working on 6 debriefs, 5 pitches and had run the New York marathon all over the same weekend. The good news is the weekend is over. The bad news is, it has gone by far too quickly.

SXSWi is the most intense conference/festival ever. And it’s not just because of the ridiculous number of panels, talks and workshops, or the mental number of parties kicking off as soon as the last speaker of the day drops the mic. I think it has more to do with the immersive nature of the experience as a whole. SXSW is basically a massive social experiment a la Zimbardo about a world, a few years out, where every single human being has totally embraced the real-time social web and is always logged on, life-streaming and constantly connected to his own tribe.

There’s no in or out of SXSW, once you are here you can only be IN: in the conference centre, on the streets, in the virtual space. It’s a total experience, a world that Tim from @madebymany yesterday described as the “Kingdom of Awesome, a metaphorical ‘State’ of hive-mind” where for one single week you’re intensely sharing and life-sharing with hundreds of people on Twitter, Facebook and the blogosphere collapses into a physical space, a few blocks weird town in Texas. No wonder that the two apps that are rocking this year’s edition, Foursquare and Gowalla, only do one thing: connecting virtual characters to physical spaces.

Foursquare experienced an extraordinary day yesterday, recording a record-breaking 347,000 check-ins in one day (as in people checking in a conference room, a venue or a bar when they get there, to let their connections know that they are there). I’ve been using Foursquare for a while in London but using it here in Austin has a completely different meaning. In a context where only a few people are using it, the engagement leans towards the gaming elements, while in situations like SXSWAustin the app serves a solid social purpose.

Foursquare’s location-based sharing meets a need that couldn’t be met by any other media: facilitating face-to-face connections between people who build and manage their networks through social media, i.e. people with ahigher number of active social connections. Imagine if you were to phone, txt or generally engage, 1-2-1, with the hundreds of people you’re constantly in touch with on Twitter… One week wouldn’t be enough just to get hold of half of them.

I had the same feeling last year, when I came to SXSW for the first time and realized how different it was to use Twitter in a place where 12 thousand other festival peoploids were doing exactly the same at the same time. In a situation like this Twitter is simply way more efficient than any other available media. And it’s not just a question of scale, it’s a completely different way of existing in a social space, building knowledge, relationships and ultimately societies. You know all this. But being immersed in it is a completely different story.

So, even if every panel had been useless, every party boring, and even if it had been pouring rain for a week (as opposed to the amazingly warm summer that welcomed us), it would still be all very worthwhile. Because SXSW is not so much about SXSW but more about the community around it. It’s not about emergent technology in itself but about bringing together in one place, people who use fairly common social technologies just to see what happens. It’s about taking part in this weird laboratory of the future, where you can really start grasping what social technology is all about, what are the opportunities, what are the challenges and the dangers ahead.

Note to self: next SXSW posts, a lot shorter and with actual content/no random rumblings

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Chatroulette – It’s Fun!

Tuesday, March 9th, 2010

Teenager dancing to bad hip-hop…middle-aged man staring aimlessly at his webcam…faceless man doing, erm, things they probably shouldn’t be doing on the internet. Yes, these are the joys of Chatroulette and anyone can join in.

I had heard quite a lot of murmurings about Chatroulette, a site where you push start and are instantly in a video chat with a random stranger. Created by 17-year old Russian high school student, Andrey Ternovskiy, Chatroulette was created just for fun, but word has already spread fast.

My first thoughts about the site were definitely in the “why bother?” camp. However, part of me just had to a take a peek, and this is obviously where its popularity stems from. Chatroulette effectively allows you to peep through the net curtains and into the lives of random strangers. However, this is a peep through the net curtains that has the added frisson of the random button. Just by pressing next, you are in a video chat with another random stranger. The fact of the matter is, you don’t quite know what that next person may be doing in front of their webcam.

Many articles have already emerged asserting that Chatroulette is just another platform for titillation online. Having played Chatroulette at Face towers, we can safely say this is most definitely not for children. However, support for the site has already emerged, with Wired giving its five reasons why Chatroulette is addictive and worth a try. One element of Chatroulette that definitely feels different is the scope it provides to dip out of conversations easily, with the veil of anonymity meaning you are not hurting anyone’s feelings. For many, this anonymity also allows them to be as outlandish as they want, knowing full well they are probably only on screen for a very short space of time. Wired’s main reason for buying into Chatroulette though, is that it’s fun.

So, is it fun? I have to admit I had my doubts. However, I also don’t think I have seen the Face team laugh and scream as much as they did when we took a quick look at the world of Chatroulette. Chats veered from the funny (teens dancing badly and holding up stupid signs), to the odd (the man who didn’t seem to understand how it all worked), to the downright perverse (it must be a rule of the internet that at any given moment in time, somewhere, there will be a naked man enjoying his company too much in front of his webcam). Maybe it’s the future of online chat, or maybe it’s just a phase. However, having played it, I can at least safely say that Chatroulette is most definitely a laugh.

Here is a great video explaining Chatroulette and using it for a social experiment:

chat roulette from Casey Neistat on Vimeo.

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The Future Planning

Tuesday, March 2nd, 2010

“The ad industry establishment can no longer simply tweak its offering around the edges if it is to cope. 2010 must be the year to begin a head on overhaul of the way the (advertising) business is organized” Claire Beale Editor of Campaign Magazine, January 2010

The global marketing landscape has changed more in the last 5 years than in the last 50 but that the leading agencies in terms of the way they are organized, structured and the service they offer, haven’t.

The main driver for this change has been the rise of empowered consumers. They have exposed the traditional advertising agency model as one that is out of date and struggling to help clients deal with the current consumer landscape.

“The fact is: consumers now control brands. They play with them, reshape them and even imbue them with new meaning. In the next decade, we will see a shift away from the traditional branding model of agencies and clients” Owen Lee, Creative Chairman Farm

The big question on everyone’s lips is how should the advertising and planning industry respond? What is the new model of marketing that will ensure as an industry we can help brands to navigate their way through the new consumer landscape? These questions apply as much to the brands as to the agencies that serve them. If we wanted to be sensationalist we would say that “brands and agencies must adapt or die” or putting it in a more positive way that the brand and agency leaders of the future will need to be fleet-of-foot and structure their businesses to function in a highly fluid way.

As research, brand and communications people we always felt we wanted to get closer to consumers, but for practical reasons were not able to no matter how creative we were. But now that’s all changing. Social media allows us to listen to consumers and monitor the conversations they are having around brands in real time. This offers valuable insight and understanding, but more importantly identifies opportunities to establish a completely new way for brands to engage with their audiences. The challenge for the industry is not to view social media as a channel, but to use it to facilitate collaborations between brands and consumers to innovate and co-create communications more effectively. It has heralded:

The Advent of Social Brands
New social media tools will help brands to be on 24/7: this is part of what we call “the socialisation of brands” where campaign and channel marketing gives way to “continuous brand engagement marketing”. The environment the brand lives and breathes in is always on and is always changing so brands need to be listening to and observing their consumers not just in communities but also on the web as well as involving them on a continuous basis in everything they do.

The Need for Big Social Ideas
“Big ideas” need to be a big SOCIAL ideas – one that has the power to live and breathe through what consumers do with it in their interactions with each other and the brand. A big social idea has to be able to evolve, adapt and gain new meaning through those consumer interactions. Ultimately this requires agencies and brands to embrace a more open creative approach based on the philosophy that ideas can come from anywhere: a new model which combines the creativity of experts with the creativity of consumers so that more big social ideas of better quality can be produced. This means experts have an even bigger role to play than ever before. Our recent case study with Nestle’s Skinny Cow where we co-created the advertising with Mindbubble women is a good one – in three months there are already 41,000 fans on Facebook.

The Need to be Fast, Adaptive and Continuous
The process needs to change as well; the annual planning cycle making way for real-time planning which allows brands to remain relevant and interesting to changing consumer needs, overall a more fluid, highly responsive and iterative way of planning, which we call Adaptive Brand Planning. The new imperative will be to maintain a dialogue with your consumers to harness their opinions and ideas to fine-tune your product and communications. One of the main benefits of this approach is the speed with which you can develop concepts and communications as shown by our recent work with Unilever and Axe/Lynx Twist.

Consumer Communities Will Reign
The focus on the 30 second TV spot will give way to the content and conversations that are being generated by consumers and between consumers around the brand. This will in turn produce different segmentation models where brands see consumers not just as potential customers who want to buy something from them but as people who want to have a relationship with them. Engaging and managing brand fan bases will be key: developing creative ways for engaging and managing fan bases will be critical.

A New Planning Mindset
The planner of the future will be more interested in how people interact, and how to stimulate those interactions. The sage-like planners will be replaced by people who are comfortable working in tightly knit teams of agency planners, each with their area of specialism such as social media or building and harnessing the power of communities. The line between planner and researcher will become blurred because there will be a constant dialogue with consumers that will offer insight, understanding and ideas in real time. A key part of the task will be to observe and spot these insights and ideas and use them to inspire creative experts to build upon them.

Conclusion
Consumers will be treated in a fundamentally different way. They will be given more responsibility and will be more involved throughout the brand marketing process. Co-creating with consumers as direct and active equals to deliver a range of marketing outputs will be a major part of the marketing model. Also the new generation of planners will treat consumers in a fundamentally different way. The gaming generation of young planners will be comfortable in this fast changing environment, where remaining in constant contact with your audience is more important than one-off research interventions. These planners will be the architects of a new contract between brand and consumer, founded on listening, understanding, adapting and co-creating.

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Face: A Co-Created History – Part 1

Monday, March 1st, 2010

This story begins in 2004, a year when 120 million Americans voted George Bush Jnr into government for a second term, The Lord of The Rings: Return of the King won 11 Oscars, Ireland introduced the smoking ban and a small start-up called Face started to get going.

In 2004 participating in social media was not a widespread activity, early adopters and young people were the groups pushing the format forward and exploring its possibilities. In its early days we were helping brands stay close to young people and therefore close to the ensuing high paced changes in on-line behaviour they were leading.

Skip forward three years and in May 2007 we proudly launched the first ever co-creation community, Headbox.com. Headbox was the result of spending loads of time with young people, researching their habits and ultimately understanding the way they interact with each other and with brands.

At the time there were no on-line qualitative research platforms for any category, let alone youth, the driving force behind the internet. In 2007 social media was beginning to reach its massive potential and the world of research needed to react. By offering clients a way into the minds of young people it opened up a more collaborative and mutual relationship between consumers and brands.

Headbox in 2007!

This was an extremely exciting time for us; working in a more concerted and creative way was being adopted as a philosophy. It was the beginning of the co-creation driven approach that would define the company, although the term co-creation was not being used just yet!

It was whilst presenting our second annual TechTribe report at the 2007 MRS Youth Conference when the real turning point came. The Axe team had seen our presentation and were interested in the approach. Axe wanted to engage with their consumers more closely and involve them in every step of the marketing process.

It was here at the 2007 MRS Youth Conference that co-creation was first put forward to a client brave and willing enough to try something new.

A few months later in the heat of Alicante, Spain, 16 young, creative Axe consumers from Headbox took part in Face’s first big co-creation project. Working alongside the Face and Axe team their task was to co-create an Axe Summer Variant.

Our first Co-Creation Project with Lynx was a great success

The co-creation workshop and co-creative approach was an instant success. By the end of 2007 we had co-created with Axe again on the infamous Dark Temptation ‘Chocolate Man’ variant as well as completing a co-creation project with Rexona, developing a new variant with their female consumers.

Next up… Part 2: 2008 and the birth of Mindbubble

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Facebook Vs. Twitter

Tuesday, February 9th, 2010

What excites you more: Getting a notification telling you that you have reached your 86th follower on Twitter or, being told that your, supposed, best friend has tagged some very embarrassing photos of you on Facebook?

Before I start it’s important to say, I am no social media expert, I probably know as much as the average social network user but, like a lot things, I have an opinion on it & would like to share my thoughts!

Like the majority of professional social networkers I have the usual accounts, Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin and Flickr however since joining Face I’ve learnt a lot more and hear a lot of educated opinions and conversations (arguments) about the world of social media. When I joined Face I set up a Twitter account, initially with a lot of scepticism, but now I love tweeting and find Twitter a great source for really interesting information. However, when I talk to my friends about it, whether it is to brag about finding the latest fashions or hearing the news before everyone else (I was the first to find out about Michael Jackson’s death and had to inform my friends via text, how very old skool), they don’t see what all the fuss is about.

I’ve tried to encourage them to sign up to Twitter but they don’t see it as any different to Facebook status updates? So, to finally draw a line between the two, here is a comparison of the world’s most popular social networking sites:

F A C E B O O K vs T W I T T E R

Facebook is all about friends, family & old school friends that you would say hello to if you passed in the street vs. Tweets come from a much bigger network, professional bodies and Celebs!
Facebook has commenting and like functions vs. Tweets can be retweeted and replied to
Facebook is fast becoming a favourite of parents and grandparents vs. Twitter is getting a lot more media attention and is a bit cooler (if either could be classed as that).
Facebook is currently full of bugs! vs. I found this out from someone’s Tweet and as far as I can see Twitter is bug free (apart from the odd fail whale)
Facebook is always changing its mind vs. Twitter has a simple story
Here is an example of my last update on Facebook and Twitter I’ll let you decide which is the most interesting:

Facebook: Joe Smith has lost his phone, if you need me you can contact me on my temporary number 07********

Twitter: @BitchBuzz: Bliss and Shelter Encourage Brits to Bake for Charity http://bit.ly/b0KCN8

In conclusion I think both have their own good points but Facebook is tiring on me. Social media is driven by content and because Twitter has such a wealth of users discussing so many different topics I think it will be the winner in the long run.

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What’s Going On: Face Youth Lab

Friday, February 5th, 2010

Focussing on the latest youth news, trends and movements, Face Youth Lab delivers regular content to aid marketers and researchers understand and interact with youth. Here’s whats been going on at FYL recently:

Music & Social Media: Youth Use What They Know Best To Help Haiti

A quick search on Google News reveals that the recent earthquake in Haiti has caused, amongst many other horrific problems, thousands of orphans. As we explored last week, young people are terrifically and passionately motivated to help their fellows when they can, with social media beginning to act as a primary means of directing people to how they can help…[Read More]

OnLive: If It’s Good Enough For Youth, It’s Good Enough For Me

The on-demand console gaming service, OnLive recently released pictures and videos demoing its product and peripheries through Facebook in an attempt to create some hype surrounding its upcoming release into public beta mode. The projected release of this cloud gaming service has brought much attention in the press with headlines such as “Is It Game Over for Consoles?” in The Independen t… [Read More]

3DTV: Brands Attempting To Get Top Down On Youth Again?

There has been a lot of hype about 3DTV recently. Yet despite the 3D film Avatar having become the second biggest grossing film in history, 3DTV seems more an extension of High-Definition TV and possibly a step towards returning TV to a more unidirectional focus for young people again where the internet has made it multidirectional and periphery…[Read More]

The Armchair Revolution Begins To Stand Up

Tech Tribe 2009 revealed how young people, despite their relatively meager financial situations, are still heavily attentive to philanthropic activities surrounding their environments. Last year was a big year for youth participation and making their voices heard within their communities. Young people in particular have shown an apparent increase in participation in both off and online political protest…[Read More]

An Interview With My Gaming Mother: Gatekeepers For Young Gamers

Upon hearing the discussions about whether Mums would buy Modern Warfare 2 for their young children, I thought about my Mum’s impact upon my early life as a gamer. Unable to conceive of getting into video games without her financial backing as a child, and baring in mind that the world of gaming had changed significantly since I was a child in the early 1990s, I decided to ask her a few questions about her interactions with games via my obsession with them as a child…[Read More]

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Face 2010: From The Rebirth of Insight, to The Death of PowerPoint

Tuesday, February 2nd, 2010

At Face we don’t like standing still; partly because we are always looking to improve and do things better, and partly because as the world changes we need to change with it. 2010 will be no different, and we are bursting with new ideas for products, communities & projects. Here are our predictions about the research & innovation business in 2010, and a sneak preview of some of the things Face will be up to.

1. 2010 the year when research goes truly mobile as smart phones become commonplace and research on the go starts to catch up

Face will be developing a smart phone application that allows us to conduct research more effectively on the go and in real time

2. The year when the research industry embraces & empowers consumers as researchers, to truly reach the parts that researchers cannot reach – peer2peer research shows what the industry looks like turned inside out.

Through our communities Headbox & Mindbubble we are training consumers to act as researchers within their own peer groups going undercover and asking the questions we didn’t even know we needed to ask.

3. The year when Tech Research & Innovation begins to learn from FMCG research in terms of innovation and product development. Why? Because the consumer is now the subject & not the object of technology.

Face is launching our own tech community in 2010, aimed at engaging tech leaders in insight and innovation work

4. The year that social media & the web as a source of insight is finally taken seriously. Everyone wakes up to the fact that the greatest source of data is around us all the time – it’s just a case of harnessing it. No more excuses.

Face launches 2 new real time research products – Pulsar Snapshot & Pulsar Tracker – designed to monitor and analyse conversations and interactions around brands & categories in real time.

5. Co-creation & communities go east – increased confidence in the methodologies takes them firmly out of the west and into Eastern Europe, Russia, Asia & South Pacific

Face is launching community platforms & co-creation projects in India & Australia, building on existing platforms in China, Russia, Thailand, Philippines & Indonesia.

6. Death by Powerpoint becomes death of Powerpoint, slowly, slowly. One day soon. We won’t be crying.

Face will be emphasizing visual clarity & simplicity in terms of outputs and making more and more of our debriefs / output material available online as an ongoing treasure trove for clients

7. The year that the industry embraces communities in their ongoing insight, innovation & planning cycles, enabling them to work in the real world as their brands become as social as the people consuming them are!

Face has developed an adaptive brand planning process that helps Insight, Planners & Marketing people to keep their brand planning dynamic, organic and always on!

8. The year of the rebirth of insight. Researchers realise that processes like Co-Creation, Communities & Crowd-sourcing are not just there to play with, but are serious methods of getting better result, especially in the day in day out job of getting clients closer to their customers.

Face is doubling the size of its insight teams and putting actionable insight at the heart of everything we do

So, 2010, some big challenges & quite a journey ahead but a truly exciting time for us and the industry as a whole. Look forward to going on that journey with you.

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Unilever Global CMI Conference – Windsor

Thursday, January 28th, 2010

After years of enjoying being briefed by clients on their insight & innovation needs we at Face finally got to turn the tables yesterday and set a room full of senior client insight people one BIG challenge. At 3.30pm Face interrupted a Unilever Global CMI conference and sent delegates scurrying out into the streets of Windsor and crawling the web to get some hands on insights in the world of Oral Care. It was all just for fun, but it was great to see a group of senior people from Unilever not only interviewing each other & getting out on the street but also fully engaging with YouTube, Twitter, a variety of blogs and engaging with content produced by our own Mind-bubble women. There were a few cheeky calls to dentists, some great mother & child interviews on the streets and the shelves of local Boots and Tesco Express were stripped of toothpaste. All that was missing in the room was having consumers there in the room to work with us and get directly and actively involved in the process, but as we had plenty of mums and dads in the room, there was plenty of home truths available!

It all just showed how much can be achieved by a focused group of people in a short space of time, and how much resource there is avaible all of the time for us as research community to tap into. We can’t reveal too much about any of the outcomes, but it generated a lot of energy, enthusiasm and a huge amount of competitiveness. The final output from each team was a 2 minute film capturing their insights and the journey they went on to get there. By the time you read this the winning team will have already been announced and with Oscar season upon us soon, the likes of Cameron, Clooney & Eastwood might be starting to feel a bit anxious about their chances this year.

For those of you who were at the session and took part in making the films, you can go and watch them all by clicking on the following link <http://www.facegroup.co.uk/global-cmi-conference>. You will need the password you have been sent by email!

Thanks to all who took part for their commitment and making it such a fun session.

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Tweeting From The Front Line

Friday, January 22nd, 2010

No one can have escaped the total devastation that has afflicted Haiti over the past week. It is a situation that is almost too hard for the majority of people around the world to comprehend. It has become readily apparent that people on the ground are in dire need of key resources, as well as exposure in order to help find the thousands of missing people in Port-au-Prince and beyond. With the majority of formal lines of communication down, social media has had a significant role to play in facilitating donations and giving a voice to people on the ground. CNN’s iReport platform is currently putting together a database to help connect people with loved ones in Haiti by calling upon people to post names and upload photos of people who may be missing. Similarly, the twitter hashtag #rescuemehaiti is being used to direct rescue efforts to where trapped survivors have been located. The Haiti Earthquake Support Center has also created a crowd sourcing app to “harness the power of the crowd to help locate and identify missing persons with just a few minutes of your time”.

These are all powerful examples of how social media can be harnessed in ways that can have a positive effect and, potentially, save lives. The past year has been punctuated by similar examples where social media has had a role to play in giving people a voice and bringing about some form of action – from student protests in Iran, to the PCC investigating Jan Moir’s article about Stephen Gately in The Daily Mail. With all these examples in mind, it begs the question: is social media coming of age as a force for good?

A key criticism that has been levelled at social media is that, whilst it allows people to easily show their support for a variety of causes or social issues, this does not often lead to tangible action. What does pledging your support for a cause on Facebook really mean in actual terms? Is this a viable alternative to good old-fashioned physical collectives of people? Moreover, does this ultimately lead to people doing less than they would before, with digital support becoming a replacement for physical action? These have all been valid criticisms of the role of social media in political and social causes and crises.

However, are we now seeing the first signs of how social media content can translate into tangible positive action? The proliferation of tech startups focused on social innovation would indicate this is the case. A key example of this is Ushahidi, a simple website mashup using user generated reports and Google Maps to gather citizen-generated information. It has already proved invaluable in mapping reports of violence and peace efforts in Kenya, reporting activity in Gaza for Al Jazeera and monitoring the voting system in India. Ushahidi exemplifies the benefits that the real-time and flexible nature of social media can deliver in emergency and conflict situations.

For now, this is still probably a question of watch this space, but hopefully this heralds the dawn of the positive role that social media can play in such situations.