Paul Jacobson

I just watched this amazing demonstration of a few Google employees’ 20% project called Google Liquid Galaxy which uses a series of LCD panels and a seemingly seamless combination of Google’s location services like Google Earth and Google Maps to present a fairly immersive virtual experience.

Its worth watching this in 480p and full screen! The Google LatLong blog has some details about how the multi-panel rig was conceived and built for demonstration purposes:

We wanted to try visualizing other cool geo displays, so in July, Dan Barcay, one of the engineers on the Google Earth team, modified a Google Earth client so that it would synchronize views across multiple computers. The effect was pretty stunning: all of a sudden, flying around in Google Earth really felt like flying, and exploring the ocean trenches was like piloting a submarine. When you splashed through the sea surface you cringed slightly, expecting to get wet. You could even command your own lander down to the Moon or Mars. It was amazing to all of us how much more impressive Google Earth felt when we were surrounded by screens and able to turn our heads to look around (and even walk around). It felt more like a ride than a computer program, something between an observation-deck and a glass-walled spaceship. As a result of this totally seamless, immersive experience, we decided to name it the Liquid Galaxy. With the Liquid Galaxy, we could fly through the Grand Canyon, leap into low-Earth orbit, and come back down to perch on the Great Pyramid of Giza without even breaking a sweat.

It doesn’t take a lot to imagine a far more immersive experience with more detailed imagery and a seamless screen setup.

I had a couple thoughts at about 4am this morning after I put our son back down to sleep. Most of those thoughts were ways that Melrose Arch might find useful and which may just help build a little community of fans about the shopping district (in retrospect, it is a little more than just a shopping mall – shopping district sounds a little more appropriate). Of course I am going to preface this email by saying that I am just a blogger and a lawyer, hardly the social media experts advising Melrose Arch, but there is a chance that I might have a useful idea here and there.

One of the reasons why photography is banned at Melrose Arch seems to be that people were taking photos there for use in adverts or otherwise for commercial use. Those uses were presumably problematic for a variety of reasons so the Powers That Be banned all photography unless permission was expressly given. An example of that sort of permission is the form I had to fill in last year.

If you visit the Melrose Arch website it quickly becomes clear that Melrose Arch is intended to be a lifestyle destination (I made this point in my previous post). Melrose Arch also has its Twitter profile and Facebook page, both have fairly anemic followings considering the organisation behind them.

I may be getting a little carried away with Melrose Arch’s appeal but there must be other people who find the district visually appealing and would love to know more about it. Unfortunately there doesn’t seem to be much attention given to the architecture, the philosophy behind the development or any of that stuff on the site. Melrose Arch has offered me a media pass to take photos and I was invited to join a walk-around but I kept thinking there must be a more sustainable way to make this sort of thing available to all tourists, local and foreign.

This is the part where I actually get to my suggestions. Here goes:
What if Melrose Arch’s security approached people taking photos and gave them a card that –

• thanked them for their interest in Melrose Arch;
• encouraged them to share their photos and videos with family and friends (not for commercial use of course) and even asked them to tag their content with something like “melrosearch” so other people could discover their content;
• pointed out that commercial photography and filming may only be done with permission from the managing agents and how/where to get that permission;
• informed the tourist about Melrose Arch’s Twitter profile, Facebook fan page and website and encouraged them to follow, join and visit (they could even submit their photos and videos to the fan page); and
• perhaps even had a QR code on the card that linked to a site or special offer of some kind for tourists (perhaps 10% off a coffee at any of the local spots serving coffee by displaying the voucher on the mobile phone the QR code links to).

But wait, there’s more. Melrose Arch should take over its Google Maps listing and add more interesting or relevant information like shopping times, profile and site links and more. It could even encourage its tenants to do the same with their Google Maps listings and add to the body of entries for businesses and retail in the district. Imagine if more people added reviews like the one I added?

I didn’t see any links to or mention of Melrose Arch’s Twitter profile or Facebook page on its website. Shouldn’t there be prominent badges on the landing page or something? This one is a little obvious so I am sure Melrose Arch’s agency is working on something already. Another suggestion is to include a dynamic news stream on the “Press Room” page to include mentions across the social Web, as well as mainstream media mentions. Granted there may well be negative mentions but if Melrose Arch manages to cultivate a community of fans, that stream will be a pretty effective way for its fans to share their experiences in a location potential visitors are going to look.

Other suggestions include Melrose Arch shooting videos with people involved behind the scenes like the architect/s, designers, featured tenants and so on which can be posted on YouTube (or various locations) so visitors can find out more about decisions that were taken when developing parts of the district or the symbolism of a particular piece of architecture. That sort of thing. What about a series of sms short codes that give tourists easy access to snippets of information about these same features as they are walking through the district. I’ve seen a phone in version of that in and around Sandton. The idea here is to engage curious tourists on the ground, while they are immersed in their Melrose Arch experience.

All of this is in addition to Melrose Arch’s social media outreach which should include monitoring and commenting on blog posts, tweets, Facebook mentions, photos uploaded to Flickr and PicasaWeb, videos uploaded to a variety of video sharing sites and more. Melrose Arch’s current social media initiatives are a good start but it can do more. It would also be beneficial if Melrose Arch people would engage too. It isn’t clear whether someone actually working there is involved in the Twitter profile and Facebook fan page or whether those profiles are being maintained by its agency. The former is more authentic and more interesting. The latter is just another PR channel.

There seems to be so much Melrose Arch can do to engage more meaningfully, crowdsource its marketing and awareness campaign and build some buzz about itself as a destination. These are just a couple ideas that popped into my head in the early hours of the morning. I am sure the pros can come up with even more amazing ideas that don’t even have to cost all that much! The real question is whether Melrose Arch recognises the possibilities and has the will to do something to achieve them?

I am periodically reprimanded by some security guard for taking photos of or in the vicinity of a shopping mall. I have essentially been told that taking photos in or of shopping malls is banned with no real rationale. I took a photo of a renovated space inside Balfour Park yesterday and I was told about the ban and also that photos have been banned for more than 20 years. No-one has been able to give me a reason for the ban. The closest was Melrose Arch where I was required to complete a film production request for filming before I could take photos.

I don’t think I have talked about why I even want to take photos of malls. One reason is that I am fascinated by some of the designs and architectural elements. I don’t know much about design or architecture but some of these buildings fascinate me and I feel this compulsion to share my experiences.

This compulsion brings me to the main reason I take photos of these sorts of places and other areas I visit. I think of it as local tourism powered by social media. It really struck home for me how empowered we are if we have a decent mobile phone with a camera and access to our social networks the other day when we were at the Joburg Zoo. We were walking from one section to another and passed a family where everyone was holding a camera-phone. Rather than visit all these local destinations oblivious to their various appeals, I like to capture the interesting and attractive things I see and share them with my communities on the various social networks I frequent.

A number of shopping malls in South Africa have undergone fairly extensive renovations in an apparent effort to make them into lifestyle destinations rather than just a series of shopfronts. The owners appear to want visitors, local and foreign, to frequent their malls and spend as much time as is possible there. Heck, the parking rates alone must make longer stays lucrative. It isn’t always possible to travel outside of your hometown for a break so local destinations are so important. Consider this tweet I noticed on Melrose Arch’s Twitter page:

When you overlay a social media and the social Web, experiencing local destinations becomes a social event if we can capture our experiences and share them. Geolocation means you can take a couple photos or videos while you are having lunch somewhere or just taking the little ones out for a walk and have that content show up on a map. Those maps can be pretty handy for other people who want to have similar experiences. You know, they guide those potential visitors to the locations their predecessors frequented.

I don’t know why shopping malls prohibit photographs and I wish someone in the know would explain it to me. It just seems to me that the people who make the decisions are missing a valuable opportunity to put their destinations on the map in a very meaningful context, literally. Visitors should be encourages to share their experiences at these destinations and interact with them as much as possible. What about QR codes on shop windows linking to their websites or information about the shopping malls themselves (design, history, future plans). Visitors to these malls are increasingly online, mobile and connected and shopping malls have thusfar only managed to achieve lackluster engagement with the social Web. Here are how two of the higher end shopping malls are doing online:

• Sandton City
• Twitter: 568 followers
• Facebook: 511 fans
• Melrose Arch
• Twitter: 148 followers
• Facebook: 36 fans (JB’s Corner, one of its tenants, has 358 fans)

Imagine if visitors were encouraged to capture their experiences and share them? It must be possible to manage security and safety concerns and still facilitate this? I don’t think that shopping malls can really afford to neglect the social Web as a tool in their marketing toolkits. These malls need to realise that engagement with their customers is more about just throwing up a Twitter account and a Facebook fan page. What about engaging with those customers in the malls themselves and encouraging them to share their experiences on location with their social networks. Remember “word of mouth”? Well, this is how it works.

I just watched a video of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s speech last week at the United Nations’ General Assembly. It is a powerful speech worth watching/reading regardless of whether you agree with him or not. His speech was inspired by a meeting he had about 25 years ago as the Israeli ambassador to the UN with the Lubavitcher Rebbe, Rabbi Menachem M. Schneerson who gave him this advice:

… you are going to a place of deep darkness and lies, and if you will light one candle of truth, you will dispel the darkness.

I don’t want to get too political in this post. I obviously have my opinions about what he said. I think this is an important speech and I hope it brings about change. Even if it doesn’t, it is one of those speeches that I hope we, humanity, will remember in future years and decades.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahus Speech to the UN General Assembly from CrownHeights.info on Vimeo.

Here is the text of the speech:

Mr. President,
Ladies and Gentlemen,

Nearly 62 years ago, the United Nations recognized the right of the Jews, an ancient people 3,500 years-old, to a state of their own in their ancestral homeland.

I stand here today as the Prime Minister of Israel, the Jewish state, and I speak to you on behalf of my country and my people.

The United Nations was founded after the carnage of World War II and the horrors of the Holocaust. It was charged with preventing the recurrence of such horrendous events. Nothing has undermined that central mission more than the systematic assault on the truth.

Yesterday the President of Iran stood at this very podium, spewing his latest anti-Semitic rants. Just a few days earlier, he again claimed that the Holocaust is a lie.

Last month, I went to a villa in a suburb of Berlin called Wannsee. There, on January 20, 1942, after a hearty meal, senior Nazi officials met and decided how to exterminate the Jewish people. The detailed minutes of that meeting have been preserved by successive German governments.

Here is a copy of those minutes, in which the Nazis issued precise instructions on how to carry out the extermination of the Jews. Is this a lie?

A day before I was in Wannsee, I was given in Berlin the original construction plans for the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp. Those plans are signed by Hitler’s deputy, Heinrich Himmler himself. Here is a copy of the plans for Auschwitz-Birkenau, where one million Jews were murdered. Is this too a lie?

This June, President Obama visited the Buchenwald concentration camp. Did President Obama pay tribute to a lie? And what of the Auschwitz survivors whose arms still bear the tattooed numbers branded on them by the Nazis? Are those tattoos a lie?

One-third of all Jews perished in the conflagration. Nearly every Jewish family was affected, including my own. My wife’s grandparents, her father’s two sisters and three brothers, and all the aunts, uncles and cousins were all murdered by the Nazis. Is that also a lie?
Yesterday, the man who calls the Holocaust a lie spoke from this podium. To those who refused to come here and to those who left this room in protest, I commend you. You stood up for moral clarity and you brought honor to your countries.

But to those who gave this Holocaust-denier a hearing, I say on behalf of my people, the Jewish people, and decent people everywhere: Have you no shame? Have you no decency?

A mere six decades after the Holocaust, you give legitimacy to a man who denies that the murder of six million Jews took place and pledges to wipe out the Jewish state. What a disgrace! What a mockery of the charter of the United Nations!

Read more…

We’re heading off to the 27 Dinner tonight like half of Joburg geekdom. I’m looking forward to it partly because we are going to hear from Justin Spratt and Google’s new country manager, Stephen Newton (please no Google PR speak??!). I’ll probably be posting to FriendFeed as we go (look for the comments to this entry in my FriendFeed stream). I am also going to mess around a little more with Qik and try shoot some streaming video on my N97.

I thought I’d try something a little different with FriendFeed tonight and give you am embed of the search channel I set up on FriendFeed for the 27 Dinner. This channel looks for any mentions of “27 dinner” or “27dinner” and includes them:

It should also update dynamically as more entries are added to it.

Update: I can’t figure out how to add the html code for a banner but you can use this version of the logo if you would like to create your own banner!

Alt.conference is around the corner and there are already over 80 people who have joined the Alt.conference site. So what is this all about? Well, here is a nifty poster I just whipped up which gives you the nutshell details of what I hope will be a pretty exciting event:

Please feel free to download the promo poster and pass it around to anyone who would be interested in attending. I’d love to see more social media pros there as well as their clients who would like to see what else is going on in the SA online space.

I am also interested in anyone who is interested in sponsoring the event (if anyone is interested, I have a sponsorship package which may be of interest).

I’ve managed to put together a pretty exciting lineup for the Joburg and Cape Town events. Both events are going to be really interesting and I am kicking myself that I decided to arrange them for the same time. Next time they’ll run on different days so I can attend both. So here are some of the smarties you can expect:

Cape Town

• Henk Kleynhans
• David and Marc Perel
• Allan Kent
• Gaby Rosario
• Bev Merriman

Joburg

• Justin Spratt
• Nic Haralambous
• Melissa Attree
• Max Kaizen

I have also set up a FriendFeed channel which will update realtime (just include the tag “altconf” in your tweets, Flickr uploads etc and the channel should import your mentions). The channel will probably look a little like this:

I chose FriendFeed as the aggregator because it updates in realtime and has terrific conversational capabilities but feel free to chat about alt.conference wherever suits you best and let me know if the FriendFeed channel isn’t importing your feed and I’ll add it.

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Alt.conference is being run by my impromptu event business which I am calling Its All Geek To Me (aka Leo Archer CC). The cost to attend is R250 and payments must be made into the following account:

Account holder: Leo Archer CC
Bank: Standard Bank
Branch: Sandton (019 205)
Account number: 42 096 219 0

Very important: Please include a payment reference using the following format: First_initial Last_name C/J (depending on whether you are attending the Cape Town or Joburg event)

Melrose Arch opened a new shopping section last week and my wife and I decided to go take a look. The centre with the slogan “the space to be yourself” has opened a pretty funky shopping space. I thought it would be visually appealing so I took my Canon point and shoot along with us. We parked underground and entered the centre through the Woolworths (it is apparently the flagship store and goes a few levels up.

I pretty much started taking photos as we exited the Woolworths. I was hoping for movies in there somewhere together with some take out spots. That would quickly make Melrose Arch our preferred entertainment spot but, alas, no movies in this phase. That being said it is a nice little centre. Not nearly as big as some of the centers nearby but there is a great selection of shops and the design really appeals to me. Here are a couple photos I took:

Highlights for me included the iStore (great find) and some of the open spaces. I love the glass ceiling in the main centre too.

Out tour became interesting when a noticeably nervous security guard sidled up to me and informed me that photography in the centre was not permitted. I pointed out I hadn’t seen any signs and, besides, I wanted to write about the place for everyone else’s benefit. He said there were no signs but he was there to tell me I couldn’t take photos.

I said that if the centre didn’t want me writing about the place then I wouldn’t and he was very quick to say they would like to be written about. By this point I was a little irked at being told I couldn’t do what I wanted (yeah, I know … !). He politely told me I had to get permission from centre management so, crusade launched, my wife and I trundled along to the management office and proclaimed that I was there to get permission. I told the one marketing person who the receptionist turned to that I have 1 000 people following me and I wanted to write about the place and share my experience (ok, not entirely true but it sounded good). I offered not to write about the new section and she quickly said I could write about the centre but needed to get permission for security and marketing purposes. They gave me a form to complete:

Armed with this piece of paper I returned to the new section of the complex and took a couple more photos. I was stopped by yet another skittish security guard who wasn’t too sure about my document (I took a copy) but let me carry on when he saw the branding on the document.

I suppose I can understand security concerns but surely photographing a public space in the mall can hardly be that serious a security risk? I mean, I could understand it if I was wandering around in closed off areas taking photographs but I just don’t see the threat I posed taking photos of these publicly accessible spaces.

As for the contention that permission is required to photograph the malls for marketing reasons … well, that is just silly. If everyone who whips out a camera needs permission to take photographs of the buildings or their companions in the complex there is much less incentive to take photos, share those photos with friends and family who may develop a desire to visit the place based on what they see in the photos. Heck, if I heard that a friend or family member was hassled for taking photos of a place, I’d be less inclined to visit there. Heck, I thought twice about whether to even publish my photos and write a post about the new section after I was hassled about taking photos. After all, I took my camera with me with the intention of taking photos to supplement a blog post about the place. No-one is paying me for the post. I am publishing this post because I want to tell you about my experiences this afternoon. Unfortunately a big part of that story is about how I wasn’t incentivised to share my experiences.