Imagine a newspaper that talks–yes, imagine a newspaper that talks to you!
Or imagine a grocery store suggesting what to cook for dinner using only products on sale. Or being part of a radio show without calling in. Or taking part in a presidential campaign by adding an electronic presidential button to your Twitter avatar.  These scenarios are all taking place today in Latin America. How? The short answer: Twitter.

Twitter has become a useful tool in Latin America in areas such as media, retail, and politics. For example, Diario Uno, a newspaper in Mendoza, Argentina, is known as the newspaper that “talks” because it interacts directly with its audience through Twitter.  “Our Twitter followers’ response in seeing that a newspaper reply to them has been enriching and has created a special loyalty to our newspaper,” said Nacho Castro, the person who is in charge of Tweeting for Diario Uno.

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If you have some time Wednesday evening, you might want to drop in on this summer’s Twitter class, either virtually (we’ll be streaming via uStream.tv) or in person (we’ll be in CMU126).

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On June 3, 2009, Bing was introduced to the public.  Many call it a new search engine, however José Piñero, Microsoft Manager, stated that Bing is a decision engine to help people to make decisions faster, especially in the areas of shopping, travel and health.

Last Tuesday,  Piñero introduced Bing to the Hispanic community here in Seattle through a Spanish News Program (KUNS/UNIVISION). Bing is available in the Spanish language and currently Bing is investing in different languages in all parts of the world.  This multilingual section not only includes the languange, but local feature development that addresses the user habits and the user needs, in other words an engine with cultural competence.

Using the term decision engine when referring to Bing, will distinguished Bing from other search engines that do not offer the same feature as Bing does.  Innovation will continue in this area as more business get that there is a global market out there.  My question is, what would be next?

According to Digitalmediawire, Facebook suprpassed the US Web traffic for the first time during the month of May.  Facebook had 70.278 million unique visitors vs. MySpace with 70.255 million.

It seems that Facebook is getting a worldwide attention. For example, in Chile, Facebook is the most used social media platform with 4,069,520 users, placing the South American country among the ten countries in the world the use Facebook the most. (Knol, 2008). According to O’Reilly Radar, among the other ten countries are, UK in second place after the United States, Canada in third, Turkey in fouth, Australia, Colombia, France, Norway, and Sweden.

This shows the power of the Facebook community, however this social media platform has not had the same results all over the world. This does not mean that it won’t in the future, but there is always the possibility that other countries will not follow the Facebook path. Only time will tell…

Side Note: Facebook overtook MySpace in worldwide unique visitors in April 2008. (Digitalmediawire, 2009).

The 2009 UW POCKETMEDIA FILM FESTIVAL: “What do U do at the UW?”

A competition of videos shot on cameras that fit in your pocket! The competition runs from April 17 to May 29, 2009. It’s free and open to all UW faculty, staff, students and alumni. Winners will be screened in a final celebration in June, 2009 (date TBD), at the University of Washington.

Ace Team, a video game company in Chile in the effort to fight piracy is using the P2P model: “All the games are there to be pirated.  We were not going to be the exception.  Once we saw the game being distributed by BitTorrent, we started to post comments in these pages appealing to those who downloaded the games” Stated a member of Ace Team.  The statement they post on this pages says that they cannot do anything to stop piracy, but if who ever is downloading the game likes to test the game and likes it, they encourage them to buy the game.

This may sound crazy, but it is actually working according to Ace Team. P2P members are posting messages stating that they have bought the game, and that they do it because of Ace Team attitude!

Would this be a new marketing model in the internet for video games, e-books, movies and music?

Now technology can be used to alert the world about important news, like the latest swine flu pandemic. Veratect, a local company here in Kirkland, Washington are constantly updating/tracking the status worldwide on the swine flu through Twitter.

Twitter/Veratect

“Veratect is tracking the swine influenza event with up-to-the-minute information about potential spread of the disease to aid in early response efforts.” (Veratect)

If you are a fan of Twitter would you love Flutter?

Flutter is a microblog like Twitter, however Flutter messages are limited to only 26 characters, yes 26!  Currently Twitter allows you to type up to 140 characters per message, which can be very limited sometimes.

However, in a simplifying world 26 characters make more sense.  Now you read more messages from others since their shorter and will take you less time to read them.

What do you Flutter or Twitter?