Afternoon all,

After the silence of last week, in Brighton and I’ve been told I’m not allowed to write about what happened there – what goes on tour stays on tour as it were, so this week, refreshed from our trip to the seaside we have a bit of tech focus.

Google AB testing

Ever wondered what happens how Google actually works?– an interesting video on how they test new tools: http://bit.ly/searchimprovements

Shazam TV

A recurring theme has been mobile activating other channels, QR codes in Press ads and outdoor and even audio synching from TV as Honda did last year (http://bit.ly/hDqLiz). Audio synching (using the microphone on your phone, via an app, to identify what you are listening to and offer supporting content on the screen of your phone, is one that we are predicting will grow quite quickly. One of the big concerns from advertisers comes from the cost of building the supporting infrastructure to make it happen. But, with a bit of lateral thinking you can often find existing platforms that with a bit of tweaking can be used. One such platform is the music recognition service Shazam.

Grey’s Anatomy the TV show, well worth a view if you have never experienced its delights, has a good track record of working with phones and tablets for dual screen viewing. The new season in the US is continuing that trend by partnering with Shazam to enable fans to get access to exclusive content if they tag the ad through the Shazam ad. Instead of delivering the info on the song being played users will get a Grey’s Anatomy page with links to new content and program reminders.

Shazam has 125m users around the world (that’s over half the size of Twitter) and is a regular on the app download charts so presents a great installed user base for your campaigns. To see an example of how it works - http://bit.ly/shazamtv

Speech recognition and AI

Artificial intelligence and voice technology has progressed amazingly over the last few years you can use your phone as a real time people fish to translate into different languages, program to speech recognition are improving, in fact this whole paragraph was written using one. – if you swap “people fish” for “Babel fish” and “program to speech” with “programs for speech” it makes more sense – but still, pretty impressive. The program used was Dragon Dictation on iPhone. Different input methods are going to be ever more important. Google are reporting how on Android phones spoken searches are accounting for up to 25% of searches in some categories. It doesn’t really change how you optimise your keyword list but it is worth staying abreast and giving it a go.

From speaking to our machines to our machines speaking to each other, here is a fun look at how an AI program called Chatbot works when it is turned in on itself. A depressing view for our Skynet future. http://read.bi/IamaUnicorn

If you are interested in this type of thing then there is an annual award called the Turing Test that sees if a machine is able to make a human believe it is human http://bit.ly/theTuringtest

As a final bonus where we are going, we don’t need roads. The hottest thing on the internet right now is Marty McFly’s trainers from Back to the Future 2. In a great initiative, the Michael J Fox Parkinson's foundation, Nike and ebay have partnered to release a limited number of the shoes that Marty McFly wore in the program. You know, the self lace up ones. For a glorious trip down memory lane; http://bit.ly/NikeMcFly And if you are interested in bidding, you will need at least $3,000. There are loads of great videos kicking about to help build the hype, so have a look around.

I’m still holding out for the hover board though.