You will often hear an Author talk about having a voice, it took me a while to understand what that really means but I think I now know and I’m prepared to say that through the development of our new website – the one you are reading, that Liquid Interactive has found its ‘voice’. The writers Voice is generally considered to be a combination of elements such as syntax, punctuation and other literary techniques that make up their unique voice, in the same way a musical instrument has a unique voice depending on the timbre, tone and materials of the instrument.

So the voice of a company could be considered the combination of its projects, employees, customers, publications and processes. Our voice is made up of our individual styles, our approach to customers and a combination of our interactions with our clients, each other and the projects we work on. You could call it brand or culture but when it’s represented in this way – personalized, intimate, immediate and online and tangible it becomes a voice.

‘iPhone Apps’ are definitely the buzzword at the moment.  Many of our clients are keen to jump on the bandwagon, but often don’t know where to start.  An easy way to define iPhone apps is from the users point of view – as two categories:

A)    Time wasters, and

B)    Time savers.

A great example of time waster apps are the ridiculously simple and addictive games like Flight Control, Solitaire and Doodle Jump, I don’t know why, but these apps seem to eat time in the same way Facebook does.  An example of the time saver app is great information sources like Urbanspoon, the weather, and Yellow Pages.  In my opinion neither of these categories is better or worse, they are just different, and both categories are proving to be popular.  So, how can brands make the most out of this channel? Should we help our target audiences waste time, or save it?

Just recently during an interesting conversation, the discussion turned to Augmented Reality and whether it actually has a valid place in interactive media or is it just another gimmick.

I have done a fair amount of work in this area, using both the ARToolKit and also with the Flash AS3 libraries that track fiducial markers and render 3D AR. However throughout all my demonstrations and applications, I’ve struggled to find any real application beyond the obvious “WOW” factor that comes with demonstrating this technology.

Over recent months I’ve seen a marked increase in the number of projects that have undertaken using AR, and although some really cool stuff….how practical is it really for end users?

We recently lost a pitch because the prospective client couldn’t get their head around the concept of a customized content management system so I thought I’d review our position by writing down why we take this approach and see if it made sense.

Liquid Interactive is deliberately CMS agnostic. This means we don’t rely on a single approach for every client. Our view is that all clients are different and that we will provide the correct solution to their business needs based on our independent unbiased advice. Taking this approach and depending on their needs, resources and budget, we could equally recommend an open source, .NET or third party CMS as required. So far this makes sense to me. For example; if I went to a financial advisor I’d be suspicious of them trying to sell me an investment product that locked me in to their ongoing commission or retainer. It’s similar when you buy an off the shelf software package. Usually there is a hosting component which means that you don’t have independent access to your data.

I’m really excited about social games, by that I mean multiplayer online games that are not MMOG’s (Massively Multiplayer Online Games). I’m referring to Farmville and other moderately complex online games that encourage social interaction, collaboration and genuine fun.

Of course I wish we’d thought of it first but never mind there will be plenty of opportunities to develop similar concepts for our clients. The race has just begun in this genre of game which could turn out to be the most successful type of online gaming so far.

Different to your virtual worlds and xbox live type environments which are also collaborative, social to a degree and fun, the social network game has a low barrier to entry, demands your attention, and opens up a window of engagement with a small investment of time quickly addicting you to the challenge.

I think they will be huge, the big story of 2010 and we are certainly excited about working on our first prototypes and looking forward to applying this to one of our clients’ digital campaigns.

So with the massive popularity of social networking, it naturally follows that brands and companies want to know what is being said about them, enter social media monitoring. Most companies can’t very well have a team of dozens of people sitting in front of computers monitoring and rating content on the vast array of SNS’s so software is emerging that can achieve this.

It’s still early days but there is very good software available that can measure, track and report on social media activity giving you important information about consumer sentiment, number of mentions etc. This will be must have for most companies within the next 2-3 years and should really be picked up by the more progressive PR companies.