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HiPiHi: The World Exists Because Of You. (Literal translation from Chinese) The name is derived from 3 base words: I, Hi, Hapi (or the phonetically similar “Happy”).

Currently in closed beta testing, HiPiHi has generated some interest on Second Life Insider and debates on whether this will take off in China.

Some key observations (the entire site is written in Chinese, so i play translator here):

• Hipihi was founded way back in October 2005 in Zhongkuanchun, Beijing. Second Life took a long time to be developed too before its launch.
• The founders are mainly Xu Hui and Rao XueWei.
• The founders are guys but everything else in their marketing, including their promo video here, appears to target the female crowd.
• The whole site and virtual world uses Chinese as the main language.
• There are two main products: Hipihi World and Hipihi Home
  • Hipihi World is exactly like Second Life: avatars can fly and modify their own appearances, build houses, explore the land with planes, choppers and hot air balloons, which HipiHi calls public transportation systems. You can also have steering controls over your flight, offering a chance to fly your own plane. Options for parachuting also exists. The World seems to be organized around malls and town squares with socializing at its very core. Of course, avatars can also buy land and build their own houses. I see a lucrative industry coming up.
  • Hipihi Home appears to be modelled after CyWorld. It is positioned as a personal space and private communication platform between friends. Users will own their “living rooms”, procure furniture and be able to invite their friends to their “homes” and attend parties at others too. Whats most interesting is the mention of a convergence between internet and mobile. Could Hipihi be a dual-screen innovation? We will have to wait for the launch
• Like Second Life, Hipihi users will own the property rights to their in-world creations.
• There will also be a in-world currency, implying a virtual economy to facilitate user-to-user transactions. Perhaps the first and Chinese-originated millionaire in Second Life, Anshe Chung, has made virtual world creators think Chinese are the best market for such a product?

Kaiser Kuo, who is accredited for this post, has the following thoughts:

My gut tells me that done right, this could be quite substantial in China, and might have more legs than its U.S. counterpart. For one thing, MMORPG culture is pretty deeply embedded among Chinese netizens, and many players are very used to “repatriating” currency earned in the in-game economy to real life. HiPiHi seems to have made dumbed-down object creation tools available while keeping more advanced options available to the more proficient–don’t quote me on that, I’ve not really played around with it yet.

There’s a definite feminine sensibility to the pitch video, which you can download (.wmv) here: a female narrator and avatar, emphasis on the outfits, the landscaping, the houses. Going after women is probably the right move: there are plenty of online gamers in China, but few of the hack-and-slash MMORPGs really work for women.

The promotional video done by Hipihi is available here. Again, its all narrated in Chinese but it being visual-based video, is self-explanatory enough.

Update: This article, via a syndication on the SGEntrepreneurs blog, has also been picked up by Raph Koster and Gigagamez.

True to its upbeat ways, Piper Jaffray, the uber-optimistic financial services firm to the Internet industry , is back again with a 425-page report called “The User Revolution: The New Advertising Ecosystem and The Rise of the Internet as a Mass Medium.”

Wow. Big words, among other things, it also invented a new word “Communitainment” (See Point No. 3) to feed the raging flames of Web 2.0. Key findings from this report (which dun seem to be privy to nosey folks like me):

We expect global online advertising revenue to reach $81.1 billion by 2011, representing a 21% CAGR (2006-2011).

The User Revolution. The advertising world is going through a revolution, one that we call the “User Revolution” as it is happening primarily with the consumers, who are taking control of content consumption and branding. We believe this trend will cause a significant rise in prominence of the Internet as a major content consumption and marketing medium.

“Communitainment.” The Internet has increasingly become a principal medium for community, communication, and entertainment–three areas that have collided together and are impacting each other’s growth–generating a new type of activity that we call communitainment.

The Internet Is Mainstream. The Internet has become a mainstream media outlet that now rivals traditional media for reach and advertising dollars.

Media Fragmentation. The proliferation of online and offline media outlets has resulted in shrinking television audiences and an increasingly fragmented media landscape.

The Golden Search. We believe search continues to gain ground, driven by the rise of search as the New Portal, the increasing use of search in branding campaigns, and the local search opportunity.

We believe Google’s wide variety of non-search-related products creates a virtuous cycle of brand affinity that drives incremental search volume.

Video Ads Could Drive The Next Wave. We believe Internet video ads could become a game changer for large brand advertisers, who are used to the 15- or 30-second TV commercial

Internet Usage Patterns Are Changing. Portals maintain the highest reach, but the fastest growing category of destinations is communitainment sites such as MySpace and Facebook.

Ad networks are experiencing increased demand due to increasing Internet fragmentation, desire for more targeted inventory, increasing usage of networks for branding, and increased site visibility.

Agencies are rapidly evolving into more sophisticated, technology-savvy entities that combine best of breed offerings.

Watch These Companies. We espect companies such as Google (and YouTube), Yahoo!, Disney, News Corp, Time Warner, Microsoft, InterActive, Facebook, Craigslist, Brightcove, Yelp, SINA Corp., Baidu, aQuantive, ValueClick, 24/7 Media, Netflix, Wikipedia, MobiTV, Digg, and Hakia to be the most important players to watch.

Is there something you do not know here? While this report incorporates China’s major internet players, Kaiser Kuo of Ogilvy China is sceptical on the gross revenue figures due to the small size of China’s internet revenue base, despite impressive growth percentages.

I prefer to focus on ONE important trend mentioned. Of consumers taking over brand perceptions on the web. The online revolution has given a voice to the long-suffering consumers of many companies and I believe the uproar over some malpractices and product quality of companies that we have seen from Edelman’s Walmart disasters, Dell Hell is only the tip of the iceberg as consumers learn to band together and organize themselves. Two-way communication services such as IM and blogs will continue to be even more embedded in the service infrastructures of companies (the Customer Support department), product development processes to incorporate feedback and make pre-market testing more transparent and effective by giving sneak peeks to alpha consumers or bloggers. Marketers will also do well to start fine-tuning their advertising plans. This does not extend to 30-second TV commercials or the online equivalent of banner ads or video ads. They need to look at more interactive and engaging medium, perhaps Second Life properties for more immersive experiences, more advertorials in major online blogs and media outlets - essentially have higher visibility and presence to minimize the communication distance between corporate and consumer.

In response to the new word “Communitainment”, i will also invent my own - The Blogsumer (Blogger + Consumer).

Watch out, corporate world.

This is nothing new to those of us who don’t watch much TV anyway but spend hours on Youtube/ Daily Motion catching the latest Jap anime like Bleach, Death Note, Naruto or American TV drama like LOST, Heroes. Youtube is the new Napster or Kazaa or whatever you call it. The days of the TV locking us in with their millitant and rigid programming schedules are over. And if TV execs will stop sueing poor folks like us, they should wise up to the new realities of internet media.

Because Internet is simply the way to go for video entertainment. The slower the TV execs realize this the better for all of us. More regular Joes and Janes like us can have a shot at stardom and infamy on the web. Think LonelyGirl15 from Youtube (pic above) and the Backdorm Boys from China (who spoofed the Backstreet Boys on their way to fame, and even had their own merchandise).

Secondly, we have a shot at earning money from our less professionally but more engaging content before the suits and corporate fatcats gobble us up with their well oiled business machinery.

Amateur Content: The New Black

Have you heard of DiggNation? The cult favorite video series among the 18-34 geek audience that features Kevin Rose of Digg.com fame . Here’s what Business 2.0 has to say about it:

(A) packed trade-show audience of more than 700, peering up at the makeshift stage, cheers wildly for the start of the main act: Digg’s 30-year-old founder Rose and his spike-haired sidekick Albrecht, slouched on a couch, sipping beers, and staring down at laptops between their knees. A lone videocamera records the action…

… By the end of the taping - held at the recent Macworld show in San Francisco - dozens of tech fanboys rush the stage as the co-hosts toss out bumper stickers and T-shirts. Nearly an hour later, Rose and Albrecht are still posing for cell-phone pictures with fans.

Diggnation is no wimp in the money and viewership stakes too.

Just a year and a half out of the gate, Diggnation draws about 250,000 viewers a week and is among the most popular free video podcasts on Apple’s iTunes service - alongside offerings from ABC, the BBC, and CNN (which, along with Business 2.0 and CNNMoney.com, is owned by Time Warner (Charts)). It’s also making some decent coin: The show has had 15 sponsors thus far, each paying as much as $10,000 per episode.

A single guy manning the videocam. Can you believe what TV execs in the ’90s or ’80s will say when they hear of this? Today’s execs can only shake their heads and despair. Yea.. =D Amateur content rocks and is in fashion!

If you never heard of Diggnation, then there’s the notoriously popular “Lonelygirl15″ too, starring a real actress (American-New Zealander Jessica Rose) as a fictional angst-sy 17-year-old teen. Lonelygirl15 was so popular on Youtube that it spurred an online investigation by its fans for the real identity of this teen. When the facts were finally out, New York Times felt it worthy of their coverage. Jessica Rose, instead of suffering from the “witch-hunt”, went onto a role with United Nations and will also star along Lindsay Lohan in an upcoming movie. If you ignore the fact Lonelygirl15 was produced by a good backend team of producers, what a massive ego boost to any webcam-toting teeny-bopper around the world!

From Reel-life “Desperate Housewives” to Real-life “Desperate Advertisers”

(Marketers) want to get in front of video watchers and Web publishers that want their money. U.S. online video ad expenditures are expected to total $775 million in 2007, up 89% from last year, according to market research firm eMarketer. But that’s still only about 4% of projected total U.S. online ad spending of $19.5 billion. To increase that number, the industry may need to figure out a new way to advertise. (Via Forbes)

There is a huge pressure for advertisers to reach out to the expanding and highly loyal audiences watching all these online videos on the video-sharing sites. Whether its amateurish stuff like LonelyGirl15, Rocketboom or DiggNation, or professional and “stolen” copyrighted content like LOST, advertisers want IN.

While inserting video ads alongside such video content appears to be an intuitive solution, advertisers, content producers and channel owners have their own mind demons to overcome. The wide range of media formats make advertisers sceptical of appropriate brand depictions and scaling of their messages across the mass audience. Measurement metrics are also immature to track such a new form of advertising. Content producers who produce good content worthy of monetization are in short supply and its currently hard to band them together to create a large enough media inventory for advertisers. As for channel owners, the jury is still out on whether major video sharing sites like Youtube, MetaCafe, Daily Motion, Veoh can fight off the legal vultures circling the laissez-faire uploading culture of their young user bases.

Its like fighting a guerilla war sometimes as you watch Youtube take down copyrighted content as soon as the young renegade uploaders wage their pocket raids and provide the latest shows to serve the expectant viewers (like myself).

What’s in it for all of us?

Get out that webcam, line up your prettiest friends in front of it and a few good men who know their videos and lighting behind it… Then, upload on Youtube/ MySpace and then watch that money roll in..

TV might not be dead, but it sure hurts for a while while the Youtube stars revel in the limelight.

Jeremiah Owyang, from Podtech, has this beautiful summary of the various web marketing forms and tactics. I think of this post as the beginnings of the definitive guide that will enter all major marketing textbooks over the next couple of years. Get a headstart on everyone else NOW. If your company’s marketing director is pondering whether web marketing is restricted to mailing lists, newsletters or think that buying banner ads is really advanced, get ready for a re-education.

My favourite part is Section 5 “Community and Social Media Marketing”. I believe widgets will rule this year and get really mainstream, after Vista launches.

Kids today. They have no sense of shame. They have no sense of privacy. They are show-offs, fame whores, pornographic little loons who post their diaries, their phone numbers, their stupid poetry—for God’s sake, their dirty photos!—online. They have virtual friends instead of real ones. They talk in illiterate instant messages. They are interested only in attention—and yet they have zero attention span, flitting like hummingbirds from one virtual stage to another.

Have we not heard this from many of those old fogeys who dun really GET IT? Those who thinks blogs, social networking sites like Myspace, Facebook, Friendster are just disasters waiting to happen because they read about online paedophiles, spammers, stalkers, phishers who steal your account info, from the newspapers? How many of your friends are real camwhores?? =) FYI, i am not one but just to prove a point to you on the pic to my left: a complete stranger at SF Halloween Parade 2005.. (yea, its an old pic, check me out on facebook for newer ones) Well, its true they dun get it, they think the web is a fad and that the young today simply have no sense of decency nor understand what privacy is…

They could be dead wrong, but the young generation’s new web habits of exposing our public lives is certainly no different from the “Rock and Roll” culture that swept mainstream society decades ago. Titled “The Biggest Generation Gap Since Rock and Roll”, New York Magazine has this fantastically well-written article on what we know and identify with while the rest simply are clueless…

Thanks to Lightspeed Ventures for this..

UK seeks to ban and criminalize companies that engage in creation of fake marketing materials like flogs, splogs or other websites and claiming them to be users/ customers’ creations. Under charges of misrepresentation, social reviews will now be regulated to ensure higher authenticity. From TimesOnline:

Online consumer reviews are playing an ever greater role in shaping shopping habits, with websites such as TripAdvisor for the travel industry being seen as increasingly influential.

However, a string of businessman in the UK and the US have been caught posing as supposedly independent customers in an attempt to boost sales.

A recent investigation found that poorly rated travel establishments could lift their reputations from one to four stars in hours by posting fictional positive reviews.

Could this be the kneejerk response following Edelman PR agency’s unsuccessful forays into blogging for their clients, particularly “WalmartGate”? And more recently Pay Per Post’s brush with the FTC guys as covered here, here and here?

What next? Is this the beginning of an avalanche of legislation by govts around the world? Will Big Brother be stepping more to regulate the blogosphere?

Church of the Customer blog has the lowdown on user-generated advertisements making it to the Super Bowl this year. But first, see this CBS News article for a view from mainstream media.

This is not good news. The shift from professionally produced to user-generated advertising makes us poorer in both economic and cultural terms. The arrival of user-created commercials at Super Bowl XLI represents the American Idolization of traditional entertainment — the degeneration of professional content into a “talent show” for amateurs.

In complement, CBS was really mournful in the rest of the reporting, with phrases like “the professional creator is being “disintermediated.”, the “tsumani” of downward pressure on wages created by new technology” because amateur productions cost a minscule fraction of professional ones.

Amid all the hoopla of traditional advertising agencies dying or making a renaissance with this new channel of ad-making, I found this excerpt from Church of the Customer insightful:

Madison Avenue is not in the business of creating fans — it’s in the business of widespread message distribution. But Mad Ave’s influence and energy are fading not just because technology-assisted creativity is commoditizing their business, but because citizen-created content doesn’t care about New York’s infatuation with status and positioning debates. The power centers of influence are shifting to Google’s server farms and thousands of online communities. The fans have co-opted Madison Avenue’s work. Super Bowl ads are a circus freak show, and that’s how about much influence they carry because the minutiae of product, brand and company discussions are being shaped in online forums, which Google follows like a studious court reporter. The points made in those forums are often carried forward to offline discussions, where they’re added to the mixing bowl discussions of personal experiences of people and ultimately, their purchase decisions. There’s your advertising.

Change is good if its for the better. The dynamic range of quality for amateur productions is undoubtedly way higher than professional counterparts. But feeling apologetic for slow-moving dinosaurs in the advertising world who do not understand the new realities of social media today is wrong.

Who feels sorry for retailers with great products who cannot afford the huge fees of ad agencies? Who feels sorry for the customers who pay inflated prices? Why feel sorry for traditional advertising when you can use web forums, blogs, podcasts to reach out and interact with your consumers directly and more personally?

An example of a user-gen ad here

The title of Joe Trippi’s book was one that really reaffirmed my faith in social media on the web. Joe Trippi was the campaign manager of Howard Dean, the unsuccessful 2004 Democratic presidential nominee for 2004, who was credited to be the first presidential and perhaps first political, candidate to use the Internet to raise his profile and funds significantly, with the Web.

Now, add the the 2008 presidential race. Today, Barack Obama launches his presidential campaign. His website is immensely integrated with social media. If you don’t know who Obama is, you might easily have mistaken his website to be another new Web 2.0 startup, complete with a blog that updates his events, speeches and appearances. There is a webcast earlier today of his announcement in the home state of Illinois where he’s a senator. His website encourages visitors to

There are highly identifiable badges, buttons and links to popular social media sites such as social networking site Facebook, photo sharing site Flickr, No1 video site Youtube and he even asks pple to create their own “parties” (more for rallying supporters than drinking). Trust me, he has been doing this for quite a while. I am a “friend” of Obama based on our Facebook profile linkups.
His campaign team obviously understands the power of the internet in reaching out effectively to the electorate, especially the young voters who might just be the swing voters this time as Obama inspires the politically disenfranchised and disillusioned voters who are sick of the mudslinging divisiveness of the “You’re either with us or against us” Bush era. Obama brings an invigorating and uplifting message. Even if he might not wind, his message is more important than the man himself - to let the people take back politics from the politicians. Using social media, get your friends, family involved in the process again of grassroots activism.

Its not just Barack Obama. The 2008 Democratic presidential nomination has seen Hilary Clinton announce her candidacy (click to see videos) on her website and video too in addition to network TV. Also John Edwards announced his candidacy with video, later uploaded on Youtube, amidst a backdrop of debris in hurricane-ravaged New Orleans.

There is no better way for the Internet to demonstrate its democratized ways than through Democratic politics. The web revolution conquers the political realm and goodbye and good night, television.

This coincides with the launch of Shycast, whose invite email I received yesterday. It seems I had forgotten when I first signed up for their service. A quick read through the email shows it came from Techcrunch who featured it a while back as a social network connecting people and brands. From the Shycast beta invite email:

Hi everyone, you’re receiving this because you’re on the beta notification request list for Shycast…and it’s showtime! Thank you so much for your help.

As you read on TechCrunch, Shycast is a community of people and brands; the brands we work with actively seek to connect with people from the Shycast community. We encourage them to listen to people’s ideas, and think of creative and exciting ways to engage the community over time. We imagine that when brands can see and engage the people who really love their stuff, in a safe place on common terms, great things might happen. It’s a big experiment in the way companies and people talk to each other…we’re not sure what’s going to happen but we’re glad you’re joining us in finding out.

Shycast’s unique positioning in the lucrative marketing industry is worth a study:

But Shycast does differ slightly from other forays in one significant way. Instead of going after traditional advertising, PR, direct response, or online marketing budgets, it is targeting promotional budgets, an area of marketing that typically has been relegated to the coupon and sweepstakes industry…

…It’s an interesting strategy, because most big media companies ignore promotional spending. During the 1980s when markers began upping their promotion budgets due mainly to the rise in so-called “trade” promotions, and it looked like promotional budgets were beginning to cannibalize on traditional advertising, most big media companies developed promotional marketing units to tap into the craze. But in recent years, traditional media outlets have backed away from the strategy. While plenty of integrated media deals have a promotional component, they generally are not earmarked against promotional budgets.

The full article from MediaPost is here. IKEA has essentially endorsed Shycast’s approach and is actively getting their customer to produce videos based on bed-making.

Looks like 2006 might really mark a turn in the tide of marketing with the power balance tilting back to the consumers with social media backed by the youtube phenom. I am working on a similar project and experimenting with a live marketing campaign. Lets see how that turns out.

Do you still remember what Kodak was good for? Yea, they are so “past-tense” now. Those good ol’ analogue films fit for the Museum of Ancient Tech History where your grandkids will ask you one day with a quizzical look while taking pictures with their digital do-it-all gadget.

This is another hilarious video of how Kodak aims to be hip and cool again! It appears to be an internal video thats now released on Youtube. I am sceptical about that but anyway.. Starting with a geriatric spokesman blabbing some crap, he gets himself increasingly excited and worked up about all the digital buzzwords you can possibly imagine and the crazy digital future ancient Kodak wants to move towards.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sz6XjXu-oT8]