Here is a second tracklist that inspires us at the Noteca team when we’re working:

• Radiohead - 2+2=5
• Queens of the Stone Age – The Blood is Love
• The Temper Trap – Sweet Disposition
• Bloc Party – Helicopter
• Madonna vs David Guetta – Revolver (One Love Remix)
• Lady Gaga – Bad Romance
• Weezer – The Good Life
• New Order – 60 Miles an Hour
• Caetano Veloso – Mora Na Filosofia
• Prince – Sexy M.F.
• Basement Jaxx – What’s Your Head At
• Green Day – Welcome to Paradise
• Death From Above 1979 – Romantic Rights
• Air – Sexy Boy

Remember our first tracklist? What songs do you like for working?

Noteca is a web-app which incorporates the entire process of conversing through Social Media. However, off-line conversations and those held within a team are just as important as those held in Social Media. With the Noteca tasks you won’t forget anything and you can organise your time and that of your work group, simply and easily.

We search, analyse, discuss. Then what?

In the New Mentions screen we decide where we’re going to hold a conversation, in Conversations we join a conversation and in Contacts we keep a record of the people we have conversed to. And after that? The tasks help you to decide the next step to take and to recall decisions.

For example: We make a comment on a Techcrunch post which talk about one of our clients’ products. I have an idea for a viral campaign, so I make a note of this. But as well as that, I create a task to request a meeting with the client’s marketing director and another to remind me to send a thank-you e-mail to the author of the post.

Flexible and easy to introduce

We all know that coordinating agendas is very often a juggling act, for that reason Noteca’s tasks are flexible and allow you to reassign today’s task to tomorrow, to as soon as possible or to a specific date.

Noteca’s tasks can be adapted to any kind of business because they have categories that are created by the very users of the application themselves. Therefore, it is easier to introduce Noteca into work management terms and the methodology of each business. Furthermore, we avoid having a long list of nonsensical tasks and we can identify tasks on first sight thanks to their categories.

It coordinates, assigns and links

Noteca’s tasks are created specifically for team work and its coordination. With Noteca you can assign tasks to any member of the team as well as to external users.

Furthermore, if assigned to people, these tasks can be linked to a specific post, comment or tweet from the Conversations sidebar. It is therefore much easier to remember where the conversation, which led us to the next step, began.

I am fascinated by Google’s new mobile, the Nexus One. But I’m also fascinated by the iPhone!. I wanted to compare their icons to see which of the two is better.

What makes a better icon? For me a better icon is a clearer icon. A better metaphor. Why only compare the icons? Because to be able to compare other functions I would first have to get my hands on a Nexus. Icons are a fundamental part of any interface. For both phones the interface is critical, great lengths have been gone to and it is interesting to compare them.

Telephone:
Both icons are good because the metaphor is simple: a telephone. But there are some differences. Whilst for Apple this function is represented by the colour green (more positive, cheerful), for Google it is blue (relaxation, tranquillity). I think green is a better choice. And whilst for Apple the telephone should be “off the hook” (facing up) and in the normal talking position (as though placed to the ear) for Google it is facing down (slightly inclined) as if being lifted at that moment (or it could even be seen as being hung up). Personally I think the position of the telephone in the Nexus One icon is the better choice, but not as far as the colour is concerned. Apple’s choice of colour makes more sense. For that reason I’ve left is as a draw, because neither is particularly more outstanding than the other. It was a very obvious icon.

Browser:
Yes, Apple hasn’t really got it right with the Safari icon. It’s perfectly interchangeable with the iPhone’s compass icon. Google hasn’t done much better. The image of the globe of the earth is perfect for its Google Maps and well…it can also be used for an Internet browser. For this reason I’ve made the Nexus One proposal the winner, but my favourite icon is still Netscape’s.

Maps:
Both could be improved. Confusing, with too much detail… The iPhone adds a traffic light which doesn’t make much sense (Google Maps is a difficult tool to use whilst driving). However, the metaphor of the unfolded map which Nexus One presents is interesting, but it is still confusing due to the small size of the icon. I was going to leave it as a draw, but I think that in general Apple’s icon is somewhat better for representing this function.

Photographs:
The image of a sunflower is a daring proposal. It’s more usual to represent a photograph with a landscape, or another type of flower (a daisy?). The rival icon uses the idea of a horizon, but it’s a bit strange. The frame around the image however, makes it easier to understand as a metaphor. It’s close but I think Nexus One deserves to win this round.

Read the rest of this entry »

If you try to login, maybe you’ll get this message. It’s nothing to worry about.

Noteca filters out the noise of the thousands of conversations held each day in Social Media and allows us to actively participate in those which most interest us. Through these conversations we establish personal and professional connections with potential clients. These connections between companies and clients are the key to the success of new marketing strategies and are what distinguish Social Media from traditional channels.

Noteca is therefore a Social CRM, a tool with which you can record all the conversations you have in Social Media. You have all your Social Media conversations recorded in a very simple and user-friendly manner and you can easily recall who you have spoken to.

Record of conversations

Each Twitter blog or user you have spoken to through Noteca is automatically added to the contacts section. In this way, every person with whom we have established a personal or professional connection has their own contact page in Noteca. In the Contacts section, useful information on the people we have conversed with (URL, e-mail, telephone, address, twitter, etc.) is just a click away.

Furthermore, you can always see a tag with the blog’s influence, as well as an indicator which shows you the number of previous conversations that have been held with a person.

The team’s experience

As a Social CRM, Noteca allows the members of your team to take advantage of their colleagues’ previous experience. Any member of your team can add notes to the contact pages about the authors of a blog or Twitter users. In this way, in future conversations with that author, you can take advantage of the previous experience to strengthen links and make a better connection with clients.

In a few days time we’ll see the end of the year and the end of the decade. It would be a good opportunity to have a look at how the Internet has changed, but it’s even more interesting to try to imagine how it will change in the future. For us, the next 10 years, the next decade, will be the Social Media decade. Here we give you Ten keys to the Social Media decade.
•    Social Media have become the buzz words of the last few years. Social Media will stop being buzz words and become the cornerstone of marketing. Company-client relationships have changed, the clients’ opinion and the influence they have over other clients will be more important than ever before. Companies will need to know who is saying what about them.
•    Social Media will stop being the private game reserve of a few expert users to become a real measure of personal and business relationships. Pyramidal relationships are out. Companies will have to treat clients as equals. It will be strange at first but companies will slowly but surely adapt to talking to their users.
•    It will no longer matter how many followers you have on Twitter, Facebook… What will really matter is the quality of relationships between people and companies. Now, more than ever before, contents and conversations will rule.
•    It will no longer be necessary to be a big company to have an advantage. Social Media will equalise strengths on the battle field. Talent, originality and creativity don’t need large budgets.
•    The world of marketing is continuously moving. It shouldn’t matter where or when, if you don’t adapt to mobile marketing you’re out of the game.
•    Clients will change their way of getting information about a brand or product. For that reason, Social Media will stop being a priority only for marketing departments. Those in charge of sales will also have to change their relationships with potential clients.
•    Marketing departments will see how the areas dedicated to Social Media and Search Engine Marketing grow considerably compared to traditional advertising and direct marketing, showing that the ROI of Social Media is more than guaranteed.
•    Social Multimedia. Blogs, photologs, podcasts or videoblogs will become things of the past. Interaction with users will be complete. Livestreamed and Real Time will be Social Media’s preferred food in the next decade.
•    All companies will have social websites. Clients will expect immediate replies from companies and the latter will take advantage of this to encourage satisfied clients to remain faithful to the brand. Companies’ priorities will be to get clients to talk about their brand, make it easy for them to share their experience, their purchases. To do this they must give them tools that are in keeping with the times.
•    Goodbye to hardware. Web-apps, direct downloads, e-books will put an end to traditional hardware. Paper, DVD’s and pen drives will become things of the past. As will market studies based on small random samples. Campaign results will be easier to measure thanks to analysis and monitoring tools.

It’s called Animated Portable Network Graphics (APNG), and it was developed in 2004 by Stuart Parmenter, Vladimir Vukicevic and Andrew Smith, as an extension to the PNG specification. Something interesting about APNG files is that they react in a similar way to well-known animated GIFs. Some of their qualities include:

• Backward compatibility with the PNG format
• 8 bit transparencies
• 24 bit images.

But, sadly, browser support is pretty limited: only Firefox 3 & Opera 9.5 are compatible (neither Internet Explorer nor Chrome have adopted it). However, thanks to its backward compatibility, browsers can always show the first frame of the animation, as if it were a conventional PNG.

On the APNG Project website you can find tools such as the “APNG Assembler”, an online application for creating animated PNGs from various static PNGs. Other available resources include editors, sample images, etc.

Before the APNG

The GIF image format was introduced in 1987 by CompuServe. From the beginning one of its main uses was to show publicity “banners”, many of which were animated. The format has also become tragically well-known as a “decorative” element on many websites. Who hasn’t stumbled across the typical “under construction” animated image of a labourer working?

For a while now, the animated GIF images have been applied in a more user friendly feature for the user: they’re used alongside the “loading” message on pages which use asynchronous requests via Ajax. This is the case of the Noteca interface, in which much of the data displayed is obtained through this technology.

Animated PNG vs GIF

(click to see in action)

Top row: GIF / Bottom row: APNG

For curious people, more info:

• http://animatedpng.com/

Soon after starting to track ‘social media’ on twitter I realized that almost everyone was writing almost in the same way:

23 Signs You are Addicted To Social Media
5 ways brands fail in social media
The Social Media Marketing List: 45 things you should be doing but probably aren’t
10 Ways to Improve Your Social Media Karma
9 Immutable Laws of Social Media Marketing
Ten signs you may be a social media addict
10 Search Topics That Require Further Discussion
Top Ten Titans In Social Media
Are you addicted to social media? Here are 20 symptoms to look for
28 Lame Excuses Why The CEO Doesn’t Want To Use Social Media
12 Social Media New Year’s Resolutions For 2010

… and so it goes, on and on… But wait! also available with ‘How To’ flavour:

How Social Media Marketing Can Work For You
How to Twitter: Different social media have different uses
How Social Media is Simplifying Workplace Collaboration
How to use social media
…etc…

Social Media is not as complicated as it’s made look. There’s no number of secrets hidden to the general knowledge. Social Media is not that special or elitist. Social Media is important and needs spending time. That’s all. But Social Media is a question of common sense and also a question of tools to work with. Reading these tweeets it seems getting involved in Social Media is difficult and requires a lot of knowledge… That’s not true.

Now that we all got the “knack” of getting people to click we want to learn about all those “hidden secrets”, how do we stand out? How do we get something useful out of these posts with such promising titles?  The answer is, we can’t. But this doesn’t matter at all. Reading about Social Media is one of the most boring things I know. There’s great interest in Social Media, and that brings those who want to know “the secret recipe” and others wanting to share “the secret ingredients” of that recipe under the heading of “expert” or “guru”, to the forefront. But there is no secret recipe. The vast majority of the time the articles simply say the same thing but in different words. Working with Social Media is 10% knowledge (in the most part, common sense) and 90% work.

Working with Social Media is not something which requires supernatural know-how. It involves doing a handful of basically logical things reasonably well: deal with those who want to talk to someone from the company, provide them with information about your products, follow and participate in their conversations to create a deeper link than pure interest on the part of the company, and be nice and clear. It’s no great mystery, except for the fact that you have to begin step by step in a new environment.

The difficulty is with the large companies who are used to working on a big scale. Big communications, big clients, big impact…but even they couldn’t have imagined that establishing relationships with thousands of people was going to become one of their communication strategy needs. And the small and medium companies, which have traditionally had very few worries in this kind of communication, suddenly find that it affects them too. Social Media is real, it’s here and it’ll go far. So how can we adapt to this environment? More than knowledge, we think it’s a matter of work & tools. For that reason, we’ve created Noteca.

We love Spanish cuisine, so we rejoice to spread the news about the new Michelin stars that a large number of Spanish restaurants have obtained. We already wrote about the success of Carme Ruscalleda,  today we congratulate Joan Roca. The chef of the restaurant ‘El Celler de Can Roca‘, located in Girona,  has just earned a third star in the Michelin Guide Spain and Portugal 2010.

Roca founded the restaurant ’El Celler de Can Roca’ in 1986 along with his brothers Jordi, as butler, and Josep, as sommelier and head room. All three belong to the third generation of a family devoted to cuisine.

Contratulations also to Casa Marcial de Arriondas (Asturias), Lasarte (Barcelona), La Terraza del Casino (Madrid), and Les Cols (Olot), that all obtained a second star last night.

Spanish cuisine is trendy.

Last week we presented Noteca for the first time. It was very exciting, at DE-MUESTRA, during Evento Blog España (fantastic), a gathering where enterprises, entrepreneurs, bloggers, directors and journalists were presented a first-hand look at what is new in the sector. We had 10 minutes to explain What Noteca is an the problems solves for community managers, pr, on-line marketing agencies and any company that works with Social Media in there day-to-day. This is an overview or the ideas that we emphasized about Noteca at the presentation:

• - Thousands and thousands of posts are published every day, any many of them mention your brand, your product or your professional field. With Noteca you will know where they talk about you.
• - Noteca is a tool for reading, writing and participating in Social Media. We’re not a monitoring tool, we encourage participation.
• - Noteca tells you where to find someone influential and who this someone is, which helps you decide whether or not to converse. Brands are created around people, not around ads.
• - Furthermore, you can see if the community around a blog is important, because we show how important the author of each comment is. We help connect with your clients.
• - In Noteca there is a Contacts section that you can check what you have been talking about with each author and revise notes that other members of your team have written about this author.
• - We generate stats around your conversations to help measure the impact of your campaigns and releases.

Following the presentation the audience asked questions moderated by Javier Martín and Rodolfo Carpintier. People asked very interesting questions. The audience was very active and the reactions on Noteca gave us a very good feeling.

We can’t end this post without thanking a lot of people with whom we talked following the presentation, definitely one of the most pleasant moments of the weekend. Many thanks to the people at Uvinum, FonYou and oportunista.com and Antonio Ortiz, Patricia Fernández-Cuesta, Sebas Muriel, Eduardo Arcos … and Fernando Gómez for the pics.

We would also like to thank the Evento Blog España team (Jose Luis Antúnez, Luis Rull and Benito Castro) that made us feel at home from the very beginning. It has been a fantastic weekend.

Reactions on Twitter:

jabad: Me parece acertado el enfoque de Noteca: Find, Analyze & Join the conversations about your business. #EBE09

earcos: woah, @noteca sigue comentarios en blogs, eso es hiper-mega-super útl #EBE09

Elizubiria: Noteca una herramienta muy interesante para Communities #EBE09

marilink: Aplausos para @noteca y yo ya pidiendo una beta en su web #ebe09

olgag: Escuchando la presentacion de Noteca, que permite desarrollar info y estadísticas de conversaciones, clientes y conversar #EBE09

antxon: Habrá que probar @noteca – lo cierto es que tiene buena pinta #ebe09

evaristonogales: presentan #noteca en #EBE09 , realmente interesante para getionar pr en socialmedia. Puedes apuntarte a la beta en http://bit.ly/Bzkr6

obokaman: En cuanto encienda el portatil, de cabeza a inscribirme en la beta de @noteca

robinwauters: Checking out Noteca http://bit.ly/3nndxt #EBE09 #webmission

ramonsuarez: Keep an eye on @noteca http://ow.ly/BR9Q “Find, Analyze & Join the conversations about your business” #ebe09