Earth-Sized Possibilities
by Ben Gardiner ~ November 15th, 2012. Filed under: Uncategorized.
After listening to a presentation by director Wade Larson about a developing company UrtheCast (pronounced “earthcast”), I became intrigued with the limitless possibilities of having a live high-definition, highly detailed images of world events available to anyone over the Internet. I believe Urthecast has positioned itself very well in the advertising business because they plan to combine real-time images with social media focusing on current events, something which no company currently offers; the possibilities for marketing on this platform are truly endless.
However, despite these promising propositions, I began to realize that Urthecast faces as many challenges as it does opportunities. Rachel Warner’s blog post entitled “Suffocating by Tweets,” explores the potential challenges the company faces, many of which could prove to be overwhelming. The most critical challenge that Rachel points out is the need to filter out useful user posts from those that are uninteresting, irrelevant to current events or inappropriate.
It will be interesting to see, in the future, how Urthecast handles these issues and if they take a similar approach to other online search giants like Google who are increasingly filtering search results and catering results to a specific user’s interests. Urthecast may do very well to use aspects of well-refined online advertising services like Google AdWords which displays advertising catered specifically to a user’s search interests. A similar advertising service could be implemented on the Urthecast server which follows users’ locations and social media activity to direct certain advertising toward them. This company has an exciting future with many critical decisions yet to be made.