Brainmesh is HiDef's weekly get together in which our team discusses technological innovations and trends and relate them to how they impact great causes such as nonprofits and social enterprises.

Google I/O Announcements

Brian brought up the fact that the announcement of Google TV means our clients should be thinking about content distribution in new ways. It's not just one more platform to push content to--it's a different way of looking at content altogether, how advertising fits into it, and how it relates to tighter user experiences as people interact with the content not from television but from their web-enabled devices. The same is true for Google Marketplace, which is taking the App Store model a step further and potentially allowing people to install apps on the cloud in one click and be able to access from anywhere (will this push Apple to change its connect-to-iTunes approach?).

Further reading:

Online Privacy

Tom opened up discussion on privacy and why it's important as different clients have committed to different privacy policies. T.J. commented that while we need to ensure that we are meeting our clients' privacy needs, we need to ensure that we also explain how people's expectations for privacy are fundamentally shifting. Brad chimed in that a lot of the issues around Facebook specifically is that they didn't follow the golden rule of "opt-in" rules, instead electing to put everybody in a public frame of sharing rather than allowing them to opt-in to broader sharing.

Further reading:

Geolocation Services are Heating Up

T.J. believes that we're just starting to see geolocation functions find their way into many different applications, even though the functionality has been there for a while. He believes the question isn't whether a nonprofit or social enterprise should be looking into using geolocation; the question is how they can deeply integrate the offerings.Discussion ensued about who's leading the geolocation charge, and who will have the best API to leverage for client applications. Twitter, Facebook, and Google all have geolocation services, but Foursquare, Gowalla, and Brightkite are still thriving because none of the Big Three have pushed their services hard in their own products.

Further reading:

What other trends are you seeing, and how do they relate to the great causes you care about?