Here’s the weeks dig­i­tal news in 2 min­utes!

‘Pokemadness’

Unless you’ve been liv­ing in a hole, with your head in anoth­er deep­er hole with­in said hole, you’ll have seen the innu­mer­able online head­lines, and like­ly wit­nessed first­hand, the explo­sion of casu­al gamers and result­ing media atten­tion that Poke­mon Go has gar­nered in the past two weeks.

The speed and scale at which the app has grown in just a few weeks has been com­plete­ly unprece­dent­ed, and already dig­i­tal mar­keters are begin­ning to talk about Poke­mon Go as if it were the newest mar­ket­ing tech­nol­o­gy that brands need to cap­i­talise on.

Indeed, Poke­mon Go could be the lat­est mar­ket­ing ‘Fad’, as Matt Roberts — per­haps some­what prophet­i­cal­ly — had writ­ten on just recent­ly. How­ev­er, when a sin­gle app quick­ly sur­pass­es Twit­ter in the num­ber of users, then sur­pass­es dat­ing behe­moth Tin­der, per­haps brands should be tak­ing notice and swot­ting up on Jig­gly­puff and Jynx, with future poten­tial adver­tis­ing oppor­tu­ni­ties beck­on­ing.

Indeed, AR has been the talk of the town all week, and this (slight­ly ter­ri­fy­ing) video on how AR/VR tech­nol­o­gy could define our real­i­ty in the future has been mak­ing the rounds.

“Self-driving, autonomous, networked, shareable, solar-powered vehicles”

In oth­er future-think­ing news, Elon Musk has out­lined “v2” of his mas­ter plan. Before we look at that, con­sid­er the beau­ti­ful sim­plic­i­ty of “v1”:

1. Cre­ate a low vol­ume car, which would nec­es­sar­i­ly be expen­sive
2. Use that mon­ey to devel­op a medi­um vol­ume car at a low­er price
3. Use that mon­ey to cre­ate an afford­able, high vol­ume car

And…

1. Pro­vide solar pow­er. No kid­ding, this has lit­er­al­ly been on our web­site for 10 years.

Here’s v2:

1. Cre­ate stun­ning solar roofs with seam­less­ly inte­grat­ed bat­tery stor­age
2. Expand the elec­tric vehi­cle prod­uct line to address all major seg­ments
3. Devel­op a self-dri­ving capa­bil­i­ty that is 10X safer than man­u­al via mas­sive fleet learn­ing
4. Enable your car to make mon­ey for you when you aren’t using it

Don’t let the con­cise­ness of the mes­sage fool you — in the word’s of a fel­low col­league, “this is big”. When you con­sid­er Tes­la’s abil­i­ty to deliv­er on their goals to date, there’s lit­tle rea­son why we should­n’t expect self-dri­ving, autonomous, net­worked, share­able, solar-pow­ered vehi­cles to become a real­i­ty in the not so dis­tant future. (Well, I’ve been wait­ing for this exact thing!)

And… Prime Day Brings in the Numbers, Visual Search, and a Brief History of SEO

Ama­zon Prime Day has now become a sta­ple in con­sumer dis­count sales cal­en­dar, and this year it’s esti­mat­ed that 74 per­cent of all US e‑commerce sales hap­pened on Ama­zon.

Not good news for oth­er retail­ers — per­haps they need to be more inno­v­a­tive? As Andrew Gird­wood writes, there are many oppor­tu­ni­ties for non-tech brands to inno­vate.

One way brands could do this is invest­ing in visu­al search, and there has been sig­nif­i­cant move­ment in the space this week, with some clever dig­i­tal sleuthing reveal­ing that Snapchat have filed for patents in the object recog­ni­tion adver­tis­ing space.

And because it isn’t quite the week­end yet, and in case you haven’t maxed-out your quo­ta of SEO relat­ed con­tent this week, I real­ly enjoyed Mike Gre­han’s piece on the Past, Present and Future of What We’ve Come to Know as SEO.

Until next week…