A mashup is the melding of two sources of material or data that when combined create a new utility or something completely different.

The concept of a mashup dovetails with the rise of social networking as websites like Digg or Reddit, acting as aggregators, pull together news or feeds from multiple sources. That platform is then often designed to be interactive, allowing users to share opinions, reviews, or update information in a fashion similar to Wikipedia.

The idea of creating web-based applications is also a popular choice for mashups as developers have used mapping software, such as Google Maps, to create everything from restaurant guides to real estate comparison sites. Mashups have also been popular in music as artists sample parts of another song to remix an entirely new song.

The mashup is indicative of the way we now consume media as traditional sources are intermingled with online campaigns in an attempt to discover what appeals to consumers.

Origin:

Mashups are considered a part of Web 2.0. The term was first used to describe a web application that pulls together content from a variety of sources to perform a specific function, whether it is comparing airfare rates or finding new restaurants.

A fansumer is a consumer online, who is a promoting a brand through word-of-mouth marketing. It is a direct reference to Facebook's "fan" designation, wherein a user can be a fan of a given product or celebrity and establish a connection on the social network. A fansumer identifies with a brand's values and promotes it as a trusted voice to those within his or her online community.

Accordingly, the ways in which products are being marketed have shifted online. As brands accumulate information about consumers' preferences, they can place advertisements in front of customers who are more likely to champion their message. Companies are now becoming personalities on Facebook, with brands like Seventeen encouraging people to become fans online and promising insider access.

Corporations seek out fansumers to act as brand loyalists, translating the virtues of a product or service online into the new world of social media.

Origin:

Forrester Research introduced the concept of the fansumer in order to describe the evolution of the consumer online as they interact with targeted advertising on social networking sites.

The uncanny valley is a theory that suggests there is a tipping point where people will reject digital or technological representations that appear too similar to human beings. By making artificial movement or speech appear too natural, a robotics or model designer will inadvertently trigger feelings of revulsion. The concept of the uncanny valley initially only referred to robotics, but as computer graphics have evolved, the same phenomenon has been observed in the world of film and video animation.

The movie "Polar Express" was panned, with critics contending that the motion capture process created animated characters that were more disturbing than cuddly. And video gamers have remarked in recent years that digital characters are becoming unsettling.

The idea of the uncanny valley has even been extended to photo retouching, as consumers have difficulty reconciling digitally altered photos with their expectations of a subject's appearance. A recent advancement in photorealistic characters from design firm Image Metrics may have provided an answer by analyzing specific movements and timing gestures.

Origin:

Japanese robotics inventor Masahiro Mori defined the concept in 1970. He was looking to explain why people suddenly rejected his creations as they became more evolved. Mori based his theories on the philosophies of Ernst Jentsch and Sigmund Freud, in which both men expounded on the idea that something can be familiar and unknown at the same time.

Correction: One of our eagle-eyed readers noted that the connection between Mori's theory and the work of Freud and Jentsch was made after his postulate was released. Mori's work was not based on their philosophies, it is just a correlation that has been drawn by subsequent researchers.

The 2008 Summer Olympics was one of the most marketing and branding-dense spectacles the world has ever seen. Not only did brands from all over the world and from many different segments strut their stuff in Beijing, but the world also witnessed a large scale branding effort on the part of an entire country - China.

So now that the torch has been passed onto London for 2012, and we've had a few weeks to digest our victories (go USA!), we can really look back and see which brands struck gold and, well, those that did not.