Archive for March, 2009
The age of advertising probably began when there were two cave men vying for the attention of one cave girl. We imagine her to have been highly intelligent and rather selective in the process. Isn’t it the one with the cachet who controls the relationship? Or perhaps it’s the one with the cash? Whatever. Since then advertising has evolved as a pretty good compromise between business and consumer interests. This path runs reasonably smoothly with a few exceptions along the way.
Then came the Internet and everything changed. As with other major collective thought shifts, the once trepidacious herd made a quick beeline toward Internet advertising as soon as the greener grass at better prices, with more promises of tastiness became obvious. Now the pasture is crowded, with several less than desirable herd members. Let the head butting begin.
Professor Eric Clemons at the prestigious WhartonSchool , noted the decline in Internet advertising. He crafted a viewpoint that this downturn was not only a result of the general economic climate but also because the public is averse to ads for various reasons. He also criticized Google for misdirecting searchers to unwanted sites.
And in the dark and stormy night that followed, negative comments about the professor’s work rained down in cyberspace. Some said – it’s the economy. Others thought ads needed to be less affiliate and more local. “Danny Sullivan Believes in the Future of Online Advertising,” proclaimed a headline on techcrunch.com, with Sullivan issuing his own critique of the professor. The lines in the sand were drawn.
As for us, we’re mostly straddling the line, weighing the arguments presented by both sides. Isn’t truth usually somewhere in the middle? For now we’ll continue with the idea that a truthful message, thoughtfully crafted and delivered, will have impact. When something better comes along, we’ll adapt.
Lately, we’ve found more than a few around us to be hopelessly hooked on Word Warp. The iPhone app is a time-chomper with great big jaws that easily consume several hours in the seeming blink of an eye. Like rats with a thumb, you’re tap, tap, tapping away at letters, hoping to get the prized six letter word before time runs out. Someone recently advised downloading it only if you’re going on vacation to a beach with lots of ugly people.
Word Warp happens to be a free download. And it’s just another incarnation of other popular word games such as Text Twist. We can’t say if that has anything to do with its popularity because free downloads are rather abundant. Doesn’t the word free come with a lasso around your neck anyway?
Regardless, behind the scenes there is turbulence around the idea of free and cheap downloads. Application developers are often not people sitting in a dorm room dreaming up new ideas – but they could be. More likely a small or large software business is spending weeks, possibly months writing the application code.
Some developers believe there will never be enough downloads of cheap, say 99 cent apps to make it worth their time. Additionally, industry watchers believe the market for cheap apps is at a plateau. They would probably like to see more downloads of say, Stockadvisor at $19.99, a price that’s well above some of the actual stocks it advises on.
And just when you think the app world might be headed for a more sophisticated approach, comes news that a flatulence simulator app for $4.99 is quite popular. We’ll just leave that alone and return to our Word Warp game, a.k.a. our drug. And while we’re here, we just wish that when coming up with words for the letters in G-O-B-L-I-N, we could say “bling,” which everyone except the dictionary knows is a word. Either way, without cheap, fun apps there would just be cage-fighting, and not all of us are suited to that.
Today is the big day – Monsters v. Aliens dukes it out in both 3-D and 2-D cinema across the country. But the buzz has been all about 3-D. Few of us could miss the fact that no less than five weeklies had articles and multi-page advertisements with those amber and dark blue paper lenses. It’s as if this is the first ever 3-D movie of all time. But the technology has been around for a hundred years.
And the person most responsible is Lenny Lipton, the fabulous brainpower behind digital 3-D. We love that it always comes back to the geeks. Lipton, a physics guy, invented the technology for engineers, medical professionals and others to view complex 3D computer graphics models. He was also into movies, founder of StereoGraphics Corporation which was later acquired by RealD.
We think it sounds like the name of a hip-hop artist? Yo. This is the RealD coming at you. But RealD is actually the digital 3-D company behind Monsters v. Aliens. Original 3-D used the paper glasses to merge the input from each eye. It sometimes caused dizziness, and in rare cases, a certain anti-gravity effect on the stomach. RealD sends through 72 frames per second to each eye. The viewer through polarized lenses sees one continuous image.
All of this depends on super computing power – Seymour Cray where are you? Silicon Valley geeksters who worked on the film, envision a future where digital 3-D is the norm on your desktop and laptop. Just yesterday AMC, the movie theater company announced a partnership with RealD to add more of its screens to multiplexes around the world.
Along the way, we’ve noticed that not everyone is feeling the digital 3-D love. Folks are complaining. Costs more. Less theaters. But we like that Lenny Lipton keeps going. Some of his other inventions went into the Mars Rover. And most of all, he wrote the lyrics to Puff the Magic Dragon – which funded the stereoscopic work.
Digital and paperless continue to dominate the media marketplace not only with the plethora of e-reading devices hitting the marketplace, but also the number of newspapers moving online. Four Michigan newspapers, a Seattle newspaper, a Denver newspaper all became news without the paper in the blink of an eye.
Alongside that, Samsung’s planned unveiling of its e-reader, Papyrus, set to hit the market in a few months is just the newest in a long line of its kind. Interesting how they’ve chosen an ancient name for a digital device. Meanwhile, Sony, Phillips, and Fujitsu all have similar products. Amazon is on Kindle 2 with winning reviews for being most like traditional media with its improved page turning and other features.
Early adopters are devoted to following and debating the merits of new e-reader technology. One e-reader requires USB access, another is wireless, some don’t support popular formats. Some are easy on the eyes while others are ugly. And readers aren’t just readers. They get points for also being phones, music players, organizers and shopping devices all in the palm of your hands. Apple even has a reading application called Kindle for iPhone. The readership is divided between those who love digital and those who want to preserve the printed version.
We envision the next wave being digital devices, or at the very least apps, tailored specifically to newspapers. We imagine them to have names such as the “e-Town Crier,” not to be confused with e-tongue crier which is what you are when you’ve eaten a very hot pepper.
But we’re also conflicted about losing our newspaper. Monetizing and other concerns aside, digital readers leave a big vacant hole in all the places where our newspapers come in handy. You couldn’t really use the Kindle as kindling for your wood burning stove, could you? Fish and gift wrapping possibilities for e-readers are also somewhat limited. Then there is the case of the new puppy. Paper training. Is there an app for that?
Deep in the pages of Transworld Skateboarding Magazine .. what? You didn’t know we were into skateboarding? Okay. To be fair the last time we tried to ollie, let’s just say our health insurance company sent us a cease and desist letter. But nobody ever said you had to be vain to read Vanity Fair. So we’re sticking with the skateboarding magazine. On page 66 we caught a small item about Skateistan, a skateboarding school about to open in Afghanistan.
We’ve all heard about Afghanistan, but skateboarding? As the story goes, this Australian dude went to visit his girlfriend who was living there. One day he took his skateboard for a spin and suddenly found himself surrounded by Afghani kids. Eventually, he would break up with his girlfriend but proceed with the skateboarding school funded entirely through donations from around the world.
Of course we being worldly and concerned wondered about the possibilities of taking a trip to Kabul to see and possibly offer our services to Skateistan – which is not necessarily the most creative name. Then reality set in. Could we bring along our digital accessories? Can we live without our flash drives, apps, widgets and what not? Aren’t we still nursing memories of our bus trip in East Africa where we shared our quarters with goats and bananas, and flash drive meant something entirely different? Disappointment threatened to haunt all our dreams.
Turns out, Kabul does have a cyber café culture. We were charmed by this quote from a cyber café owner in the BBC news. “People talked about this being the internet era. I wondered how an era could be named after the internet.” And he’s not even the only one. Several cyber cafes are nestled among the kebab stands in Kabul and people line up for access. We had no idea there’s an Afghan Wireless Communication Company. All of which reminds there is so much we have yet to learn.
Read more about Skateistan here: Skateistan
There we were immersed in an article about recycling electronic waste. It occurred to us we hadn’t used the words tech and trash in the same phrase before but technically there’s trash in everything. One company claims to recycle 95.3 percent of what it collects. We feel so much better about the world because of them.
And that’s when things started to get hairy. A little bullet point, sidebar mentioned that 65 million computers, 99 million televisions sets and 126 million cell phones are yet to be recycled. How’d they know that? Who’s been cruising our basements and garages? But it didn’t take the rocket science part of our brains to figure out that they simply got the statistics from sales data. Subtract the number of electronic items received for recycling from the number purchased and there it is.
Knowing this, we set our brains ticking about the amount of data we leave out there. The great Buddha advanced the idea that all life is suffering. We don’t often take issue with renowned spiritual leaders but we’d like to advance our own idea that – all life is data. Beyond the stuff on social networking sites, there’s the cell phone, the debit card, the GPS system in your car and the list goes on. Call for pizza delivery and your hard to find phone number makes someone’s data list.
Even if you made a bold attempt to live off the grid, carrying actual dollar bills in your wallet, taking public transportation and the like, you would need to move to a rather remote part of the world to avoid the ubiquitous cameras in stores, parking lots and the like. Remote parts of the world are fine but they don’t hold any charms for us so we’d rather take our chances with the data trail. And we’ll try to recycle our electronic trash soon.
You. Seeking recommendations from a newspaper advice columnist on a replacement cassette deck at a good price. You’ve got tapes. An extensive collection. Your old cassette player is on its last leg. What to do? What to do? We have to ask – what rock? Didn’t anybody tell you, the cassette format is on its death bed? We recently heard about some folks with Aldus Persuasion slides that they never did convert fast enough to Power Point. What were they thinking?
Time marches on. Progress happens. Obsolescence happens after progress. Every step of the way, the old formats become endangered species with no format preservation act in sight – save for a few forward thinkers who make conversion gadgets. So the advice columnist recommends getting an extra device or two because you never know how long they’ll be around.
But it’s not just you. Inquiring minds everywhere want to know – what’s the best format for their music, photographs, home movies, slide shows. Into each life a little data rot must fall. And it would be nice to find the perfect solution to avoid the battle between the tons of stuff that we want to keep while the formats keep changing. Today’s data storage devices include CDs, DVDs, flash media and more. And while we could currently recommend moving everything to the newest format – migrating as it’s known in geek speak, we know it’s not a permanent solution.
Every format has a shelf life. In some cases it’s ten or more years. But every once in a while, one of our large software companies could buy out a smaller one and before you know it – a well loved program is obsolete. So ultimately, our advice would be - keep moving your files with the pace of progress – “even when your hope is gone, move along, move along…” Yeah, you’re singing it.
If it seems like every time you tune in to radio or television, or read newspapers or magazines, the word, “Twitter” appears, you’re right. In one week in February there were about a thousand media mentions of Twitter. Okay so you don’t care, it’s just too much.
On the other side of this, advocates of smart marketing say you can’t beat them so you might as well join Twitter and use it as your very own marketing tool.
It seems a lifetime ago when Seth Godin published his book, Permission Marketing, that called for businesses to reinvent the way they related to customers. In a world saturated with advertising, Godin advocated e-mail marketing as one way to establish personal relationships with customers. But now, that’s been done and practically gone and it’s time to look at new avenues.
Who knows if Twitter will be the hot thing, in ten years, or even next year? We sure don’t. And we don’t care. What we do know is that gazillions of people are connecting with Twitter’s now famous 140 character messages. Shaquille O’Neal with nearly 357,000 followers, Martha Stewart with 168,000 and everyone from the President to CEOs to celebrities are on it.
As with everything else, it’s how you use it that matters. Advertising guru Donny Deustch promotes his show, Martha tells people about her lobster ravioli dinner – we had cheese ravioli from the grocer’s freezer - in case you care. Some use it to point to their blogs. Any number of CEOs may or may not post but they monitor comments about their business and products. Southwest Airlines is known for reaching out to customers who Twittered, uh, tweeted?
In the no brainer column here, it’s cheap, easy and reaches a lot of people. All of which extends the possibilities for getting noticed by someone notable. Could your products get by with a little help from Twitter? What have you got to lose?
By now it is widely known that we embrace the fast pace of technological advancement in a big way. With no regrets. At least it should be widely known. We’re not likely to be sitting around wishing for the good old days when computers were booted from floppy drives and if you were away from home you had to drop a quarter in a public phone to make a call.That’s just not us.
But the universe has a way of surprising us and we were recently intrigued to learn about Halted Specialties Company. This electronics store of sorts has operated in Silicon Valley since it was just a valley with no silicon in sight. It has an old fashioned appeal that tugs at newfangled tinkerers to take a second look.
Back in the day when the two Steves of Apple were just a couple of young unknowns, looking to build their yet to be tangible empire, they shopped at Halted for parts. They even invited the owner to invest. But he turned them down because they just didn’t look professional enough and he probably thought they were scam artists.
Back in the day there were lots of stores like Halted but now they’ve all departed. Gone to the big electronics junkyard in the sky? Still, Halted is the place for engineers and ham radio operators – aren’t those one and the same? Anyone looking to create or enhance an electronic device can show up at Halted to look for outmoded and useful stuff such as wires, resistors, transistors, ovens for baking silicon and the like. At exceptionally reasonable prices.
Yes, we may not be the ones looking for this stuff but we like the idea that they’ve stuck to their core beliefs, if indeed there were some core beliefs. We think it’s highly possible that the next big thing could come from someone shopping at Halted today. So soldier on brave tinkerers and be sure to tell us when you have something interesting.
Read all about them here