First image of Fisker's plug-in luxury hybrid released?
[Via Autoblog]
a collection of things i like and want to remember. by "scrapbooking" it on my blog i can go back and google it later
Posted by Augustine at 3:02 PM
For New York Fashion Week, Elle MacPherson Intimates launched an interactive storefront, allowing users to reveal the video footage of the models on the windows through their movements on the street. This is by no means a new medium but it has been executed very well and has received a lot of positive WOM.
Via [TrendHunter]
Posted by Augustine at 6:32 AM
Posted by Augustine at 6:30 AM
The tax moratorium on the Internet runs out on November 1, but the Senate just passed an extension. It just has to agree with the House on how long it will be (the Senate wants 7 more years, the House wants four), before sending it the President. You kind of take the tax-free thing for granted when it comes to e-commerce. But it is not going to last forever. E-commerce is all grown up, and no longer needs the coddling that the original legislation provided. Although, it makes you wonder how much slower Internet sales would be growing (compared to being up 23 percent last quarter) if you had to pay sales tax.
Posted by Augustine at 6:29 AM
Someone just shot the monkey. Patent Monkey, a Web-based patent database, is closing up shop and selling its assets to domain-name holding company Internet Real Estate Group (IREG) and Monster Venture Partners (MVP). (Disclosure: Patent Monkey is a CrunchGear affiliate). The Patent Monkey search and index capabilities will serve as the back-end technology for Patents.com, which IRG recently acquired for an undisclosed sum speculated to be over $1 million. Patent Monkey co-founder Paul Ratcliffe will make the transition to Patents.com as CEO, while co-founder Cory Sorice has moved on to Black & Decker as Director of Business Development. Patent Monkey now joins the deadpool.
But it shall rise again as Patents.com, which is slated to launch in the next few weeks, coinciding closely with a series A venture round that Monster says should close within the next 30 days. Patents.com plans to serve both the mainstream market and lawyers, but given Patent Monkey's inability to reach profitability in this space, it remains debatable whether or not the new entity, with more overhead, will have any more luck. On the other hand, Free Patents Online currently sits in the Alexa top 3,000 and does business solely through ads, suggesting that Patents.com has the potential to turn a profit through targeted ad sales alone.
More interesting, however, is Patents.com's potential to broach the more professional realm of Internet IP, a field currently dominated by Delphion . Due in part to its ad-supported initiative, it can forgo the $100 - $250 monthly fee that Delphion charges—a move that could help it to gain traction more quickly. The goal then is to create an international patent licensing network wherein patent owners can claim their patents and provide contact information. Patents.com could then serve as a sort of patents brokerage, providing a communications conduit between patent owners and patent searchers who may wish to license them, which is not insignificant. According to McKinsey Quarterly (PDF file) , the licensing of U.S. patents alone grosses $100 billion annually, indicating that a channel for effectively communicating with patent holders could be monetized handsomely.
Monster Venture Partners founder Rob Monster will serve as chairman for the newly structured entity. Through Monster's involvement, the new Patents.com will be translated into 15 languages using Worldlingo, a company in which Monster sits on the board.
While Patents.com will launch serving only U.S. patents, it has ambitions to soon index documents from the European Patent Office (EPO), the Japanese Patent Office (JPO) and the World Intellectual Property Office (WIPO). Stephen Pinkos, a former Deputy Under Secretary of Commerce for Intellectual Property and Deputy Director of the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, will serve as Patents.com's Executive Vice President. It also probably won't hurt that Monster's Worldlingo currently holds the translation contract for the EPO (a task that it claims to complete with 95% accuracy). Patents.com will be worth watching to see how a domainer firm can do transitioning from a holding company to an operating company.
Posted by Augustine at 10:33 PM
The folks at Crave UK recently got a chance to tour Nokia's R&D facility in Finland; and while they may have seen a robot dog, the real prize here was updated information on the S60 Touch UI. We already knew that the software, accused of being an iPhone clone by some, had a couple of sweet features that the iPhone couldn't compete with (namely, stylus input and tactile feedback response). What we didn't know is that the R&D team is also working on an app that translates foreign words in pictures taken with the phone's camera, and another one that identifies objects by pointing the camera at them (finding product information while shopping is one proposed use). Hit the gallery to see it all up close, and let us know what other apps you'd like to see in the comments. [Crave UK]
Posted by Augustine at 10:30 PM
As an experiment, I recently ran two advertising campaigns on Facebook - one used Flyers Basic (CPC) and the second used Flyers Pro (CPM). If you are wondering how effective are Facebook ads in terms of clicks, here are the results:
1. Facebook Flyers Basic - They cost $5 to display your ad 2,500 times on various Facebook pages. I bought 5,000 ad impressions on Facebook and here's what Google Analytics has to say about the number of clicks received from Facebook - Total Visits = 5
[Facebook won't share the click-through-rate for Flyers Basic version]
2. Facebook Flyers Pro - This is a CPC ad program of Facebook where you pay only for the clicks. Flyers Pro The ads made around 800 impressions on Facebook and the number of visitor clicks received was five (CTR = 0.6%).
Though the above advertising campaigns on Facebook were run for a very short period, they do indicate that the click through rates for ads appearing on Facebook can be extremely low.
Sidenote: If you are located outside US, you can make the payment for Facebook Flyers via International Credit Cards but not PayPal. The Payment page for Flyers looks as if it won't accept non-US credit cards but just type your full address and it will work just fine.
Related: How Blogs Can Fix Their Advertising Rates
Posted by Augustine at 10:23 PM
Even if you aren't an accountant (I'm not) you can tell right off the bat things aren't so sunny when you only see the word "sales" leading the press release bullet points, and not the words "net income" or "profit." Such is the case with Motorola, continuing their downward spiral. The release highlights tout $8.8 billion in sales and "financial improvements in the mobile devices business." Ruh-roh. The mobile section choked down an operating loss of $138 million—a nearly billion dollar drop from the year-ago Q3's operating earnings of $843 million—on sales of $4.5 billion, down 36 percent from last year.
They estimate their global handset marketshare to be 13 percent, jibing with an earlier report , which marks a drop from 22 percent marketshare a year earlier. We've said it before, and it's worth repeating, a real flagship would help the languishing brand power and maybe edge it back toward claiming its old number 2 spot from Samsung. Or, you know, you could maintain your image of pumping out RAZR knockoffs and bleeding money like you've got the deadly Motaba virus. [Motorola]
Posted by Augustine at 10:11 PM
Web users tend to ignore everything that looks like advertisement and, what is interesting, they're pretty good at it. Although advertisement is noticed, it is almost always ignored. Since users have constructed web related schemata for different tasks on the Web, when searching for specific information on a website, they focus only on the parts of the page where they would assume the relevant information could be, i.e. small text and hyperlinks. Large colourful or animated banners and other graphics are in this case ignored.
Source: Banner Blindness: Old and New Findings
Posted by Augustine at 4:37 PM
For people whose paranoia leads them to believe that there are boogeymen actually living inside ATMs, this invention from Innovative Card Technologies and eMue Technologies lets them input their PIN—and presumably encrypt it—before they approach the machine. Cool as it is, I have a problem: I only remember my PINs from muscle memory, so this would need a standard telephone numberpad to work for me. How many problems can you spot with this admittedly slim piece of high technology? [Gizmag via OhGizmo]
Posted by Augustine at 4:01 PM
Posted by Augustine at 3:19 PM
Samsung is cranking out the ideas with OLED displays lately, and now adds the world's first bendable OLED screen to its stable of coolness. This 4.3-inch screen's rocking 480x272 pixels, and Samsung claims it's capable of a contrast ratio of 1000:1. Demonstrated at the FPD International 2007 Forum going on now in Yokohama, Japan, this prototype is in the early experimental stage thus far, but if Samsung can build one they can build a million of them. There's no word on how soon the company will be able to do that at a reasonable price, though. Anyway, we can't wait for the day when we can carry around cylindrical objects that open up to huge screens, using up very little energy while entertaining us everywhere. [New Launches]
Posted by Augustine at 3:18 PM
Since Microsoft paid $240 million for 1.6% of Facebook, I thought I'd make a comment.
Open wins.
Facebook opened its platform for developers to make apps for it; their efforts which were zero cost to Facebook made it more valuable for users. Now everyone is opening their network through APIs and trying to be a "platform" even MySpace -- but it's too little too late.
Palm made Palm OS something that developers could develop apps for and thus make the product more valuable at no cost to Palm.
But ...
It is not necessarily sustainable forever. Palm had its day in the sun, but it too failed to innovate along with user trends -- it's heyday was before phones became PDAs, cameras, and MP3 players.
In mid 90's Yahoo solved a particular large need as the web was starting to get unwieldy -- a directory of sites curated by humans which helped organize the info into a yellow-pages like directory. It had its day in the sun.
Then as the amount of information continued to skyrocket, a more efficient way was needed so help users get to what they wanted. Google came along with a better search algorithm, and also did a nice thing for users -- made the homepage so simple it contained only 1 textbox (what a concept!). It quickly took the crown from Yahoo and users switched since there was little to zero switching costs (even the Yahoo personalized homepage which I invested time into was not enough to keep me on Yahoo). Google is having its day in the sun -- but what's next?
The next "pair" of "contestants" is MySpace and Facebook. As users spent more and more time online, their real-life social interactions were also desperate to have an outlet online. MySpace was one of the earliest to solve it, specifically for the younger set of users who practically grew up online. They had their day in the sun, but also failed to innovate along with user trends. MySpace was the "web 2" version of GeoCities but lacked better social functions.
Then Facebook came along (after they opened membership to the public, rather than just alums) and the killer feature was the sharing of apps and the open platform. The sharing helped amplify the reach and speed of the social interactions. Facebook is having its day in the sun -- but what's next? Microsoft is desperate and definitely paying a premium to play catchup. Facebook has a shot at building sustainability but as it moves towards an advertising revenue model it risks offending and alienating the very users it seeks to serve.
It will be interesting to see whether Facebook can avoid the same fate of Yahoo and Palm (and MySpace) despite being such a huge success thus far.
By Ken Wheaton Published: October 22, 2007
This is one viral sensation you don't want to be part of. It's called Flip. The premise is simple: A young girl films herself flipping your brand into the dustbin because its advertising is offensive, insulting or just plain stupid.
There are 190 such videos on a dedicated YouTube channel as of this writing. And 3iYing, the all-girl creative consultancy behind the effort, says it's received 400 entries and counting since opening up the concept to the public more than a month ago.
Brands that have been flipped include Lifestyles, Sony, Candies, MAC cosmetics and Lot 29 Juniors. Many get hit because the ads seem tailor-made not for girls but rather the lads who read titles such as Maxim or even Penthouse. Said a girl complaining about Christina Aguilera's sexed-up appearance in a Candies ad: "Christina Aguilera getting down and dirty with herself is a guy's fantasy, not something a girl wants to see." And 12-year-old Selina holds up an ad she found in a tween magazine and wonders why Lot 29 Juniors is trying to sell her jeans by featuring what appears to be a D-cup temptress (R&B artist Brooke Valentine) striking come-hither poses.
Leopard prints and pink laptops
Even when the product is for more-mature women, the advertising wildly misses the mark. One doesn't know whether to laugh or cry as 20-year-old Jennifer, with the help of other young women, takes down an ad for a Lifestyles sensual gel. The product is designed to give women better and more-frequent orgasms. So what's the problem? It features a bottle-blonde in a leopard print unitard. The copy reads, "Release your inner beast." Words the women used to describe this pictorial representation of their inner beast: "hooker," "slut," a "very low-end porno girl" and "total whore." One says the ad seems directly aimed at men. So much for the target audience. "It ended up turning girls off before it ever had a chance of turning them on," Jennifer says. Sony gets hit for featuring a pink laptop on the beach. Says 19-year-old Emily, "First of all, you would never bring your laptop to the beach." And even if you did -- and it matched your bikini -- you wouldn't leave it unattended to run off into the water.
According to a Sony spokeswoman, "While we understand 3iYing's take on this Vaio ad, we believe that ads are subjective and shouldn't necessarily be taken literally. The Sony Vaio shown in this ad is one of our best-selling models, and we think conveys the message that Vaios (especially in colors like pink) are fun and liberating." She also pointed out that the pink Vaios are part of Sony's pink-product lineup developed to support the Breast Cancer Research Fund. (Neither Lot 29 nor Lifestyles returned a request for comment by press time.)
Of course, there is a business angle to this. "We want to be advocates for girls, but we're not a nonprofit," said 3iYing founder Heidi Dangelmaier. She declined to discuss billings but said the company, which offers marketers a girl-centric mix of strategic planning, new-product creation, brand positioning, package design and creative treatments, makes money from licensing deals as well as projects.
Ms. Dangelmaier is fast-talking and passionate, someone who was pushing social networking back in the '90s, long before it was a buzzword, and throughout her consulting career has been an advocate for the girl audience. It's little wonder. She worked on her Ph.D. in the geeky but testosterone-laden field of robotics at Princeton, where she found that guys weren't necessarily sexist; they simply had no idea how women processed information or approached creativity. Not surprisingly, she went on to work with such marketers as Sega, Electronic Arts and Samsung.
Surviving 'boot camp'
For the past two years, she's been running 3iYing as a creative consultancy for brands. The company is made up of Ms. Dangelmaier and a group of girls and women ranging in age from 16 to 22, many of them recruited from art and design programs in the New York area. The girls must have the necessary skills and go through a "boot camp" program, and they're paid to work.
It's not the giggling gab-fest a cynic (or a man) might expect. And 3iYing isn't set up to be a trend-spotting shop. A recent visit to the SoHo office of 3iYing found two girls quietly working away on redesigning Varsity.com, the website for anything and everything related to cheerleading in the U.S.
Cheerleading, despite what some might think, is a big business, and it's taken seriously by the millions of girls who participate. Yet the old design is heavy on pink and a multitude of fonts -- a decidedly Web 0.5 affair. It looks like something someone thinks a girl should like rather than something a girl might actually like.
The company also has worked for brands such as Playtex, Rubbermaid, Merck and Unilever, doing everything from new-product development to package design. One notable project was a "modern-girl makeover" for Jones Apparel's L.E.I. denim line that included branding, positioning, identity, packaging, activation and advertising concepts. Said Ms. Dangelmaier: "It gave us a chance to show that even in an area as bloated with competitors as the denim industry, you can still create something fresh that stands out above the clutter."
Backfiring ads
The idea behind the Flip campaign -- aside from promoting the company and snagging more work -- is to help advertising stand out above the clutter for the right reasons. Marketers, Ms. Dangelmaier said, are not only throwing massive amounts of money away on bad advertising; they're angering the target audience. It isn't so much the tawdry, oversexed nature of some ads or the reliance on pink in others that they find offensive; it's just plain old-fashioned stupidity -- a creative outcome that could come only from the minds of people who have no inkling about what girls actually think.
Indeed, listening to Ms. Dangelmaier speak or watching some of the videos on the site, they're not suggesting anything radical. Get past the fact that she's a bit of an eccentric science type and that most of the girls aren't old enough to drink, and you'll hear a mix of best practices culled from traditional and Web 2.0 advertising.
The consumer is in control. Priorities have shifted to the audience -- in this case, girls. The ads and spots should be something she wants to see. The website has to be a place where she wants to spend time.
In one video, Jennifer (of the Lifestyles takedown) offers marketers and agencies an idea of what a girl wants from an ad: design, humor, intelligence, originality, truth.
Different generation
"Forget girl power," she said. "How about good ideas? That's what we want."
Beyond that, of course, is the fact that they're girls of a much different generation. It's no longer about geography or even demographics. There is a fairly dramatic difference in a 25-year-old woman who's likely just a little too old to have "grown up" with MySpace and YouTube. For those 22 and under, it's an entirely different world.
"It's not geographic borders that divide us. That girl in Ohio isn't locked away in isolation anymore," Ms. Dangelmaier said. Indeed, there's a bit of international flair to the Flips. Rosauro Lezama, a 20-year-old native of Mexico who moved to the U.S. and intends to major in marketing and graphic design, works for 3iYing and has done her fair share of Flips. The problems, she said, are universal. "They have the same problems in Mexico. I thought it would be different here."
Girls can now find their own niches, make different circles of friends. They're socializing and sharing -- and, yes, oversharing -- online. Where the 25-year-old may have written some autobiographical poetry on LiveJournal, the 20-year-old is using video to get her point across. In the process, she's learning a thing or two about media. Since these kids are using some of the same creative tools the professionals use, they have first-hand knowledge of the manipulation and editing that goes on. Dove's "Evolution" in other words, may have been a revelation to their parents, it was nothing new to girls in that age group.
Of course, there's a thriving industry built around telling marketers and advertisers how to advertise. It would probably be naïve to think a group of girls will get anyone to listen with a video camera and righteous indignation. In fact, none of the videos have approached true viral status yet.
Still, Ms. Dangelmaier said, "the humanity of the Flips might start changing their minds."
Posted by Augustine at 10:15 AM
Labels: consumer power
from IDEAS IN FOOD by Aki Kamozawa & H. Alexander Talbot
Today was great with discovery. I have wanted to figure out the functional viability of brussel spout stalks. Aki has cooked up broccoli stems and has me trained not to get rid of them no matter what. I have seen cauliflower stems used in dishes at Alinea and McCrady's. Yet I was curious about the large stalk which brussel sprouts grow from.
I spent the morning in the city at the green market. I picked up a number of great ingredients from sunchokes and wild watercress, which I have somehow lost, to brussel sprouts sold on the stalk, my initial reason for going to the market. When they sell the sprouts on the stalk, there are some beautiful specimens as well as a number of sprouts which have gone past their prime. The variety in quality did not deter my want and need for procuring the brussel sprout stalk.
When I returned home I trimmed the sprouts off the stalk and then watched my knife bounce off the stalk itself. What the heck had I gotten myself into? I then pulled out a serrated knife and tried to cut through the stalk. When I was halfway through the stalk I tried to break it. Silly me. Now my leg is bruised. I used the knife to cut all the way through the stalk and what I found was well worth the effort. The center of the brussel sprout stalk is tender and a mirror image of bone marrow. As it turns out I was cutting through brussel sprout bones. So, we cut the stalk in several different ways and then pressure cooked the pieces to tenderize the vegetable marrow.
After ten minutes in the pressure cooker what I imagined as vegetable marrow had the silky rich decadence and texture, without the fatty quality, of true bone marrow.
I am not sure how we will use this marrow, though a dousing of anchovy butter and some grilled toast would not be a bad place to start. I suppose we will also look at traditional methods of serving and preparing marrow and adapt them to our brussel sprout marrow.
Posted by Augustine at 9:16 AM
How to make a viral video and create viral profits
Consumers Have Changed, So Should Advertisers -- ClickZ -- June 4, 2009.
Social Media Benchmarks: Realities and Myths -- ClickZ -- May 7, 2009. The ROI for Social Media Is Zero -- ClickZ -- April 9, 2009. How to Use Search to Calculate the ROI of Awareness Advertising -- ClickZ -- March 12, 2009. Enthusiast Digital Cameras - Foveon, Fujifilm EXR, Exilim 1,000 fps A New Immutable Law of Marketing -- The Law of Usefulness -- Marketing Science -- February 17, 2009. Social Intensity: A New Measure for Campaign Success? -- ClickZ -- February 11, 2009. Connecting with Consumers: Next-Generation Advertising on the Web -- AssociatedContent -- January 30, 2009. Beyond Targeting in the Age of the Modern Consumer -- ClickZ -- January 14, 2009. Experiential Marketing: Experience is King -- ClickZ -- December 18, 2008. Search Improves All Marketing Aspects -- ClickZ -- November 20, 2008. Do something smart, not just something mobile -- iMediaConnection -- November 7, 2008. Social Commerce: In Friends We Trust -- ClickZ -- November 6, 2008. The New Role of the Digital Agency -- RelevantlySpeaking -- October 29, 2008. Make Digital Work for Your Customers -- ClickZ -- October 23, 2008. Social Networking: Make Your Product Worth Talking About -- HowToSplitAnAtom -- October 23, 2008. Social Media Ads are DOA -- MediaWeek -- October 13, 2008. Missing Link Marketing -- Marketing Science. -- September 22, 2008. The Need for Speed -- MediaPost -- September 22, 2008. SEO Can't Exist in a Vacuum -- HowToSplitanAtom -- October 8, 2008. A Different Perspective On Social Media Marketing -- Marketing Science. -- July 15, 2008. WOM: Just Don't Do It -- Adweek -- July 14, 2008. Tips for Success in a Web 2.0 World -- iMedia. -- April 23, 2008.