========================================================
FreshMeat #24 from Steve Portigal

               (__)
               (oo) Fresh
                \\/  Meat 

Last night I dreamt I read FreshMeat again
=========================================================
Telephone line, give me some time
=========================================================

The cell phone continues to be a surprisingly
prominent item in our public discourse. The idea of the
phone exists on multiple simultaneous fronts:

- a technology platform for multimedia (i.e., camera
phones and text messaging)

- an economic booster (ringtones, just the latest flavor
in mobile merchandising are big bucks, perhaps even a
legit solution to the problem of music sharing)

- a designed accessory that displays economic and social
status (or at least aspirations thereof) – check out
Bling Kit for cell phones, including Swarovski
crystals, the rhinestones of the new millennium

- a performance item to either facilitate or impede
social interaction (just when we were beginning to get
used to the handsfree users who appear to walk around
talking to no one, the New York Times reports on a
supposedly emerging behavior where people use their
phones to avoid face-to-face interactions, making
like they are talking to someone – but are really
talking to no one)

- a challenge to unstated but powerful social norms (in
one of many examples, a man got out of his car and
punched another driver who was talking on his phone
instead of moving when the light turned green)

This last area is seeing an unusual amount of activity
recently, as the powers-that-be are exploring the
possibility of using cell phones on airplanes. The
airplane is a space that has had strict controls on cell
phone usage, and as changes to those controls are slowly
being considered, the debate is growing. This is fairly
unique in the history of the cell phone – it wasn’t until
they began appearing (and ringing) in hospitals and
movie theaters and concert halls and libraries and
trains and restaurants and classrooms and places of
worship and banks that rules intended to control use
began to appear. Belatedly, signs are posted, threats
are made, and consideration of others is urged. But I
think most of us have given up on reliably avoiding
annoying or disruptive ringing and talking.

Virgin territory – using your cell phone on an
airplane – has now appeared, and the battle lines are
being drawn. If you’ve heard about this issue, you’ve
probably heard some strong opinions being expressed.
If not, when you first consider the possibility of
in-flight cell phone usage, what comes to mind? Being
reachable throughout your trip, or the horrifyingly
likely possibility of a loud-mouthed doofus bellowing
details of his root canal all the way to JFK? I’ll bet
that it’s the latter; the careful balance begins to tilt
between i) the benefit to us for access to the phone and
ii) the cost to us for others having access to their
phones.

Of course, there are more players involved than just us
and the doofus in the middle seat. Technologies/products
are part of larger systems, and any changes are going to
impact each element of that system in a different way.
Careful consideration of the different players is
essential to fully understand the drivers for change,
the barriers, and the potential impacts. For this issue,
let’s take a look at who’s who:

A. passengers making and/or receiving calls
B. passengers who are not making or receiving calls
C. flight attendants
D. airlines
E. airplane manufacturers
F. wireless carriers (i.e., Verizon, Cingular)
G. infrastructure players (i.e., whoever enables this
new technological capability)
H. handset manufacturers
I. government

Let’s look at each of them in turn:

A. passengers making and/or receiving calls

There are already phones on board the plane. People can
make calls while flying. Using cell phones would
enable passengers to receive calls. All the features
of the handset (i.e., phone book) would be available.
These are both powerful symbols of greater personal
control. The travel experience often entails a
significant surrender of control, even of the most
basic functions (time and choices of food, sleep
schedules, access to a bathroom), so whatever people
can do to reassert that control will have some appeal.

A parallel example might be the payphone; in
metropolitan areas payphones were ubiquitous, yet cell
phone adoption grew enormously and the payphone
continues to fade away. Individual control over the
device itself triumphed “good enough” access.

The ability to make and receive calls (even if these
passengers seldom or never take advantage of that
ability) is a big win for these folks, although there
has not been a lot of impassioned demand for this from
the public.

Conclusion: benefit of new capability

B. passengers who are not making or receiving calls

The loss of control we experience while traveling comes
not only from the circumstances of travel, but also the
intrusion of other people – who we can not control –
into our lives, spaces, and faces. “The screaming baby,”
“the drunken boor,” and “the snoring fat guy” are well-
established archetypes for comedy routines and reality
shows.

A tangible manifestation of the control issue was
obvious in last year’s Knee Defender, a product that
would enable you to prevent the person in front of you
from leaning their seat back into “your” space. The
suggestion here was that you could physically over-ride
the conventions of the airplane (you may lean; you may
also be leaned into) and that was okay. More power to
you, for taking whatever control you could, even at the
expense of others.

Our experiences with others who use their cell phones
around us (during our non-travel times) are poorly
regarded. Anyone reading this can probably come up with
their most recent horror story in less than 5 seconds.
Giving other people the power to further disrespect our
personal space and surrender control over our environment
while traveling seems to be a potential for even more
unhappy traveling (even though there is significant
overlap between group A and group B), and the amount of
public grumbling about this potential bears witness to
that.

Conclusion: cost of annoyance

C. flight attendants

No doubt that any new regulations would require some
sort of new monitoring role by the flight attendants.
Passengers that can do more with more devices now are
more independent and need more attention, i.e., making
sure that cell phones are only on during certain
portions of the flight, making sure that passengers talk
at a reasonable volume or set their ringers to vibrate.
Whatever it is, it’s going to require more work from
them. Perhaps they may benefit from access to their
phones during breaks, but the increase in their work
makes this mostly a loss for them.

Conclusion: cost of extra work

D. airlines

Current airplane phones add two inches to the thickness
of the seatback. Removing those phones would allow more
seats to be installed, or perhaps make room for
entertainment equipment such as the TV screens that
JetBlue offers as standard amenities.

One would also expect that whatever technology enables
on-board cell phone usage would be something they could
charge an extra fee for. It may even be a feature of how
the technology is developed, to provide a fee-for-access
gateway (just like WiFi access at some coffee shops).

The existing phones may remain on board; as long he
boarding process. Already the rules begin to be changed.
Once you get to the seatback card (labeled a “guide to
how to make the world a better place…one flight at a
time.”) you may begin to consider the flight experience
differently. The card reads “Be nice. Attitude is
everything on JetBlue. Kindness, respect and
consideration are the way to a nice flight.” Amusing
graphics that evoke traditional flight safety cards
depict passengers creating a common experience, for
example introducing themselves to each other. Sure, many
of us do that on a plane, but JetBlue takes some
ownership of it, and encourages it, with just enough
humor. Other graphics discourage people from bringing
their own smelly fish on board, or sleeping on the
shoulder of their neighbor, or removing their shoes when
their feet are too pungent.

JetBlue (and some of the other newer, more innovative,
and interestingly cheaper airlines) are rethinking the
entire experience they are creating for passengers. A
fresh look at air travel won’t eliminate turbulence, of
course, but they could easily extend this to help people
manage their behavior. Rather than a turf war over
knees, shoulders, ears, and mouths, creating a common
experience could encourage cooperation, establish new
social norms (and social sanctions rather than punitive
ones) that would allow for polite cell phone usage.
Sure, I’m skeptical too. Adding some verbiage to the
pre-flight announcement and posting a few stickers isn’t
going to do it. A new approach to creating a
relationship between the passengers and the airline, and
between the passengers themselves is the key. The
dinosaur airlines aren’t capable of this (i.e., United’s
Ted is a cheaper United, with better graphic design;
it’s not a re-think of the flight experience the way
JetBlue is).

Two thoughts by way of conclusion here: first, with any
new offering, if we fail to understand the differing
concerns of the larger set of stakeholders, we run the
risk of limiting our success; second, if there is a way
to encourage desired behavior rather than enforce
restrictions on undesired behavior, that may be the way
to greater success. We’re trying this strategy with our
dog, in fact.

–

This discussion is all about voice. Other work is being
done to enable WiFi on airplanes; presumably the cell
network could also transmit data to allow email or
Internet surfing, but that seems peripheral to the
issues at hand. Laptop users on board airplanes with
high-speed Internet access can now do VOIP (voice-over-
IP, or Internet telephony) but right now that’s a
smaller, bleeding-edge type of user unlikely to have the
type of impact we’re considering.

–

Is it actually dangerous to use today’s phones on
today’s planes? This is one report that documents
the effects of mobile phones on avionic (isn’t
that a great word?) gear. But other studies have
said it’s not a problem. Hence the complicated
governmental role – between communications (FCC)
and aviation (FAA). Sure, there’s reason to be
skeptical, compare the supposed danger of using
a cell phone at a gas station, which even led to
proposed legislation in some US states.

–

See Don Norman’s recent essay Minimizing the annoyance
of the mobile phone – The Annoyance, Irritation, and
Frustration of The Mobile Phone — A Design Challenge

Excerpt: "We are in real danger of a consumer backlash
against annoying technologies. We already have seen the
growth of mobile-phone free zones, of prohibition
against phone use, camera use, camera phones, in all
sort of public and private places. The mobile phone has
been shown to be a dangerous distraction to the driver
of an automobile, whether hands-free or not. If we do
nothing to overcome these problems, then the benefits
these technologies bring may very well be denied us
because the social costs are simply too great."

Tags: air rage, airplane, cell phone, cellphone, chat, chatting, flying, freshmeat, mobile phone, talk, talking

30 must-have PC skills

Here’s the top 10, just to make the point

1. Move and copy files
2. Navigate using keyboard shortcuts
3. Use shortcuts in Word
4. Install and remove new hardware
5. Send image files as attachments
6. Search your hard disk
7. Hard disk maintenance (including disk cleanup and defragmenter)
8. System restore and backup
9. Update software online
10. Create desktop shortcuts

How many can you do? To me, this list suggests how daunting a lot of this stuff is. I know several PC users that don’t understand file systems – where files are stored when you download them or save them. To ask them to attach something, say, by finding it somewhere on the vast structure of files and folders, yikes. They’ve managed to use apps without building that level of knowledge. So doing these tasks, I dunno, it’s pretty challenging without getting a sense of the underlying model of the system that these tasks all require.

I’d opt for things like “cleaning up the desktop” “knowing what the start menu is” “choosing a printer” – some real fundamental stuff that you can build on to get to these skills.

But anyway, the fact that the 30 things they picked are actually pretty hard just confirms my sense that computers are still too hard to understand/use.

Update: A reasonable-looking intro/tutorial on Windows XP can be found here.

Tags: computers, ease of use, PC, technology, usability, XP

Seven Habits of Highly Effective Nappers
via

1. Announce your nap to yourself and if possible to your family, friends or colleagues.

For many people this has been the key step to guilt free, productive napping. In order to feel comfortable psychologically when napping, you have to know that by napping you are doing yourself and your significant others a favor. By ‘announcing’ your nap to yourself you are reinforcing and reminding yourself of the productivity and health benefits of napping.

2. Gather your napnomic devices

This much we know is true–nappers have certain devices that make their nap more pleasurable. We call these napnomic devices, i. e., things that assist you to nap. When you were a toddler, perhaps you had a teddy bear, a favorite blanket, a pacifier. Now that you are an adult napper you have put away your childish things, and have other napnomic devices. These might be certain pillows, your favorite bed, soft music, cool bed sheets, workout clothes, etc.

3. Insure a method for on-time awakening

Many expert nappers do not worry about awakening from their nap. They just do. They can tell themselves how long they wish to nap and they awaken at that time. Concern about on time awakening can ruin a good nap. Nappers who are apprehensive about waking up on time use wristwatches, clock or radio alarms to awaken successfully. When napping at a hotel the wakeup service can be used.

4. Insure control of your nap environment, including a plan to avoid nappus interruptus

Nappers need to feel secure in their nap, knowing not only that they have a method to wake up, but also that they will not be awakened prematurely, i. e., experience nappus interruptus. Common strategies are to shut off the phone, hold calls, and/or find an out-of-the way or secretive napping spot. Hotel nappers can use the doorknob sign asking for privacy.

5. Revel in the nap

Enjoy! No relevant suggestions here if you master the other six habits.

6. Deal with sleep inertia, if necessary

Sleep inertia is that groggy and slightly disorienting feeling that some nappers experience when awakening from a nap. Some people believe that if you nap about 40-60 minutes you will be waking up from a deep sleep and are more apt to experience sleep inertia. To combat sleep inertia they recommend naps of shorter duration (20-30 minutes). Overcoming sleep inertia is not rocket science. For the most part all the things you need are readily available: water, coffee, a bathroom, and a good nattitude (i. e., napping attitude).

7. Begin to plan your next nap as you awaken from this nap

Even accomplished nappers often miss this step. But it is important to make napping opportunities a traditional part of your daily planning, even if you don’t always use the opportunity.

Tags: HOWTO, nap, napping, sleep

The New York Times reports on the results of a project I was involved in last year.

And Rodale has signed a deal with the Westin lodging chain with a lengthy list of unconventional elements.

For example, editors of a Rodale magazine, Runner’s World, are training employees of Westin hotels to be ‘running concierges,’ helping guests navigate local streets or parks with customized maps bearing the Westin and Runner’s World brands.

Westin will become the sponsor of Runner’s World races around the world.

Also, Westin guests will find in their rooms free copies of Rodale magazines and copies of Rodale books available for purchase like bathrobes.

Also in the rooms will be offers for discounts on Rodale books like ‘Lance Armstrong: Images of a Champion’ and ‘Eat Smart, Play Hard,’ as well as discount offers for subscriptions to Rodale magazines like Best Life, Bicycling, Men’s Health and Women’s Health along with Runner’s World. (Rodale employees are also being offered discounts on rooms at Westin hotels.)

Interestingly, the client was neither of these companies; the client was an technology firm looking to help Starwood (the parent of Westin) improve the gym experience for their guests. As part of their offering to Starwood, this IT company brought in a user-centered/innovation/design-y/ethnographic (etc.) methodology that led to a number of recomendations, not all of which would make use of the IT that the client wanted to develop/sell. The focus was on the overall experience.

As so often happens, since my consulting work takes place in the very early stages, it’s hard to find out what happened with a project, and here I happened to stumble upon this story in the newspaper.

Tags: b2b, consulting, ethnography, gym, hotel, innovation, rodale, starwood, westin

The latest FreshMeat is up, looking at the issue of cell phones on airplanes.

The cell phone continues to be a surprisingly prominent item in our public discourse. The idea of the phone exists on multiple simultaneous fronts:
- a technology platform for multimedia (i.e., camera phones and text messaging)
- an economic booster (ringtones, just the latest flavor in mobile merchandising are big bucks, perhaps even a legit solution to the problem of music sharing)
- a designed accessory that displays economic and social status (or at least aspirations thereof) – check out Bling Kit for cell phones, including Swarovski crystals, the rhinestones of the new millennium
- a performance item to either facilitate or impede social interaction (just when we were beginning to get used to the handsfree users who appear to walk around talking to no one, the New York Times reports on a supposedly emerging behavior where people use their phones to avoid face-to-face interactions, making like they are talking to someone – but are really talking to no one)
- a challenge to unstated but powerful social norms (in one of many examples, a man got out of his car and punched another driver who was talking on his phone instead of moving when the light turned green

Tags: annoyance, cell phone, cellphones, culture, freshmeat, JetBlue, manners, mobile phones, social norms

In a previous post I related my experience at AD:TECH. While there I picked up some trade rags, including DIRECT: Direct Marketing Business Intelligence. Thought it was interesting to look at some of the marketing lists now available:

Nasalguard
This is a postal list of 10,000 consumers who requested a free tube of Nasalguard, a topical gel for allergy and asthma sufferers. Buyers’ names are included as well. The average unit of sale was $10. The Internet is the source.
Selections: Hotlines, gender, state/SCF/ZIP
Price: $116/M

More than 3.2 million individuals who entered a sweepstakes and contributed to one or more charities are named here. Most are married women, median age 48, who earn $37,000 a year. Sixty percent of those listed are homeowners and about half have children. The file was assembled from mail order buyer, survey and transaction data.
Selections: Gender, age, income, homeowners, children, gift buyers, book buyers, magazine subscribers, donors by type, Internet connected, bank cardholders, mail order buyer category, golfers, travelers, state/SCF/ZIP
Price: $65/M

Those who spent $1 million or more within the last 12 months on luxury homes are named on Million Dollar Homeowners, a file derived from recorded mortgage deeds. Some 133,000 records are available. Forty-one percent of these properties are in California. Other states with large counts are New York, Florida, Connecticut and Illinois. A third of these real estate buyers paid cash.
Selections: Gender, type of dwelling, purchase price, equity, type of mortgage, state/SCF/ZIP
Price: $110/M

TTK Data Services, the operator of Web site Healthguides2005.com, has a list of men and women who expressed interest in laser eye surgery. TTK gathers information through online surveys. There are 473,529 e-mail and 387,222 postal records available. Prior to release to the broader market, this file was used by retail laser centers for targeted direct mail campaigns.
Selections: Hotline, behavior, income, presence of children, homeowners, gender, state/SCF/ZIP
Price: $125/M (postal or e-mail records)

More than 1.7 million donors are identified on a recently assembled file called I Give to Religious Causes. This file was built from direct mail data that’s been overlaid with mail order buyer, demographic and lifestyle enhancements.
Selections: Age, income, gender, state/SCF/ZIP
Price: $75/M

Men and women who purchased the Ogoplex digestive supplement are named on this postal file. The last-12-month count is 131,456. The unit of sale is $28. Direct mail and space advertising are the sources.
Selections: Hotlines, age, credit card, gender, state/SCF/ZIP
Price: $100/M

Online publisher and conference producer Robotics Trends Inc. offers postal and e-mail lists with 6,000 postal and 5,570 e-mail records, including subscribers and attendees.
Selections: None offered
Price: $275/M (postal or e-mail file)

A combination of direct mail data generated from surveys, catalogs/subscriptions and public records was gathered to build Lifestyle’s Hispanic Females in Charge, a postal list. Some 417,049 women who head households are named. They paid for direct mail purchases with a credit card. E-mail addresses accompany 60,179 records.
Selections: Hotlines, household income, age, presence of children, length of residence, occupation, mail responsive, religion, interests and hobbies, telephone numbers, state/SCF/ZIP
Price: $85/M (postal file); $125/M (e-mail file)

Thrill seekers who made purchases from various catalogs or subscribed to sports publications are identified on the Extreme Outdoor Sports Adventurists file. There are 729,443 postal records available.
Selections: BMX biking, bungee jumping, all-terrain-vehicle riding, kneeboarding, lacrosse, mountain biking, parachuting, paragliding, water skiing, windsurfing, white-water rafting, skateboarding, snowboarding, mountain climbing, rock climbing, surfing, inline skating, trail running, age, gender, home/business address, income, state/SCF/ZIP
Price: $80/M

Tags: advertising, direct mail, direct marketing, mailing lists

You sure do smell a lot like flowers
Excellent piece from 37signals about features, innovation, and connecting with the customer in meaningful (more than functional) ways

The salesman made a big deal about a feature I’d heard a lot about already: the bud vase mounted in the middle of the dashboard. That, I thought at the time, has got to be the stupidest feature I’ve ever seen in a product. Who has time to keep fresh-cut flowers in their car? Do you really want your car smelling like dead daisies?

Tags: 37signals, Beetle, brand, design, features, Volkswagen, VW

Twenty-Five Years of Post-it Notes is a fantastic essay covering the innovation, technology, inspiration, invention, manufacturing, marketing and ultimately the cultural impact of the little, yellow, and different semi-sticky pages.

Post-it Notes, on the other hand, were dynamic, customizable, business casual. They inspired spontaneity, rapid ideation, free association. You could link one seemingly unrelated idea to another without worrying about any logical cohesion of ideas; that�s what the glue was for. After all, the digital drudgery of Office Space and �Dilbert� didn�t tell the full story of office life in the eighties and nineties. It was also the era of Wired and Fast Company, the rebel businessman, thinking outside the box.

Tags: 3M, Art Fy, history, innovation, invention, marketing, Post It

This Fast Company piece is presented as a consideration of individuals who have their own brands, but I didn’t quite get that out of it. It’s mostly individual stories of people who are the faces on businesses. Martha Stewart is the classic person-as-persona-as-brand but the examples here are all over the place and the article doesn’t work as an investigation of that. It is an interesting set of quickie stories from prominent/famous business leaders, however.

Todd Oldham

It makes no difference to me whether my name’s on something or not.
I just like to design stuff. My style is an amalgam of inspirations that come from spending part of my childhood in Tehran, where I strolled the colorful bazaars, mixed with a cowboy culture from Texas, where I was born. Somehow, my designs come out in a way that has become a signature. But I never forget that the appropriateness of the end product is as important as the design.

(via Agenda)

Tags: brand, business, design, Fast Company, FC, Todd Oldham

What a freakin’ scam…this just happened to me. This company called OAN (aka Nationwide Conn.) somehow submits fraudulent bills for collect calls that never happened. They don’t bill you directly, they add it to your local bill (Qwest, Verizon, or in my case, SBC). For me, it was $5.41. It took me noticiing it, doing a websearch, then making a couple of calls and spending time on hold (!) to get this taken care of (assuming that it is indeed taken care of). It’s hardly worth it, and yet this company (and others presumably) continue to “cram” – to knowingly bill falsely through the carriers, knowing that most people won’t notice it or have the comfort to dispute it. Which is just so shockingly immoral…the web page I link to shows a huge number of people who have also been scammed and realized it, many who report it to the government.

How come this is allowed to continue? SBC told me they are legally required to pass these charges along.

Shudder.

Tags: at&t, cramming, oan, ripoff, sbc, scam, telco, telecom

In this Slate article by Dan Crane the fancy-delancy salts and their poor-as-peter siblings are put through their taste-test paces.

Although sodium chloride is the primary component of all salt, the texture and shape of the crystals must also be considered, as those qualities fundamentally impact salt’s taste and how it interacts with food. Does it provide satisfying crunch, dissolve nicely when it should? How well does it season food? How well does it stand alone?

Three tests were performed on nine salts (from each of the four salt varieties) by eight tasters in New York City: the finger dip (self-explanatory), salt atop a slice of fresh cucumber, and salt used in pasta sauce made with unsalted canned tomatoes. (I made Marcella Hazan’s classic tomato sauce.)

While the East Coast results were interesting, I felt they were inconclusive. Thus, I embarked on Round 2, which took place in Los Angeles at one of my favorite neighborhood restaurants, the Edendale Grill in Silverlake. The restaurant kindly agreed to cook French fries and steaks for a group of eight testers, using each of the same nine salts.

In both rounds, testers were asked to blindly rate the salt from 1 to 10 and comment on its taste. The scores from all five rounds were averaged together for one final ‘taste’ score. Salts were also assigned an aesthetic rating based on the packaging and the look of the salt itself, since appearance is often as important as taste.

Tags: grocery, review, salt, taste test

(click on any picture to enlarge it)

Today I spent a little bit of time at AD:TECH. To set the frame of reference here – this (interactive technology for advertising) isn’t my field; I went out of curiosity and a chance to meet a friend for lunch. I attended the opening keynote and looked around the exhibit hall. There are several days of presentations and seminars that I didn’t experience.

The opening keynote featured John Costello, Executive Vice President, Merchandising & Marketing, The Home Depot, and Mary Meeker, who watches Internet and advertising for Morgan Stanley (I seem to remember a detailed New Yorker profile of her a few years back; perhaps before the bubble burst).

John Costello (all quotes approximate): “I am often asked how many brand managers do we have? The answer is 325,000 – the number of associates we have.” He went on to stress how all the touchpoints for the customer need to work together. You may see a great ad on TV but if you go to the website and it’s difficult to use, it’s no good. This isn’t so trite because as much as it’s a good idea, it’s just not practiced that way. Home Depot certainly isn’t living up to Costello’s idea. My bad experience with their “clinics” here and see here for their non-response when I tried to resolve it.

Mary gave a really dense presentation, but reassured us that the slides were online. They are, and for now you can read ‘em here. I’ll excerpt a few slides that I really liked; I’m not sure what to make out of any of it, just a bunch of factoids that seem provocative and worthy of filing.

Here’s the top five Internet companies (I didn’t know that was the list; interesting) – this slide shows what they were worth before 2000, before they went public, what they were worth at the highest point in the market, what they were worth at the lowest point (and kinda interesting to be reminded of those dates; 3/10/00 and 10/9/02) and here’s what they are worth now – so there is more worth there now than before the crash. It’s one of many angles on ‘recovery’ in the tech sector (hey it feels cool to say “the tech sector”).

These two slides are just some data points to consider when thinking about the various online, mobile, phone, data, wireless, etc. markets around the world. Here’s who the analysts are watching and what they are thinking about…

You’ll need to click on this one to make it bigger in order to see the details; the point here is looking at the number of different services or products (depending on your perspective) that Yahoo has launched in 2003, 2004, and so far in 2005. You can see just by the shape that this year already is as many products as in 2004. This was all under the category of User Experience, but she used that phrase interchangably with other phrases like User Interface, so it wasn’t always clear what exactly she meant. But the slide seemed interesting anyway.

This took a bit of thinking about, looking at different countries, how many PCs do they have and how many mobile phones, and the ratio of the two. The U.S. has the lowest ratio, China has the higest. So the relative prominence of phone vs. PC as platforms for daily info-living, and as opportunities for innovation, etc. are extremely different in these different markets.

Mary, an avid golfer, recounted the recent Tiger Woods dramatic shot at the 16th hole in Augusta, and considered a scenario where someone missed it and wanted to watch it – they’d willingly watch an ad for it, or pay to see it (she suggested $1.00 is what people would pay to see it, but that’s ridiculous). But if you go into Google and Yahoo, you can’t find it. Even if you look in their video search, you can’t find it. You can find it on a blog, where it was turned it into a hypothetical Nike ad. Somehow in this story Mary seemed to imply that it wasn’t really available in that case. She seems to deny blogs (or anything that comes from the consumer side of the equation) as an invalid source of content not to be taken seriously. Yes, there were no rights clearances, but of course, the information gets out anyway. Hello, BitTorrent?! The fact that the only way she could show us this clip was to use the file she found on this blog (and then put into her presentation) seemed to be ignored, since the real problem was that Google and Yahoo didn’t have the clip in their systems. I don’t get that.

In the Q&A there was some emphasis on the future successful companies being those that place the premium on customer service – citing Amazon Prime as an example, but then both speakers seemed to flip between customer service and customer experience. She cited, but couldn’t remember the specifics, a recent book by a professor (Jeff?) in Pennsylvania? who makes the case for the last great competitive advantage being user interface, and she went on to suggest the web is the best user interface, better than an in-store Starbucks experience. Clearly we see why Mary is an online person because her contention, if I understood it, is just silly. I’d be interested in finding out what book she’s referring to, so if you have any ideas, let me know.

The trade show itself was the usual – booths with people in matching t-shirts being extremely extroverted. But it was working – the place was noisy and jam-packed and people were shaking hands and swapping business cards and just being business people in deal-making mode, I guess. There were the usual trinkets – things that flashed, bent, bounced, squeezed, etc. and lots of iPod giveaways. It wasn’t very intersting to me; it was companies with names like AdBrite, AdDrive, AdDynamix, adInterax, Adknowledge, adMarketplace, Adteractive or AdTools; Blowsearch.com and Eyeblaster; Search Engine Optimization, Search For It, SearchAdNetwork, Searchfeed.com, SearchForce.com, SearchIgnite, SearchRev, Findology.com and FindWhat.com; as well as companies that I recognized because they serve the annoying pop-up ads on websites I visit: ZEDO and Undertone.

There were a few of the usual booth babes, and all you really see in this picture is some nice blonde hair, but some women manning booths were obviously models, at least one wore a t-shirt with a slogan across her chest that was something about looking up top. Hmm.

I found this variation quite unusual

A gymnast? Or, a slinky woman in skintight lyrca, twisting her body in interesting ways. Oh, and how’d you like to buy some advertising services?

Looks like she’s in need of some advertising services herself. Cheese!

Attendees engaged in some sort of SMS swordfight.

Google’s booth. Is that a real George Nelson Marshmallow Sofa?

Tags: Ad-tech, advertising, conference, lecture, notes, technology, tradeshow

SF Chron review of Mount Appetite, a new book by Bill Gaston

What’s with the Canadians these days? It seems to have started a few years ago when Michael Moore turned a spotlight on our northern neighbors in ‘Bowling for Columbine,’ proving that they love their guns but don’t shoot people (nor do they lock their doors). Then during the past year or two amazing Canadian bands, the likes of Broken Social Scene and the Arcade Fire, have been showing up in music stores. And now, all of this great Canadian literature keeps landing here, from Derek McCormack to Michael Turner, and most recently, Bill Gaston’s latest collection of short stories, ‘Mount Appetite.’

Yes, just when some of us Americans had settled into the idea that Canadian cultural exports are only good for a laugh (Second City, ‘Kids in the Hall,’ Celine Dion, Bryan Adams), we are forced to think again.

I find this annoying, yes, but also somewhat offensive. Where has the article’s author been? Never heard of Margaret Atwood, to pick one very obvious example?

Tags: America, Americans, bias, Canada, Canadians, media, perceptions

Dreyer’s is going to jam as many attributes into one packaging label as possible. If your mouth gets tired while saying it, you may have a design and branding problem.

Dreyer’s
Slow Churned
(Rich & Creamy)
Light
Vanilla

And the one at the link above (the image was too small to post here) also includes
New!
Vanilla Bean (with Real Bean Specks)

Meh. I’m exhausted. Too many subcategories of features and benefits and attributes and brand. Why is this so hard?

I didn’t know about this, but according this story, this slow-churning technology (with no props to John Hiatt, I guess) makes lower fat ice cream taste like it’s full-fat. Hmm.

Tags: brand, dreyer's, grocery, ice cream, packaging, slow churning

Via Stay Free! Daily comes EVOLUTION BY MARGARITA a new bra that is “designed to create a natural cosmetically enhanced look.”

Tags: America, Americans, bias, Canada, Canadians, media, perceptions