“A typical American office worker checks his email more than 50 times a day, sends or receives an instant message nearly 80 times a day and visits more than 40 different websites.”
—New lifeline for staff drowning in emails - Telegraph
June 2008
“Bill Gates logged off yesterday after 33 years in day-to-day control of the world’s biggest software company”
—Geek who inherited the earth goes in search of another kingdom | Technology | The Guardian
Play
“Along with the Conference Board’s index tracking the decaying state of consumer confidence, add another, less scientific measure of economic anxiety: the YouTube videos predicting economic collapse. When the words “financial” or “economic” are typed into YouTube’s search box, the site automatically suggests pairing them with the words “collapse,” “crisis” and “depression” as the most commonly searched-for phrases. The searches bring up thousands of videos uploaded within the last year, with an outsized portion added in the last month.”
—Real Time Economics : YouTube Provides Outlet for Economic Anxiety
“Most people have been really positive about ‘Onslaught,’” said Stacie Bright, senior communications marketing manager for Unilever. The controversy, she said, “has just been part of the conversation.”
—CCFC News - Dove viral draws heat from critics
“In China, not answering your mobile telephone is considered rude, no matter where you are, whom you are with, the time of day or what activities you are engaged in. And voice mail does not exist. Despite this cultural imperative to be available anytime and anywhere, there is a simple work-around practiced by hundreds of millions of Chinese. Manually removing the telephone battery creates a message to in-coming callers that the telephone’s owner is out of range and thus unable to answer”
—Vodafone | receiver » Blog Archive » China and the next billion mobile customers
“SiiTE is helping one of the fastest growing frozen yogurt franchises with a mobile coupon-generating iPhone application. Users make their fruit and yogurt choices, and then literally shake the phone to blend them up. Once the concoction is ready, a mobile coupon for their drink is displayed. Yogurt fans bring their iPhone into the store to have the onscreen bar code scanned and receive a discount.”
—iMedia Connection: Breakthrough marketing with a twist, shake and squeeze
“Today, the mobile phone is changing the agricultural landscape, literally. Recognizing high mobile phone penetration rates in rural areas, and leveraging the power of SMS, Reuters Market Light is providing customized weather and market information to Indian farmers. “We can ask individual farmers what crops and locations they want to know about, and using their phone number to record their preferences we can deliver information anytime and anywhere directly to their phones,” noted Mans Olof-Ors, one of RML’s co-founders. Armed with such information, farmers can make pricing and crop planting decisions that meet current and emerging market demand. This is a fee-based service that provides a revenue stream to Reuters, raises farm incomes, reduces consumer prices and makes agricultural markets more efficient and sustainable.”
—Vodafone | receiver » Blog Archive » Poor markets make good cents – phones, finance and innovation at the base of the pyramid
“Growing up with the assumption that you’ll always be able to publish whatever you want to say, to whoever you want to say it, is going to make people different.”
—advertising practitioner: shirky, twitter, sweeping generalisations
“that the most profound things that’s happened with all this internet and media stuff is this; fifteen or twenty years ago, if you’d wanted to say something in public, to the world at large, you couldn’t. You just couldn’t do it. You always had to get access to someone else’s media machine. You had to persuade your way or buy your way into the public discourse. You could write a letter to a newspaper, publish a pamphlet, make a sandwich board, do all manner of things but expressing a personal voice in public was an expensive and difficult thing. You had to do it on someone else’s terms. Now, of course it’s trivially easy. That’s a big change.”
—advertising practitioner: shirky, twitter, sweeping generalisations
“Mr. Brier is the creator of a new Web site that shows visitors the logos of big companies and asks them to type in the first word or phrase that popped into their head upon seeing the logo. It’s called Brand Tags, and in just a few days the site has attracted more than 30,000 visitors and about 183,000 individual responses, according to Mr. Brier. His thinking: If a brand can be defined as the sum of all perceptions about it, what would he learn by asking people online to give their snap reactions to a bunch of logos?”
—Buzzwatch : What Do People Think About Your Brand? Here’s a New Way to Find Out
“Mr Bezos has stuck to his original vision—while adding two new ideas as they presented themselves. His original plan, in the 1990s, was to become “Earth’s biggest river” of merchandise, from books and toys to electronics and almost anything else that can be shipped. He tried and failed to become a rival to eBay in auctions. But then Mr Bezos realised that the same online store-front and logistics system that worked for Amazon itself could also work for others. So he added an entirely new category of customers: third-party sellers, who account for 30% of all items sold through Amazon’s site today. They range from one-man-bands to huge retailers, such as Target. Then, about four years ago, another, and potentially bigger, idea struck Mr Bezos. “We had built this huge infrastructure internally for us,” says Mr Bezos. “We thought, surely others out there could use the same infrastructure services.” That infrastructure consists of Amazon’s prodigious numbers of server computers and storage discs, rivalled in scale by only a few other firms in the world, including Google. So Mr Bezos again added an entire category of customers: firms that wanted to rent computing capacity—from processing to storage to database functionality—from Amazon over the internet, rather than build their own data centres in a warehouse. It has signed up over 370,000 customers, ranging from web start-ups to the New York Times, which used Amazon’s infrastructure to digitise much of its archive. Almost by accident, Amazon has thus “backed into cloud computing,” as Mr Michalski puts it, using the buzzword for today’s next big thing: the trend among both consumers and companies to compute and store data on the internet, rather than on a local computer. If there is a leader in the cloud, it is Google. But Amazon is now right up there.”
—Yahoo!, eBay and Amazon | The three survivors | Economist.com
“Tech savvy teens are using Google Earth’s splendidly clear aerial shots of the UK to launch a summertime craze – pool crashing”
—Teens use technology to party in strangers’ pools | Register Hardware
“People’s ability to read maps will further decay… (but) what will grow instead will be better geographic imagination and awareness. People will see the connections between places more clearly — not quite as accurately — but will better imagine how to get from one place to another because of this technology”
—Lost or Found: GPS May Make Us Dumb
“There is a social function of being lost,” Slavin said. “And that social function of being lost will itself be lost. Think about how many times in the last month or so you have asked somebody for directions, or somebody has asked you for directions. That bit of social communication, in which a stranger and native meet at some point, will slowly ebb away. The question is: Will we feel ourselves to be natives everywhere, or to be strangers everywhere?”
—Lost or Found: GPS May Make Us Dumb
“When we develop a crutch for technology, we lose the ability to do that which we did previously,” White said. “It couldn’t be more true. People become more and more reliant, and their expectations get bigger and bigger, and if technology doesn’t deliver, they get frustrated.”
—Lost or Found: GPS May Make Us Dumb
“When asked what kind of an impression the ad made, 56 percent of survey respondents said traditional media ads made a positive impression, in contrast to 31 percent who said that about digital media ads. Thirteen percent reported a negative impression of traditional media ads versus 21 percent for digital media ads. Thirty-two percent said they had neither a positive nor a negative impression of traditional media ads, in contrast to 48 percent who said they had neither a good or bad impression of digital media ads.”
—Traditional Media Not Dead Yet for Marketing, Study Says - TV Decoder - Media & Television - New York Times Blog
