Friday, January 29, 2010

"iPads? We don't need no stinkin' iPads"




While I have heard numerous people and pundits shower Steve Jobs with deity-like praise for the impact he has had on the computer, music, and telecom industries, I've never been eager to join the chant. Don't get me wrong, my media is in iTunes, I tolerate AT&T for my iPhone, and I am using my MacBook to write this. I always thought Jobs was just taking the next logical technology step and slapping an aesthetically pleasing silver casing around it. However, after Wednesday's introduction of the iPad, I am prepared to sculpt his likeness out of some old Macintosh IIes and display it in my front yard.

Now before you assume that I plan on dusting off a lawn chair, give my "The Truth Is Out There" t-shirt its annual wash and wear, and emotionally prepare myself for hours of World of Warcraft banter to get my hands on Apple's latest and greatest, I have no intentions of buying an iPad. The reason for my new found Jobs fanboy status has nothing to do with the what he has brought to market. Instead, it's his unmatched ability to stir a world wide audience into a year long, Jonas-brother-to-a-12-year-old-girl-like psychosis over an iPod Touch for giants that will pull you in even closer to his digitally licensed and restricted retail world.

Thousands of chat threads with specs speculations, hundreds of grainy photos of possible prototypes (why do tech spies always have the worst cameras?), and numerous blogs leaking any minute detail they can dig out from their best friend's sister's boyfriend who works at an Apple Genius Bar.

I can empathize with Mugatu. I too feel like I am taking crazy pills.



Listen up, everyone! It's a laptop without a keyboard running dated software. That's it. Cool looking? Yup. A platform on which new applications for a portable computing device can grow? I guess. But a bargain starting at $499? Uh, no.

The man in black mock turtleneck, and again to his credit, has generated so much market credibility as an innovator, nobody actually stops and asks if his newest endeavor is really innovation or proliferation. Maybe its just another device that will spin his followers around so many times that they'll be too dizzy to realize that they're paying an extra $0.30 for their favorite Miley Cyrus track. Or better yet, too blinded by the glowing Apple on the back to see they're coughing up $2.99 for an episode of Archer that Hulu will let you watch for free (at least until they start charging subscriptions fees).

I could probably go on for a few more paragraphs about Jobs, the iPad, and definitely Miley Cyrus (apparently she's never even heard a Jay-Z song nor does she even the know title of one because "I don't listen to pop music."), I simply will encourage everyone to realize that just because something is new, it isn't necessarily innovative. Well, I guess if you looked up innovative in the dictionary, new is in its definition. But just like a dictionary, why buy a new one if it hasn't changed any of the definitions.

Monday, January 25, 2010

There's an App for That

I have had a vision of the future, it's the new iPhone commercial.

Have you ever been stuck in a massive earthquake, broken your leg, suffered a laceration to your head, lost your glasses, and had to field treat your own wounds so you could survive for 65 hours without food, water, or sleep? There's an app for that.

Wait, WHAT?!

Apple has found itself the center of controversy several times in the past few months. Most of this controversy was stemming from what can only be called laziness on the part of Apple and the iPhone App Store. After the colossal embarrassment from apps like I Am Rich and Baby Shaker Apple was due for some good PR.

Dan Woolley has about the most amazing survival story I think I have ever heard, his spectacular tale even rivals that of Aron Ralston. Woolley was filming a documentary about the current poverty level in Haiti. After returning to his hotel from a day of filming, he found himself in a magnitude 7 earthquake with nothing but his iPhone.

The dust settled and Woolley had sustained a compound fracture in his leg, a severe laceration to his head, and to top it off, Woolley is severely near sighted and he lost his glasses. Using his iPhone camera, equipped with an SLR focusing light, he took pictures of his surroundings. Using these pictures as his eyes, he was able to find his way to an elevator shaft. After reaching the elevator shaft, he used a First Aid app he had downloaded onto his phone to help him bandage his leg and head. Once he had patched himself up, Woolley continued to read about his injuries. The app informed him to keep himself awake, just in case he was suffering from shock. Woolley then set his phone alarm to go off every 20 minutes. This is how he was able to survive for 65 hours when a 6 story hotel crumbled around him.

There is even more to this amazing story and I believe even the most hardened person will be stirred emotionally by this tale's heart-warming conclusion. I truly hope that everyone reads this amazing account of survival. Not because there's such a thing as an iPhone whose battery somehow lasted longer than 6 hours, but because it demonstrates how beautiful the synergy between spirituality and technology can really be. The iPhone lasting that long alone, suggests divine intervention.


~ Kyle Jackson

Thursday, January 21, 2010

Technology Today

Over the last few days I've been working in a program called Adobe Flash CS4 to create a corporate video introduction. After completing the video I intended to turn it into a standard Quicktime video, like most things you view on the internet. When I tried to export it, however, the video looked terrible. Parts of it were missing entirely. So I looked it up to find some help, and as it turns out there's a problem in the program that happens with Macs. It's been like this since its release, and Adobe is showing no intent to change it.

Whenever I purchase a product these days, particularly concerning electronics or programs, I more or less expect something to not work properly. I expect to have issues connecting to the internet, or not having a touch pad work all the time, or having a program auto-quit on me in the middle of working. These are things commonly accepted in today's world of technology...they're bugs, they happen. My question is, why is it accepted?

Why is it acceptable for a company to put out what is, essentially, a defective product? The more I think about it, the less sense it makes. If my grandparents bought a product a mere thirty years ago and it didn't work exactly as intended they returned it, no questions asked. With electronics, for the most part, we don't. We suffer through the technical problems by trying to find the solutions ourselves or listening to a support line. What happened between then and now that allowed developers to get away with releasing products unfinished?

My gut reaction is that we're dealing with products far more complicated than ever before. One coding mistake, one misplaced wire, among the millions of code lines and thousands of circuits, can cause a slew of problems. It must be extremely difficult and time consuming to make sure all those parts are in order. That said, isn't it the developer's and manufacturer's jobs to make sure they are? I find it difficult to excuse those mistakes knowing someone gets paid to ensure it.

Is it about the rush to get the product out, do we have to blame ourselves for some of this? Not only for becoming okay with shoddy work to begin with, but for needing everything on demand so badly that it pushes companies to rush out their products? I look forward to the day when I can purchase an electronic product and not only expect it to work as reliably as a swiss army knife, but hold it to those expectations instead of letting its failures slide simply because it's electronic.

Monday, January 18, 2010

Crimes Against Humanity...

...well mine at least.

Social media sites like Twitter and Facebook have been surprisingly successful over the past couple of years. While these social networks have grown at an exponential rate, I have developed reservations about Social Media and Web 2.0. Not because of the tools themselves, but because of the way people are using them.

I have received far too many invitations to pointless apps whose only feature is to, “poke” my friends. The most advanced of these apps allows me to, “buy,” my friends, and make them, “poke,” each other. The best thing about these apps is that when I run out of fake money, they will gladly take my credit card number in exchange for more friend, “poking,” goodness. Even worse are the countless poorly written surveys that tell me, “Which character from Twilight are you?” (I’m Carlisle by the way)

This atrocious behavior is viral. E-chain letters and endless reposts of the same quiz for months at a time are growing at an alarming rate. I love those instances where I send my friends a great joke (and I only forward the very best) and they turn it around and copy it back to me (along with 225 of their closest friends). At the very least, my, “friends,” could listen to the words of Emily Post, “Don't send the joke back to the original sender.”

I can’t delete my, “Friends,” fast enough.

But I have had a slight change of heart over the past couple of days. On January 12th, 2010, a massive earthquake devastated the impoverish country of Haiti. Phones, power, and water were inaccessible for many of the citizens of Haiti, but surprisingly, internet access remained intact, and accessible, that is for anyone lucky enough to maintain power.

When hurricane Katrina destroyed much of New Orleans, communication was not available for several days. There were even cases with Katrina, where people could not reconnect with loved ones for months after the natural disaster. Residents of Port-au-Prince were able to communicate with relatives and friends outside Haiti, via Facebook and Twitter. Using this amazing tool, people with friends and/or family living on or visiting Hispaniola, were able to re connect with loved ones hours after the disaster, instead of days. Even more incredible, many people in Haiti were able to communicate with the outside world during, and immediately after this natural disaster.

If that wasn’t incredible enough, posts like this, "Text 'Haiti' to 90999 to donate $10 to the Red Cross for relief. It'll add the donation to your phone bill,” spread to all corners of the social media network. Within 48 hours, this social media campaign had raised over 3 million dollars for the Red Cross and the Haiti relief effort.

This Recent series of events have shown me that if used properly, Social Media like Twitter and Facebook can be really incredible. But please, for the love of all that is holy, quit telling me the latest thing your dog, “Snuggles” ate from behind the refrigerator. If this abuse of social media continues, you’ll leave me no other choice but to help the Bilderberg Group achieve their "goals."

~ Kyle Jackson

Friday, January 15, 2010

Trendspotting

Brent Shiely, iMarketing Technology Manager and Planner at General Mills since July of '09, has been kind enough to write a guest blog for us on trendspotting. His background includes over a decade of consultation work and internet marketing, and we are very happy to have his extensive knowledge available to us here where we can share it with you. Without further ado:

brentshiely

Predicting the future is the golden ticket to success! One talent to perhaps get you closer to becoming a fortune teller is Trendspotting – identifying trends as they happen with measurable data. It’s one thing to have talent, it’s another thing to have theory. This article attempts to tackle the theory behind Trendspotting.



We all want to get in front of something just as it’s about to happen. People have stories of purchasing stock before it “went big” like Google and Microsoft. Originally, I was going to write this article about something even bigger – Chinese business. It occurred to me that Chinese business is a perfect example of a Trend. Rather than writing about a specific trend, I’d rather “go big”!

I define a Trend as a measurable event that can be sampled over a time range. For example, business bankruptcies month over month – bankruptcies would be the event, month over month filings would be the sample, and data from the past six months would be the range. Often people look at events when trendspotting. Here are some examples:

• Annual number of children born in Brazil between 1997 and 2007.
• Annual total employed in China from 2005 to 2007.
• Monthly number of new business licenses filed in Russia between 2000 and 2008.
• Monthly revenue from mobile phone companies in India between 2005 and 2009.

The power of data to support your trendspotting is critical. Intuitive observations can often be brought to form with staticstics and data. Most good trendspotting starts with intuition, but you’ll need impartial data to back it up. One thing to be aware of, not all observations you see are trends. Be prepared to accept your observation was an outlier and more rare than you thought. Some examples of impartial data sources to support your intuition:

The Central Intelligence Agency World Factbook
– Yeah, I know what you’re saying. CIA?! How are they impartial? Turns out the US Government hires the best and brightest people to research and assemble factual data about every country in the world. If you want to learn about a far away place, the Factbook is a wonderful place to start.

The United States Census Bureau
– I recall assembling data for a client to demonstrate the size of a market in the United States. Up until factual data was presented, his colleagues would use data like, “huge” and “massive” – not “45.5 million households”.

Google Scholar
– Opinions from learned professionals have been indexed and made available to the general public. Often a trend has data and research that you can quickly obtain.

National Bureau Of Statistics in China – The Chinese Government publishes data much like the USA. Chinese population, for example, is still growing (1/2 of 1%), but the Tiger is still roaring.

Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) OECD – The data available here can help you pinpoint samples and ranges to support your events.

Benefits of Trendspotting

I’ve been very lucky with identifying trends only from my intuition. I learned the theory behind Trendspotting while getting my MBA at UCLA. Let me save you the tuition. You can use trendspotting in:

• Daily Business – You’re in charge of performing while on the job. You know the events you’re seeking to grow/shrink/etc. – identify measures to start sampling. Once you sample the events – measure it and identify a trend.
• Career Development – Thinking of a career change? What are events occurring in growing frequency where your talents are needed?
• Investing – This has been the big payoff for me. I invested in Brazil, Russia, India and China long before my friends. These countries are growing in personal income and productivity. Those are leading indicators to energy consumption.
• Education – What fields will be relevant over time? What events require professional expertise to make the events successful?

Monday, January 11, 2010

A 3dve Industry Perspective





Companies we follow in the conferencing & collaboration industry.


Business Model – Challenged Companies…
These companies (see below) are “established” players in the conferencing industry. Their services are heavily-laden with legacy infrastructure costs, traditional sales models and a “transaction-based” service mentality. While they appear to be embracing some new technology tools, their ability to implement new offerings is constrained by their organizational dynamics and limited capital resources.

Ultimately, all of these companies have pieces and parts of a solution that are valuable, but their challenge is whether they have both the management expertise as well as the financial flexibility to make the shrewd decisions that the current market dynamics require.
• ACT Teleconferenicng
• CITRIX
• GLOWPOINT
• ILINC
• INTERCALL (a division of WEST Corp.)
• OnStream
• PGI (PremiereGlobal)
• ConferencePlus (a divison of WESTELL)

Transformative Technology Players…
We watch these companies (see below) with a careful eye… in order to understand the strengths and weaknesses of their product offerings. So, that when our clients find ways to derive value from them.
• ADOBE
• AKAMAI
• CISCO / WebEx
• FACEBOOK
• GOOGLE
• LINKEDIN
• TWITTER
• SALESFORCE

And, finally, there are the 800-Pound Gorillas of the industry – a mix of “Telecoms” & “Tech.”
These companies live to commoditize (or “dumb-down”) services. If you work with any of these companies, please call us – immediately! Their products and services are not designed to meet your unique “needs,” but rather, they are set-up to optimize their low-cost provider business model.
• ATT
• BT
• GLOBAL CROSSING
• HP
• MICROSOFT
• POLYCOM
• TANBERG
• VERIZON

Thursday, January 7, 2010

Counterpoint



As much I respect my associate's opinion, I'm not prepared to stand on my chair and applaud Coke and its $2.5B advertising budget for coming up with a clever way to engage the community and get them to try a new Diet Coke that isn't actually Diet Coke because it tastes more like regular Coke after they changed back to the old recipe.

Instead, I'd like to share an anecdote about a friend who manages an amazing hotel in downtown Minneapolis. Unlike much of his competition, his hotel isn't part of a chain with an established brand identity reinforced by a multi-market advertising campaign or episodes of Mad Men. He has one line on a modest P&L that represents the entire means with which he can attempt to persuade people to stay at his hotel.

We hadn't spoken for a while when I received his invitation to become LinkedIn. While I was prepared to brush it off as simply a friend who was virtualizing their rolodex (a sporadic but increasingly common occurrence), within minutes of my acceptance, I got an e-mail from him asking me to call him when I got the chance.

I gave him a ring later that day and with very little friendly of our customary banter consisting of NBA talk and Clark Griswold misquotations, he told me that he was looking for some contacts to help him with a social media campaign. And while I was going through my virtual rolodex, he indulged my curiosity and began to explain his new found interest in the medium.

Paraphrasing up to the border of complete fiction without actually touching it, he said that as a hotel spending a dime to every dollar that his competition is spending, social media offers him the greatest return on investment and most level playing field. While his competition was airing commercials and filling up business periodicals, his hope was to leverage his hotel's impeccable reputation into a network that continues to gain the attention and credibility of the consumer market. Or, to plagiarize, engage the community as a call to action. A call that would hopefully be answered by a greater awareness of his hotel and increased room sales.

That's why I enjoy social media at this stage in its development. For now, it's a community of merit. Like something? Tell your friends. Shoot, they'll even give you a free upgrade/month of service/discount to do so. Don't like something? Tell everyone and watch the company that is paying attention respond to fix it. Or, even better, watch the company who isn't watching lose sales without even knowing why. That is until we completely botch net neutrality legislation but lets not digress.

So sure, maybe Coke deserves a little kudos for its efforts. It's scary for a company, especially one with so much at risk and the bank account to hire even the most endangered Polar bear to a talent contract, to blow up the water wings and jump in at the deep end of the growing social media pool. But as people like my friend have begun to realize, the fact that those with so much are still reluctant makes it even more valuable for those trying to compete with less when they do.

Monday, January 4, 2010

Doppelganger

In October Coca-Cola began gathering data for a facial profiler that allows facebook users to find their look alikes around the world. The purpose of this advertising method was to show the similarity between Coke and Coke Zero, but what the web site does is unrelated to their product. Instead, Coca-Cola is offering customers and curious people (some who may not even drink Coke, like myself) something beyond their product. They're providing a source of entertainment. This is an example of an advertisement method that is meant to break Coca-Cola into a community. Instead of looking like a corporation that only pushes product, they've come up with a method to engage the community so the product pushes itself.

This is an extremely important thing for companies to do, that is, engage their community. Just selling products doesn't cut it anymore. Offering something more than your competitors as a differentiator is getting there, but it needs to be more than even that. Customers and potential clients need to know there's a face to your company, they need something they can connect with that doesn't make them give you money but does give you their time. Why spend the resources on such an effort?

You reach a larger audience. If you're only marketing your products, you won't be reaching the millions (billions?) of people who have no interest in what you do or sell. Now at first glance that may seem like a good thing, why spend resources on something that's not targeting your consumers? Think of it this way, if you own an MP3 player have you always thought you needed one? Was there ever a point where you didn't want one at all? When that changed, what was the first one to come to mind? Probably the iPod. This is because Apple made you aware of their product's existence so that when you did have the need they were waiting for you.

I learned something very important from an old professor of mine, Nancy Rice (founding partner of Fallon and advertising legend), advertising is not about trying to get someone to purchase a product. She referred to it as a call to action. It's making people aware your product exists so that when the time comes when they want something you sell, they go to you.