Technology

Saving your contacts in the ‘cloud’

/ Angelo Fernando / Leave a comment

If you haven’t heard of cloud computing, where have you been?

Seriously, not many people know about this, and those who do are quite confused about it. For good reason that I will get to in a moment.

But there’s a service I came across that seems like a good way to get those business cards thrust at you at a recent conference or event saved on a  remote server to be accessible anywhere. It’s called Cloud Contacts.

Sounds a nifty thing, since you ship them a stack of cards ina  prepaid envelope, they scan it and save it in formats that you can suck into Gmail, Yahoo or Outlook.  Except that it strikes me as a pricey way to go ($29.95 for 100 cards, $69.95 for 300) considering that (a) you could type that information yourself on a plane, say, or pay someone to do it if you’re that lazy (b) You could buy yourself a card reader for the price of getting them to scan 500 business cards.

For all its geekiness, cloud computing at its basic level is nothing flashy or new. If you have a Yahoo or Gmail account, all your saved email, your contacts and folders exist in the cloud, so to speak. If you save your files to an online storage service like Dropboks.com, those files are basically in another cloud. Heck, your Facebook profile exists in a cloud as does your Plaxo contacts. To me it’s another name for what has become the third place where we work — after the PC and the mobile device.

And because it is so many things we know of and didn’t realize –there are many more dimensions to it — it confuses us.

Listen to the leading tech folk describe it here with more gravitas.

Quotes for the week ending 3 January, 2009

/ Angelo Fernando / Leave a comment

“Resuscitating a dead guy — particularly one whose yearning for peace has been used to sell everything from diapers to ice cream — never works in your favor.”

AdRants, on John Negroponte’s use of John Lennon for a campaign to promote One Laptop Per Child.

“Social Media is right-hemisphere brain function…which is why the left-hemispherical ROI evangelists have a hard time understanding it.”

Ron Ploof, new media evangelist and consultant.

“It can be a trivial and childish realm, filled with blather about bodily functions, pet excrement and what users had for breakfast, lunch or dinner.”

Julio Ojeda-Zapata, in the book, Twitter: From Blather to Business.

“Health care is one of the best messengers of peace between nations.”

Mike Leavitt, US Secretary of Health, blogging about what Iraq Prime Minister Maliki told him.

“I have decided that my goal for 2009 and beyond is to be famous for relevance.”

Nathan Wagner, blogger at RelevantChews.com

“You have proven that Wikipedia matters to you, and that you support our mission: to bring free knowledge to the planet, free of charge and free of advertising. You’ve helped make and keep Wikipedia available for the whole world.”

Jimmy Wales, Wikipedia founder, at the conclusion of the fundraiser since July 1st, 2008 to raise $6 million.

2008 in Retrospect: The Good, The Bad, and The Absolutely Hilarious!

/ Angelo Fernando / Leave a comment

We said goodbye to some extraordinary people this year.


PR disasters and signs of the times

  • Bill O’Reilley’s studio performance over a teleprompter
  • Scott McClellan‘s unconvincing tell-all book on his White House years.
  • New York Governor, Eliot Spitzer busted in prostitution scandal
  • Alaska Senator Ted Stevens found guilty of ethics violations
  • Illinois governor Rod Blagojevich charged with corruption
  • Sheriff Joe Arpaio of Arizona launches immigration busts.
  • Sarah Palin ‘pranked’ by two Canadian radio DJs, into believing she was speaking to French president, Nicolas Sarkozy.
  • The Big Three car makers, GM, Ford and Chrysler, arrived in DC to ask for a bailout in their corporate jets. They were sent back and returned, driving hybrid vehicles. One even car-pooled. Honest!
  • The Guardian in London, declares Gillette ad featuring (Roger) Federer, (Tiger) Woods and (Thierry) Henry the worst ad in 2008.

Milestones:

  • The 15th birthday of Hypertext – Tim Berners-Lee
  • Barack Obama elected the 44th president of the U.S.
  • The iPhone cuts its price, and adds a new model
  • The New Yorker‘s controversial cover on the Obamas
  • The 2008 Olympics in China
  • Dipnote celebrates one year as a blog
  • Blackberry introduces Storm, the answer to the iPhone
  • ASU’s Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Comm celebrates 25 years
  • Saturday Night Live‘s YouTube skit on Sarah Palin
  • Arizona governor, Janet Napolitano, picked to be new Sec. of Homeland Security
  • Christian Science Monitor – shifts from daily to Weekly
  • bizAZ Magazine folds due to downturn in economy
  • The horrible Mumbai terrorist attacks, which now have a Wikipedia entry

Data becomes art: what a virus and a microblogger look like

/ Angelo Fernando / Leave a comment

They steal your passwords, hide under the folds of your browser, and turn off your virus protection software.

Alex Dragulescu turned these deadly computer virus into visual models that look like works of art.

We work with huge amounts of data at the Decision Theater, and often over-simplify what we refer to as a ‘visualization’ — a JPG, a PowerPoint, a map are, after all, visualizations. But data can be rendered as a city, a strand of DNA, a mathematical model…a Twitter user’s digital profile? That’s an eye-opener for me.

Take this, from Alex Dragulescu. It’s a look at what Twitter users do when they micro-blog, creating a data profile as it were. As Alex puts it:

“we visualize the topical and temporal patterns to create a portrait of the author.”

A new ‘out of office’ message. Harsh, but necessary

/ Angelo Fernando / Leave a comment

Like many of you, I’m taking a few days off  always wondered what it might do if we were really honest in what we wrote in our Out Of Office message.

Such as:

“Hi! I am outa here. No email, no forwards to my Blackberry. (Ha! I don’t even use a BB!) If you really have to get a response, sorry but that’ll have to wait. I wouldn’t bother you when you are having surgery or on your honeymoon, so I won’t pretend that I would ‘get back to you shortly’ –that would be pure BS.”

Would that offend anyone?

So, this approach by Danah Boyd made me want to applaud.

“For those who are unaware of my approach to vacation … As such, I’ve trained my beloved INBOX to reject all email during vacation … You cannot put anything in my queue while I’m away (however lovingly you intend it) and I come home to a clean INBOX. Don’t worry… if you forget, you’ll get a nice note from my INBOX telling you to shove off, respect danah’s deeply needed vacation time, and try again after January 19.”

For all our transparency talk, we still ‘craft’ a lot of nonsense when it comes to our corporate communication channels. Voice mail out-of-office messages are no different. I’m going to experiment with mine in a few days, so if anyone has recommendations, love to hear.

Bernoff: Corporate blogs need to earn trust

/ Angelo Fernando / 2 Comments

Josh Bernoff’s commentary around recent study by Forrester Research on the low trust of corporate blogs is very timely. At least for me. I contribute to a few other blogs outside of this one, and have just stared a corporate blog for the Decision Theater.

I instinctively shunned the style of a blog that deals with just my work place. Granted, it’s quite an unusual place, with a whole bunch of 3D visualization, technology bragging rights and is also the ‘front door’ to Arizona State University. But people come to walk through our doors for solutions, not brochure-speak, and I like to tell them that the “about us” part of the 5-screen presentation is really about our clients, and the big issues out there in decision-making.

Bernoff’s point is that a corporate blog shouldn’t come across as corporate stuff forced through a blog platform. In fact it should not be a 100 percent about the organization.

I couldn’t agree more.

  • I trust Dell and subscribe to their blogs like Digital Nomads not because of what ‘the company says about its products, but because of  the conversations they allow to take place around the Nomads idea.
  • I often click on a company’s blog before even read their press release, so why would I read a blog that is written like an extended press release?
  • The ‘platform’ doesn’t earn respect in an of itself. It’s the human voice. Reid Walker writes a blog about ‘WorldSourcing’ that happens to be a blog for Lenovo. He’s the VP of global communications, but writes about books, outsourcing, innovation… not about Lenovo ads or PR.

TechCrunch’s Michael Arrington’s fatwa on PR

/ Angelo Fernando / 1 Comment

You better watch out, you better not cry, you better rein in your PR spammers I’m telling you why…

TechCrunch‘s Michael Arrington has launched a missive a la Chris Anderson, saying PR firms are out of control. Specifically, it’s the PR people for the tech industry that have raised his ire. Now, he’s mad as hell and … will be putting a lump of coal in your stocking.

But it’s not just about PR spam, it’s about the abuse of the embargo. TechCrunch is now launching a sort of a fatwa against the embargo. See Death to the embargo.

“We’ve never broken an embargo at TechCrunch. Not once. Today that ends. From now our new policy is to break every embargo. We’ll happily agree to whatever you ask of us, and then we’ll just do whatever we feel like right after that. We may break an embargo by one minute or three days. We’ll choose at random.”

Arrington also warns that his blacklist is coming. Is this drastic, or has this been coming?

Cross-posted to ValleyPRBlog. Join the discussion there!

Where’s that 3D Web we were promised?

/ Angelo Fernando / Leave a comment

Whatever happened to all the business infatuation with the 3D Web?  Until a little over a year ago, when Second Life was all the rage, it seemed like we would one day interact with each other as avatars, on a 3D Web and two-dimensional interaction would be history. Young people would check into Habbo Hotel,  and business folks would mouse over to IBM, PR types would exchange virtual business cards on Reuters’ island, car buyers flock to Pontiac island, and those needing a technology fix would fly over to Circuit City.

It’s not entirely over with SL. Accenture is still recruiting  at their virtual career center there. But lately the bloom is off the rose, and instead of spending time over sculpted prims and private islands, people are getting into more pragmatic modes of interactivity. Reuters (!) reports that the Second Life Community Convention (in real life, mind you)  in Florida last September, only drew half the number of attendees that came in 2007.

Flash has grown up to a point that we could give users a simple 3D experience like this without crashing their computers. An interactive game or animation with data input could hop across a number of platforms. Even create realistic simulation and movement like this.

We don’t live in one dimensional worlds, and some form of 3D will be part of our online experience. But I was at a tech meetup yesterday and one of the takeaways from that was, despite all the ra ra about web 3.o being upon us, we all seemed to agree with Aaron Post that those sites that will be valuable will be those that have an offline component.

Offline, as in Real Life. As in the original 3D, interactive experience!

I say this, even though a lot of impressive work we do and showcase here at the Decision Theater is in 3D!

Quotes for the week ending 13 December, 2008

/ Angelo Fernando / Leave a comment

“sliding down Hell-in-Handbasket Ln.

AdRants about Virgin Mobile, commenting on the offensive/kinky video featuring an intoxicated Mrs. Claus.

“Goodbye, eyeballs—hello, conversations”

Article at Ragan.com featuring Katie Paine’s six steps in social media, where she advises against going for the nebulous value of media, and focusing on that which is measurable.

“This Wasn’t Quite the Change We Envisioned.”

Headline of Op-Ed by Barack Obama, quoted in Politico, which notes the rising dissatisfaction of Liberals with Obama’s centrist policies.

“There are still opportunities to defuse this.”

Duncan Clark, on the  Chinese government’s plan requiring foreign computer firms to submit security technology -which includes data encryption secrets –for government approval.

“…to bring the joy and the interest of our Islamic art to an Australian audience.”

Artist Phillip George, on his line of 30 Inshallah surfboards featuring Islamic art on display a beach in Sydney.

“When it comes to gaining consumer confidence, company blogs are the used car salesmen of the media world.”

Mark Walsh, on the news from a Forrester Research report that only 16 percent of people trust corporate blogs.

“You naysayers can laugh all you want. You’re just troglodytes caught up in old-word illusions like “ROI” and “profit” and “sales.” You probably scoffed at pioneering technologies such as Betamax, CueCat and Friendster, too, didn’t you? You talk trash about Web 2.0 and we’ll use the power of social media to bankrupt you just like we did Pepsi and Motrin”

AdAge columnist, Ken Wheaton, making fun of the Web 2.0 cheerleaders.

“Old World Perspectives on New Technology Is What Ails You.”

Response to the article above, by reader Rodney Mason.

Bubble comment lets reader talk back. Scary! Fun!

/ Angelo Fernando / Leave a comment

Have you heard of Bubble Comment? It sounded pretty cheesy at first until I clicked on a link someone had left on this article in Advertising Age.

Some background: Ken Wheaton, who writes a fabulous Adverting Age column, AdAges, wrote a piece poking fun of the whole Web 2.0 thing. Granted Wheaton was merely being funny, (“Web 2.0 Cured My Cancer and Made Me Taller — and Rich!”) but some didn’t get the joke. He also raised a lot of hackles by ending with some hard facts woven into the parody:

“You naysayers can laugh all you want. You’re just troglodytes caught up in old-word illusions like “ROI” and “profit” and “sales.” You probably scoffed at pioneering technologies such as Betamax, CueCat and Friendster, too, didn’t you? You talk trash about Web 2.0 and we’ll use the power of social media to bankrupt you just like we did Pepsi and Motrin”

So the responses have been a mix of furious and this-guy- is-surely-nuts. But the whole point of this is to highlight what one commenter did, rather than said.

Turn up your speaker volume, click on this link, wait a few seconds and you’ll see. I won’t give it away, except say that it takes speech bubbles to a dare-I-say 2.0 dimension.