Technology

Crayon launches this week

/ Angelo Fernando / Leave a comment

Crayon_site
I don’t know Josef Jaffe, but as a listener to his ‘Across the Sound’ podcast, I have to believe that his new company, Crayon, will change the game in marketing. Ruffle a lot of feathers, plant a stake in the ground etc. etc, etc, as Jaffe would say!

Also, he’s teaming up with two people I know, Neville Hobson and Shel Holtz –fellow IABC-ers– and CC Chapman, all of whom have made bold moves into Second Life.

So it was not that surprising that Jaffe’s tease on his blog talk about the company launch at ‘an undisclosed island,’ actually referred to an island in Second Life. Neville, Shel and CC dislosed the details. Their headquarters will include "a theater, a presentation
amphitheater, housing, and a variety of other elements that will all be
unveiled at our launch party this Thursday, October 26."

Interestingly, Crayon, true to new media and marketing, is "not an agency nor a consulting practice…What we are is whatever you want or need us to be" as Neville says. For Shel, he’s "leaving the world of sole practitionership and independent consulting to join a startup."

For those who’ve listened to Josef’s analogies of the box of crayons, the name is quintessiantial Jaffe! This out-of the-box un-company is prepared to pull any color out of its crayon box. A true mashup, when you think of it, using a real-world writing tool as a metaphor of a company that will operate solely in Second Life.

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Wireless Libary project

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Techmobileopen
As information gets digitized, and library hours get slashed due to budgetary restrictions, the Wireless Library project offers some hope. This high-tech Bookmobile is in the Washington DC area. If we could only get one started in the Phoenix metro!

The objective of the XTreme Mobile, a 32-foot converted bus is to make books, programs and computers available topeople who live in areas where libraries have closed. It has space for 10 people, and can hold 2,750 volumes! It also serves as a wireless hub for people in the area who wish to get online via WiFi.

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A modest proposal for the dis-comfort zone

/ Angelo Fernando / Leave a comment

Josef Jaffe puts it well when he describes podcasting as an opportunity to be daring; a way for marketers to plunge into the experimentation of emerging media. "The rawness of it, the humanity of it, and the ability to do something that’s never been done before," he says is very important for marketers. I was reminded of his comment when I saw the news of WB launching into an experiment called Studio 2.0, a short-film division where ad content would integrate with programming.

In one of Jaffee’s podcasts (#49), his guest Adam Curry discusses how agencies took a long time to recognize that there was a better way to deliver content. Curry and Ron Bloom were streaming content way back then before broadband, using CuSeeMe (does anyone remember that?) which was the genesis of their new media company today.

The point, to be taken from all this is that engaging in risky business should be integral to marketing, or else, we will be doing something other than marketing. It’s about getting out of our comfort zone. But i meet dozens of marketing or communications people whose main complaint is that their bosses or their clients are totally risk averse, and slap them on the wrists for even trying something outlandish. Others want to wait until ‘the idea has been fleshed out better’ for fear that it would get shot down. That perfect time never comes, and the opportunity vanishes –in the direction of the competition.

So it’s about time we began rooting for the things that focus groups don’t tell us, the ideas that 8 out of 10 people (often in the office) say will surely fail because it’s way too risky.

So let’s re-instate the discomfort zone. Let’s put all the old-media platitudes about branding and synergy on hold, and experiment with some ‘raw’ material. Making mistakes is a better indicator of creativity than scoring hits. I don’t believe Apple would have created the iPod if they had not also made the Newton, the PDA than bombed more than a decade ago. They made a few mistakes but never stuck to the comfort zone. That’s my spiel for this week!

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Television in the broadband era

/ Angelo Fernando / Leave a comment

How will we watch TV five years from now? In our attention-deficit media environment, every story in print or on radio seems to draw us online with the "more information online at…" footnote or sidebar.  In a few weeks form now (Sept 5th 2006) CBS will begin to simulcast its evening news with Katie Couric, a definite nod to the fact that the once-captive TV audience is moving into broadband.

On the face of it, this doesn’t seem like anything new, because they have been all taking baby steps in this direction. ABC, NBC and others have all begun streaming news off their web sites. But not live, as will now become the standard. A few years from now we will wonder how we ever put up with time-delayed news clips for so long. Apart from news, there’s the entertainment side of things that’s clearly feeling the YouTube effect. CBS PrimeTime will make available hits like CSI and Survivor on Innertube, the broadband counterpart irolled out earlier this year.

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Subway agency pitch a bizarre experiment

/ Angelo Fernando / 1 Comment

I’ve scrutinized the so-called viral video and it beats me why an agency would think of this as the most creative way to pitch a client. Does the fact that a team can put-together hand-held video footage (some parts obviously staged) tell you anything about their approach? They talk of wanting to ‘learn about the customers’ perspective’ as if it was some secret sauce for marketing. And what’s with that ‘research’ question a woman asks of a man on the street. he seems to walk away in a hurry and she asks "are you allowed to talk to women?" if I was Subway, I would be deeply troubled by handing over my account to people who trivialize what understanding customers is all about.

Sure, the stint about working at the restaurant for a day was a good idea, but nothing novel there. Agencies have done that for years. As Steve Rubel aptly puts it, in the macro sense, Agency.com has set back the credibility of the social media, and hurt all interactive agencies

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Amazon’s video ups the ante

/ Angelo Fernando / Leave a comment

Amazon’s got the brand recognition, and the marketing savvy to own the digital video space. It’s a very crowded playing field in the digital download business when you consider iTunes, Zune (the Microsoft answer to the iPod)  Urge, and not to mention YouTube, and DivX (a Google partner)

AdAge looks at it as "the digital version of the Netflix rental model."

Having watched the FishBowl experiment on Amazon, I can see how they’ll find some very creative ways market their service. Apple, meanwhile is rumored to have a larger video iPod, so suddenly it could be a battle between not just like-minded services, but service provider vs technology.

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mobile phones drawn to the web

/ Angelo Fernando / Leave a comment

Those small screens, and the poor navigation on cell phones have held them back as far as m-commerce goes. I am optimistic that the W3 Consortium‘s Mobile Web Initiative might change this. Its Best Practices1.0 recognizes that web experiences which are essentially desktop-based should accomodate to devices that are different.

Soon we’re going to perform most of the web transactions on our mobile devices, as Paypal’s text to buy program shows. I could buy something by sending a text message to a number placed on an ad, and by typing the product’s item code in the body of my sms. Of course, since PayPal is now a part of eBay, a financial interface for mobiles will draw other online ecommerce sites to experiment with similar services.

Sprint, Verizon, T-mobile and Alltel support Paypal’s service, while O2, Orange, T-mobile, Virgin, Vodafone and even Tesco in the UK do so.

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Businesses that blog –the more authentic voice

/ Angelo Fernando / 2 Comments

Should every CEO maintain a blog? That’s a question being asked more often now, with the rise in popularity of CEO blogs such as new evidence on how much businesses lag on the blogging front is reported today in MediaPost’s Online Media Daily. Only 5.8% of the top Fortune 500 companies have blogs.

In a recent article I wrote for CW Bulletin, I noted how communicators, and the PR department in a company may want to blog, and even the CEO may be tempted to start his own blog, but there’s another department that usually frowns on such endeavors: the legal department. The Jonathan Schwartz and Bob Lutz blogs for Sun and GM respectively, may not be enough to tip the scales of corporate blogging. What it might take is for a lot of smaller companies to prove its value, and create a bottom-up momentum.

Take a look at Munjal Shah’s blog about Riya, a small company with a big idea –a visual search engine that uses face and image recognition to search the web. He says things no corporate communications person would dare say anywhere, apart from on a blog. Commenting on one reviewer of his service, he observes:

While I disagree with some of their UI comments (especiall because they wrote it before I blogged the new search strategy), from an SEO perspective, Riya is a disaster. We haven’t done even the most basic things like good meta-tags.

That’s right, the CEO calling his product a "disaster." How often do you see that level of frankness in product blogging? The ability to say things minus the spin is what makes company blogs more credible. There’s the approved company voice on its web site, and there’s the true voice on its blog. If you were a customer, which one would you return to?

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The other Nano scores big

/ Angelo Fernando / 1 Comment

Nano_plus PC World’s james Martin reviews on technology talks up the Creative’s Zen Nano Plus and how it came out ahead among other similar MP3 players in PC world’s audio-quality tests.

On output and frequency response, in addition to features such as an FM tuner (absent in an iPod) and more radio presets than its competitors, the other Nano is a better buy and a better experience. You could tell, I use one!

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