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Marketing Once Again Pushes The Envelope

Israeli startup Innovid is another example of how marketing is constantly at the forefront of technological innovation.

The company specializes in embedded video advertising and does it really well. I am not entirely sure I want development to go in this direction. But then again I'm turning 40 in a couple of weeks so maybe I'm just too old to fathom stuff like this. You gotta marvel at the execution, though.  

Web Statistics - How Good Are The Tools?

Are you into web statistics and do you speak Danish? Then this link to a comparisson of webstat tools  might be of interest to you. 

The writer is Jacob Kildebogaard, who works for the Danish online consultancy firm Deducta.

Memo From The Past

This is old news, maybe... but I find the memo that Microsofts chief software architecht, Ray Ozzie, wrote to all employees back in 2005 quite thought provoking.

Or maybe it is simply the way it is referened in the latest issue of Wired Magazine that makes it interesting. Wired hints at the implied messages from Ozzie in brackets.

"Our products have embraced the internet in many amazing ways (implied message: Not enough).
But for all our great progress our efforts have not always led to the degree they could have (We're falling behind).
And while we continue to make good progress on many of these fronts, a set of very strong and determined competitors is laser-focused on Internet services and service-enabled software. (And we're not.)
Even beyond our large competitors, tremendous software-and-service activity is occuring within startups and at the grassroot level. (Twentysomethings in garages are surpassing us!)
Many startups treat the "raw" internet as their platform. (While we're still trying to finish Vista!).

Pretty funny stuff. But this all happened in 2005. Ray Ozzie the it-visionary has had three years to change things. So why hasn't much happened, you might ask. Well, it basically just takes a freakin' long time to change the course of a super tanker like Microsoft.

Axure For Mac

I regularly use the beautifully crafted application Axure RP for making wireframes and prototypes of web pages. I do it on my pc at work, which is fine. But sometimes I would really like to be able to work on wireframes on my mac too. This however is not possible because the wireframe app is not made for Mac OSX.

This seems rather strange since a lot of UI- and IA-people tend to use Macs. So dear Axure, let's have a version that will run on an Apple computer, please :-)

Newspaper Ad Revenue is Stalling

New York Times today reports that newspapers are in for even tougher times. Revenue from web advertisement is  stalling:

"...the advertising glut, particularly in display advertising, on which companies had based their optimistic projections, has shrunk. As newspapers keep adding pages, they are forced to sell ads at cut-rate prices."

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Web 2.0 The Longest Suicide Note

Speaking on painkillers, too much coffee and sans power point presentation Ben Hammersley really aimed at provoking his audience at New Media Days 08.

"Web 2.0 is the longest suicide note in the history of media as such," Hammersley said and then set out to argue for the abolishing of user generated content in traditional media.

"As the generally accepted argument goes: Old media is dying and new media is very successful. Therefore we should stop what we were doing before and convert everything into a Facebook application. So that’s what every media outlet is doing," stated Hammersley.

His point was that the content users create isn't very good and that it can never reach the quality of  content written by professional writers.

"Stop moderating the crappy writing of a myriad of users who don't have anything to offer. Looking at user generated content is like taking a trip to the mental hospital to look at all the sick people who think they are Jesus in the vain hope that one of them for once turns out to really be Jesus," Hammersley said comparing web 2.0 to Bethlem Psychiatric Hospital in 18th century London.

If anything Web 3.0 will really be about writers finding themselves and for once concentrating on the art of writing, he noted.

While I do think Hammersley has some interesting points and isn't entirely off track - I also think that he is fundamentally wrong in the sense that web 2.0 and user generated content has never been about good writing. Accusing web 2.0 of bad writing is like accusing a horse of not being a dog. User generated content is about social interaction and relationship. It is not about creating a fine tuned, fact checked reading experience. That is and has always been the task of traditional media. If some of its practitioners have lost focus, I don't think web 2.0 is to blame. In stead blame lack of editorial vision and leadership and perhaps even laziness in tradtional media.

No iPhone Without Contract

Contrary to what you might have read on various blogs and news sites, there is no way to buy the iPhone 3G without a contract (i.e. plan or subscription) in USA.

I recently spend my summer holiday in the States and went to an AT&T and an Apple Store in Boston. At both places I explained that I wanted to buy an iPhone without a contract since I live in Europe and have no need for the AT&T-hook up.

The answer I got at both places was: No can do! The iPhone is not purchasable without a two year AT&T contract - which according to the sales guy at the Apple Store comes to a total of a couple of thousand dollars.

The Apple Store guy even looked at me all puzzled and said: But Sir, the iPhone is available in Denmark, why don't you buy it there?

heh, heh...

Well, Telia which sells the phone here in Denmark seriously over-prices the damn thing - and even charges you extra for unlocking it.  All in all the gadget winds up costing around 1200 dollars compared to the rumored 400-600 dollars for the American zero-contract iPhone. Besides... the Danish iPhone has been sold out for more than a month now.

You have to do a little digging on the the AT&T corporate Web Site but then you'll find a press release indicating that in the future AT€T does plans to sell the phone without a contract. But there is no saying if "in the future" means tomorrow, in the next couple of months or next year!

Carte Figurative

A couple a weeks ago, I attended the conference An Event Apart in Boston, MA.
There I heard a presentation by Jason Santa Maria who talked about the narration of design. He briefly  touched upon the french engineer Charles Joseph Minard and his Carte Figurative (from 1861) showing the progression of Napoleon and his army to Moscow and back in the campaign of 1812.

The chart is famous for it's clear and simple communication of something incredibly complex, difficultly graspable and horrific (i.e. the progressively lower number of soldiers in Napoleon's army in relation to temperature and location).

Thereby the chart has become quite a guiding light for designers everywhere trying to communicate complexity with simple measures.

Another presenter at the conference Jeffrey Veen also referred to Minard's Carte Figurative. He pointed to the fact, that Minard himself said this beautiful thing about the chart:

"The aim of my carte figurative is ... to convey promptly to the eye the relation not given quickly by numbers requiring mental calculation."

Veen - a former designer at Google Analytics - has this insight to offer:

"Well designed sites "convey promptly to the eye" what's possible, while doing so intuitively as to avoid "requiring mental calculation." That's not to say we should treat people as stupid. Rather, we should help them focus on what they're trying to do, rather than struggle with the means for achieving it."

Rules Of Co-creation

Anyone working with on line communication should check out James Cherkoff and Johnnie Moore's Co-creation Rules. The two guys eminently sum up what building a relationship with your customers is all about.

In traditional marketing the aim has been to create a finished piece of work that people will enjoy or find useful in some way. In the modern marketplace it’s more effective to invite people to participate. In practice that means making an offer that is sufficiently enticing for the customer to want to become involved. With modern marketing, you let the customers do more of the talking.

Right, you are.

 

iPhone Knocks Out Telias Danish Site

The new iPhone brought Telias Danish webshop to its knees today. Customers were simply told to wait in line. At 1 pm I got the message: You are number 879 i line pLus a message stating, that all black 16 GB iPhones were sold out.

What a bummer :-)

Swedish owned Telia is the only telco in Denmark selling the the Apple hot phone.