Despite the persistent dull thuds of individual apples being dropped on the floor, Elaine refused to give in to Gary’s passive aggressive demand for a coffee table.
I think it is only a matter of time until we see more Pinterest snark. The form has already been cast by sites like authors of catalog living and unhappyhipsters.com. Pinterest should be the great canvas where this mode of unadulterated snark might find it purest expression.
I tried it. It’s hard. These two are geniuses.
Apocalypse No.
This ad is wrong in so many ways, it’s kind of hard to start. First, why a Mayan apocalypse? Mayan apocalypse is no more probable than a zombie invasion, virus outbreak, or the gods of Asgard coming down to earth. Any of those offers a lot more comedic opportunity. It might be better to stay away from apocalyptic scenarios altogether. Disaster is not far from the top of my mind. Last year a tsunami and nuclear meltdown poisoned a fifth of Japan. The earth is getting hotter because of industrial activity. Industrial activity like building Chevy trucks that get less than 20 miles per gallon. I don’t advise car companies to evoke Ragnarok, but if you have to go there, at least, have it make sense.
For example, what kind of jerk would look at the destruction out the window of his truck and smile? If the world ended in a cataclysm, the first thing I would do is go looking for my wife and kids or my siblings or my mom. I might smile at my dog, but it would be a bittersweet gesture as I fixated on the all the people killed and ripped from their loved ones. I wouldn’t go meeting up with a bunch of fat guys at some random place (Wall Street?) to talk about who or who didn’t survive and what truck they drove.
If I were that into trucks, I would have driven down to the nearest Landrover dealership and taken my pick of the trucks on the lot. (Or the Ferrari dealership). Then, I would be focused on rounding up a couple of years’ supply of gas, food, and ammunition. See, I’ve seen all the apocalyptic movies and I know the script. Speaking of, isn’t the Walking Dead the best show ever. I’ve been reading the serialized graphic novel and if that isn’t literature, I don’t know what is. Chevy had an awesome product placement in that show, when Glen finds a brand new orange Camaro, hot wires it, and uses the wailing of the car alarms to lure the zombies away from the other survivors.
Second, if the guy just drove out from under a pile of rubble and his truck is undamaged, why is he all dirty? What exactly is the timeline here? How did he get into the truck if it was under a pile of rubble? Frogs fly from the sky at the end, but before that, the spot becomes buried under an avalanche of red herrings. There is a Bob’s Big Boy sign on fire, a giant robot a la Transformers, and a kilometer wide spaceship from Independence Day. Cool references, but what does it mean?
Basically, they got it all wrong. What this spot needed was zombies. Zombies give the protagonist something to struggle against. Maybe Ford trucks just don’t hold up against zombies as well as Chevy. That is a storyline I could get into.
The understanding I am left with is that the apocalypse happened because of the same kind of unthinking consumerism that is epitomized by people whose main interest in the immediate aftermath of a world-ending cataclysm is to figure out which kind of truck is better and eat some twinkies.
TwitPic @adam_hinton
Last week, I wrote about Nike Fuel and the FuelBand that is being launched this month. I took a spin over to the Nike channel on youtube and can see how the marketing is shaping up. This is going to be a hit. Nike has managed to wrap up the idea of “Just Do it” in the functionality of the product and just like they managed to move fitness apparel into a fashion statement beyond the strictures of performance athletics. The product engagement ecosystem includes the device and it’s design, the smartphone apps, the website apps, twitter, celebrity athletes and endorsers.
Message #1: All activity is good and athletic
Message #2: “Be Like Mike”
The way Nike is marketing this idea may very well get people over their reticence to post their exercise activity. I don’t post my workouts on Facebook because I don’t want to brag and I’m not sure anybody really cares. I do post them all to Endomondo and share because I want to find other people who are running in SF and want to encourage anyone who may be interested. But everybody on Endomondo is already “doing it”, so I’m not recruiting new customers. I think Nike Fuelband users will post on Facebook. They are already posting on Twitter even before the Fuelband is in the market. The #Makeitcount hash tag is generating a ton of activity. You have a mix of consumer and celebrity athlete tweets streaming on the site. The idea has legs, and Nike has a product that will help users realize their aspirations.
On a related note the Nike athlete vignettes look a lot like an ad I helped make back in the 90s for Adams golf:
Bagel making at La Victoria on ravn.com
You wouldn’t think it too hard to find something an activity for the family on weekends in San Francisco. The city is a tourist Mecca. It’s practically designed for amusement. Yeah, right. I find myself scrambling through the listings on sfgate.com trying to find something age appropriate that isn’t a San Francisco tourist franchise. That’s why I was delighted to find ravn.com. Just type in what mood you’re in, and who’s in your posse and your price range. The site comes up with interesting appropriate activities to do. I can see it becoming a regular part of my planning. Check it out!
cc/flickr/mlpeixoto
If you’re like me you just wrote down some New Year’s resolutions. I was on the site 43Things, and I noted that someone had listed using the Pomodoro Technique as one of theirs. I looked it up and was intrigued. I’ve tried Getting Things Done and a few other list-making methods that promised to make me more efficient, but I found it very hard to incorporate any of them sustainably into my practice. Pomodoro, on the other hand, has been an immediate win. It works like this: First, you list all the things you want to complete in the day. Then, you break your day into 25-minute time chunks, and assign the tasks you want to complete across them (estimating, in 25-minute intervals, how long it will take to complete each). Time chunks are indivisible. If something takes longer than 25 minutes, you break it into multiple 25-minute time chunks. If a task takes less, you aggregate the task with another in that takes less so to make a 25 minute chunk. On your task list, these chunks of time are called pomodoros, after the tomato-shape of the kitchen timer that the originator of the technique used to keep track of the 25 minutes cycles.
During that 25-minute chunk, the pomodoro, you focus intently on the one task you’ve assigned to that time. Distractions, whether self-created or external, are brushed away, duly noted on your list of things to do, or assigned their own pomodoro to complete.
You then race to complete each task within the 25 minutes allotted. No more “5 minutes more.“ If something takes longer than the 25-minute chunk you allotted, you then allocate another 25 minutes. The system focuses your efforts on completing parts of tasks, breaking it down into digestible chunks. You give things their due. The net result is that you end up being either really efficient and getting things done within the allotted time, or, spending more time than you ordinarily would and increasing the quality of the work.
The biggest difference I noticed is the change from a rollercoaster of guilt, fear, shame and elation as burdens are taken on and lifted off. Instead, you launch a series of sprints with clear deadlines that give continual satisfaction of continual progress toward a worthy goal.
I have made a commitment to do Pomodoro for a week. We’ll see how it goes. For someone like me, with the attention span of a cracked-out hamster, this kind of atomic organization is very helpful. I’m all checked out on lists. I have an extraordinary ability to focus. I have 360-degree awareness. What I have a hard time doing is staying in the moment. Perfectionism and fear of doing less than the best possible job can be paralyzing. Pomodoro is looking promising enough to get me over these hurdles.
Perhaps this blog post is the best example of what I am talking about. It usually takes me about 3 hours to write a blog post. I do three drafts. I agonize over the grammar. This blog post, on the other hand, was completed in 25 minutes.
Oh Behave! may be the simplest and easiest way to parenting an obedient child. One of the age-old problems with discipline is not knowing what to do, it’s being consistent. Giving a kid a two minute timeout should be easy. It’s not. First, you need a clock. You must watch it diligently to catch when two minutes have passed. If you’re like me, devoting two minutes to clockwatching is not really what you want to be doing. Especially since the misbehavior or outburst that earned a timeout already kept you from something you wanted to do. Consistently promoting good behavior in your children just gets even more complicated. The available tools like point and reward programs just add complexity. I can barely find my childrens’ jackets, how am I going to regularly keep tally of their behavior points?
When I am putting together a project, I usually focus on describing a system on paper before automating it. The odds of my coming up with something genuinely useful without it having been fully expressed using paper and pencil first is pretty low. But child discipline is all verbal.
The problem is coming up with a suitable consequence on the spot, remembering what you said, and carrying through with it. Even more difficult is staying in synch with the other parent. If you two show the slightest bit of uncertainty, your smart child will quickly learn to play you off each other. And, most parents don’t do all that reward-chart-points-off-for-misbehavior stuff because it’s just freakin’ more work! Note re: above on the chaos that is parenting!
Enter Oh Behave. Timeouts, rewards, misbehaviors, consequences, points, tracking and communication all in one easy, coherent and simple app. You’ll remember every misbehavior, timeout and consequence. Your partner will know all the bad and good stuff your child did when he or she was with you. Problem solved. How much would you pay for such a miracle? Let me know!
It seems as though the long drought of typography on the web is finally over. Type foundries and browser makers have come to an entente for the distribution of type faces over the web.
The Babbage Blog at the Economist details the new WOFF File Format 1.0 which utilizes data streaming and online repositories rather than DRM to deliver type faces to web sites in a orderly fashion. I’ve used SIFR and flash to set type online but this has always been a bit clumsy and difficult to guarantee proper rendering on all the browser and platform configurations. I believe that the standard will be adopting rapidly.
Coachella phone: http://www.flickr.com/photos/andrethegiant/
When I first saw Twitter in 2008 at the Web 2.0 show, I didn’t get it. I still don’t. And apparently I am not alone. A recent Yahoo Research Study showed that .05% of Twitter users generate over half of all Tweets. I’m talking about you Justin Bieber. (#winning.) Being in the social media marketing space, I have to think of how to leverage all the social media channels, every mention of Twitter makes my head hurt. After years of suffering I think I might have found some relief.
Enter the Color iPhone app. No, it doesn’t provide any relief. What it does is give me some insight on why I can’t understand the appeal of Twitter. Here goes.
I’ve been using Color for the last few weeks. I take pictures that the people who are in my immediate vicinity can see and comment on. And vice-versa. Cool. Why do I need that? I don’t know. The pictures in my local Color group are of SOMA traffic intersections, grubby 20 something hipsters perched around a conference table, computer screens and coffee mugs. Meh.
Maybe I’m missing something. My underwhelming experience with color got me thinking about the other kind of social-mobile-location-based-sharing apps. With a little bit of breathing room today, I decided I would check them out too. I installed Yobongo, (a neighbor here at Pier 38), Groupme, Beluga, and Instagram. Yobongo – like an AOL chat room except of geeky 20 somethings instead of 13-year-old girls and 50 men masquerading as 13-year-old girls. On Yobongo, I have a total of 2 girls who are discussing a gross-out Japanese game show. I work in an office with 40 companies all in the Web 2.0 tech space and that’s the total action going on. Groupme – can’t tell you, it wants a phone number, but the iPhone I am using is doesn’t have cell service, only Wi-Fi, so can’t use it. Beluga – I don’t have a bunch of people I want to text at the same time. Instagram – I’m kind of stuck with taking pictures of my desktop, or the window, or the coffee machine. I can’t see how I am going to use these things.
I’m probably harsher than I ought to be because I don’t like crowds. I become uncomfortable whenever I am in the midst of more than 200-300 people. Going to the opera is a strain for me. And the real value of apps like these three is that they allow people to share their impressions of shared experience at events that are spread out and have many facets. At Coachella or SXSW, these kinds of apps would have an immediate application. Where you have lots of very specific discreet experiences. There may be 10 must see presentations or performances going on simultaneously. Since individual participants can’t be all places at once, sharing media to communicate impressions of the fragmented experience is of immediate and significant value. I avoid events like that. The ones I do go to don’t lend themselves to the application of technology.
For example, I am a fair-weather baseball fan. I’ll admit it. My fandom for the Giants began last year when they spanked the Braves. But I did go to some ball games. A Giants game may have 26,000 people at it, but I don’t need any technology of an iPhone app to mediate that experience. I can hear the roar of the crowd. It’s clear what the general and the immediate experience is. The crowd roars or boos or heckles depending on the action. If I want a more substantive conversation, I can consult with the fans immediately around me.
One place where I think this kind of functionality could play a big role is at Burningman. At Burningman, there are not dozens but hundreds of very high engagement experiences going on simultaneously. No one can see them all or even be aware that they are happening. Every year my friends’ photos from the event show art and spectacles that I had not even an inkling of. It is just too massive to take it all in.
Which is a long way around to my thesis, which is: The events at which these kinds of apps gain their loudest buzz may be the only place where they provide any value. Twitter, Yobongo and Groupme shine at SXSW, because this event has the precise conditions where the app can deliver value. Take it out of its native habitat and you get streams of pictures of coffee mugs.
If I’m right about this then there should be significant doubts about the viability of the use case for these apps. An application, which is only useful 2, or 3 times a year when the user is at a large eclectic event is maybe too much solution for the problem. At the same time, the applications Color, Yobongo etc. all require a abdication of the principle of privacy and relevance that operate in the regular world. Showing you pictures to everyone, broadcasting your texts to anyone in the vicinity flys in the face of what we consider normal discourse here in the real world. I propose that this might be a manifestation of a cyber “mob mentality”. That is the phenomenon whereby people cast off their inhibitions and relax their moral principles in the context of a large crowd. Perhaps this is why these apps don’t make much sense to me in my everyday life.
Contrast color to Pixamid, which instead of broadcasting picture to the most proximate users, focuses on delivering a timeline of your images to your friends on whatever photo service or social network they use. Finding ubiquity in social networks and providing the tools to reach your friends on the channels that they prefer to communicate seems to me to be a more useful enabling technology than the unfettered broadcast to ad hoc communities that is the feature of Color.
Here at Bizily, we are in the introductions space. In this space, the same principle applies. On the mob mentality end of the spectrum, are companies like Hashable. Hashable provides a way for you to broadcast your meetings using Twitter. Hash tags characterize the meeting and the application keeps a record of your tweets about your encounters. Users can keep track of with whom they are meeting and let their friends know. There is also an introduction feature where you can hook up two people that you think should know each other. Although you don’t necessarily broadcast to the world, Hashable is like Color in that privacy or relevance are not considerations of the tweets and posts you create from these encounters. And Hashable is designed for the real world without the benefit of a mega-festival milieu to justify the loss of privacy or the mob mentality effect to compel it. For real life everyday use outside the unique conditions of the mega event, an approach to introductions that follows Pixamid’s angle is perhaps better. Make it easy to reach out to friends using all the networks, channels or devices that they prefer. Users are on Facebook, LinkedIn, or Email. They may be in your address book or your phone. Facilitating easy introductions is more dependent on bringing all these profiles and contact information together than it is on the complete abdication of social norms about privacy and relevance. That’s kind of where we are going at Bizily.
Shoestring budget. Does it get the point across? Check out: Hüklüp