A Wider Net

Nabaztag - a wildly buzz-worthy robot that speaks, listens, blinks, and wiggles - can wake you up, tell you the weather and the traffic reports, read you the news you care about and email that you don’t, and even help you send secret messages to your rabbit-toting significant others. It’s worth a few minutes to play around on their site - you won’t believe me otherwise. It’s a communication bot and a toy, but unlike most other robotic devices that read you your mail and tell your kids stories - this one has moods, speaks it’s own mind, and listens to you.
I haven’t figured out if this creepy-yet-awesome rabbit is a sinister plot or a wildly inventive communication gadget. There’s something orwellian-creepy about a fleet of talking rabbits placed at our bedsides that receive their programming via the internet. I can imagine TV Tech-u-dramas called “Max Headroom Raving Rabbids” or “Star Trek Series 15: The Trouble With Nabaztags”

No matter how you slice it, these cute rab-bots are full of smart technology, and they do bring to mind one interesting marketing hook: Can you gift these to your customers in such a way that the critters will have to broadcast your news updates every morning while their owner is having coffee?

This is Engadget’s fault. But if you send it to a key customer and they love it, then it’s my fault.

According to iMedia Connection, a recent eMarketer study indicates that 46% of users would not watch a video ad longer than 20 seconds. I think that’s too long - especially for Gen Y.

On a related note, when you’re planning your webcasts, consider the success of video shorts found on You Tube, Google video, and recently, Brightcove (Get Smart clips - woot!) People LOVE short-and-to-the-point.  Like this post.

Adrants links to a few clever agency christmas cards here. Clever… but while these elaborate e-cards were being made, who was handling their clients?

There’s a ton of video on the web. Among this ton of video, is nearly a ton of video we can all live without. Gotuit Media has an answer - personal video tagging from any video source. This means that you can watch a video on the web, anywhere, and using the Gotuit system, identify the part that’s cool or relevant and share just that part with people. Then, you can add other scenes from the same video, or scenes from other videos, and stitch them together into something entirely new. It could be a highlight reel of football moments, or presidential mispronunciations, or it could be a collection of commercials from all your competitors.
Sharing videos has great viral potential already, and sharing sequenced bits of videos can be all sorts of fun, but it’s going to give the ad-insertion people fits. Gotuit seems to allow you to serve up a piece of a video without any leading or trailing ads, and without any of the source owner’s player page brands or banner ads.
In this example, a user compiled a chain of their favorite Family Guy scenes.

I’m not sure how this is legal, except it’s possibly protected in much the same way deep-linking is protected on web sites.

This tool may have practical applications for marketing and communication people as well, allowing you to easily tag and organize pieces of videos to illustrate examples, provide training on specific subtopics, etc.

I think it also should remind us that putting a video on your website doesn’t mean it’s going to stay on your website. Assume it won’t - and make sure that video carries your brand and message even if it’s lifted out of your page or player. A simple “bug”, like a logo in the lower-right, may be all it takes.

Then, hope and pray that someone cuts up your video and sends it to a ton of friends, and they do the same, and so on, and so on, and so on…

Via Techcrunch.

round tuit

Remember the Million Dollar Homepage? No? Here it is - the most ugly page ever, which netted it’s college-kid creator $1million by selling clickable spaces as small as 1 pixel by 1 pixel at $1/pixel. Brilliant. A lot of cheap nothings in viralspace apparently equals a cheap lot of money.

Well, he’s back again with another way to make a million box. Pixelotto is off and running, offering not-so-premium pixels at the still low price of $2/pixel. This time, however, he’s offered an incentive to everyone who clicks on those adds - a chance to win half of his revenue or $1,000,000. Apparently, the drawing to pick the lucky winner isn’t until after all the pixels are sold. If, after a year, the pixels aren’t all sold, then the winner gets half the lot.

It’s pretty ingenious, because to win, you have to register, and to win, you have to click. He builds a nutty-huge opt-in database, gathers money, and splits it with a winner. Not bad.

Via Adrants.

Swivel just launched, according to Techcrunch. This is still a very early startup phase for what may be a wildly interesting data playground. Users can submit their own data - any data - and share it with the world. Then other users can play with that data, compare it to other data, and share that with the world.

Data purists will hate this as much as historians initially hated the Wikipedia. But, properly used, this will be fun, interesting, and ultimately - valuable and informative.

See the graph below that was on today’s front page. There are already almost 600 data sets to play with and cross-analyze. You just have to be careful about drawing conclusions that may be due to other factors.

No, this isn’t a post about how to present the perfect toast at a wedding, bar mitzvah, or company downsizing. This is about toast - the kind you eat - which, strangely, also involves buttering-up something.

Check out the Zuse - a high tech toast printer. While currently not for sale, according to Gearlog, this baby can print your logo on toast at a whopping 12×12 pixel resolution. So, when the brilliant folks at Inseq Design realize what they’ve got, prepare to see little Bud logos on your Panini sometime soon.

I spent a decade working with lasers in live entertainment, and the industry has changed significantly over the years. Lasers still have their place in live events because they possess unique qualities - brilliant, truly pure colors, long reach (they stay thin), and unparalleled speed and precision. The days of using laser graphic animation at corporate events are largely over, but the use of laser beams and atmospherics to create visual impact and reach out over the crowd is still highly relevant.

So, it’s nice to see lasers used well in high profile events. The gang at MTV Europe deserve a nod for their production of their recent awards show, and I wanted to highlight one piece in particular. The video clip found by clicking the link below contains a performance by a band called Muse, and features a sudden and dizzying eruption of laser beams. The beams appear to be created with an array of “microYAG” green lasers and are scanned all throughout the room, including at the audience. While audience scanning isn’t typically allowed in the United States, this European show exemplifies the pace, brilliance, and impact of well-utilized lasers.

For those of you who have used lasers before, it’s especially nice to know this type of show can now be done with laser equipment that plugs into standard power outlets and doesn’t require water cooling. Believe it or not, this type of show USED to require a torrent of continuous flowing water to cool the lasers, and each of those little green-emitting boxes would have required 30,000 watts of electricity and been the size and weight of a full cast-iron bathtub.

From this nice list of (possibly) underappreciated blogs, you might want to take note of a few in particular (ripped right from the list):

23. Ypulse You can count the number of people making a living by blogging on a couple of hands, but be sure to add a digit for Anastasia. If you think you know what teenagers are talking about today, you may reconsider after reading this blog, which tracks everything that the kids (Generation Y) are into.

25. We Make Money Not Art
There’s an easy way to get me to fall in love with your blog — just link to a meat chess board, and I’m all yours. The international talent on this blog covers topics in the digital arts: social media, electronic design, wearable computing, etc.

8. Subtraction
An editor from The Atlantic who was doing a story on buzz-building recently contacted me about finding the source of a meme he saw on Fimoculous. He asked where I got it, and I said Subtraction, to which he replied, “that’s what everyone else said too.” A blogger’s blogger, Khoi Vinh is the new design director at the NYTimes.com, which might sound high-brow, but his personal site has the quality you most desire from a blogger: curiosity.