A Wider Net

I probably shouldn’t be giving up more links over to Gizmodo after the TV-B-Gone stunt but they have a very good point with this post that I had been meaning to highlight. At CES last week, IBM utilized female ambassadors with LCD screens embedded in their T-Shirts. This, by itself, is neither a problem or unprecedented.

They added a line of text to the shirt that says “Stop Talking. Start Doing” which is subtle, yet still fairly inappropriate. But it’s the fact that they require these women to say to viewers of their shirt-screens “Are you looking at my chest?” that puts them over the line. The outfit is ugly, the campaign is stale, and this tactic is embarrassing.

IBM - you’re a brilliant company with tons to offer. This doesn’t suit you.

Boooooooo to Canon. They sent me this (twice today):

Click the image to zoom in. With it, I can enter to win tickets to the Super Bowl. The medium print says “next year”. The fine print says “2009″. So here I am, a relatively young male living in New England, just days before the Patriots attempt to go to 18-0 and gain an opportunity to win another Super Bowl championship in a couple of weeks. I’m the perfect demographic to attract to a promotion like this for THIS YEAR.

Booooooo - no entry for me, thanks.

Pizza Hut, the $5billion pizza giant (they are 50 times larger than Papa Ginos - who knew?), just added support for mobile phone orders. The next two largest pizza chains, Dominos and Papa Johns, had already entered that space to some extent.

Hungry football fans can order pizza using their mobile browser or text messages. Pizza Hut aims to receive half of their order via online or mobile within five years.

As a logical progression, soon we may see these pizza chains offering special code scan promotions that look like this:

Here’s how it works: Pizza Hut would print these on ads or coupons. Users simply snap a photo of the image using their phone and a free scanning widget they get from a company like NWW who makes ConnexTo. The system decodes the code and connects their phone to Pizza Hut where they can place an order and receive whatever promotion they were offered with the printed ad. These things can probably be highly personalized, so a digitally printed image on a postcard can tell the Pizza Hut system precisely who the buyer is, look up their buying history, and give them a well-targeted offer.

I guess in that last scenario you’d have to be careful not to share those coupons with your friends. They may discover your deep, dark secret passion for pizza with anchovies, pork rinds, pickled beets, and gummi worms.

Steve Jobs’ 2008 Macworld keynote came and went the other day, as did my carefully written post about it. So upset was I, at accidentally overwriting half of it, that I shelved it until today. Ever been there?

Anyhow, I felt that having just written a retrospective comment about last year’s big Macworld revelation, the iPhone, it would seem logical to follow it up with something about this year’s keynote. This year’s keynote had it’s share of major announcements, although none of them quite as significant as the iPhone and none of them were strong enough to keep the stock market from plummeting that day on bad retail news.

Here were the major points from the keynote:

- iPhone and iTouch will get new software. The iPhone gets a free firmware update including a Google-driven mapping system that creates GPS-like functionality without actual GPS hardware in the phone. It works by triangulating the position of the phone from three nearby cell towers. Run out of nearby cell towers, and you run out of functionality for this service. Presumably you will also run out of roads to choose from anyway. The iTouch gets a suite of applications that should have been on the device to begin with including mail. The early adopters get to pay $20 for the update while new buyers get it for free. That’s two slaps in the face to early adopters in a year. Goodness, this brand is teflon.

- Apple TV Take 2 - A new, cheaper version of Apple’s set top movie and TV download-and-player is now able to operate without a Mac. So the price drop from $299 to $229 is actually a price drop from $2299 to $229 - if you count the previously necessary Mac. It also can download podcasts, designed for a 2″ screen, and feed them to your HDTV, maybe a 40-60″ screen. That will be a bit like looking at dust mites under an electron microscope - really nasty when magnified. Kudos to Apple, however - this service has a chance for success with every major studio already on board.

The significance of this product is amplified by the fact that Apple also announced a new laptop (See below) and neither the laptop nor the Apple TV box contain any support for Blu-Ray or HD-DVD. Apple has quietly yet profoundly declared the high definition optical disc format war, recently claimed over and won by the Blu-Ray camp, totally irrelevant. Downloads are the future. Microsoft was thinking the same thing, as their XBOX movie and TV download service had managed to grow to twice the size of their nearest competitor. This will certainly impact our video production and media authoring plans in the near future. I am very interested to know what the cable TV industry has to say about this product. I suspect they have something cooking.

I am also a little surprised that Apple TV has no user-rating functionality (at least, I don’t think it does). This is a big part of YouTube, and even Blockbuster and Netflix allow users to rate their content. The lack of community and peer recommendation within Apple TV and, for the most part, iTunes continues to disappoint. In fact, it doesn’t even appear to have preference-based recommendation engine like Blockbuster or Amazon. They seem to be completely blind to the process of media discovery by users.

- New Laptop. Easily the biggest news from Steve Jobs was the unveiling of the MacBook Air. An impossibly thin yet technically superior machine, the MacBook Air is as beautiful as it is respectable. It is a green machine (mostly biodegradable or biorenewable), and it is a pricey machine ($1,800-$3,200 ish). While the trend in notebooks has been toward the cheap, Apple and, to a certain extent Sony, have opted to maintain premium models to keep up their brand image.

You can check all this stuff out, and more, at Apple.

The keynote seemed to drain the life out of the whole internet. Everything ran slower. It worried me that all these new iTunes movie rentals are coming through Akamai, the same delivery network we were using to produce a live webcast at the same time as the keynote.

Footnote: The coverage of the keynote was extraordinary. Apple refuses to webcast the event, which is beyond belief. Instead, a legion of live bloggers, twitterers, and phonecam streamers delivered us the news guerilla-style. And it looked bad. Apple should really control the way it looks, and if they can’t keep a lid on it, they may as well broadcast it or allow it to be done right. This blog even listed all the top coverage and updated it in real time with the status, since many went down under pressure. QIK - a beta live phone webcasting system had a few brave souls trying to webcast it live, with very poor results. I still think they’re onto something BIG.

Saw this on Gizmodo and had to highlight it for our team and community: The Free Air Guitar promo:

From Ad Goodness

Reactrix, a gesture-based interactive signage company who is best known for their permanent interactive floor installations in malls all over the USA, partnered with Samsung at CES to showcase a new product called WAVEscape. Clearly a competitive offering to Gesturetek’s Gestpoint, the WAVEscape appears to be considerably easier to stage. You simply hang a 3D Infrared sensor bar above the screen and you’re ready to go (I think). The sensor can detect hands and fingers in 3D so it can react to motion such as a horizontal sweep or a forward point, which it would probably interpret as a mouse click. It appears to work with several people at once.

The video at Gizmodo makes it look fairly decent, although it suffers from the same awkward lag that Gesturetek’s products can have when the application isn’t well-tuned. They demonstrate the device being used in a “box the panda game” (has PETA seen this?), a traditional point-and-click application, and virtual volleyball.

As a method for creating a compelling interactive experience, with one or more participants, this looks like another promising offering. Is it as intuitive and slick as Microsoft Surface? Not even close - but it can service a larger crowd, will probably work through storefront windows, and is much easier to hang on a wall. It is also much easier to keep clean!

CNET has a nice article about it, too.

What do these devices have in common?

via multiple sources including Engadget and Ubergizmo

I managed to avoid posting over the holidays while I was on vacation, hanging out with family, and playing Rock Band while, strangely, our viewership actually went UP on this blog. To our readers who stuck with us through the holidays despite a brief lack of fresh content: THANK YOU.

I thought I should kick the year off with an oldie-but-goodie: 3D Viewers.

I found myself hanging around a friend during one of last weeks holiday gatherings who specializes in 3D of all sorts from the old nostalgia to the new IMAX movies. He was sharing some astonishing 3D still photos he had taken at various exotic places when he mentioned that he also produces 3D View-Master reels for corporations. It warmed my heart to hear that, not only are corporations recognizing the nostalgic karma they achieve by gifting these nifty contraptions to people, but they’re actually funding original relevant content for them.

If you’re interested in this stuff check out the official View-Master site, or one of these sites here, here, and here.
My friend’s site is also great 3D reference: Studio3D.com.

And as far as the relevance to New Year’s is concerned: Here is a View-Master reel that brings you into Times Square for New Year’s Eve at the Millenium.

Also, don’t forget about the American Paper Optics people. They specialize in branded paper 3D glasses, including 3D “fireworks glasses” used at (you guessed it) First Nights everywhere.

Billboardom covered these great video billboards/digital signs that feature the character in one billboard hucking a snowball at the character in the other billboard. Good clean fun. And very achievable with multiple screens in your exhibit, your lobby, the hallways of a trade show, or on the screens of Times Square. Just think outside the boxes.

Here’s a cool widget article from Adweek featuring a quote from yours truly.
Thanks to Richard Brunelli for the mention and for the insightful article!