A Wider Net

Two gadgets launched this this week that are worth mentioning here. The first is very well-known - the iPhone 3G. The second launched the day after to considerably less fanfare, but has big potential: The new HP TouchSmart2.

The iPhone is the easiest to talk about. The stories of it’s runaway success are second only to the stories of how it has completely changed the cell phone industry in the United States. Now the iPhone 3G is poised for a worldwide distribution at a price point that may very well keep it sold out for the rest of the year. Adding a support for the high speed 3G networks, better battery life, true GPS, and a host of software improvements that will be shared with it’s older brother and the iTouch line of media players, the iPhone 3G is a significant evolutionary improvement to the iPhone. At $199 and $299 for the 8 Gigabyte and 16 Gigabyte versions it is now cheaper than the Motorola Razor (at launch) and more functional than any handheld gaming system, all mobile phones, and many, if not most, laptop computers currently in use today. Some of us were a little disappointed at the lack of Flash support, lack of streaming video from the onboard camera, and lack of a 32 Gigabyte version, but this is still the coolest smartphone on the planet right now.

The HP TouchSmart 2 greatly improves on the previous model in form factor, functionality, and price. At $1300, it’s a pretty easy way to add touch and gesture control to a trade show demonstration kiosk. Take a look at the video on this link, but make sure you have the sound OFF first. You have been warned.

We’re producing a live video webcast about online video techniques? Cosmo Kramer makes a coffee table book about coffee table books and Cramer makes an online video about online video… is it just me or is that, like, really weird? Normally I avoid talking about Cramer’s work here on A Wider Net, but since this blog is all about marketing ideas and technology I figured this was an event our readers would want to hear about.

Developing online video programs for marketing and communications has never been easier, faster, or more confusing. Questions commonly asked include: How do I produce the video? Can I do it myself? How do I get it online? How do my customers find it? How do I measure the success of my online video programs? How do I make it go viral? Should I stick my video up on my website, on YouTube, or on some other network? How do I make it look great for everyone? Should I allow people to use my content on their sites and blogs? How do I build interactivity into my video content?

Do I have to use 8 treadmills or can I get away with one?

To answer some of these questions, check out Best Practices in Online Video: A Platform Approach on June 19, the first in our latest series of live webcasts. But rather than repeat all the details here, let me share a short promo video with you:

For more information and to register, please head over here. If you have any thoughts on what you’d like to see discussed, please feel free to comment on this post.

Twitter may not have the user base of Facebook or MySpace, but as social networks go, Twitter contains a dense population of internet early adopters and technology evangelists. Scattered among the millions of 140 character messages floating through Twitter each day, when it isn’t down due to capacity issues, are threaded discussions about consumer experiences with brands. Recently, Twitter users witnessed step-by-step “tweets” from one power user as she struggled with customer service at an Apple Store. She was having a terrible experience and her thousands of tuned-in Twitter followers knew about it. These are the sort of conversations that brands need to monitor and react to. Tracking twitter conversations is fairly easy. Doing something about what you find there - that’s not so easy.

Enter Frank Eliason. Frank is the person behind the Twitter account Comcastcares. I first heard about Frank through a technology podcast called “This Week in Tech” (TWiT). They described a person at Comcast Customer Outreach who had taken the initiative to handle service questions through Twitter and respond to them promptly. During the recording of the TWiT podcast, which is usually done in one take without edit, they were able to use Twitter to reach Frank at Comcast through his comcastcares account, and get him to call into the show via Skype. I was shocked at how quickly they were able to get him on the phone (although the skeptic in me is still not convinced it wasn’t staged like a “millionaire” lifeline call.)

To date, Frank has sent 4,000 public updates to his twitter account, each under 140 characters. He answers questions as well as he can and sometimes forwards information to his office for direct follow-up. I recently had an awful experience at a local Comcast branch (an hour wait in the rain to pick up a set top box) followed by a so-so experience with a pair of smart yet helpless technicians who visited my home. I decided to give Frank a try before I called Comcast to express my sentiments.

I sent a message to comcastcares telling him that my cable signal looks far better when I connect my cable directly to my TV then when I use their new high-definition cable box. This is only a problem on standard definition channels, which look great on my other HDTV on an older HD cable box. Two technicians had been out to look at it and told me that the problem was the new line of Motorola set top boxes and that they decoded standard definition channels poorly. I was told to find another out-of-service old cable box or “live with it”. The technicians, in their defense, were friendly and fairly knowledgeable, but had their hands tied. Within seconds I had a response from Frank asking questions. We exchanged short messages off and on for a little while and then he took my account number over a private message and said he would have someone from his office contact me. Within 24 hours I received a call from their executive offices who are now working the problem. I will update the post with news of how this turns out.

Frank is a breath of fresh air at a company that I was convinced had completely lost their way. Comcast may still have fatal flaws when it comes to pricing, quality, and service, but Frank is a big step in the right direction. By listening to the conversations on Twitter and answering them publicly to the best of his abilities, Frank is helping to turn some of the Twitter community into Comcast fans, which is both a tall order and a powerful PR achievement. The real question will be: Is Comcast simply satisfying the needs of these few in return for some positive word of mouth like this, or is Comcast taking this feedback from the tech-savvy Twitter crowd and using it to adjust their business? In other words, does Comcast really care, or is it just Frank? Time will tell and Frank will, hopefully, let us know.

Update: Shortly after the call from the executive offices, I received a call booking an appointment with a technician. That technician came to my house and while his knowledge was exceptional, mine was a problem he was not able to resolve. The technical description is below. The story from the perspective of customer service is simply: they made a good effort to resolve my issue. It was, ultimately, an issue that will require improvements in their infrastructure to resolve so I was fairly out of luck, but they tried. Am I happy with the result? Not at all, but I understand that this is the best they can do at this time. I will be giving Verizon a close look when my year of free digital voice runs out, listening to the reviews of my neighbors who are switching to Verizon this month. At the end of the day, all the customer service in the world can’t save a bad product, and that may be what we’re dealing with here. If they want to keep customers, I think they need to start acknowledging their shortcomings, make a road map to improving their product, and stick to it in a very public way.

Technical Answer: We tried swapping the NEW Comcast HD box with a previous model, which had been working beautifully in my house on a much larger TV. The result was that the picture did, indeed, get cleaner on standard definition channels, but my other TV still looked better. Apparently my other TV, a 3-yr-old Sony HDTV, has a much better ability to clean up crappy signals than my brand new Samsung. Both look great on HDTV channels. But the older model Motorola set-top box also crushed the contrast and color of the picture, and I rejected it. I preferred the noise. So it appears there aren’t enough bits in each of the Comcast digital channels - they’re compressing video into too narrow a signal, and depending too much on the set-top box and TV to decode and clean it up. Most of what we watch now is HDTV but most of the channels are still standard def, and most of them look like relative crap.

Just a quick note to highlight my current favorite Twitter stream: Tweets from the Mars lander, Phoenix can be found here.
This is a very nice bit of PR from NASA/JPL. As Hollywood fuels our fondness for robots with personality (good or bad) we love this personification of a robot that has successfully traversed millions of miles, landed on the pole of another planet, and has now begin digging in search of ice and other goodies.

I look forward to it’s updates and I find it’s handling of public questions to be more interesting than anything on the NASA and JPL pages. Well done. Now, if only Twitter were one-millionth as reliable as Phoenix…

Photo of today’s first dig in the dirt was snagged from Phoenix Mars Mission page.

Having just written about the gas price visualization, I thought I should get this one in front of you, too: An Australian advertisement that helps you visualize CO2 emissions from every day tasks and devices by portraying the emissions as filling up black balloons and releasing them skyward. Very good storytelling.

The advertisement is part of a “black balloon” campaign which states that each balloon can hold 50 grams of greenhouse gas. You can even download a desktop widget so you can tally up the emission equivalents of leaving your computer running. It’s not a true “widget” because you have to install it as an applications, but it’s a great idea nonetheless.

Loved finding this at Infosthetics.

Gas prices. The most common answer to “what’s up?”

Take a look at this map from gasbuddy.com, a cool zoomable mashup of gas prices across the continental USA. As a “temperature map”, the hotter the color, the higher the price. So you can look at this and divine two painful facts instantly: Gas is expensive as hell, and you’re probably in a rougher hell then most of the country. Visualizations like this are designed to tell a story, and I’m not sure what story this one is best designed for. It’s not like you can afford to drive from a red area to a green area in search of lower gas prices.

Colorful heat maps like this help support the irrational backlash against the oil companies for their “record profits”. I’m not a big fan of oil companies by any means, but their margins aren’t very big when you compare them to other massive corporations like Coca-Cola, who sells us flavored water that dissolves our teeth and makes us obese. If the oil companies gave all their profits back to the consumers, it would amount to a relatively small adjustment at the pump. Then, because the oil companies would have no profit to reinvest, it would ultimately lead to higher prices as their fields ran dry and their equipment failed. We don’t want another Valdez so let’s make sure they have enough money to build safe tankers.

I don’t know, maybe I’m extra sensitive to misleading information as a result of all my years in marketing and communications. But consider this: If you were to plot this same heat chart on a global scale, and include areas like Europe where gas costs $9-10/gallon, and the Arabian peninsula where gas prices sit below $.50/gallon, then it would plunge the entire USA into a uniform shade of pale green. That would tell another story entirely.

Wednesday night, the American Idol winner was announced. But the show ran long causing what had to be hundreds of thousands if not millions of people to miss the winner announcement due to their PVR failing to record past the scheduled time. My PVR, for example, recorded up to “The winner is… David….. Coo-”

I got the winner’s name, which was a delightful surprise by the way, but I missed the big emotional payoff immediately following. What did I miss? Tears? Freakouts? Screaming? Did little David get all Grand Theft Idol postal and take bigger, badder David out with a shiv? What? What did I miss?!?!?!?!

So I ran to the computer and went to the only place one can go at a time like this: YouTube. Already, dozens of clips had been uploaded from fans across America, bringing that exciting ending to me in crappy YouTube-shot-with-my-phonecorder quality. Despite the fact that the video quality was poor enough to make it difficult to tell David Cook from Randy Jackson, I got a sense of how it played out and was somewhat satisfied. (The video quality improved over time as people took more time to transfer the video from their Slingboxes and stuff)

So where was Fox? Asleep at the wheel again. I thought the wrist-slapping that the networks received at NAB this year was enough to teach them that timing is everything. Get your video up immediately after the event is over. If you’re a major TV network, your stuff should hit the online channels about fifteen seconds after the start of your on-air broadcast. If you have a live show that would be tricky, since the show hasn’t happened yet, so you have until about a minute after the show ends. Less if it’s a clip from earlier in the show.

Millions of people watched YouTube clips through the night and into the next day. Fox and Apple were nowhere. If kids can shoot, encode, and upload this stuff why can’t you?

Event Marketers - as you look to deliver your onsite event content online, which I hope you’re all doing now, consider the timing relevance of your content. Three or four weeks after the event is too long to be bringing archives online. The event has lost it’s mojo by then.

Perhaps you have heard of the OLPC campaign - Nicholas Negroponte’s vision of outfitting the children of the world with tools that allow them to access a larger world and experiment with creative expression. It is a noble idea, funded through a buy two, give one program at a very low price point. His initial program has run into fatal competitive pressure due to ultra cheap options from mainstream manufacturers. But now, apparently, a new vision has risen from the OLPC ashes that has many of us standing up saying “wait a minute - that’s not half bad, and I want one now!”

Here we have the OLPC 2.0, or, XOXO concept- a hybrid dual touchscreen, laptop, ebook thingy. It looks amazingly flexible and futuristic, but it doesn’t seem remotely possible to produce these cheap enough to sell at $75 as reported. I’m also not sure if this type of thing will inspire a child, especially one that is worried about his next meal or how to find clean water, but I can tell you - the conceptual design has inspired me.

Note to Steve Jobs: get your touch OS on this thing and sell it for $500 as an internet/media browser and e-book reader and I’m sold.

Seen also on Gizmodo.

Disney has apparently created a testing lab to determine how advertisements affect viewers physiologically. By tracking biometric measurements they can optimize content to produce the most positive physical (and presumable psychological) response. I guess I have a hard time believing this hasn’t been going on for decades already, especially since the concept was so optimistically laid out in “Max Headroom.” In this futureshock comedy, an evil network had developed a sinister brainwashing technique using rapid firing subliminal video suggestions called “blipverts” that resulted, occasionally, in the viewer exploding.

Looks like we will have to add this to our web design usability studies. Next we need to figure out how to measure the physiological response to any kind of customer experience. Can you imagine if they could measure this sort of biometric activity at, say, the Registry of Motor Vehicles? How about on a typical United Airlines flight or, more likely, a typical United Airlines DELAY?

Disney creates laboratory for biometric testing of advertisements - Engadget HD

Flogos are helium-filled foam shapes made of a soapy material that is bio-degradable and safe for aircraft (says the manufacturer). The machines, rentable for about $2,500 a day, create 24″ or 36″ wide logos at a rate of one every 15 seconds, which sounds great if you have a simple logo and need to catch attention at an outdoor event. They are apparently working on a 48″ version. Despite the manufacturer’s claim, I question how happy a traffic copter pilot will be to fly into a four-foot-wide logo made of anything, but having not tried it - I can’t knock it.

I’m a little late to the party on this one, but eagle-eyed Sue Pelletier apparently picked it up, as did OhGizmo! (where I found it initially) and several others. You can read the original source at Live Science and a great post on BLDG BLOG that contains some other sky advertising images and a very interesting article about sky writing from, believe it or not, 1892.