Last August I was struck by how many comments Tara Hunt got when she took a picture of herself in her Failwhale T-Shirt. That was 2008 when twitter was for geeks.
Now it's 2009 and on a quiet March evening in London Imogen Heap who is best known for "Let Go"did the same thing with 3x times as many comments in a short period of time. I'm also pretty sure that very few of her 57,939 followers are considered 'in the tech industry'. She racked up 7,982 views to her Twitpic page, which means that 7,982 people clicked from seeing Imogen Heap tweet that she uploaded a picture. And then 23 people could not help but comment about her and the Failwhale she was wearing.
Facebook is making products talk too - I enabled Netflix with Facebook connect today, rated one movie, Midnight Run from 1988 and already I've had 3 comments in 1/2 hour
Here are all Imogen's comments from Twitpic
Monday, March 30, 2009
Twitter bump: Failwhale sightings on land prompt much conversation
Wednesday, March 04, 2009
"Hey, Ivanka Trump" says Ruben Blades, "Panama it will never leave you"
It is next to impossible to find on the internet, but if you have been in a cab lately Ruben Blades has recommended you visit Panama in the Panama Tourism commercials on NY10taxi TV.
Thanks to John Carney at The Business Insider in his pickup of Latin Business Chronicle Ivanka Trump is now forever linked in his post "Weirdly Smart Ivanka Trump Says its Time to Party in Panama". So now in terms of the web, we're sure that Panama will never leave her.
Unfortunately you cannot find the video of Ruben Blades' commercial anywhere on the web, but it is begging for a mashup and fake summit, romance or otherwise that involves Ruben Blades salsa singing and dancing and courting his newest, all-business spokeswoman, Ivanka Trump. There are, if you must look, much less interesting and lower production quality videos of panama on Youtube and on panama tourism sites.
The commercial is campy and says there are so many birds that you could have an air traffic controller pushing feathers in the rainforest. In the video a bird poops on the air traffic controller's shoulder and Ruben Blades says 'Get that man a hat' (would love to add a link here, BBDO, Ruben?).
Ruben, I must ask you...now that Ivanka Trump is saying that Panama's Real Estate is a bright shining light in her portfolio, doesn't she deserve a hat too?
Monday, February 02, 2009
Pillow Talk with Vlingo and Fennec
Remember this rumor on Gizmodo?
There's a lot of fear that the execution wouldn't work because typing could suck, which is why we were graced with the 'MacWheel' on the Onion News Network recently. You can learn a lot from a spoof, and the MacWheel rightly pointed out that we're not ready yet for touch screen computers, both in terms of usability and popular disposition. But touchscreen netbooks are not far away; the technology is ready, the marketing use cases are not.
There is hope today, in the form of two new browsers. One is a mobile browser that deals well with limited real estate and touch screens, Fennec from Mozilla, and the other, which is much more groundbreaking to me, is vlingo. Vlingo is a 'browser' of sorts but it's really just a layer of control to the web that uses voice to navigate. Here is the AppVee review of Vlingo if you haven't used the app already.
I wasn't much into voice controls, especially in public. What's good about vlingo's interface is that it only uses voice to suggest and pre-populate words so that you can get most of the way there to a search or status update or even a voice dial. You can then use the touch screen to edit what you've said like the google voice search application.
Although this extra layer of voice control does not take away the need for a browser, the voice-to-text interface makes voice the center of your world and lets you input information in a variety of modes.
It's not a surprise that it made TechCrunch's top ten iPhone apps of 2008. There are lots of voice to text companies, SpinVox who's done something similar in the EU as well, and then there's Yap, Voodoovox, Jott and PhoneTag. When touch screen netbooks take off however, it will be interesting to see if vlingo and or these other companies take off with them.
I said in a previous post about ChaCha that I would be embarrassed to use a voice application out in public, but I'm quite comfortable talking to inanimate objects in my house. In fact, if I'm folding my laundry, I'd much rather use voice and then tap a few corrections rather than be stuck walking back and forth to a desktop and finding the typing position at an upright computer or carry around an awkwardly folding laptop.
I think that trend towards nice flat netbooks will soon see the use of vlingo, or like apps working overtime as people sitting in bed start talking out searches and quick notes and editing them before sending them out. Here in an UWS studio, talking is the perfect way to control my media. I love and would not trade my AirMouse + iMac combo, but after a while trying to control Hulu from across the room with my iPhone starts to feel like archery.
With vlingo + netbook, or vlingo + TV there's less typing and that comes much much closer to a universal remote. Most of the work will be about selecting your results and how and where to share the information you have readied for public, private or semi-private consumption.
And this is all using language, there are even voice tools for humming commands, like this drawing done by Ze Frank.
Try the voice drawing tool for yourself...
Since you're saving lots of keystrokes using vlingo, you can now forget those silly keyboard shortcuts. If vlingo brought you to Fennec, you could replace keyboard shortcuts like 'cut' with a little scissor icon and forget about your mouse. Fennec then offers more touchscreen gestures like dragging the screen left or right give you the ability to share, email or browse to deeper content.
The picture below shows Fennec from Mozilla, which has a menu with star, page back and page forward that appear only when you wipe the screen to the left. You'd see your tabs if you wiped the other way, right. Right now the iPhone's Safari slows down your browsing behavior on mobile in the same way that IE did on the desktops in the pre-tab world.
With easy to get to tabs, and the view to what other tabs are open you can multi-task on a smaller screen more easily.
I'm not sure on the form factor, but the new idea from a google engineer could test well - the NIMble looks like a strong prototype for the touch screen, but voice could really make it interesting.
I say voice is the new frontier in technology precisely because it has not yet been made fun of to my knowledge on any comedy show. What should be a much more difficult technological advance, potentially the last piece of the information logistics puzzle would be to give the screen a 3rd dimension, so that what we say could come in as holograms like we saw in the minority report in 2002.
But that has already been spoofed here in a new episode of Lazer Cats on this week's Saturday Night Live. (click through to skip to this spot in the video)
Friday, January 30, 2009
The Reading Rainbow Guy's Answer to the Kindle...
When I come out of the subway and see this poster, the first thing I think of is, 'She needs her peripheral vision.'
She looks like a lady I know. If I didn't know her, she'd be the lady....I didn't know. She's chopping broccoli...
(click thru to skip the long skit intro)
Then I think, 'She'll need mittens because she shouldn't be practicing cooking with these things on.' 'Her face should look like she's saying please don't think i'm a ditz for using this to watch a cooking show.'
Yes, many things are wrong with this picture. I tried to sympathize with the 'my view' makers (I had to think about the name even longer - meeevooh?). I finally realized the intended customer. YES! It's LeVar Burton!! You know, the reading rainbow guy. Yeah, he wore one of these later on in his career if I remember correctly.
Then I became angry, because I got the Reading Rainbow song in my head. I adapted it for the ad, 'Take a look! It's not a book, it's myyyyyyyyvieeeeeeeeeew!!! STOP. Just stop and call this an iSee and everyone would get it.
But since they didn't call it an iSee I kept with the LeVar Burton ad campaign...later on in his career they called him Lt. Commander Georgi LaForge.
This looks like groundbreaking technology, but tell me how many people have any idea that this is for an iPhone or iPod?
Wouldn't a better ad be, 'Who wants to carry around a Kindle?' and show a picture of LeVar LaForge?
The TV commercials would be him singing in the reading rainbow style, wearing both the myvu and the star trek garb, then falling into manhole when wearing these walking around the city?
Maybe not.
If you want effective futuristic teaser ads, just look to the KGB.
The Knowledge Generation Bureau...the futuristic trekky version of ChaCha. No matter how many people know about similar services, the popular consciousness still begins on TV. Maybe if I saw MyVu on TV first, none of this would have been necessary.
Monday, December 29, 2008
Welcome to the Compensation
I've had this picture of John Roland sitting in my phone for the past month and wanted to write a post, but I had to get my head around the true meaning of what Compensated Spokesperson meant. When I searched to see if others had the same reaction I found this post on Lost City.
I used Camerabag to improve this iPhone photo, and that's the only difference from mine and the one on The Lost City, or others that people have sent me after I shared mine with them. They are the same damn photos, because they are all just too funny. To even keep writing here I must add some analysis, so here's what John Roland's Wilens and Baker ad for legal services means to me about our society.
John Roland's Title is part of an old media meme that I'm calling the Compensation.
The Compensation includes Robert Wagner of the Senior Lending Network. "I know you must have lots of questions" as Robert Wagner would say. As the economy crumbles advertisers see the need to stand upon rocks.
We must reverse this bad economy with trustiness, and since we no longer have Charleton Heston with us, after Robert Wagner
we look to the appropriate Anchorman
for our local area, a statesman to see us through these hard times. It's kind of screwed up that we cannot somehow stop companies from pandering to our need for security and trust, and allow commercials targeted to people who cannot see that we cannot reverse our problems with reverse mortgages. However, choice wins and for now there is momentum in choosing paternal figures to hawk predatory lending products.
Maybe the Madoff scandal will turn attention to this, but hopefully not until a few more of these hilarious posters make it into the subway and commercials show up on late night tv.
There is however a really interesting social trend here though - the same trend that made my favorite Anchorman, Will Ferrell make the skit about the Coconut Bangers Ball in which Robert Goulet is selling his Rap disc. (note, this clip is not on Hulu or NBC.com!)
"The Compensation" uses gangster rap tactics to sell to people who just happen to buy Cadillacs, by saying John Roland, 'he gets paid' and you should listen to people who get paid. That's why we see real estate newspaper-thick ads dedicated to Donald Trump's real estate conferences. The Compensation, it's a rap!
Wednesday, November 19, 2008
Looks like I picked the wrong week to start sniffing Glue
Start using Glue people! NYC Startup, firefoxy, good design, new idea, very social. I can't be the only one who has reached this page over the past week, it just means there's not enough glue. Check out Glue from Adaptive Blue. Gotta have more friends on glue.The title, if you were wondering is a take on Airplane! when Lloyd Bridges in a running gag that has him relapsing into every imaginable substance abuse, finally says he has "picked the wrong week to stop sniffing glue." And if you use Glue, you'll see that 6 people visited that page on IMDB as of like right now.
Oh and they have an iPhone app.
I'll check back later on the Chow.com post to see how you're all doing. After I figure out how to say Txikito. Txikito.
UPDATE: Nice work guys, looking only a few hours later...
Tuesday, November 18, 2008
Welcome Back, Improv Everywhere's take on the random act of kindness at JFK
Mr. Charlie Todd has outdone himself with his latest scene called Welcome Back. He's getting schrewder, getting sponsored by brands while making a scene. Welcome back is part of the ongoing 'In an Absolut World' campaign for Absolut Vodka, which I'm guessing is TBWA, the same agency that did the great Be Kanye Now campaigns running one the 1,2,3 subway line a couple of months ago.
My favorite Improv Everywhere was Frozen Grand Central which I posted back in Feb, which was given tribute in a Law and Order episode that starred Robin Williams--here's the original Frozen Grand Central video.
If you want to see these updates when they happen I'd suggest you follow Charlie on Twitter
