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by: Alain Thys
Do you know the penguin dilemma? Hundreds of penguins standing on the edge of a cliff looking at the water full of fish. So why don’t they jump in? Well, among the fish there may also be an orca, and he quite literally has penguins for breakfast.
by: Eliane Alhadeff (also see Business & Games)
TechCrunch, among several other sites, recaps the rumors of a Google powered virtual world based on Google Earth which surfaced in January; over the weekend there was word that Google might be testing their virtual world at Arizona State University (ASU).
Continue reading "Google Powered Serious Games: A New Virtual World? " »
by: David Armano
Is it possible for design to be too good? At last weeks Design Research conference, Tania Aldous of Whirlpool gave a stunning presentation called " Winning the Hearts and Minds of Consumers". I cannot overstate how visually magnificent her presentation was.
by: David Polinchock
Richard Hytner presented on the Saatchi Lovemarks approach. Rolf Jensen (www.dreamcompany.dk), futurist, said the highest paid profession in the 1st half of the century will be storytellers.
by: David Armano
Rob points us to this insightful article in the Globeandmail. I especially like this excerpt:
"Executives at Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia took great pains earlier this year to make certain the company's redesigned website looked flawless before rolling it out to the public.
Continue reading "Why Execs Are Stumbling in a New Media World" »
by: C. Sven Johnson via Business & Games
Well, there’s been so much buzz about the possibility Google is creating a multi-user virtual world it’s kind of hard to miss. What’s equally hard for me to miss is the apparent surprise being registered by so many people. Hello? Are Google and Microsoft investing time and money in creating 3D representations of the Earth so that we can simply be impressed? so that we can download their applications and wander around them in social isolation like some modern version of The Omega Man… minus vampires? C’mon, already.
Continue reading "A Collection of Virtual World News Items" »
by: Karl Long
If there was a techmeme for marketing Firebrand would be the most talked about story for sure. Even technorati which famously lumps every blog in the world in the same category is listing Firebrand in it’s top ten searched terms. With Rohit, Jaffe (Firebrand is a client of Jaffe’s Crayon), and Steve Hall weighing in it’s generating a lot of buzz in the Marketing O’Sphere.
Continue reading "Firebrand - Extremely Ambitious Advertising as Content Destination" »
by: Guy Kawasaki
Chris Brogan is a social media expert specializing in building communities using digital tools. He is co-founder of PodCamp
, a free unconference exploring the use of social media like podcasting and videoblogging to build relationships. He produces the Video on the Net conference for Pulvermedia and blogs at Chrisbrogan.com
by: Guy Kawasaki
I loved this PowerPoint adaptation of "You Know You're Old When" (be sure to read the comments). Here's also an audio version that I did. Just in case you missed it the first time around.
Continue reading "Presentation of "You Know You're Old When"" »
by: Roger Dooley
A few weeks ago, WIRED published an interesting story on the massive amount of testing that has gone into producing Halo 3. The biggest part of this has been usability testing to ensure that the game is continuously playable.
by: Eliane Alhadeff via Business and Games
Mechdyne Corporation is the world’s largest company dedicated to consulting and development of immersive, networked and collaborative visualization systems.
Mechdyne’s subsidiary Fakespace Systems Inc. applies the skills acquired over 18 years of innovation and market-building experience to offer the industry’s broadest range of large-scale and immersive displays and interaction technologies.
Continue reading "FakeSpace: Serious Games As Doors Into Virtual Worlds" »
by: Ilya Vedrashko
AdAge: "The HeadOn, apply directly to the forehead spots (YouTube) are arguably among the worst commercials ever from a creative standpoint. They're annoying, repetitive, obnoxious -- and effective."
Continue reading "HeadOn Spots Effective in Driving Sales " »
by: Dick Stroud
The only age group to show a rise in the divorce rate last year was the over-60s, the Office for National Statistics announced on August 31, 2006.
by: David Jennings
My book is out in the UK. If you buy it from Amazon.co.uk
Continue reading "Net, Blogs and Rock'n'Roll is published" »
by: Guy Kawasaki
Like CEOs, marketers, engineers, entrepreneurs, and venture capitalists, lawyers tell their own specialized tales. Most of my experience is with lawyers who do work for tech entrepreneurs, so this is my focus.
by: David Armano on Design Research Conference
If you're writing a book—you might as well take the advice from someone who's already written a few. Louis Rosenfeld is considered one of the founding fathers of modern day information architecture and co-wrote the "Polar Bear" book titled "Information Architecture for the World Wide Web".
by: Joel Makower
Markets for environmental products and services tend to cluster in categories. Makers of computers and other electronics, for example, have almost unanimously embraced energy efficiency, product takeback, and the like, as demands accelerated from from customers, activists, shareholders, and regulators. Energy and environmental considerations are also becoming commonplace in appliances and most other energy-consuming goods -- with the notable exception of automobiles. It's hard to find a dishwasher, for instance, that doesn't boast about its energy-saving features.
Continue reading "Follow the Money: The (Slow) Rise of Green Financial Services" »
by: Christian Smagg
Blogs, podcasts, video-sharing sites, social networks ... You will find below great graphical representations of Forrester's Social Technographics® research
results … a very informative set of charts as to the demographics of Internet users and how they spend their time online.
by: Roger Dooley
Online community builders love to toss around gross numbers - twenty thousand members, two million posts, and so on. Amid all the statistics, it’s important to recognize that all community members aren’t created equal - some are a lot more prolific.
Continue reading "Taking Care of Your Best Community Members " »
by: David Armano on Design Research Conference Day 2
It's day 2 at the deign research conference in Chicago. Steven Herbst of Motorola drove in interesting point home with a video from a focus group. You have to be careful when putting folks in a "lab environment"—essentially asking them for their opinions. Watch the video and make your own conclusions.
Continue reading "Use Caution When Asking People What They Want" »
Continue reading "Advanced Brand Strategy Masterclass Week 4 - Managing Brand Architecture" »
by: David Armano on Design Research Conference Day 1
Day one of IIT ID's Design Research conference is done and I'm already looking forward to day two. Couple of observations right off the bat:
1. Design and research go hand and hand.
2. Design Research, like any research can be manipulated.
Not so long ago when browsing through a glossy Danish magazine (forgot which) I stumbled across an ad for RENT A MINI, a car-rental company based here in Copenhagen.
by: Roger Dooley
The company cited by Brand Sense author Martin Lindstrom for doing the best job of sensory branding is Singapore Airlines. Now, Korean Air seems to be making its own major effort to appeal to multiple senses… via the primarily visual medium of television.
Continue reading "Korean Air Tries Sensory Branding - on TV" »
by: Ilya Vedrashko
This is too meta. Koinup, a social networking site for avatars from across all virtual worlds, just sent a press release about its launch: "In Koinup you can create your profile and publish pics, videos (machinima) and stories you created in virtual worlds as Second Life, World of Warcraft, IMVU and also games as The Sims 2 and many others.
Continue reading "Social Networking Site for Avatars Launches " »
by: Roger Dooley
Logic tells us that a bigger problem should get more attention. One person suffering from a disease is certainly bad, but a thousand afflicted individuals should motivate us far more. As is often the case in our odd world of neuromarketing and neuroeconomics, research shows that our brains operate in an illogical and perhaps unexpected manner.
Continue reading "Nonprofit Marketing: The Power of Personalization" »
by: Jon Miller
Another popular session at Dreamforce 2007 was titled 21st Century Lead Cultivation. My favorite part was the presentation from Jason Hekl, Sr. Director of Marketing at InQuira, which focused on best practices in lead scoring.
Continue reading "Media Co-habitation and Experience Design" »
Here day Nr.3 of a course I am teaching at a Masters class on "Modeling Business Models" at the Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts (Hochschule für Wirtschaft HSW Luzern). Apologies again for those who don't read German. On the 21. September I will be presenting the last set of slides in German.
Continue reading "Course (in German) on Modeling Business Models - Day 3 of 4 half-days" »
by: Eliane Alhadeff (via Business & Games)
Santa Clara University's new library building won't be completed until the autumn of 2008. But people on the campus can experience what it might be like inside the building, and offer advice to its designers, by exploring a three-dimensional model of the library in Second Life.
Continue reading "Serious Games Exploring A Virtual Library Before It Is Built" »
by: Jon Miller
The most crowded session I attended at Dreamforce 07 was Best Practices in Lead Management. The room was PACKED beyond capacity, and to make matters worse, the AC was broken so it was sweltering.
by: John Caddell
Negotiating skill is partly personality, mostly hard-won experience. There are a few good books on the subject (I've found "Game, Set, Match: Winning The Negotiations Game," by Henry Kramer pretty useful, despite the silly title), but they don't substitute for getting in there across from the other party and trying to work a deal.
by: Roger Dooley
I’ve written about this topic before, but the fact that food images are powerful marketing tools deserves mention again. In the same Oxford study (see Addictive Foods) that noted that pictures of chocolate triggered areas of the brain associated with addiction when viewed by chocolate cravers, the researchers also examined the response to actual chocolate with and without images.
by: Karl Long
Big point here is ad agencies have to change how they are compensated.
Continue reading "Bob Garfield on the Death Of The Advertising Agency (video)" »
by: Idris Mootee
There are many good postings to share:
Continue reading "The Transformation of Luxury Brand Marketing" »
by: Idris Mootee
Here's a piece by Morgan Gerald, it is an interesting piece so I decided to post it here. So you know, Morgan is an anthropologist (he holds BA, MA and PhD in Anthropology) and has a special interest in youth culture. He spends a lot of time hanging out in malls observing teen and youth's behavior. Interesting job, right?
Continue reading "Luxury Brand Marketing - Marketers Must Read" »
by: John Caddell
Lessons learned practice involves examining projects for things that went wrong or could have gone better. The old name, postmortems, has been retired, I guess, because it was too graphic or too negative. Too bad. The best lessons-learned stories are from scrutinizing worst practice.
Continue reading "Lessons learned captured in stories at Lawrence Livermore " »
