Monthly Archive for December, 2005

Magic of Skype

Published
by
Karl
on December 23, 2005
in Marketing
. 0 Comments

Well I’ve had skype for a little while now and have not used it a great deal, mainly because trying to remote control my luddite family in the UK through the process would, ironically enough, involve alot of expensive phone calls.

As luck would have it I was able to travel back to the UK for christmas, and get my mum and dad on skype and really start putting it though its paces, and I am gobsmacked by the things I can do with this, I mean its just brilliant.

Here’s an interesting scenario, skype has a feature called skypeOUT(not gay, it means you can make outgoing calls to landline phone numbers) for most worldwide calls it costs 0.017 euros a minute, dirt cheap. They also have skypeIN, which allows you to have a local phone number which landline phones can call into. skypeIN essentially gives you a local phone number and voicemail. Now once you have this setup, you can also have skype forward any unanswered calls to any phone number in the world. The upshot of all this is that if you call my Miami number it forwards the call to my parents house in England, the person calling me only pays what it would cost to call my miami number, and I pay 0.017 euros a minute (that is pennies a minute).

A good “Interview with Mozilla’s User Experience Lead Mike Beltzner”

Published
by
Karl
on December 21, 2005
in Marketing
. 1 Comment

This is a very interesting interview with the user experience lead at mozilla, Mike Beltzner. As always its interesting to see how people got into this business early on in an industry/discipline that is still figureing out what it is. It does rather focus on browser development than it does on user experience, but hopefully this will open the door to someone interviewing him on the topic of user experience as a discipline/process/concept. Anyway, if you are interested in where firefox is going this has got some nice titbits.

Interview with mozillas user experience lead

Web as agriculture

Published
by
Karl
on December 18, 2005
in Marketing
. 1 Comment

Some of the most recent successes on the web have been something more akin to agriculture than construction. All the ’social’ and ‘viral’ and ‘organic’ terms that are being thrown around are because many sites are more like ecosystems than they are monoliths.

I wonder how tools and techniques will develop to help us build ecosystems as opposed to applications. How do company strategies and business plans look when you are farming as opposed to strip mining? I guess you get companies like google, and flickr.

Farting Elved vs. Audible and Agency.com

Published
by
Karl
on December 13, 2005
in Marketing
. 2 Comments

I know you came here for the farting elves, so if you don’t care about interactive agency ad campaigns scroll down to the links about viral campaigns.

Anyway, dontread.org is part of agency and audible’s new campaign to

With the ‘Don’t Read’ campaign, we wanted to create a captivating experience that brings a taste of Audible right to the user,” said Adam Lavelle, Vice President, Strategy, Agency.com.

In fact the only reason i’m writing about it was because they’re press release ended up in my inbox because it had the words “enhanced user experience”.

Well I hate to be a whiny mac user but the “captivating experience” of the ad was pretty mediocre on my ibook and firefox. Mind you i’m sure the level of compression they used on the audio clips was not a function of my ibook’s lack of power, or my macs lack of audio processing capabilities. As soon as I hit the site a highly compressed clip of “jarhead” started playing, that was so thin and tinny it had me looking for the stop button immediatly, it grated on my ears, and i’m no audiophile, but it was uncofortable to listen too.

Here’s what they wanted to get out of the campaign

“Starting with the ad space, users are able to experience the brand immediately, and most importantly, pass it along to their friends,” said Tom Ajello, Vice President, Creative, Agency.com. “Creating viral components as part of the complete interactive experience is essential to giving consumers access to the great products and services made available by Audible. This campaign is built upon our core philosophy to drive acquisition by delivering immersive and positive experiences, not just messages. And that is what makes an interactive campaign the best it can be.”

“creating viral componants?” that’s funny. Viral doesn’t mean “ability to send to friends”
not viral

Viral means “compelled” to send to friends because something is shocking, surprising, or hysterically funny. Think KA’s evil twin - cat getting decapitated, subservient chicken, or anything from JibJab. In fact since I just mentioned JibJab I must recomend they’re “very viral” Farting Elves present the 12 days of christmas, and while i’m on the topic, how come the farting elves sounded better on my ibook than the audible “don’t read” campaign?

Sorry but “don’t read” isn’t viral, except for the fact that i’m talking about it because it’s not viral and someone may disagree and a whole meme will develop on the sidelines talking about whether this campaign is viral or not. Maybe that was your plan all along… Touché agency.com, maybe you do know viral from your elbow.

And it seems the Canadians aren’t too happy with this campaign either :-)
Canuckflack - Audibile’s new campaign is mean to child literacy

Vanderbeeken Shared Experience Design Resources

Published
by
Karl
on December 13, 2005
in Marketing
. 2 Comments

Mark Vanderbeeken has created some excellent shared Experience Design resources for the community:

Experience design calendar, featuring conferences and workshops worldwide, is now hosted on Eventful (and no longer on Upcoming.org) because Eventful provides so much more functionality and is also much more user friendly.
Also on Eventful are experience design groups for Asia, Europe and North America, which only contain events of global relevance and those in your region.

Del.icio.us list of experience design companies
Tag is xdcompanies.

Del.icio.us list of experience design email groups
Tag is xdemailgroups.

Del.icio.us list of user experience and experience design blogs
Tag is xdblogs.

Del.icio.us list of mobile user experience and experience design blogs
Tag is mxdblogs.

The new “positioning”

Published
by
Karl
on December 12, 2005
in Marketing
. 0 Comments

Positioning, as popularized by the excelent book, Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind by Reis and Trout has somewhat fallen out of favor in recent years. The whole concept that company can “own” a word in the prospects mind, like volvo “owns” safety, and BMW “owns” driving just falls flat when you look at successful companies like google, yahoo, flickr, apple etc.

For many smaller companies trying to own a word in the prospects mind is much less important than owning a word or phrase on google. Companies that stake out a position on google are having to do a positioning excersise, but in many ways a much more pragmatic one, balancing what customers might actually type into a search engine, to what competitors are trying to own.

Positioning on google and classic brand positioning do share many things, but the good thing about positioning on google is that it is a far more measurable, and that is a good thing.

Moved to a new host

Published
by
Karl
on December 11, 2005
in Marketing
. 0 Comments

Hi all, I just moved to a new host and have been hard at work trying to make sure everything is working. Please help me out and let me know if anything is broken.

Thanks,

Karl

The Consumerist - Shoppers Bite Back

Published
by
Karl
on December 11, 2005
in Marketing
. 0 Comments

I love this new blog from the Gawker media blog network (the people that brought you lifehacker.com, gizmodo.com etc.), basically it’s a kind of a f’dcompany.com for consumer companies with the latest stories of companies doing the wrong thing. Like Chucky Cheeses Choky Whistle recall, actually they have a section called “recall of the week”.

Some hot topics currently amazon and of course walmart.