Category: Uncategorized

The rumors on the new iPhone state that it’ll have a second camera for "video conferencing."  But think about it…if it’s on the faster 3G network, and it has that second camera, it’s not really "video conferencing," which conjures images of staid meetings and boardrooms and such.

If the camera is there, and the network is fast enough, and the UI is right, this is that individual, person-to-person videophone that has been envisioned for the last 50 years.

Thoughts?

(And yes, for the record, I still want my flying car.)

"In every successful viral campaign there’s at least an ounce or two of
luck, but let’s dismiss that and focus on everything else. What we are
seeing now in online communities is a shift toward humanness. It’s no
longer acceptable to the Internet savvy individuals to interface with a
faceless corporation. Social tools like blogs, messaging services and
community sites have broken down barriers between individuals and also
between brands and consumers." – Jackie Peters

In particular, Jackie was talking about the success of Blendtec, which now has a marketing department that is a profit center, based on the success of their marketing videos on Revver.  (Yes, you read that correctly.)

So…will it blend?

Clay Shirky will be a speaker at Supernova 2008.  Some great insight from a keynote earlier this year:

“I was recently reminded of some reading I did in college, way
back in the last century, by a British historian arguing that the
critical technology, for the early phase of the industrial revolution,
was gin.

The transformation from rural to urban life was so sudden, and
so wrenching, that the only thing society could do to manage was to
drink itself into a stupor for a generation. The stories from that era
are amazing– there were gin pushcarts working their way through the
streets of London.

And it wasn’t until society woke up from that collective bender
that we actually started to get the institutional structures that we
associate with the industrial revolution today. Things like public
libraries and museums, increasingly broad education for children,
elected leaders–a lot of things we like–didn’t happen until having all
of those people together stopped seeming like a crisis and started
seeming like an asset.

It wasn’t until people started thinking of this as a vast civic
surplus, one they could design for rather than just dissipate, that we
started to get what we think of now as an industrial society.

If I had to pick the critical technology for the 20th century,
the bit of social lubricant without which the wheels would’ve come off
the whole enterprise, I’d say it was the sitcom. Starting with the
Second World War a whole series of things happened–rising GDP per
capita, rising educational attainment, rising life expectancy and,
critically, a rising number of people who were working five-day work
weeks. For the first time, society forced onto an enormous number of
its citizens the requirement to manage something they had never had to
manage before–free time.

And what did we do with that free time? Well, mostly we spent it watching TV.

We did that for decades. We watched I Love Lucy. We watched
Gilligan’s Island. We watch Malcolm in the Middle. We watch Desperate
Housewives. Desperate Housewives essentially functioned as a kind of
cognitive heat sink, dissipating thinking that might otherwise have
built up and caused society to overheat.”

Go check out the whole discussion here, or the video here.

In a timely follow-on to the last post, Shel Holtz has put up an outstanding podcast entitled "Employees Are The Brand," from a session he hosted at the recent New Communications Forum.  An excerpt from Shel:

"I had an interesting conversation with a fella a couple of months ago.  We were talking about this whole issue of your employees going home at night and being part of Facebook groups and commenting on blogs and frequently identifying themselves as associated with their employers.  Some of them are doing this from work because their company allows it, others were finding ways around the restrictions and the blocks.  I talk to more and more IT people who tell me ‘we block access to Facebook’ and ‘we block access to YouTube,’ but employees bring their home laptops in with their wireless access cards, or they use their cellphones and they’re doing it anyway. 

I was at one company where they actually have the means to block the signal from your personal cellphone or your personal laptop that you bring in so you can’t do this stuff on work time.    It’s getting kind of ridiculous.  But the fact is, your employees ARE participating in these spaces, because they are the people who go out and participate in these spaces.  These aren’t unemployed people in pajamas in their mom’s basements."

You can listen to the whole thing here.

Related:  The People ARE the Brand

Zappos has a great process for ensuring their corporate culture stays strong, and validating that the people they hire are truly bought into what they are doing:

"After a week or so in this immersive experience, though, it’s time for
what Zappos calls ‘The Offer.’ The fast-growing company, which works
hard to recruit people to join, says to its newest employees: “’f you
quit today, we will pay you for the amount of time you’ve worked, plus
we will offer you a $1,000 bonus.’"

Nice.  Here’s a link to the full article from HBS.

(from here)

In the old world, you were defined by what you consumed*.  In the new world, you are defined by what you create.

*- your credit report, your vehicle, etc.

A couple of years ago, Jerry Michalski introduced a number of people to the concept of "Red:Green Cards," which are described thusly:

Ever wish you could talk back
to the speaker at a conference?
To offer approval
or register dismay?

Use RedGreen feedback cards.

I found the concept to be absolutely fantastic.  It was a clear, yet unobtrusive, way to bring the audience into a conversation, without having to disrupt the flow of a thought and without having to deal with those little voting clicker boxes or microphones.  It was possible to achieve this goal without any kind of intrusive hardware at all, actually.

Red:Green cards are a wonderfully elegant way for an audience to give respectful feedback in real time.

At the iPhoneDevCamp last year, Biggu built a prototype of the Red:Green voting concept for iPhone.  However, it appears that their implementation has been taken down or is no longer working.  (The site was throwing errors the last I checked.)

So, we (re)built the Red:Green iPhone app from scratch.  You can find it here:

http://cerado.com/rg/

It
uses the Mobile Safari orientation hacks from the Apple code samples,
so it only works on the iPhone.  If you go there from a desktop
browser, it’ll just show a blank page.

Of course…

– Concept inspiration from Jerry Michalski.
– Code inspiration from Nicole Lazzaro and the TILT iPhone game.
– Implementation adapted from the Apple iPhoneOrientation sample.
– Address bar hiding hack from Christopher Allen.

Enjoy!

Related: By the way…the other fun iPhone-related thing we just did was to create an
iPhone-friendly network/directory of female political bloggers.  Currently,
there are over 100 bloggers listed from all sides of the aisle.  Here
are the coordinates if you are so inclined:

iPhone-based directory of political bloggers: http://blogher.com/politics/
Back story: http://tinyurl.com/5hob7wHer

Here’s a link to a video of the Red:Green iPhone app in action.

Cerado got some coverage on CNN yesterday, in a segment about how fast-moving companies are using outsourcing.  Check it out.

Michael Rindley is building his own “people keeper” because he says “social networking applications are handy, but what I’d really rather have is a personal CRM system.”

What would your people keep(e)r do?

• "Evaluating New Social Technologies" – Some key tidbits from Groundswell (thanks to Steve G. at PrimeRevenue for the tip)
• "A remarkable number of business people trying to reach consumers tend to forget, they ARE consumers" – Sage words from Paul Greenberg (thanks to Marty T. at Consona for the tip)
• "The Emerging Main Street Web"- Some good thoughts in here on the intersection of social media and (acutal) business models (via Bart)