No this isn’t a late reference to my face scraping escapades in Stratford a few weeks ago. Neither is it specific to iPods. It’s an article on the possible adverse health affects of having to listen to portable audio players too loud to compensate for the background racket of travelling on London’s tubes and trains.
Full story here replete with typical Evening Standard alarmism and knee-jerk soundbites.
tag: london & evening standard & ipod
If I try to describe this, I’m sure to offend someone, so I let these moving pictures speak for themselves. This is what you can see if you walk down Oxford Street innocently window shopping in Selfridges. It’s one of a number of windows supposed to represent Las Vegas. Yup, words fail me.
I’ve put still pics of the other windows on flickr.
tags: inflatables
If you want to incorporate the use of mobile technology in your marketing strategy, particularly the use of SMS then you should make time for Helen Keegan‘s forthcoming one-day workshop on 18th May in London, W1.
Helen knows more about mobile marketing and customer experience in this field than anyone I know, she makes it real and tells a good story – this won’t necessarily be everyone’s bag, but if it is your’s, go for it.
[Disclosure: Helen’s been a good friend of mine since the early 1980’s when we hung out theatrically, darling, in the splendid city of Worcester – of course she was very very wee at the time and I was not much less wee myself. Although our relationship went on hiatus during the 1990’s, we have recently been trying to find common ground to work together and I think we’re just about to crack something. Helen *will* be an interviewee on a Perfect Path Podcast. She *will* also read the Cluetrain manifesto, or maybe listen to the audio book, as read by the authors, or maybe just keep listening to me quote bits at her witheringly.]
tags: sms & mobile marketing
Dave Winer’s isn’t the only podcast I listen to every time it comes out, of course I listen to the Daily Source Code too. So I had to share this discovery with you – a couple of minutes from the master copy of Adam Curry and Ron Bloom’s strategy cast.
The two most plausible theories are a) that they did this as they were and then Adam weaved some audio-wizardry over it to make them sound (almost) straight or b) they were so pleased with the cast that they kept repeating and recording bits of it over and over into the wee small hours even though Ron was totally plastered and Adam was floating around on the ceiling, totally in love with the lampshade. You decide.
tags: adam curry & podshow
At least one cheer for the speed of delivery on the UK version of Google Maps – I thought it would take much longer. Viewing maps is fine, but some of the search results are still quirky to say the least and when I look for Whitehall I don’t expect either of these
Trouble is I’m having trouble thinking of serious test cases. All I’ve come up with is:
Lloyd’s House in Epsom
Guys with fat arses in London
Satan in Bromsgrove
Hooray Henry in Sloane Square
Please vote in the comments for the most accurate in your view.
1st prize – a haircut like Adam Curry’s
Not really ready for Dave Winer to find a hotel in London.
Perhaps the only advantage print has over online for me is that I was able to sneak a look at this FT article while waiting in an office lobby today without paying for the privilege.
News Corp. does provide full text of the speech though (link from Jeff Jarvis).
On balance I’d say “Too little too late, Rupe” but he won’t go down without a fierce and bitter fight. He almost gets it – but he still sees the environment as one where there are people who sell the news and people who buy it. He talks about a decentralized model, but then seems to think that a huge centralized organization like News Corp. can somehow still dominate it. Interesting too that he drops in a reference to podcasting and video.
Nice article on digital radio on p19 of the FT as well, including podcasting and a plug for podshows. Just in case you’re down the library tomorrow…
Tags: Murdoch & newspapers & podcasting
Evan Williams is interviewed at Ipodlounge (says Dave Winer on his newly minted podcatch.com) and quoted thusly:
“…More good ideas in the world. More knowledge. Less ignorance. Less conspiracy. Less corruption. And more funny. That seems important to me.”
Mmmmmm… “More knowledge. Less ignorance” – hey you know a great way to deal with that – talk to people direct about what you’re doing instead of chatting to an invited audience of people you know in advance are going to agree with you, and write a blog (yeah 10 contentless posts in as many weeks is fine) that’s so poorly maintained that archives from a two months ago throw a 404. Now *that’s* funny!
You know what would make this oh so much better? Can you say “Here we are folks with the first Odeo podcast”? Obviously not.
I’m amazed at how many people continue to end up here looking for stuff on Alan Sugar and BBC Two’s The Apprentice – surely other people are blogging about this more than me?
Anywho – I’ve missed a couple of episodes (goodbye to the dreary Rachel and Sebastian) but just saw tonight’s Farmers Market show. It really showed how people just don’t listen to what they’ve been asked to do. This week’s task – as Alan Sugar so graphically demonstrated (while subtly reminding us that he’s still in the computer manufacturing business) – was about ADDING VALUE.
This was a task where you really had to do some thinking up front, starting with the end in mind – work out how much you thought you could possibly sell, of what, from a Market Stall at Ally Pally and then go all out to get the ingredients for the cheapest possible price, all the while thinking about the biggest possible margin – presumably bottling tap water wasn’t an option.
Then set prices very aggressively at the start of the day, working the numbers as you go and cutting the price to squeeze every last drop out of the market. But most of all ENGAGE with your customers – what a privilege to get the opportunity to speak directly to every single person!
And at the end of the day, the winning team were the ones who’d kept costs right down – negotiating free professional cooking in return for promo work on the day, for example AND were out there talking to people, offering generous samples and going oooh aaah isn’t it lovely, buy some now madam, show me the money.
The other team may have run more smoothly in the buying and production phase (putting aside some horrible spending mistakes) but none of that counted when they couldn’t sell for toffee (except for Paul – I have to say that ‘cos someone might read this to Paul and he might get cross – it has been known)
This is only going to get better in the last four weeks. My money’s on James or Saira (although neither of them really need a job with Sugar) – Miriam has just about used up her nine lives, and Paul’s close to the edge – Raj and Tim are actually dull and inexperienced enough to be natural management trainee material – but this ain’t Reality it’s Reality TV
via my referrals log: I’m now #8 on the UK MSN search for “How do I find my perfect man?”
note: link may not work as expected outside UK.
I’m on the switchback this morning that is Google’s GMail April Fool offering.
Blah Blah Blah, it’s our birthday and we want to do something special, blah
“The result?… starting today, we’re beginning the roll-out of our new and top secret Infinity+1 storage plan. The key features are:
* Write, don’t worry.
You want to stop caring about storage. We want to keep giving you more. Today, and beyond.
* The gift that keeps on giving.
1126.096746 megabytes of storage (and counting) for every user.
* No complicated equations. No tough algorithms.
Just this one graph: ”
with the meg of storage counter rapidly shooting upwards and then a cute scribbled-napkin graph showing Google going beyond the theoretical limit and giving us infinity *plus* one MB per user.
Ha ha, funny joke for nerds and non-nerdy maths students alike.
So check out the new features page and you see that they’re actually giving us 2MB. Thanks guys – you still have some evil tendencies, but giving us a present on your birthday and making a funny April 1 joke shows part of you still cares a bit.
But what stopped me getting in the shower and got me posting was the fact that that storage counter is actually telling the truth. Everytime I refresh my inbox, the counter at the bottom tells me I’ve got another few kilobytes of storage, exactly in line with that counter on the front page. Oh nerd heaven.
Perfect Path 