Culture: November 2007 Archives
At the IDEA 2007 summit, I heard the Director of Marketing for Blendtec talk about how an unknown brand getting phenomenal brand exposure thanks to one good idea, a digital camera, youtube and staying true to its brand. Blendtec launched the Will it blend campaign on YouTube a year ago to promote its blenders. These ads depicted the CEO (with all his quirkiness) demoing different products being blended. By products I mean cellphones, iphones, ipods, rakes and lots more. Millions of views later, there advertising budget is still very small but their sales have sky rocketed.
Will this work for everyone? Of course not. We don't have enough patience to watch more blending. Good ideas can only be used once or twice. But what matters is that there's a small cost to experimentation and when the experiment appears to be succeeding, that's when you shouldn't stop but keep doing more.
Will this work for everyone? Of course not. We don't have enough patience to watch more blending. Good ideas can only be used once or twice. But what matters is that there's a small cost to experimentation and when the experiment appears to be succeeding, that's when you shouldn't stop but keep doing more.
Barack Obama has announced is technology vision. It's a PDF document and fortunately not a very long one. In addition to all the usual stuff like enacting net neutrality laws, speeding up broadband deployment, improving math and science education and letting in more foreign tech workers, he also talks about wikis and blogs.
He'd like to employ a chief technology officer for the country (now that's new!) who's responsibility will be to make government more transparent and visible using the best technology in the market. This means live streaming of executive branch government meetings, public wikis through which information can be shared between government employees and the public and blogs for communication as well. Nice ideas, I wonder if they will ever get implemented though. Is government ready for openness? Visit News.com for more on the story and hop over to ObamaForTechnology.
He'd like to employ a chief technology officer for the country (now that's new!) who's responsibility will be to make government more transparent and visible using the best technology in the market. This means live streaming of executive branch government meetings, public wikis through which information can be shared between government employees and the public and blogs for communication as well. Nice ideas, I wonder if they will ever get implemented though. Is government ready for openness? Visit News.com for more on the story and hop over to ObamaForTechnology.
The Ted.com clip below showcases a new game called Spore by Will Wright, the game designer behind the Sim City games. Spore is unique in that everything you create, whether it be an animal, building or island, gets uploaded to a central database and shared with other users. Your terrain and all the other creatures on it, are built by other users as you navigate the universe, fight aliens and evolve. Imagine Sim City meets Second Life and that's what Spore is.
Playing the game forces you to take a longer term view of life as your creature lives much longer than a human being does. And with the game changing each time you play because of the social media influence, you're guaranteed an engaging experience each time. Wright calls the game an imagination amplifier. I'd agree with that.
Playing the game forces you to take a longer term view of life as your creature lives much longer than a human being does. And with the game changing each time you play because of the social media influence, you're guaranteed an engaging experience each time. Wright calls the game an imagination amplifier. I'd agree with that.